It was the week before and....

Magical Times of Christmas

It was one week before Christmas when I stepped through the ambulance bay doors into the ER for the night shift. The room was decorated in that sort of tacky ER Christmas style. Someone had blown up some rubber gloves and painted on them with markers to fashion them into a group of malformed reindeer. Ribbons and garland were draped across things that really should not be decorated, such as the shelf that holds the emesis basins, urinals and bedpans…not really festive thoughts come to mind with those items. Yet it brought a warm feeling of love for my coworkers and made me merry and bright!

After a couple of steps into the room, just before I reached the door to the break room, I heard a scream. While it is not unusual to hear screams in the ER, this one startled me. One of our male nurses was wheeling in a patient who had blood running down his face and pouring onto his bright green elf costume. His hair was dark in color but I could see immediately it was matted heavily in blood. The scream had come from his lady friend who accompanied him and stood, wringing her hands, at his bedside the entire time he was there. We offered her a chair but the big wings she was wearing presented a problem when she sat in the straight chairs we had available and she seemed opposed to removing them. It was sad to see someone dressed as an angel, looking beautiful but weeping and fearful. Though her angel costume was very sexy looking, not too angelic, she was a sight to behold.

I have to admit, at this time the elf looked like something out of a horror movie.

It turns out they had been at a festive party with people from all walks of like, including local politicians. I am a believer in live and let live. I do observe things though and I have seen over the years that some people cannot just have a glass of wine or a drink. Some go overboard to the point they lose control;  reaching a place of no return and then misbehaving. This elf was one of them. Some people just should not drink. Everyone knows at least one person who fits that description, I know several. I did not know this elf nor his lovely friend. He admitted his temper goes out of control when he drinks. He said and he did some things at the party he should not have and another person hit him over the head with a beer bottle. It was quite a crack that had been created right across the very top of his head and it gaped open revealing a bloody mess that oozed out in every direction. It was a sobering experience for him.

The blinking lights on the sad, sparse, bent up Christmas tree in the center of our workstation somehow kept reminding me it was a joyous time of the year. I love Christmas like a child loves candy.

The elf had a concussion and required many stitches to close that wound. I hope the next morning when everything was clearer to him, he realized drinking is not his niche in life. Sobriety should be his choice in the future, but who knows what he will decide. I must say the elf costume that he wore was wonderful, even down to the green turned up toes on his elf shoes. There was a bell sewn on the turned up toe of each shoe and every time he moved, the bell would ding.

It made me think of the Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”…”Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings”. So all night I would smile each time he moved his elf foot and I heard the bell ring. In my mind many many angels got their wings that night. I just love elves, even drunk ones with busted heads.

There was an elderly male patient who lay on a nearby gurney. He was on oxygen as he lay only a few feet away from our elf patient. He seemed annoyed at first with all the ruckus and noise. But after he saw things were going to be ok, it seemed to relax him and he began to smile. I could tell he probably had not seen many grown men dressed as elves and was very amused by it all. He could not seem to take his eyes off that elf. 

As the night passed, I came to realize, it was not the elf he was looking at but the sexy angel with her bare legs and ample cleavage. She stood next to the elf, between his gurney and the one the old man occupied.  She was standing very close to this elderly patient and would occasionally turn and smile at him. The wings she wore were beautiful.

To this day I am not sure if the elderly patient was ogling a beautiful woman dressed as a sexy angel or if he perhaps thought this angel had come from heaven to get him. Either way he was in a zen moment for hours, dozing off now and then. When his eyes popped open he was once again a happy man staring at this angel.

The moment I realized what he was staring at and why he was smiling so big, my eyes and the old man’s eyes locked up and he and I smiled a knowing smile that was priceless. He was busted but quite happy with his care in the ER!

Christmas, it is a wonderful, magical time…even in the Emergency Room. 

Merry Christmas!

Why I love Christmas...

A tiny, sparsely decorated tree stood in the corner near the door. It had a slight lean like a ship that was listing at sea, not sure whether to remain afloat or give up the fight and go under. The first time I laid eyes on that tree when I came into work that night I knew that I had finally seen a real Charlie Brown tree. Also, someone had strung silver shiny garland around the work station and up the poles that support the ceiling just above it. It was officially Christmastime in the ER.

Christmas is so close I could reach out and touch it! This story is of a time when I worked in the Emergency Room of a local hospital and the people and cases that walked, or were rolled through those doors.

One thing I learned when I worked my first Christmas season in the emergency room was that it is NOT a joyous time in everyone’s lives. From patients and from fellow employees I realized that for some it is a deeply lonely and sad time. For them Christmas brings back horrendous memories of great pain and emptiness. 

Thankfully for most it is a time of great memories.

I remember a little girl about 4 years old that was brought in a couple days before Christmas. She was in a Christmas Pageant at her church and she wore a beautiful green satin dress with lace and a peter-pan collar. It had a huge bow that tied in the back and a matching bow was attached to her beautiful black hair; though at this point it had loosened its grip and was about to let go and slide right out of her hair. We learned that her brother, who was 6, had accidentally slammed the car door on her hand as she entered their car to head home after her performance. She looked to be in great pain, yet she forced a sweet little smile when I looked at her. As I approached her bed she said, “Brent didn’t mean to do it, it was an accident!” I thought it was sweet that she felt the need to exonerate her brother of any blame. She had a small laceration and a cracked bone in one of her fingers, some bruising too. It was overall a good outcome. As they carried her out she turned to me and said, “Merry Christmas!”

This was a brave and compassionate child.

Later a man came through our doors, led by a nurse and screaming obscenities. He was very intoxicated. He exclaimed he hated Christmas and everything about it. “The only way to make it through all of the Christmas Bull-S*#t, is to stay drunk!” he said. I watched as he was rude to all those around him and continued to push everyone away.  A police officer had accompanied him to the ER and now stood by the gurney where he sat. I could see blood oozing through a wrapping on his hand. He was a perfect example to show people not to play with your gun while you are drinking alcohol. Somehow he was not aware his gun was loaded and accidentally shot off one of his fingers, then fought with his family when they tried to get him in for medical care. He was a mess; his clothes had spatters of blood and his face even had a spot or two. The more everyone worked to calm him, the more combative he became.

It was a busy night and my attention strayed from him as I worked on my computer. The night slowed by 2:00am and I thought about the angry, drunk man, who was now in recovery. Surgery had cleaned up the nub where his finger had been and stopped the bleeding. A friend of mine worked in recovery and around 6 she came by as she was heading home. I asked about the man with the finger and she stopped to talk about him. Somehow when he sobered, he turned into a decent guy. She talked to him at length about Christmas and learned that he had terrible memories as a child, especially at Christmas when others were joyous and opening presents and being visited by Santa. He yearned for those things as a child. I suppose his pain had turned to anger and to drinking. She told me she believes he is a good guy with a good heart but he hides that part of himself this time of year.

It is so true that we do not know what others around us have in their hearts or what they have walked through in life. Since that time when I see someone angry, drunk or unreasonable I tell myself they are hurting. I envision a child who is hurt or mistreated as I look at them and my view is kinder. I am aware there are people who are just plain mean without anything to blame, but this man was not one of those people.

We are complicated creatures and we each handle disappointment in our own way. I don't think it is our place to judge others. The older I get the more I understand why I love Christmas so much!