Respiratory Therapy 101: Just Keep Breathing

I was asked to stay late to help out nights the other day. I did so grudgingly, not out of any disrespect for my comrades on the graveyard shift but simply because staying at the hospital for 16 hours seemed unappealing to me.

Of course, instead of keeping me in the unit I had been in all day, the night supervisor reassigned me and made me go out and help out on the floors. I was exiled to the mysterious lands of the sixth floor, a place that I have actually never been to. This seems to happen to me consistently on the floors; there are a lot of floors in our hospital and every time I go to the floors I wind up in a different place that I don’t know at all. I try to look at the bright side: attempting to locate the med dispensing machine and my patients and the equipment all before something bad happens is sort of an adventure.

Anyway, I was on the sixth floor and about halfway through my rounds when I came to a room with a crazed-looking old lady in it. She was sprawled across the bed in a state of total disarray, her body splayed this way and that, her crazy old-lady eyes staring out at me from beneath an enormous pile of hair.

“HELP ME!” she screamed. I looked down at my notes. “Pleasantly confused,” read the note from the day therapist. I sighed and went into the room.

“Hi, I’m keepbreathing. I’m from the respiratory department here. Do you know where you are?” I knelt slightly to appear less threatening.  The lady stared at me with her crazy googly eyes. She reminded me a little bit of cookie monster for some reason.

“GO GET YOUR MOTHER!” bellowed Crazy Lady.

“My mother is completely uninterested in your care,” I responded. Whoops. Meant to keep that inside. So tired…I shook myself awake and continued without missing more than a couple of beats. “I am here to give you your breathing treatment. Your lungs are sick and you need it for them to get better.”

“I don’t need no breathing treatments! I told you to get your mother! Isn’t your father working here?”

“No, my father’s an accountant and it’s Sunday. Here, this is going to make some steam and I want you to breathe it in for me.” I handed her a nebulizer. She looked at it like it was a live grenade, then saw the steam. Some distant memory from her wild days back in the 60’s apparently kicked in, because suddenly she put it to her mouth and puffed on it like a pipe. She inhaled deeply, held it, rolled her eyes, and blew it out.  She turned and saw me again, and proferred me the pipe like a hippie offering a hit on a bong.

“No, that’s for you. I don’t need it right now. Keep breathing on it.”

“Ha! You’re half-baked already! Where’s your mother?” She cackled a little bit and then narrowed her eyes when I didn’t respond. “I SAID, where…is…your…MOOOTHEEEER?” At this I could hear footsteps coming behind me as the floor staff approached.

“Alright, I think we’re done here.” I turned the neb off and began to walk away. Her antics were tiresome. An aide came in to talk to the lady and explain her own mothers whereabouts, but the nutty old thing wasn’t done with me yet.

“Hey, you! You in the blue!” I turned and looked at her.

“What do you want?”

“You’re getting FAT, bucko!”  And with that the crazy old lady turned her atttentions to the aide. As I strolled down the sixth-floor hallway to my next patients room, I could hear the old lady’s abusive ramblings and incessant maternal inquiries fading down the hall. I crossed out “pleasantly confused” and scribbled in “12-cylinder wackaloon.” 

It’s always an adventure working on the night shift.