Naked People Falling On Me

I never would have remembered these suppressed memories had my Aunt not dredged them up by mentioning volunteering in her last blog post. (Give her some ideas people, before she turns into the lady on the news who is the owner of 112 cats that she brought home with her from the animal shelter and quickly became overwhelmed and is found by animal control living in poop and kitty litter 6 inches deep and carting around a bird on her shoulder.)

So after thinking about the only time that I have formally volunteered, ( I spend time in my kids' classrooms at school and do church stuff, but no longer anything with a name tag), I remembered how much I dreaded putting on that red and white striped apron and going to the hospital. I'm getting ahead of myself here, let me start from the beginning.

I was fourteen, and I have no clue who's idea it was for my sister, Natalie, and I to become Candy Stripers at the local hospital. It must have been Southwest Washington Medical Center, but I'm not entirely sure, having worked so hard to forget the entire experience. At any rate, some well-intentioned person signed Natalie and I up for orientation, where we spent an entire day being instructed on the rules and regulations of volunteering in a hospital and also being shown the correct way to make a bed using "hospital corners". Valuable piece of information there, people. So following all of the regulation mumbo-jumbo, we were given a tour of the hospital and shown all the areas where we might be assigned to volunteer. Of course, everyone's favorite was the pediatric wing where you could play with the cute little sick kids in rooms surrounded with rainbow paintings and tiny-sized armchairs. And nothing remotely disturbing or grotesque could ever happen in a pediatric ward, right? (Wrong.) So when it came time to fill out our preferences of where we'd like to work, all 50 of us surely put down the same departments: Pediatric, gift shop, (with it's cheery sounding cash register), and lobby, where we could smile and direct people to their loved ones' rooms without having to actually come in contact with the unfortunate sick and dismembered. (Feel free to call me 'insensitive' in any forthcoming hate mail.)

So a week later, all of us Candy Stripers anxiously arrived at the hospital to learn our fates. Apparently, all of the happy places were assigned to the blond haired, blue eyed beauties, for I was assigned to the surgery wing.

Did you get that? Surgery wing. Not a happy place at all.

We broke into groups and were escorted to our designated areas. I said good-bye to Natalie, and if you'd like to know where she went, you'll have to ask her because it's one of those details too painful to dredge up, but let's remember that she has blonde hair and blue eyes, was approached by "model scouts" more times than I can remember, and was given a job at Musicland before she'd even finished asking for an application by the man who later became her lucky husband. The elevator doors opened up on the surgical floor and all of my awkward adolescent comrades and I emerged into the very hallways of Hell where, I kid you not, you could hear people moaning in every other room and one woman was actually screaming and everyone was ignoring her.

Every Thursday I went to that wing and did my best to disappear into the background as nurses bustled to and fro, taking calls and answering pages. I know they weren't doing anything to help their patients, because if they had been, then the moaning surely would have stopped. Some days I avoided having to go into anyone's room and got away with delivering samples to the lab or picking up more kidney shaped vomit catchers from the supply warden.

Some days I was not so lucky.

One day I was given the assignment of making sure that all the patients had adequately stocked bedside drawers. I was checking for bedpans, the stinking vomit catchers, little plastic cups and tissue boxes, among other things. Once in a while I had to converse with women who were still coming off the morphine high and smile and talk nicely while I backed out of the room with promises to send a nurse. And then I came upon the room. The room that was blessedly void of any living soul. I checked the drawer, found it satisfactory and headed back out. But as I passed the bathroom, a large, lumbering person stumbled toward me, and with a little groan, fell completely naked into my arms. Too shocked to know what else to do, I tried my best to keep the slippery person from falling all the way to the floor. My arms were underneath their arms, but I was unsure of whether I was dealing with a man or a woman, so I couldn't make myself use my hands to grab them around the middle for fear of latching on to two naked breasts. And why was this person wet?? Please let them have just taken a shower, please don't let this slippery being be covered in sweat! Just as my knees were about to buckle, a nurse came into the room and helped me drag the person upright. Then I bolted. I didn't even stay to help the nurse get the patient to his or her bed. I needed to wash both my arms from the shoulders down, pronto.

And that is the last memory I have of volunteering in a hospital. It is not, however, the last memory I have of someone naked falling on me.

The next story is not so awful. It takes place in a daycare. I must have figured out how to do my hair and make-up in a way that would validate me to be in the presence of darling children. Or maybe the staff was desperate. However it happened, at 18 I found myself the sole caretaker for more than the legal number of pre-schoolers for several hours a day. Once the school-age children were off to their classrooms I had some help, but until then, I spent the morning hours on my own. Thankfully, we only took kids who were potty trained. That does not mean that they were all capable of the entire spectrum of toilet duties on their own, however.

One day, little Dylan yelled from the bathroom, the door to which he had left open, "Teacher Beth, can you come wipe me?" He was an intoxicating and adorable 3 year old, and of course I could wipe him. I went into the bathroom and Dylan promptly bent over and rested the top of his head on the floor so that I had an unencumbered view of his wiping needs. I gathered the toilet paper and went to work. And then he lost his balance and his tiny butt landed on my arm, one cheek on either side of my radius bone. Laughing hysterically, he regained his upright position and said through his giggles, "Sorry, Teacher Beth", and then went on with his chuckling. I was desperately trying to control my urge to lunge my forearm into boiling water, because I had a skid mark where there never ought to be a skid mark. I toughed it out and finished wiping his behind before I scoured my arm under the sink with our month's supply of liquid soap.

Moral of the story, you never know when a naked person might fall on you, and there's nothing you can do to stop them. That's about it.