Down and Out
by Don Drewniak
I was running
low on money late into my sophomore year in
college. Thanks to one of my professors, Dr.
“Jumping Joe” Riley, I secured a job
working three nights a week (11pm-7am) at a local
Catholic hospital. I chose the night shift
because it paid an extra twenty-five cents an
hour, bringing my earnings to $1.45/hour. That is
the equivalent of $14.15/hour as of this writing.
Big money back then.
The nearly two
years in which I worked at the hospital as an
orderly proved to be quite an education,
especially since I worked in a medical ward.
Upwards of a dozen people died while I was on
duty ranging from a fourteen-year-old boy to a
woman in her mid-90s. However, more often than
not, I saw people recover and smiling as they
prepared to go back to their homes.
Working with a
head nurse, a support nurse (sometimes two), two
or three student nurses and a nurse’s aide,
I was the only male on duty. This led to my being
involved in several unique happenings that I have
never forgotten. Presented herewith is the first
one.
The medical
wing was located on the sixth floor of the
hospital and consisted of two corridors
positioned in an L-shape. An alcoholic recovery
room with six beds was located at the far end of
one of the wings. During weeknights, there were
rarely more than one or two “patients”
in the recovery room. Saturday nights were quite
different. More often than not, all six beds were
filled. Some of the super-inebriated had to be
restrained. The room was for males only.
It was on one
such Saturday night/Sunday morning that all hell
broke loose. I was sitting in the nurses’
station talking to a couple of student nurses
when screams could be heard from one of the
corridors. I dashed out of the station. Running
toward me from the “alky room” as we
called it was a man in his twenties who was about
six feet tall and well over 200 pounds swinging a
metal urinal over his head.
As he
approached me, I tried a cross-body block. Down
we went. In the process, he clipped me along the
left side of my head with the urinal. I blacked
out for a few seconds. When I came to, the nurses
and student nurses were cheering me. The runaway
freight train was out cold. The ladies thought I
had knocked him out. However, I knew that he must
have passed out from a combination of the alcohol
and exhaustion. I said nothing as one of the
students put a cold compress where I had been hit.
Who was I to
disabuse them of what they believed happened?
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