I had surgery, and something went wrong during recovery at home. Both the surgery and what went wrong are gross, so I’ll spare you the details!

I went back to the hospital and they set about making the problem right. And they did, quickly and efficiently, as it was something that happens about 10% of the time.

I was recovering afterward in a side room. The door was open, and all I’d been able to hear for HOURS was nothing but fellow patients and their relatives complaining to the nurses. They complained about the parking. They complained about the food. They complained about the choice of TV channels. They complained about the variable mobile phone signal. One woman complained about the wait to get surgery AND how quickly the appointment came so she couldn’t arrange for someone to water her houseplants for her four hours in hospital. The man in the room opposite complained that the disposable surgical gown he was wearing wasn’t soft enough. One woman physically stopped a healthcare assistant with a tray of pills in his hands in order to complain that the coffee machine didn’t do the thing she usually ordered from her local chain coffee shop.

Honestly, I was in Not Always Right entitled customer Hell. 

My usual policy — be nice to people in service industries because I’m also a human being — was ramped up to eleven, and I pushed through the pain I was in to try to be charming and funny and non-demanding with everybody I saw.

I was laying there with a cannula (drip) in my arm when it suddenly slipped out. My husband, who is more likely to panic in such situations than I am, shouted out the door of my room for help.

The main nurse who had been dealing with me all day appeared, in her coat, with her handbag, and with her car keys in her hand.

As my husband was explaining to her in panicked tones about the cannula, I was horrified. 

Me: “You’re done for the day! Go home! Someone else will deal with this! Go away! Go home!”

She was so lovely about it. She calmed my husband — he really doesn’t cope well with medical stuff — and then said she’d deal with it.

Me: “You’re done for the day. Go home! Off you go! It’s fine; someone else will deal with it in a minute. It’s fine!”

She grabbed my arm, popped the cannula back into place, put new tape on it, and turned to leave.

Nurse: “I only did that because you boys were so nice all day. Good luck with the rest of your treatment.”

Me: “You didn’t have to do that. It’ll be fine if—”

Nurse: “I hope I never see you again.”

I burst out laughing — which hurt! — and so did my husband. She gave us a wink and left.

The treatment worked, I’m almost fully recovered, and she has never seen me again — which is EXACTLY what both of us wanted, for the same reason. Nurses: you are wonderful.

Related:
Why Nurses Should Rule The World, Part 16
Why Nurses Should Rule The World, Part 15
Why Nurses Should Rule The World, Part 14
Why Nurses Should Rule The World, Part 13
Why Nurses Should Rule The World, Part 12

When I had my baby, I started labor on Friday and she was born on Saturday — not unusual, especially since my labor started Friday afternoon.

However, when the certified copy of her birth certificate arrived a few weeks after she was born, it listed her date of birth as that Friday rather than that Saturday. The hospital where she was born had sent off all the paperwork, and someone put in the wrong date, maybe being optimistic about how fast she’d be born.

I called the department of vital records to figure out what to do. I was told to go to the nearest Social Security office and file some papers in person to have it fixed. As my daughter was breastfed, I brought her along, signed in, and waited my turn.

I sat down across from a Social Security worker with the birth certificate and explained the date error. I held up my daughter.

Me: “And clearly, you can see that she’s only forty-two days old, not forty-three days.”

The worker got a chuckle out of that and approved the change. A little bit later, the corrected birth certificate arrived in the mail.

And when my daughter became a big sister, I noticed that the hospital (the same one) gave me all the vital statistics paperwork to fill out. I’m thinking my daughter wasn’t the only one whose birthdate was reported incorrectly.

A while back, I posted this story about my Cousin Lisa, who’s nearly two decades older and is the best cousin ever. This is despite the fact that she’s technically not my cousin, since she’s related to my married-in uncle and not my parents. Lisa’s so much My Cousin that I never even questioned HOW we might be related until my great-aunt started getting upset that Cousin Lisa was invited to a wedding but way-off relatives I’ve never met in maybe fifteen years aren’t.

What I didn’t tell people is that I also have a younger brother.

When Timmy was in high school, he was a very good soccer player, and his team got to travel interstate for a competition. This involved an entire team of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds traveling alone with only the company of chaperones.

Sometime during this trip, Timmy and several of the other boys snuck out one night and apparently went to a bar… where they proceeded to get drunk. (Yes, Timmy lied about his age.) And then, Timmy got injured. Timmy swears it was a bar fight, but he’s full of it and was probably just being stupid. The chaperones had to take him to hospital to get a cast on his broken arm, his best friend got a concussion and stitches, and when he got home, he was grounded for more than a year.

Up until now, I thought that was all there was to the story.

It turns out, the full story goes like this.

Timmy, his best friend, and his teammates did sneak out. But then, sometime during the night, some kind of miscommunication meant that Timmy and his friend got left behind at the bar when the rest returned to the hotel. Thus, you had two drunk seventeen-year-olds alone in a strange city.

This is when they got injured — alone, drunk, in a strange city. Being very intelligent seventeen-year-olds, they decided that they would not call their parents, the chaperones, or even the police or an ambulance. The reason? They were scared they would get in trouble.

Fortunately, Timmy was drunk enough to make dumb mistakes but sober enough to remember that he had Cousin Lisa’s number in his phone and that she lived nearby. So, he called her.

Cousin Lisa, despite all reasonable expectations, answered a phone call at 2:00 am on a weekday. She somehow understood what Timmy was saying and went to get them. 

It was after picking them up from the side of the street that Lisa discovered they were injured, as opposed to just drunk, so she then took them to hospital, wrangled any paperwork and phone calls with chaperones and parents so that she was allowed to sign the forms for them, and sat with them in the emergency room for hours until they were seen. 

By the time she personally escorted them into the hands of their chaperones, the wee hours of the morning were not so wee anymore. Lisa has confirmed that, since she had a uniform in her car, it was late enough that she just went straight to work.

The kicker is that Lisa did not live in this city. She lived close by, which is to say she lived in another city about an hour and a half or two hours away.

Based on the hospital record and the phone record, she had to have picked them up within fifty minutes of getting the call.

Timmy and his friend were both in VERY big trouble, but Lisa herself has never thought the story worth mentioning until swearing this story is getting retold when Timmy finally gets married. As far as she was concerned, her youngest cousin called a safe adult for help and that’s all that matters.

And people wondered why I’d never questioned how we’re related.

Related:
We Could All Use A Cousin Lisa In Our Lives

CONTENT WARNING: Blood, Childbirth Procedures

I’m soon to be a granddad for the first time as my son is having his first child, and it reminded me of when my first child was born way back. My wife and I did all the childbirth classes, practiced the panting and coaching stuff, and we were feeling good. She was excited just to get the da***ed thing out of her at the end! We had done all the reading and preparation we could. Then, as it happens, D-Day arrived when her water broke at about 4:30 in the morning. No problem; we grabbed her go-bag and headed to the hospital, and we were calm and ready.

It was a hard labour. Contractions started and stopped, she had severe pain (back labour, they called it) and little dilation, and she was not having a good day. Finally, after being induced and getting an epidural, the show started close to midnight. We were in the delivery room, and our doctor asked her if it was okay if an intern — I think that’s what she was — observed. My wife was a medical professional and agreed, though at this point I think she didn’t give a s*** other than wanting the ordeal to be over.

The baby was born, and the doctor asked if I wanted to cut the cord. I declined. He put some plastic ratchet clamp things on and cut it. (It’s not a quick snip like in the movies; it’s tough tissue that crunches as it’s slowly cut through.)

The baby was taken by a nurse for the tests, and my wife was laying there, exhausted, with the rest of the cord still going up into her and attached to the placenta, which essentially had to be “delivered” still. I was hugging her and telling her how much I loved her and what a great job she’d done when the intern stepped in, took the clamp attached to my wife’s end of the cord, and released it.

If you have ever seen the loose end of a garden hose whip around when it’s under pressure, you have some idea of what happened, except it was blood being sprayed everywhere. The poor intern tried to grab the end but she just couldn’t. The doctor stepped in, caught it, and put the clamp back on in a matter of seconds.

I was standing there, sprayed with blood, and I’m sure my eyes were as large as saucers (as were the intern’s). This was not in the childbirth videos we’d watched in the classes.

I remember squeaking in a frantic voice, “Is that supposed to happen?” The doctor said not to worry, but I heard him say quietly to the intern, “I’ll talk to you later.”

The baby was fine, and Mother was fine (she was so drained she didn’t remember the hose incident at all), but I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the doctor had his talk with the intern.

If there’s a moral to the story, I guess it’s that if you’re a noob thinking, “What would happen if I do this?” it’s maybe best to ask first.

I’m happy with the outcome: a great son and a strangely funny story.

I used to volunteer with the Administrative Manager of Volunteer Services at a local hospital. Due to the new hospital tower being built, some departments were getting shifted to new quarters.

As part of a pre-packing process, [Manager] and I swept through the office, rummaging, trashing, and cleaning things. As an “Eh, why not?” I delved into the fridge where [Manager] usually stashed her microwavable lunches and sorted through the various things looking for expiration dates.

I received quite a large fright when I found three salmon dinners that expired in 2008. It was 2011! I threw them away so quickly there was a sonic boom behind them.

I told [Manager] about the long-expired food and she was freaked out. Apparently, she had bought them the previous week!

[Manager] had me tear off the expiration dates so she could return to the chain store where she’d bought them. The lawsuit if she had gotten sick or killed by that expired food would have been far too little too late, no matter what the settlement had been. Normally, I am against whining at employees and storming my way up through the chain of command, but this one was a legitimate complaint with honest-to-God consequences.

I mean, really? YEARS past the expiration date, and they kept it on the shelf and sold it? 

Our best guess was that the retail employee who stocked just kept shoving the dinners into the back every time they restocked, and nobody went through to pull expired food off the shelf.

After the move, I asked [Manager] what had happened. She told me that she had gotten something half-mumbled by a manager and a refund before being brushed off. 

She returned a few days later and did a bit of digging in the frozen section, only to find several other expired frozen foods, some over five years past the expiration. Clearly, her complaint hadn’t been taken seriously and nobody had bothered to get the store checked. She subtly put them all back exactly where they had been “hidden” before.

Then, she filed an official complaint with their corporate hotline. The entire store ended up being closed down and then reopened under new management. She said that other than a few faces, she didn’t recognize anyone on staff anymore.