My husband had a falling-out with his former best friend after the guy cheated on our other best friend. (She found him in bed with another woman and immediately left him.) Then, the woman he cheated with got pregnant. My husband has described this woman as “crazy,” “abusive,” and “manipulative.” He’s 99% sure she got pregnant just to keep her boyfriend from leaving. She drank alcohol during her pregnancy, and was seen in public with her baby, clearly under the influence.

At one point, she threw something heavy at her boyfriend’s head, giving him a black eye. She’s also a pathological liar, constantly telling everyone that she and her boyfriend got together after he had already broken up with his ex when everyone knows what really happened — the guy admits it.

Now this couple has decided to get married even though the guy clearly doesn’t want to be with her and had tried to get back together with his ex several times.

It’s the day before their wedding, and my husband asks him, “So, are you really going through with it?”

His reply: “Oh, yeah, she’s acting okay now.”

What a touching proclamation of love! Just what every bride wants to hear her husband say!

I’m past due with my second child by a week when I wake up around 4:00 am and find fresh blood in the toilet after urinating. I wake my husband, get the toddler ready, and grab the bags, and we get to the hospital a little before 7:00 am. At this point, I am beginning to feel contractions coming on. The intake takes several minutes before I’m placed in a pre-check room — essentially a small department of eight beds, divided by curtains, where they do cervix checks, blood pressure, and first-step inductions. I’m placed in the last bed on the far side and hooked up to a fetus monitor while a new nurse checks all my vitals. I come to hate this woman immediately.

She tells us first that my toddler can’t be in the room with us, to which my husband and I both say we are trying to contact nearby family but no one’s answering yet, plus we have yet to be moved to a birthing suite and I cannot carry all those bags myself at this time. The nurse relents after two more tellings, but says snippily that the toddler can’t be there for the birth. We both know and inform her that we have no intention of having my toddler in the room at that time. She leaves and my husband goes back to calling family repeatedly.

A second nurse comes in, checks everything and suggests maybe I go home, stating that it’s probably too early for anything to happen. I tell her I don’t want to — that the contractions are starting to hurt badly — so she takes me into the birthing wing and sets me up in the jacuzzi. I’m there for twenty minutes. The first half, I’m starting to feel better, but then the contractions double. I count through the pain that I’m in a contraction for about a minute every two minutes.

Cue the b**** nurse. She comes in at 8:00 am and says I shouldn’t be in the tub — yet doesn’t help me climb out — and that my contractions can’t possibly be coming that fast, and has me walk back to the intake wing. Everything hurts! I’m trying not to cry and to do the breathing exercises, etc., all while the nurse hooks me back up to the fetus monitor, berates my husband for still having our toddler here, and then leaves. She only returns once, to snap at me, saying, “You need to keep it down! You can’t be screaming or crying; you’re upsetting other patients here!”

For context, I was induced in my first pregnancy due to the possibility of preeclampsia, stayed four days in the hospital, and was so completely loopy between lack of sleep and the epidural that come the birth, I did it half-dazed. I have never experienced the pain before this, but I’m trying to soldier on and muffle any screaming and tears due to my toddler being in the room. I finally convince the nurse to check my cervix next time she’s in, which she does, only to say I’m not even dilated. That’s a lie, because I was nearly two centimeters dilated when I saw my OB three days ago. I ask for the doctor and she says he’s not there and leaves. My husband leaves at this time to pass our toddler on to family. Out of desperation, I call out for a nurse until another one comes a few minutes later. I immediately ask to see the doctor and she goes to fetch him. He comes in at 9:00 am with the b**** nurse, who’s talking to him, “She’s not dilated… Didn’t do labour classes… Not breathing right…”

I want to punch her.

The doctor takes off the fetus monitor devices and checks my cervix. He goes, “She’s four centimeters dilated! Get her to the birthing suite now.” Then he vacates the room.

The nurse looks at me. “Okay, let’s go.”

A second nurse asks if she should grab the wheelchair, to which b**** nurse says we don’t need it and proceeds to have me walk out of the intake wing and into the labour side. That’s a distance of seven hospital beds and past three birthing rooms.

I’m leaning against the wall, trying to walk through crippling contractions, while she’s telling me I need to hurry up and I shouldn’t take so long. I hiss at my husband that if she doesn’t stop talking at me, once I get closer I’m going to rip her throat out. Unfortunately, she says nothing by the time I shuffle to the door and disappears.

No thanks to her, I can’t receive any pain medication because I am too far dilated by this point, and I deliver my healthy baby a few minutes after 10:00 am.

My better half booked a two-week cruise for us both. She is fastidious when it comes to paperwork. We board after showing our tickets and are directed to our room.

While we are unpacking, there’s a knock on the door. We open it to see one of the cruise workers and a lady. The lady reminds me of an owl by the way she is peeking around the employee, looking into my room. I shut the door a tad so she can’t peer in, and I am informed that there seems to be an issue with the booking.

The employee asks if I could make my way to the purser’s desk with any paperwork we may have. We get the folder containing the paperwork and I head off with Mrs. Owl to get this sorted.

After ten minutes of listening to Mrs. Owl complain how unprofessional everything is, we get to the front of the line and are asked by the purser for any documentation we may have to help clear up the matter.

I hand her the folder saying, “This is every piece of correspondence between my partner, me, and your company, in chronological order starting with my partner’s first inquiry up until yesterday morning confirming our room number.”

The purser looks to Mrs. Owl. Mrs. Owl hands her a sticky note with a handwritten number on it.

Ten minutes later, I’m back in my room with my feet up drinking an extremely alcoholic cocktail.

Not sure what happened to the Owls.

This one’s on me. For the past year or so, I’ve had five wonderful 10- to 12-year-old boys in my Minecraft classes, good friends who became closer through interacting on their computers. A sixth boy recently joined for the spring term, and I noted that he shared [Uncommon Last Name] with one of the previous students — who has a hyphenated name, but half of it is identical — and both of them listed [Mother’s Not-Too-Common First Name] [Uncommon Last Name] as their emergency contact. Naturally, I figured they were brothers…

…and managed to greatly upset the long-time student by telling him that. Probing further before the next class, I found that one student lived on the east end of the county while the other came from a more western city. You can bet I was extremely apologetic to the student in that next class!

Yes, there are two mothers with the same first and last name, with a son between 10 and 12, whose child has high-functioning mental challenges, who signed him up for the same class at the same time in a town neither of them lives in.

After being rushed to hospital via ambulance, I was put in a bed on the ward around two in the morning.

Each bay had four beds in it, and each bed was labelled one through four. The patients’ names were above the beds, and the charts were located at the bottom of the beds.

I hadn’t been asleep for long when I was suddenly thrown upright by someone fiddling with my bed and adjusting the top so I was sitting. Another nurse grabbed my arm before I had fully woken up, so there was one on each side. One was taking my blood pressure and the other was about to insert a needle into my cannula.

Neither had said a word to me.

Tired, cranky, and having only just gotten to sleep after being transferred up from A&E, I asked them what they were doing.

“Just giving you your medicine, Catherine,” one of the nurses replied.

My name is not Catherine.

I asked them to check my chart and to get the needles away from me. They did, grumbling as if I was being dramatic, only to both go wide-eyed. I was in bed two and apparently, they needed the woman in bed one.

I thought nothing of it. I was only happy that they hadn’t injected me with a random drug as I was pregnant, and who knows what could have happened.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I found out that Catherine in the bed across from me was 102 years old and suffering from dementia.

I was twenty-five and heavily pregnant at the time.

I don’t know how they managed to mix us up, but it did not give me much confidence in the nurses during that hospital stay.