The end is in sight

As of this Friday, I’ll be off call, and will remain so through the end of the year. Know what that means?

Two more days as Chief of Staff.

I know, I know, I really shouldn’t kvetch. After all, the year has been uneventful.

True, we had the Feds breathing down our necks this year, but my hospital (St. Mammon Community) fared well in the end. We’re still open for business — not even a suspension.

And, also true, we had some serious competency issues to deal with, as well as an unruly doctor who needed a stern talking-to.

But aside from the Feds checking our rectums for suspicious freckles, one or two near comatose staff members, and that one anger management issue, it has been an uneventful year.

Oh, wait. I forgot the hostage crisis.

Yeah, that was tense, but there were no fatalities. For six hours, some dude from Klamath held captive an ER doc, a physican’s assistant, and Kurt from Maintenance. He was asking for a rehabbed double wide, a full tank of gas, free passage across the border into Humboldt County, and a six-pack of Bud Lite, and he meant business. Must have had six M80s taped to his chest.

Nevertheless, if you ignore the structural damage caused by our town’s impromptu pseudo-SWAT team barreling into the ER waiting room with a Humvee borrowed from a local realtor, it was an uneventful year. Ignoring, of course, that angry doc threatening me with the jagged edge of a broken ginger ale bottle, the Feds and their mandatory anal probes, comatose doctors, and the extraterrestrial visitation.

What? You mean I forgot the extraterrestrial visitation?

He (it?) landed his craft on our hospital’s quad, newly remodeled to include extra large ashtrays, and demanded to see our leader. This led to no small amount of kicking, scratching, and hair-pulling between the Chief Executive Officer and the Assistant Administrator, Patient Care Services, so while those two were duking it out, I spoke to the little gray guy. (Never ceases to amaze me how BROAD the job description is for Chief of Staff.) Turns out he was jonesing for some of our cafeteria’s famous biscuits and gravy. When he found out we had discontinued breakfast services, he was irate. I had to talk him down or else he would have shoved us up some dank intergalactic wormhole.

Yes, we weathered the community’s torch-and-pitchfork march (those libelous rumors of postmortem reanimation experiments were greatly overexaggerated), an unscheduled shoot by Seymore Butts (hey, the guy needs a permit to work on hospital grounds just like any other movie producer), the unannounced delivery of Brad and Angelina’s newest baby, Elvis’s return, and the second coming of Christ — oh, you would want to hear about that.

He came for the biscuits and gravy, too, but took their absence with far more equanimity than our ET. I think he’s too pissed at the Republicans to get upset over breakfast.

But aside from that, it was an uneventful year.

D.

PS: I’ll have another pic posted later this evening . . . one with less, um, topography.

Walnut, December 19, 2007. Category: Humor, such as it is.

About Walnut

View all posts by Walnut