How To Get Kicked Out Of The Hospital

My daddy was recently hospitalized for a 10-inch blood clot in his leg. Yeah, I said a 10-freaking-ass-inch blood clot!

Now, we’ve gotta get these sexy legs fixed, right? They have him on some blood thinners, and also some heart meds, because his heart was going into atrial fibrillation.

You may remember that my dad is borderline crazy. Not in a schizophrenic kind of way, but in a lovable half-step-away-from-the-loony-bin kind of way. Of course, this totally endeared him to the nurses.

They loved him! There was one little nurse who he ribbed at every opportunity. She asked if she could get him anything, and he pointed at the oxygen tubes they had up his nose. He said, “Yeah, can you go outside and get some damn grass burrs to run up my nose? Because that would be more comfortable than this thing.”

He was constantly making nutty comments like this. And don’t even get me started on his visitors.

WTF???

This is Dad’s classmate from back in high school, Marguerite. She showed up in his hospital room with this horse head on. They are 60 years old, and still act like little kids! It was pretty freakin’ funny, though!

 Then there was my husband. The white board in the hospital room lists the nurses and doctors on call for that particular shift. Well, my husband took a note from Chevy Chase in the classic movie, Fletch, and wrote “Dr. Rosenpenis” on the white board.

We are a fairly loud and rowdy bunch, and I fully expected a team of hospital administrators to storm through the door with discharge papers at any minute.

But I think they actually enjoyed having us there. The nurses seemed to come into my dad's room a lot more often than necessary, whether to see what he was going to say next or to get some of the food he was constantly offering them.

Dad offered one of his favorite nurses some ribs and she snuck into the bathroom to gobble them down, because apparently, the hospital frowns upon nurses accepting barbecue from the patients.  Go figger!

But we weren’t the only ones pulling hijinks at the hospital. We were there on April Fool’s Day, and someone in the staff put up a sign by the printer that told employees that they had new software, and the printers were now voice-activated. The sign told them to just say their name and how many copies they wanted.

So, all morning, there were people yelling at the printer, “THIS IS CAROLINE. I NEED 4 COPIES.”

I guess that’s better than replacing everyone’s pain pills with Viagra. That's what I would have done!