It’s the 21st century and they gave them a fucking bell ;p

I was on shift at the hospital today, and… safe to say I almost peed myself laughing, but not just me. My colleague, a medical specialist consultant, was there too, and the story our nurses told during their lunch break left us helpless for a good 20 minutes because we couldn’t stop laughing.

So the story unfolds (mind you, they sat so close I was involuntarily eavesdropping on their conversation before it became a dialogue)

To give you context – it is not a secret that in an overstretched and crowded ED, we sometimes have patients on trolleys in the corridor. Nobody likes it, and the medical and nursing teams often bend over backwards to make this unpleasant situation bearable, but it is as it is. Also, usually, ‘corridor patients’ are the most stable with the least medical needs, and because of this, those patients are often elderly with more social than medical needs and often exacerbated by dementia. Now to the story.

One nurse( N1) showed another(N2) something resembling a Santa bell. It was quite a large bell with a handle, one you could happily ring, shout ho-ho-ho and not look out of place. That was what caught my attention, and then I heard.

N1:‘Can you imagine someone thought giving the patients a bell was a good idea?’ said one, showing this to the other. Sure, we don’t have a call system in the corridors, but a bell?

N2: ‘Oh, but they don’t have it anymore.’ Said the other.

N1: ‘Yeah, because all the elderly patients rang them at once. Next, they’ll be giving them a bloody tambourine to complete the orchestra.’

N2: ‘So they were taken because of the noise?’

N1: ‘No, they were taken because one confused patient hit the other with the bloody bell.’

At this point, my doctor colleague and I lost it, and we were bent over the desk, dying from laughter, when I heard the second nurse adding.

N2: ‘Good, otherwise our next mandatory training would have to cover ‘you rang my lord’ nursing skills.’

So there you it. We live in the 21^st century and went back to ringing a bloody bell.