- - TIME FLIES, FINGERS DO TOO - -

- At 1:36 AM Wednesday morning, the emergency room at Sanonte’s Timberhill Hospital, got very busy.
- Two unconscious bodies were brought into the ER, both were victims of a single-car accident.
- Jasper, a medic in the ambulance, had visited the VFW’s second floor, he knew the woman’s first name was Pearl. He told one of the gurney-pushers that during the drive to the hospital, he had dug around in the man’s pants pockets and found a wallet, and the man’s name was Douglas X. Furr.
- At 5:07 AM, both Doug and Pearl were out of the ER and into Timberhill’s ICU. Both were classified as "stable", but both were still in comas.
- At 7:50 AM, the ER staff was having a party in the hospital’s lunch room. Coffee, in cardboard cups, and Twinkies, cut in half, were being consumed to celebrate their night’s work.
- The ER doctor said, "Well done staff, well done! Two bodies off the truck, one birth, four bodies into beds, and zero bodies out the back door. Well done."
- Pearl was no longer pregnant, she had two premature boys by cesarean section. However, they were co-joined, the old term is Siamese twins. They were joined at the foot by a thin band of skin. The doctor quickly cut the skin so the "premies" could by placed in separate incubators.
- At 7:51 AM, complications arose, in the hospital’s admin-office.
- When the hospital’s admin-clerk Betty, (as in Douglas Furr’s ex-wife Betty), reviewed the forms filled out by the doctors and nurses since she left work yesterday, she spotted an error and said, "Gotcha again bitch!"
- She sipped her coffee and waited for the hospital-wide synchronized wall-clock to reach 7:58 AM.
- (Hours earlier, Louise Rencher, the maternity nurse, had entered the birth statistics for Pearl’s babies, onto the hospital’s computer system. She entered "left foot trauma", in the ‘MIDDLE NAME’ box for the first boy, removed through Pearl’s C-section, and "right foot trauma", in the ‘MIDDLE NAME’ box on the second certificate.)
- At 7:58 AM, Betty cleared her throat then flipped on the hospital’s public address system and said, "Nurse Rencher come to the admin office before clocking out." The word "please" wasn’t anyplace in Betty’s broadcast.
- Nurse Louise Rencher gritted her teeth so hard some Twinkie filling squirted out of her mouth. She wiped her mouth then left the hospital’s lunch-room party.
- Betty and Louise are enemies. They lambast each other every chance they get. Think of them as co-joined, not by skin, but by an invisible filament of twisted raw nerves. The feelings became mutual years earlier, when Betty got a parking spot closer to the Employee Entrance, than Louise.
- Louise questioned Betty’s random assignment of parking spots, by picking a name out of one box and a parking spot number out of another.
- Betty seemed incensed by Louise’s innuendo and said, "That’s the way the numbers came up. I was lucky."
- "Right! Lucky!", said Louise. "So were most of the doctors."
- Betty said, "I wear wool suits during the rainy winter months. You wear synthetic nurse-pants. If I get wet my suit shrinks."
- "I get wet too, you know."
- "Buy an umbrella."
- Parking spot assignment, was the trigger for the mutual disgust. Before the disgust was mutual, it had been one-sided. Betty thought Doug was having an affair with Louise.
- Betty reacted by buying twin beds to replace her and Doug’s king-sized bed. She told Doug he had ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’, and he kicked her at night.
- After the bed switch, she said, "That should fix the problem, maybe now your legs will become less active."
- At 8:03 AM, Louise opened the door to the admin-office, and glared at Betty, "What!?"
- Betty snorted. "It’s crap!", she pointed to the PC’s birth certificate screen, "Using the ‘MIDDLE NAME’ boxes like that, is the dumbest crap I’ve ever seen. Even candy-stripers ain’t that stupid."
- Louise yelled, "There ain’t no box on the stupid PC screen for notes... plain old notes. So I used the ‘MIDDLE NAME’ boxes. I hate PC’s. My shift’s over. If you don’t like what I did then fix it yourself!"
- Betty yelled, "I don’t have access! I can’t change the stats. It takes a nurse or doctor to do that. You Rencher... you have to fix your crap!"
- Louise yelled, "No! The mother is in a coma and can’t talk! Leave it like it is until she can talk!"
- With her teeth gritted together again, Louise walked away.
- It was almost a clean break, but then Betty spoke, "Gee, I hope you don’t get hit by a truck or something. I mean, I’d have to ask a doctor, maybe Doctor Wilcox, to fix your screw-up. You know Doctor Wilcox don’t you?"
- Doctor Wilcox and Louise were dating, it was supposed to be a secret.
- As Louise left the admin-office, her right hand was the last thing Betty saw, it had one finger pointing up.
- Betty returned the one-finger salute and said, "Gotcha again bitch!"
- At 8:11 AM, the best finger movement in the whole hospital went unseen. Pearl moved the index finger on her right hand.
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- That's the latest from Sanonte, or Sanity
- G, December 19, 2007