The thick-forearmed and innocuously named Jason had little hair and a froggy baritone. He read off a list of the various codes and things that may be of alarm in a hospital, Code Red for Fire and so on. We heard anecdotes of those days when there were only four security guards instead of thirty-something; he told us about that one time the hospital should’ve called a Code Silver[1] but didn’t. At the end of his presentation the chief security guard furiously prodded us, an audience of twenty-something teenage hospital volunteers, for at least one question. Nobody obliged him.

The other activities at orientation were similarly forced: wheelchair “training”, that Glo Germ demonstration to emphasize the importance of hand washing, some attempt at team-building or breaking the ice by throwing around a large and luridly colored beach ball that compelled the catcher to share something about themselves, etc. I’ll note that I was the only guy there, which variably made me lucky or effeminate depending on who I asked. Phallus or no, we were all dressed the same: an offensively blue polo, khakis[2], and that little electronic badge that opens doors to certain parts of the hospital and makes us feel like we’re part of some slightly-exclusive club. Upon exiting, we were assigned to any of multiple on-the-job-training type departments where we could most efficiently learn some pattern-matching task and be put to use.

Having little to do with veterinary medicine and instead being a combination of janitorial and delivery work, PETS stood for Patient [and] Equipment Transport Services. Duties include but are not limited to: stopping at lower-level-of-care units and collecting all varieties of soiled equipment[3], using wipes that are drenched with tongue-twisting antimicrobial compounds, which seem to induce headaches in some, to clean said equipment, and wheeling patients out of the hospital (this is referred to as “discharging the patient”). My assigned “duties” quickly became rote, but a few anecdotes stand out among the rest.

PETS employees transport a volume of equipment that necessitates the use of a cart. The cart is simple in its construction – four wheels[4], a top and bottom shelf, brown splotches of rust and who-knows-what on many points throughout the frame. Basic as it was, there was a requisite amount of creativity and “higher-order thinking” associated with making full use of your PETS cart. Tight and meticulous packing of the smaller items in the bottom shelf was a given, and a thinking man could conclude that commodes and shower chairs will only fit on the top shelf. However, none but the brightest and most geometrically-inclined players of the 4-dimensional board game that is the management of a PETS cart will realize that you can put one pair of the commode/shower chair’s legs between the cart and its front and back handles, affording the transport of two more purposed chairs. Now carrying thirty-something pieces of equipment, the cart was pushed by one hand as the employee/volunteer pulled behind them a collection of IV poles stacked precariously atop each other’s legs.

A common task of mine was the so-called discharge, which consisted of me hauling a wheelchair to the patient’s room and directing them to sit only when I’ve applied the brakes (it may be a poor situation to have a 250 pound mass of lard and flesh throw themselves onto an object that isn’t secure to the floor). I then ask which entrance to take them to, where we can both wait for their Loved Ones or whoever to come collect them. Depending on the patient’s bariatric status and the condition of the wheelchair’s bearings, movement around the hospital can be slow; waiting for elevators (in which the patients go backwards so that they aren’t awkwardly facing the wall but rather awkwardly facing the door) adds a minute or two, here and there, to the discharge.

Small talk is a skill I am somewhat deficient in; nonetheless, the weather is always topical. One patient, a male of no less than fifty years (I am not trained in the art of gauging people’s age by sight, but his hairline’s loss in the war against recession plus the loud, I-don’t-care-that-we’re-inside tone of his voice made my assessment almost obvious) honored me with a token of wisdom given to us Youngsters only by the nearly-senile. He asked if I was volunteering for a GPA boost; I joked about how I wished that was the case, precipitating this: “That’s good that your giving back to the community. In a few years, your friends will be face-down in the trenches with their asses in the air”. The second half of this comment struck me as both peculiar and funny – I’m still not sure what to make of it.

There was that one time when I had to go down to probably the lowest-level-of-care unit in the hospital, a place that reminds one of a nursing home because of both its patient population and atmosphere[5], to deliver an item so rare that it isn’t even on hand in the PETS room but rather had to be retrieved from the storage closet[6]: a telephone, presumably for communication with a patient’s Loved Ones. The door to the patient’s room was closed which usually means Go Away, but a nurse asked if I was uncomfortable going in – unsure if I was intimidated by or trying (pathetically) to impress the 5’2” figure, I entered the room. Supine on the bed-with-wheels was a husk of a human being, presumably female but you can never be sure; past 80, we lose our hair and forfeit any semblance of a smooth complexion – men’s and women’s facial features become indiscernibly similar. It spoke what was probably English in a voice too soft  to really hear.

 I played with the 1990s China-made artifact that was that telephone; reading instructions is a difficult task without that handy thing called light. After mashing both ends of various wires into the phone until one of them went click, I circled the bed and plugged something into a wall whose outlets were already powering numerous obscure life-support instruments. A nurse entered and barked at me to leave, and that was that.

When not engaged in the stimulating activities detailed above, my time was spent in one of three places: 1) the bathroom, 2) the PETS storage room, 3) the PETS department room. The room was situated in the middle of the hospital; on the second floor, in a badge-only access hall that connected the east and west wings of the building. This made sense given the department’s function.

Described as if one walked straight through the room (which, as some explanation for the length of this description, was maybe ten times as deep as it was wide): falling-apart wheelchairs to the left, yellow and blue bags to the right (these “bags” were large, canvas constructions whose purpose was to protect nurses/Loved Ones whose circumstances decided that they must interact with a contagious patient; the bag was hung from patients’ doors by a hook/sling contraption and its nine pockets contained a number of contagion-curbing measures: gloves, masks, and these poncho-looking, see-through plastic outfits)[7], a few carts whose purposes were described above, a collection of shower chairs and commodes with weight capacities well into the eight hundred pound range, a horse-stall-mat-covered area for cleaning the larger equipment, a small shower whose purpose was not human use but rather the removal of hard-to-get-off mystery stains and such from (usually) the commodes, racks of IV pumps and other handheld items, stacks upon stacks of IV poles whose legs and hooks were interlocked with dubious security, that stainless steel countertop area where we cleaned stuff by hand (and more[8]).

The salient valuable bits of the PETS department resided at the back of the room. Behind the desk was a whiteboard where the employees were depicted as decently-doodled human forms of dry erase ink; a character named Randy was foremost among them, placed in the center and a few inches higher than the rest. Randy’s beard was, to use that everyday beard-describer, scraggly. It was also grey, in contrast with the gold halo indicating that Randy left humanity behind. “Lung cancer. He also liked to ride bikes” was the obituary I received upon asking; he started the Whiteboard Tradition and, unlike other employees who’ve left the department, was not erased as that would’ve “been wrong”. I have found it in myself to agree.

Other characters included Nick, who made fun of me for being unable to swim and introduced me to Def Leppard which, to me, sounds oddly similar to Van Halen; same genre, same era, blah blah blah. Jarod held a number of odd jobs and told me that he prides himself on adhering to a diet he considers nutritionally non-embarrassing, consisting almost wholly of very gamy meat like elk; three days later and straight-faced: “All I’ve eaten today’s like a Coke and some cookies or something”. The variety of cookie was never specified. These two were the managing employees during the time I was at the hospital, the 4-8pm shift.

Ancillary to Nick and Jarod were the employees who actually did more than exist behind a desk and operate the telephone; I remember few of them and only in very lacking detail. I’m sure the feeling is mutual, as my seeing these people in the hospital on a given day prompted them to introduce themselves as if we’d never met. Thomas was some 6’6” mastodon of perhaps 280 pounds, who pitied his pregnant wife because “the kid’s gonna be big like his dad”. Eric was considerably lesser in height and spoke with something of a regal courtesy and politeness; he told me that he partied way too much as a younger man and was trying to get back on track. Juany is remembered by me because of that story he told about the diarrhea.

After three weeks, the above characters seemed to tolerate me decently well.

As I made my escape from the hospital after my last day “on the job”, I managed to inhabit the domains of confusion, happiness, and introspection all at once; it was the same state of mind any K-12 student will enter in the hour surrounding the dismissal bell on any of their many last days of school.

     “So, why did you choose to volunteer at the hospital in the first place?”

 Being on the other side of it, knowing that I didn’t really learn anything meaningful – I didn’t learn anything some other opposable-thumbed mammal-thing couldn’t be taught to do – I was a little sour. It was a weird kind of sour, too, because I signed myself up for the program with zero parental coercion, I went through the mild hassle associated with the application and interview process, I showed up and did the menial grunt-work with what hopefully resembled a smile on my face. If it was my choice all the way through, shouldn’t I have some aversion to writing it off as a waste of time?

A big reason I signed up was the word “hospital”. Whenever I’m asked what I’ve decided to dedicate my life to – as if I’ve got a clue at sixteen – I usually mention something about maybe being a physician. It’s the thing to do, right? The letters MD (or DO, we live in accepting times) are a one-way ticket to obscure European cars and a white coat with My name on it, plus the power to impress non-doctors with very relatable phrases such as paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea – “Yeah man, me too!”. Unfortunately, God Status isn’t free; I’d end up toiling away slave-like through my best years for the privilege of being summoned at 3AM to do a surprise abdominal aortic aneurysm[9] repair.

     Whether that’s for me, I don’t know; I do know, however, that I was silly enough to think a three-week stint at the hospital, where I wasn’t allowed to meaningfully interact with patients (duh – I’m an untrained, unqualified kid), would inform me about my future life choices. I thought I’d do something sexier than cleaning equipment, I thought I might save a life and have one of those I-am-God power-trips, I thought I would talk to and work alongside doctors and nurses who spent years getting to where they are now – all because I spent an hour filling out and mailing the hospital volunteer form.

 I think I forgot about the word “volunteer”.

[1] Code Silver indicates a “Weapon/Hostage Situation”; the occasion was some domestic dispute in the far reaches of the hospital parking lot, culminating in a nursing student being shot in the head by her boyfriend/fiancée/male partner (who, I’ll add, was something like twice her age). I was told that the individual who discovered the body attempted “live-saving techniques” – CPR.

 
[2] The particular pair of khakis I wore to orientation was about two inches too short, a product of my poor ability in reading clothing labels and hate/fear of Walmart dressing rooms; the pants’ dimensions made one question “are those long shorts or short longs?”. They were also generously wrinkled – I noticed a crease that most would not and decided to “iron” the trousers by pressing a cylindrical Nesquik container lengthwise along the pants’ inseam. This was a poor idea.

 
[3] Some of the equipment I handled was decently interesting or at least performed a function I never thought was necessary (the so-called sequentials pumped air in and out of sleeves around patients’ legs; this on-and-off compression prevented blood clots in bed-ridden patients by promoting blood flow in areas that wouldn’t otherwise get it), other items were some combination of boringa or (necessarily) disgusting.

[3a] We had low-tech stuff too: dense-as-clay foam wedges that could function as hurricane-proof housing material, acting as pillows for parts of one’s body that are not the head.

 
[4] Two of the cart’s wheels were capable of full-sweep 360⁰ rotation while the others were fixed in place; think of a front-wheel drive car. In some display of my lacking mechanical aptitude/street-smarts/whatevera, I pushed the cart’s “front end” for an embarrassing length of time. This produced numerous near-collisions in the hospital’s slightly-too-narrow hallways as I tried needlessly hard to maneuver the cart.

[4a] LENGTHY PERSONAL ANECDOTE OF PRECISELY ZERO VALUE TO THE GREATER ESSAY – A discussion about me being bad with my hands is especially appropriate in a paragraph dealing (tangentially) with motor vehicles. I have always been kinesthetically challenged in some regard; this is not the result of any neurological disability – although that’d make a great excuse – I just didn’t play catch enough as a kid. It is easy to see how this effect compounds on itself: I am bad at catching flying items, so I will not practice, therefore I will become worse at catching flying items, and so on.

This quality, if you’d call it that, of mine was expressed on an occasion involving my car. After entering the Driving Machine and performing that same routine – everyone has one – of checking my face in the mirror and making the appropriate non-surgical adjustments, selecting a piece of music that fits my mood, etc., I started driving and heard a noise that may be described as “bad”. The flat tire itself didn’t make much noise, but the weirdly-loud gravel-sloshing plus my tire pressure indicator’s stare through the eye formed by “0” informed me that I must exit the vehicle. Most unfortunate.

It had been about three months since my Generous Parents bought me this car, meaning that the weekly carwash visits and abstinence from eating inside had ceased. Regardless, I still felt as if the car deserved to drive on four decently-full tires. I consulted with my Advisors – mom and a stepbrother – and was informed that car manufacturers are smarter than myself and have already installed the appropriate tools in the car. (continued)

Changing a tire is a rather straight-forward task. I did, however, nearly manage to lose a few fingers or more when I tried to elevate the car without making sure the jack was totally engaged; 2000 pounds of metal sliding backwards at you is not an everyday experience for sheltered suburb-dwellers like myself.

 I still never quite figured out why I had a flat tire that day.

[5] It’s obvious that a hospital unit’s atmosphere is a direct function of its patient population; the animalistic crazies in the psych ward are eager to bunch nurses and start brawls, but the guys in the morgue are pretty chill.

 
[6] Insulation was visible above you and rebar jutted out obliquely from the walls; the PETS storage room was a concrete dungeon left many steps from finished by the hospital. A favorite pastime of mine was born within the walls of this very room:

Gloves were a mandatory thing and in plentiful supply behind any door that only opened to badges; the storage room was among them. I soon realized that the gloves’ composition allowed for a beautiful thing – you could take them almost completely off, loop the elastic bit around your thumb, and send them flying like some sort of wearable projectile.

To complement the gloves, commodes of all sorts were grouped by the dozen in neat rows and columns against the walls of the storage room. I never played basketball for a number of reasons, but the generously wide mouths of the toilet allowed for me to shoot “hoops” from maybe fifteen feet away.

 
[7] The yellow bags were boring, general use stuff for when a patient had the flu or whatever. The blue bags, though, were called “chemo bags” because they were hung on the doors of patients who were undergoing chemotherapy, apparently rendering their bodily fluids radioactive and a large spill thereof being grounds for a hazardous-materials-indicating Code Orange.

 
[8] Densely packed dispensers of rubber bands for constraining wires and wooden dowels of maybe eight inches and unknown function tickled my mind in the spot wherever Legos do, obligating me to create a number of projectile-launching constructions including a “bow and arrow” that grew increasingly large in its multiple iterations.

[9] A balloon in your belly, sort of