Since it is the time of year when people start wearing sweaters and thinking about putting the winter quilt on the bed, and here in Arizona it might drop down to the brisk upper 60s at night, I thought I might tell a hospital ward Halloween story. But first a note about the ward. It was long. There were nine beds down each side with about six feet of space between beds. The left side, as you came in, was for girls, and the right side was for boys. All of us were between the ages of 10 and 15. The nurses were, to say the least, busy.
Every year around the first week of October, each kid on 6-West would get a small pumpkin, which we would carve into the scariest, or weirdest, jack-o-lantern we could manage. The jack-o-lantern would then sit on our bedside stand until a few days after Halloween.
Attentive readers will already have calculated that those pumpkins would be on those bedside stands for three or four weeks—in a ward that always seemed to be almost too warm. Suffice it to say that by the time Halloween came around, they were well past their prime. Rotten might be too strong a word, but they were definitely ripe. The ward would take on an odor with strong compost pile notes, but because the ward had so many odors that you really didn't want to identify, one more was not too alarming.
This particular October was one of the few times my younger brother, Merton, and I were in the hospital at the same time. You would think that with all the hemorrhages we both had that we would have been in the hospital at the same time a lot. Not so. Even though we tended to have entirely different kinds of hemorrhages, it is one of those strange twists of the universe that they didn't overlap just a bit more than they did. Whatever the reason, this was one of the three or four times we were in the hospital together. As usual, I have absolutely no idea what was bleeding in either of us.
Mert was two or three beds down from me. We were close enough that we could talk and exchange comic books and stuff by tossing them to the kids between us to pass on, but far enough apart that we wouldn't get on each other’s nerves. Mom came up to see us every afternoon, and I think it was a little unsettling for her having to go back and forth between the beds, but otherwise it was just another trip to the hospital.
It must have happened during the “Quiet Time” we had after lunch (it wasn’t called a nap in deference to our maturity), when everyone had to be in their beds reading, putting a model together, talking quietly, or doing some other quiet, nonrowdy activity. Some of the kids actually slept. “Quiet” is the operative word here, because if you got loud enough for the nurses to hear you out at the nurses' station, they would come in and draw the curtains around everyone's bed.
Anyway, this particular October afternoon, my brother was talking to the kid next to him. At some point, the kid on the other side of that kid said something that Mert took umbrage with. This led to an exchange that got a bit more heated with each volley. Pretty soon, about four of them were whisper-shouting epithets back and forth. At some point, one of them said something that Mert decided was beyond a verbal response, and he picked up his pumpkin (remember the pumpkins?) and threw it.
If this had been the first week or so that we had them, it might have been a serious weapon. Not fatal, but it would have surely left a mark. This was, however, very late in the month, and the pumpkin was the consistency of mashed potatoes. The only thing keeping it from slumping into a mushy pile was the skin, which, as it turns out, was not quite up to keeping things together when handled. Those parts of Mert’s pumpkin that didn’t fall out of his hand back onto him went flying off toward the verbal miscreant, but just as the shot from a shotgun spreads as it flies, the portions of the pumpkin that Mert managed to actually throw took widely varying paths.
Parts hit the kid in the next bed, parts hit their target or at least his bed, and parts fell into the spaces between beds. Naturally the two who had been fired upon retaliated. Most of those pumpkins landed on Mert’s bed and on the bed of the kid between us, but a fair-sized chunk landed on my comic book. Luckily it was one I had read three or four times. I picked up the shrapnel and tossed it in the general direction of the battle. The now four major combatants were busily throwing whatever pumpkin glop they could reach, at whoever was in range. As the neighboring kids saw what was happening, they gleefully joined in.
One of the unexplored aspects of the hospitalization of kids is that while in the hospital, they have very little opportunity to be annoying little brats. At that time and at that particular hospital, no one went in for a day, or just overnight. We were in there for three to six weeks usually, and some kids were there for months, and all too often, for the rest of their lives. Six weeks of having to be a brave little fighter, doing everything you are told and being a role model for the rest of the class will soon have the best of kids wondering about emptying the bedpans out the sixth floor window or dropping water balloons down the nine floors of the main stairways. (For those who jump to conclusions, we couldn't open the windows, and I've been advised that it's probably best if I don't talk about the stairwells.) It is a kid's instinctual need to test all limits placed on him or her by parents, teachers, and anyone else hell-bent on controlling his or her behavior, including nurses. We have to annoy those people at regular intervals to make sure we can't get away with anything, and, truth be told, to make sure they still care enough to keep us in line.
Well, the kids on the boys’ side of the ward released a lot of pent-up mischievousness that afternoon.
The arc of pumpkin volleys traced their way up and down the row of beds for 15 or 20 minutes, with everyone taking hits but suffering no real damage, except to our olfactory systems. Everyone's beds looked like a brownish-orange biological accident. It had come to the point where there was only one pumpkin left. It was mine. I was saving it for the ultimate shot. The other kids were scraping together globs of pumpkin guts for their next shot and trying to build a fort out of a pillow and some comic books.
Then I saw my shot. It was this smug kid at the end who thought he was a hotshot because his father was going to bring up a color TV for him to watch. He kept telling us how much he would charge us to watch it for a half hour. They had set up TVs on the ward before for various reasons, and they had all been spectacularly unwatchable. They had to rely on rabbit-ear antennas, and there was so much metal and stone in the building, along with a whopping amount of electronic interference, that the best picture usually consisted of one blob, vaguely male, talking to another blob that might, under the right circumstances, be vaguely female. The last time they brought one in I got a headache that lasted into the next day. Anyway, this twit kept talking about how he would soon be watching “American Bandstand” and telling us what Barbara and Christine and the other regulars were wearing. My pumpkin was for him.
He was at the end of the ward next to the linen cart and the main doors to the ward. I was in the next bed. He picked up a handful of glop and threw it. The main bits got me along the side of the head. I had seeds and the membranes and glop from the center of the pumpkin hanging down the side of my face. He laughed like a hyena. That was his mistake. I had already figured out that if I picked up my pumpkin by its paper plate and used what was left of the plate’s sturdiness as a launch platform, I would stand a good chance of getting the entire gourd or squash or whatever it was to my target. While he was busy laughing at the pumpkin guts on the side of my face, I carefully lifted my missile by its slightly soggy base. Then I let it fly. He was looking down at that moment, and the pumpkin got him squarely on the top of the head. It was beautiful. When he looked up at me, he was wearing the cutest little beehive-shaped pumpkin-gut wig. A fair portion of the gourd ended up in the linen cart, and I knew that spelled trouble, and perhaps doom, if they figured out who threw what.
By that time, the rest of the battle had pretty much ended due to the ammunition being spread fairly evenly over most surfaces on the boys’ side of the ward. Most of us were grinning that grin you sport when you know you’ve done something that is very definitely going to get you killed, but it was so much fun that you just couldn't not do it.
About then, one of the nurses came in. She walked about 10 feet into the ward and stopped. She looked up and down the boys’ side of the ward. She closed her eyes, shook her head and looked again. Then she looked at the girls’ side. It was clean and neat, with no sign of the great pumpkin war. She closed her eyes, opened them slowly and looked at the boys' side again. I won't transcribe her exact words here. Suffice it to say that it was the first time I ever heard a woman say that particular word. I was shocked.
Then she went back out to the desk to call the troops in.
In about five seconds, three RNs, two nurse’s aides and four students came in, along with two guys from housekeeping. I can tell you that a group of nurses in full crisis mode will put to shame any SWAT team in the nation with their organization, focus on the objective, and their attitude that one shot, one kill can and will be done more efficiently. Getting clean sheets was the real problem. The afternoon linen cart only had enough sheets, blankets and pillowcases to repair the occasional accident. They could deal with two or three complete bed changes, but they had nine to do. This meant they would have to borrow from the other wards. That was the bit that really caused the axe to fall. They hated having to borrow from the other wards because payback was always so … tricky. They sent negotiators out to five other wards, but it was a tense situation. Eventually the needed supplies arrived, and the ward clerk made careful notes concerning who had loaned what.
First, wet washcloths and towels were passed out, and we were told to get clean, and we were given pajamas to change into. When one of the guys said it was too early to put on pajamas, the nurse just looked at him with one eyebrow arching about two inches higher than the other. He decided not to push the issue. Then, those of us who could walk were told to strip off our filthy sheets and remake our beds with clean sheets. Being able to only use one hand because of an IV or anything else was no excuse, and the corners had better be done correctly. Those of us who could not walk had our sheets changed by the nurses, and it was done with all the “vigor” they could muster without causing injury.
The head nurse announced that there would be no dessert that night; but the real punishment came when we saw the smug looks on the girls’ faces when they were taken up to the recreation room for that afternoon’s activities, and we were told our “rest period” was extended until the next morning.
It was a long afternoon.