Tag Archives: nurses

Pranks in Hospital

My mother and informant, KK, meets up with her friends from high school about once a month.  They call themselves “club.”  I was home when KK hosted “club” and listened to her and her friends, several of whom are nurses, swap stories about their shifts when working in a hospital.

KK and her friends were working the night shift in the hospital on the oncology floor.  It was probably 1993.

KK and her friends decided they wanted to entertain one of their patients.  Their patient was an 18 year old man hospitalized with leukemia.  KK said, “We wanted to make him happy.”   KK explained that the patient was always up late because his friends would come visit him late at night.

In order to cheer him up, KK and her friends stuffed their chests with pillows, barged into his room, and sang Jimmy Soul’s “If You Wanna Be Happy” and Cher’s “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss).”  They called themselves “The Boobettes.”  “And of course he laughed like crazy.  He loved it,” KK said.

KK and her friend’s prank reveals what nurses do that lies outside of their job description.  Rather than being a rite of passage, her skit demonstrates a kind of compassion that often seems to accompany nurses.

Nurses in Suits on Halloween

My mother and informant, KK, meets up with her friends from high school about once a month.  They call themselves “club.”  I was home when KK hosted “club” and listened to her and her friends, several of whom are nurses, swap stories about their shifts when working in a hospital.

On Halloween my informant, KK and her friend, both nurses, dressed up in suits when working the night shift at the hospital in the early 1990s.  Arthur Anderson Consulting had recently come into the hospital and “told the nurses how they should do their job.” From KK’s tone of voice it was clear that she and her friend thought it absurd that a consulting group could come in and tell the staff how to do their job when they had no medical education.

The patients that KK and her friend visited found their costumes amusing.  The administration and staff of the hospital did not really react because it was not too busy at night.

So it seems as if my informant and her friend were using Halloween as an excuse to mock the consultants and hospital administration for hiring Arthur Anderson.  This is typical with Halloween celebrations.  At Halloween, it is appropriate to act differently than one would in normal life.  KK and her friend became what they are not.  In doing so, they poked fun at the Arthur Anderson employees who, ironically, became someone they are not when they consulted a hospital without medical know-how.