I have 2 good stories from nursing, and a few from private life that I will share another time. I worked at the VA in Asheville in 1997, and was first assigned to the beautiful new nursing home that they had built. They had these neat small TVs that would pull out on an arm from the wall and you could position them directly in front of the patients. There was one, however, in a semiprivate room where the patient in the first bed was essentially vegetative. This TV, whether turned on or off, emitted a constant "lub-dub", exactly the sound of a heart beating. I SWEAR it's true. The only way to make it stop was to disconnect the cable from the TV. We all freaked daily when we had to go in there. Maintenance could not answer the question "WHY?".
My other story is in Columbus, NC, where I worked for 5 years in a small OR. We had a great urologist there by the name of Randy Williams, who unfortunately died from carbon monoxide poisoning while at a conference in Jackson Hole, WY. We had stereos in all the ORs, and after Dr. Williams passed away, the radios would come on by themselves at all hours. This could get pretty spooky when you are in a room alone at all hours of the night on call. Some of us thought that the stereos had a timer, but they did not. It was almost always the same song, Rod Stewart's "Some Guys have all the Luck". One day during a cataract surgery I was playing a CD, and this particular doc was very picky that the music always be "soothing", Muzak sounding stuff. Suddenly, the CD quit and the blamed stereo went to AM radio, with a blaring static! No one listens to AM radio! As far as I know, this stereo had NEVER been on AM radio! We all thought that it was just Dr. Williams picking on the eye doc, because he was so anal all the time and Doc W was real laid back! Oh yeah, and the automatic flushing toilet in the PACU would flush frequently by itself with no one in the bathroom. That we thought was another doc, who died long before I went to work there. Just food for thought!




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