Me and the Mafia

Did you know I've had intimate dealings with the mafia? Yep. You just never know who you will encounter as a nurse. Okay, this time I was a student nurse. My friend Amy and I were in nursing school. We were both working at a hospital as nurse externs. This particular hospital had a contract with the federal prison systems.

This contract meant we had prisoners from all over the country. They would have 2 armed guards on them at all times, and depending on their crime, they may have 2 additional armed guards outside the door. They were all shackled to the bed. There were all sorts of safety restrictions we had in dealing with these particular patients...But that is irrelevant to today's tale.

You see, Amy and I had to do a particularly.....Errrr......intimate procedure on a particular patient. He was a shriveled up little man. He was semi-comatose. He looked like death warmed over. We both discussed how pitiful it was that he was spending the end of his days shackled to a bed, with no family around, with two guards sitting, munching on potato chips and watching Springer....Anyway, we completed the......ummmm......thing that we had to do, that I seriously don't want to shock you with, and we were essentially done for the day.

We gave report to the oncoming shift, and stood around talking. We were just about to head out the door when we hear: CODE BLUE ROOM 445. CODE BLUE ROOM 445.

What? That was our little shriveled prisoner! Being nursing students, we were morbid. We stuck around to see what the excitement was going to bring. Can you guess what it brought?

It brought a man....But not just any man. He was a man in a very expensive dark suit with dark sunglasses, and he arrived in a limo. A LIMO! You have to understand I have never worked in a hospital that was in a good part of town. Completely the opposite. To see a limo in that particular area was nothing short of shocking. And, the dark suit man was not alone. He was surrounded by other dark suit men.

Apparently, when the doctor decided shriveled prisoner man's death was imminent, he got permission from the federal prison system to notify the family. Only, there was a hitch....They said it would be "very bad" if the staff allowed him to pass. In fact, they scared the dickens out of the team working on him. They "saved" the patient. For him to arrest several times more in the next 24 hours, when the "family" agreed that it was fine to let him pass.

After all of the drama we found out that our pitiful little shriveled prisoner was actually a very powerful man. A man with enough power that it would be "very bad" if he was deceased. He was with the mafia. I have no idea who he was or what his role was, but apparently he needed to be alive as long as possible.

You just never know who you will meet in that bed. It could be a housewife, a plumber, a preacher, a farmer, or just your ordinary run of the mill Soprano. Yep, you just never know!