possible pestilence prevention

a couple of our patients have some pretty nasty skin complaints. DorothyDuck has boils on her face that defy description. it’s as if moses threw all his soot at once and the whole lot landed on Dorothy.

whatever her dipsomaniac doctor is prescribing, it’s having very little effect and nursemyra thinks its time to try something with a bit more guts. like a dried toad.

“toads should be thoroughly dried in the air or sun. they should be laid on the boil. then the toad will swell and drain the poison through the skin into its own body. once the toad is full it should be thrown away and a new toad applied to the boil.”

I’m all out of toads at the moment but I think I can cobble together the ingredients for this promising cure…

“roast the shells of newly laid eggs. ground the roasted shells into a powder. chop up the leaves and petals of marigold flowers. put the eggshells and marigolds into a pot of good ale. add treacle and warm over a fire”

it certainly sounds delicious and more achievable than “put a live hen nest to the swelling to draw out the pestilence” as live hen nests are thin on the ground at the Gimcrack. “to aid recovery after this, the patient must drink a glass of their own urine every day”.

now that won’t be a problem. we’ve got buckets of the stuff. they can bathe in it too if that will help though apparently “being put to bed and washed all over with a mixture of vinegar and rosewater” could have better results. I rather fancy that one myself so I think I’ll bring it to Bruno’s attention on monday.

I’m not sure what the cause of DorothyDuck’s outbreak is so I’ve been researching images of similar complaints. the closest I could find was this though she doesn’t actually have curly black hair at the base of her nose so try to picture her face without that detail.……. and please let me know if you have access to dried toads. or live hen nests. I need a gross of each….

scrotum poles at happy hour

every saturday afternoon we show old movies and tv serials to the patients and on the last friday of each month we have happy hour. this is the day we roll out the aged madeira and vintage port so all the staff line up for free meds and wash them down with Terrantez. Ten minutes later, when the buzz comes on, we bring up the cask red and a dozen tooheys and whisk the tea trolley round the lounge.

there’s maybe 50 or 60 inmates congregated together clutching their sweaty $2.00 coins, waiting for the genteel afternoon tea to finish. nursemyra likes to prolong the tension, 5mg of  oxycontin washed down with a single quintas brings out the mildred ratched in me. by the time I’ve dropped platters of cheese cubes and cocktail onions on each table they’re all champing at the bit.

the thing about happy hour is that it tends to get the hormones happening. we’ve got our eye on Madame Crazy and also on Dr. Do-Able but there’s often a few dark horses running in this race. New kid on the block is The Actor. He arrived on monday and confused everyone by appearing way too normal to be an inmate. he was mistaken for the furniture removalist, the chaplain and the geriatrician and it wasn’t until he was found blessing stethoscopes in the carpark that anyone realised otherwise.

The Actor used to star in a famous 70s aussie soap, the one that first dared to show nudity, adultery, rape, drug taking and homosexuality. characters became pregnant to priests, were sent to mental hospitals, lost limbs and married their nurses. all rather like real life though I doubt The Actor envisaged ending his days at the Gimcrack when he signed up to dispense drugs at number 96.

over the course of the next hour, the coolabah and the tooheys start to take effect. Madame Crazy’s practically under the table and definitely out of the running. Dr. Do-Able looks too pleasantly buzzed to be capable of any shenanigans so the fan club’s attention is definitely on the Actor.

did I mention that BabyJane is back from hospital? she made a full recovery if you ignore her tendency to throw the odd mini stroke every couple of days. she and the new kid have exchanged glances but they’re at opposite sides of the room and there’s an obstacle course of walking frames to be traversed before any bodily fluids can be exchanged.

it’s up to The Actor to make his move and at 10 to 5 he decides it’s time. he lurches out of the chair and takes a step in BabyJane’s direction. her eyelashes flutter expectantly as she smoothes the creases out of her capri pants, the bulge of her continence pad barely noticeable.

he’s crossed the room and almost reached his goal when Dr. Do-Able slides a walking stick between The Actor’s ankles. he’s down for the count and it doesn’t look good. one leg is at an odd angle and is no longer the same length as the other one. nursemyra casts a practised eye over the carnage and diagnoses a fractured neck of femur. I send the junior off to call an ambulance and make The Actor comfortable with a few pillows

the dinner bell is ringing and the casks are empty. patients start filing down to the lift, BabyJane and Dr. Do-Able are among the last to leave. he offers her an arm but she’s having none of it. the siren wails its way toward us and I’m not sure if it’s the spinning red lights or the sight of her admirer on the floor but BabyJane throws a petit mal as the ambo comes through the door.

so they call for backup and the star crossed lovers are whisked off to the E.D. together. nursemyra turns out the lights and wheels the tea trolley down the corridor.

that’s happy hour at the gimcrack. can’t wait for the next one but in between now and then we’ve got four weeks to show movies and I think we’ll be screening back to back episodes of No. 96…..

the wig that got away

for most of our patients their ticket to the Gimcrack is one way. occasionally we provide day excursions to the Emergency Department of a real local hospital or even a long weekend at a 5 star hospice but generally speaking they’re here for the duration.

yet once in a while an inmate makes a legitimate getaway. Mr. DandyFop (whose personal style could best be described as Quentin Crisp meets Harpo Marx) had a mobility disorder, a liking for ethanol and a particularly odd wig. according to his case notes, a flying accident in WW2 had burnt most of his scalp destroying the hair follicles. he chose to disguise it by wearing a short curly wig with a flattering blue rinse.

 Mr DandyFop was quite the flirt always complimenting nurses, drooling over cleavages and pinching bottoms. when not engaged in these practices he was either petitioning for an electric disabled scooter or falling down drunk. the gimcrack does not allow such scooters. can you imagine if Madame Crazy got her hands on one?

so DandyFop bided his time, flirting, drinking and making plans. he booked himself in for a laminectomy, allowed a month or so for recovery, wrote a notification de stopper, held a going away party, fell over drunk and blacked both eyes, kissed and fondled all nearby women then boarded a flight for Cambridge, WA.

this was late February and nursemyra has gotten a little behind in her work. yesterday I sat down to archive the old files and glanced through DandyFop’s case notes. the thing about being an inmate at the Gimcrack is that anything you say or do will not only be held against you in a court of law, it will also be writ large in your file for all authorised personnel to read at their leisure.

like many of our nursing assistants, Bruno is from a non english speaking background  and often struggles to find the appropriate terminology when recording incidents. his entry for February 22 read “Mr DF put his hand on my knee tooching my penis (it reaches to his knee? nursemyra might have to do a spot check on the men’s locker room shortly) and requested that I suck his bolls. I did not think this was appropiate behavour and I infomed him on this.”

so unless he had a particularly dry pima plant to show Bruno it seems Mr DandyFop didn’t restrict his attentions just to the gals. I was pondering this information as I sorted through the mail delivery and there at the bottom of the pile was a postcard from the swinger himself. the image showed a naked couple lying on a beach. DF had drawn curly hair on one of the figures and stuck a picture of an electric scooter beside them in the sand.

so for the lucky few the good news is that there’s life beyond the Gimcrack though you may have to risk an uncomfortable operation or two beforehand. now if you’ll excuse me Bruno is about to start his shift and nursemyra needs to inspect some lockers.

inflatable breasts

 

I think a male version could really take off with just a few minor adjustments.

grape cutters

while pursuing my long running quest to track down certain elvis costello lyrics I came across this 

It looks like it’d do the job quickly.

you’d just have to leave the battlefield momentarily.  seek out the surgeon and bare your butt.

he flicks the ecraseur and voila! ephemeroids

aposiopesis

conversation overheard in one of the Gimcrack’s elevators yesterday.

“I used to think that Doctor X was really good looking, but since I had my hearing aid repaired…..”

diving for pearls

you don’t really need to know how nursemyra’s mind works but in my own defence I came upon this site while trying to remember the lyrics to an old elvis costello song.

It is important to note that not all sexual partners enjoy the feeling of genital beads.

maybe they might like to add that not all sexual partners enjoy the associated look either. but I felt a strange attraction to the single star studded variety further down the page. sometimes less is more. I’ve memorised the procedure from the helpful photographs so any boys out there who want to freshen up their look are welcome to drop by the Gimcrack tomorrow. nursemyra will be on duty from 9:00 am.

the case of the broken baculum

back in the good old days before nurse myra knew of the Gimcrack’s existence, she used to work in the crazy world of fashion. The whipcracker at this establishment was Tree, a cocaine-fuelled casanova with a not very bright but volatile wife and a girlfriend whose husband was currently serving gaol time for murder. Tree liked to live on the edge.

we shared an office which was little more than a den of iniquity strewn with the accoutrements of drug taking and disciplinarian sex. It was almost as much fun as working at the Gimcrack but with the added thrill of the medications being illegal. Tree employed enough abstemious staff to keep the business up and running between his bouts of activity and rehab but it was quite a challenge when he was at his most out of control.

back in the days when people didn’t know or care that their high fashion garments were produced by badly paid sweat shop workers, Tree outsourced manufacturing to three or four canny asians who constantly undercut each other’s tenders in a desperate bid for contracts. Tree was a late payer who used a variety of excuses to avoid parting with cash until weeks past the agreed date, mostly because all the cash he had was going up his nose or into the hands of his various women.

the day of reckoning was always going to come, it was just a matter of when. Mr. Chin was getting tired of the same old excuses and had taken to camping outside the showroom door during Tree’s absence so as to be first in line if he was cashed up. this particular morning, he was waiting as my bleary eyed boss stumbled out of the lift nursing the usual hangover.

Mr Chin followed him to our office, all the while demanding money. Tree’s mutters of “not now not now” were ignored so he spun round to face Chin and screamed “what do you want? the shirt off my back?” Given the state of his clothes that was highly unlikely but Tree tore it off and threw it across the room followed by his watch, shoes, socks, belt and trousers. when he was down to his pink elephant print boxers there was a moment’s silence while they glared at each other in a standoff.

the staff knew Tree kept his cash in a pocket sewn into his boxers but did Mr. Chin? “you want these too? you want to leave me with nothing?” Tree tried to outstare Chin but it wasn’t working. he dropped the shorts and we all looked. swollen to twice its normal size with balls like rotten grapefruit his cock was completely black. Chin’s composure cracked as he backed out of the office and into the lift.

Turns out Tree was servicing the mistress but missed both docks and crashed into her coccyx with blood vessel breaking results. the male staff all averted their eyes in horror but nursemyra was fascinated. “what’ll I tell my wife?” was Tree’s main concern.

an image of his gullible blonde bimbo flashed through my mind. “why don’t you tell her you broke your baculum in a squash game?”

he did. and she bought it. the moral to this story is: if you’re going to cheat then wear your glasses. and if you need more time to settle your bills, a broken boner always speaks louder than boxers full of cash.

triskaidekaphobia

yesterday we sent the ailing widow in 613 to a real hospital temporarily so they could insert a few tubes and run a few tests. she’d been whining about her unlucky room number since the day she arrived but it’s got a great view and she’s reluctant to give that up. nursemyra showed BabyJane a room on the fifth floor and offered to do a transfer but having a view was a higher priority than a lucky number so the whining had continued.

BabyJane is your typical gimcrack patient. she has a lurid history involving a Russian prince, a husband who was a preacher, a gambling addiction, a dwarf and a ouija board. a year or two shy of 80, she still goes to bed at night with her hair bound in rags to form ringlets and paints false spidery lashes beneath her eyes in the morning. her preferred mode of dress is tight capri pants and a low cut top to display plenty of cleavage. It may have looked ok when she was continent but capri pads and  wee-catchers do not make an attractive fashion statement even at the Gimcrack.

we have 3 other rooms where the number 13 appears on the door and strangely enough, they are all vacant at the moment. BabyJane’s whining brought this to nursemyra’s attention and today I got out the old register to see just who had been the last lucky occupants.

513 had been the rockspider. none of us knew about this until a current affairs crew camped outside the gimcrack last year hoping to boost flagging ratings with an expose of alleged hijinks in the 1950s. he had an aneurism in January and the room’s been vacant since.

the last occupant of 413 had been one of nursemyra’s favourites. Beppy was a gentleman, always helping old ladies who dropped their walking sticks or passing them the digestive biscuits at morning tea. he had a full head of bodgie hair styled in an optimistic quiff and saturated with california poppy oil. his dipsomaniac doctor let it slip in the nurse’s clinic one day that Beppy had served 30 years for a double murder in an off-licence heist gone wrong. he died in his sleep on australia day. RIP Beppy.

313 was an ex senior sergeant in the police force. hmmm….. there seems to be some sort of criminal connection happening with these rooms but let’s not go there. SS breathed his last earlier this month after complications arose from acute psoriasis. he left behind a room carpeted in a thick layer of shed skin that Guiseppe mistook for fish scales. 313 is designated a high level care room so we’ll have no trouble filling that spot as soon as the vacuum cleaner recovers.

in fact, if BabyJane’s prognosis is not good that’s where she’ll be heading. another unlucky number and no compensating harbour glimpses. I can already hear the whining……. but look on the bright side, BJ. April 13 is coming up and it’s a Friday. if history is anything to go by you may be reunited with the prince, the preacher and the dwarf in about 3 weeks.

beware the farmer in the dell

madame crazy bought her very own policebaby back to the Gimcrack this afternoon. high on sugar after our culturally aware morning tea she slipped out and headed for the airport intending to fly to new zealand to visit her parents and their farm.

I tried telling her that since she is 78 it’s highly unlikely that her father is still farming and that maybe just maybe he is no longer even alive. she calculates quickly and concedes that by now he would be 110 but assures me that advanced age would be no impediment to his ability to continue farming.

nursemyra  sighs and goes in search of her own sugar high. I know from Madame Crazy’s notes that she has a history of travelling to airports and according to her daughter has twice managed to actually board a plane without a ticket. It goes without saying that both these incidents occurred prior to 9/11 but still…..

so the thing is she’s crazy but not so crazy that we have her in the dementia-specific lock down ward. she’s free to come and go as far as a 78 year old can get when she’s reliant on a walking frame to move around. off she toddles up the hill where she manages to flag down a truck driver by planting herself in the middle of the road and hitching up her skirt.

this seduction technique fails but it does attract the attention of a passing patrol car driven by the youngest policeman nursemyra has ever laid eyes upon. he may be due to start shaving by next christmas. I was tempted to offer a thorough examination to see if his testes had yet descended but his peachy complexion was already ten shades past crimson. besides, my lips were covered in icing sugar from self medicating with turkish delight and I probably wasn’t going to be able to pass myself off as a doctor anyway.

so madame crazy didn’t make it to the airport today. a little tired from all the excitement  she allowed a junior nurse to escort her toward the lifts. policebaby nearly made it through the door unscathed but at the last moment we all heard a voice from the elevator. “tell that wolf in little lamb’s clothing if he ever tries to kiss me again my father the farmer will dock his tail”

happy harmony day Constable Lamb. hope to see you at the Gimcrack again.