After I
had finished high-school back in 1987, if anyone had said I'd be
working in the local public hospital by the end of the century, I would
have laughed. After so many visits to the building as a patient, it was
quite unusual to wind up with a job there.
But I
did end up working there, for half of 1998. To be honest though, I
should never had gotten that job. For
starters, I really wasn't cut out for the type of work, the long (and
late) shifts, the hundreds upon hundreds of telephone calls (I still have nightmares of constantly ringing phones) and for all the wierdoes that would congregate there, including the city's self-mutilator (least said about him the better). But as the
old saying goes “it's not what you know, but who...” and with a
colleague from the West Tamworth Leagues Club (where I was working as a
casual at the time) on the interview panel (the Leagues club was her
second job), I was not surprised when I was informed that I was the
successful applicant in becoming the new switchboard operator and
casualty clerk.
The first thing I found strange about this job, was the pay. Being paid fortnight was okay (you get used to it being on benefits) but being paid casual rates whilst working full-time hours was a bit strange, but hey, was I complaining? Some fortnights I was pulling in more money than the supervisor of my section. The second was getting used to all of the routines. There were so many of them. Handling the switchboard was the easy bit, remembering all the protocols, knowing where to send each and every call was the tricky part. The biggest pain though were the forms. A hospital, like any organisation, always has forms to fill out, and quite often in duplicate. Admission forms, health insurance forms, Workcover forms, accident survey forms, etc. the paper work was tremendous. There were keys to look after, monies to handle, staff to page and so on.
But by far the most frightening thing that
could happen during the course of a shift, apart from a lunatic running
amok in the casualty ward (which I'm surprised it never happened on my watch, considering the lack of security after 6pm), was the sounding of the cardiac arrest
alarm. It was located on the wall above the paging system. (One thing I
never found out, what happens if the switchboard operator suffered a
heart attack? Who would page the crash crew then?) It was priority one. When
it sounded, you stopped whatever you were doing, and summoned the crash
cart and its crew. It only went off twice when I was manning the
switchboard by myself. Once was a false alarm (a porter in Casualty
accidentally leant against the button) and the other was from the Renal
Unit. As the story goes, a woman undergoing dialysis, fainted, which
was mistaken for a heart attack, and the alarm was activated. However
whilst the woman was being treated, she actually did have a heart
attack. She actually survived. Of course, from my end, how am I supposed to know if a patient
has merely fainted or not on the other side of the hospital?
In
the end, I just got sick of the whole thing. I was fed up with the
attitudes of staff in certain departments (especially the psycho ward),
I was fed up with working on seven days in a week, I was fed up with
having no social life and I was fed up with my life, no amount of money
(and I was earning quite a bit) could turn me into a happy chappy, and
I really wanted to leave. So I did. I served out my contract (plus an
extra two weeks), sold or gave away a lot of stuff, and shipped the
rest off to my mate's place in Woolloomooloo. Then I left Tamworth for good.
There was one strange thing (that stood apart from all the other strange things) that happened whilst I was working there. One of my duties, in the first few weeks I was there, was to chase up signatures from people who, for some reason, didn't sign the forms when they were admitted into the hospital from casualty, and this happened quite regularly. In one of my walks around the hospital, I happened to pass the very room that my mother died in. My entire body shivered uncontrollably for a couple of seconds, which was quite unnerving.