Say the name of this week’s cookie 3 times fast.
It is quite the mouthful.
Spooky cookie month continues.
And I promised the department a surprise ingredient.
Shh, don’t tell them quinoa replaces some of the oats in the traditional fudgey cocoa no bake cookies.
Plus the addition of freeze dried raspberries.
An experimental cookie if you will.
To quote Dr. Frankenstein of what he called his abomination “It lives!”
That is a tad over-dramatic.
There is nothing living about this cookie.
The spooky story of the week is about my very first hospital.
Well, not a hospital, definitely a nursing home.
I was brand spanking new to any kind of nursing care as a job.
As my previous experience had only been as a nursing student.
I clutched my newly obtained certified nursing aide certification as I started night shift as a CNA.
This particular nursing home was set up as a wheel with 3 spokes.
There was the red wing.
There was the yellow wing.
And there was my wing, the blue wing.
I had 16 double rooms.
Which means I had 32 nursing home residents that I turned and cleaned and turned again and rounded on nightly.
We worked 4 nights on with 2 off.
My wing gave me the willies.
There was something about the shower room that I did not like.
I hated organizing the shower room so I did it when I first came on shift.
The residents were nice.
I like Amethyst.
She had a neuro degenerative disease that left her seriously disabled.
She was only in her late 50s but confined as a resident in the nursing home.
Her father was on the memory care wing.
They did NOT share a room.
She was the one that told me that the nursing home used to be a psych hospital.
And the blue wing was the lock down room.
And the shower room.
The one I hated.
Was the rubber room.
This was the 1990’s.
And she told me that this story was from the 1970’s.
When rubber room was a socially accepted word.
The rubber room means that it was where they put people to calm down.
She told me the shower room was the lockdown calm down room on the lockdown ward.
Creepy.
It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I had the realization that she was pulling my leg.
And that was mean.
But at the time the shower room gave me the willies.
And I avoided the room when I was alone.
Less a spooky story, more a creepy story.
Like all of the best horror movies.
There’s a reason the shower scene in Psycho was so effective.
And now I’ve creeped myself out some more.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 