This is Halloween! This is Halloween!

The regularly scheduled Tuesday Top of Mind has been co-opted by the spooky!

Do not adjust your TV sets.

<spooky music!>

Where there are hospitals there are stories of odd things.

Things that go bump in the night.

Medicines that get moved or go missing.

Instrumentation that gets moved or goes missing.

There is a lot of suffering in hospitals. And if you ascribe the creation of ghosts to suffering, it makes sense.

If you believe in ghosts; you do you.

I’ve had my spooky share of weirdness in the hospital.

I’ve written about them before.

But This is Halloween and I want to share.

I worked evenings as a Med-Surg RN in this older hospital in California, and then I worked nights as a Med-Surg RN on the same floor when they conned us that 12-hour shifts were awesome! One night, late, either in the middle of the night or after 2230 waiting for the night shift to arrive, I was checking the medicine cart for something. I no longer remember what. I looked down the long. empty, dark hall. Empty because we were only half full at the time, and I saw her.

An elderly woman, bundled up in a pink robe, looking at the painting on the wall.

Not my patient.

I glanced over to ask one of the other nurses which of their patients was out of bed. This took seconds. When I looked back, she was gone.

Uneasy now, I went down the long, empty, dark hall to the painting, glancing into the rooms as I passed. Everyone was asleep in their bed.

I came up the other side of the hallway, think of the unit being like a racetrack. No one was out of bed, the rooms were dark.

I took the stairs to the ICU unit. No one was out of bed there.

I took the stairs to the Skilled Nursing unit on the first floor.

No one was out of bed there.

Still the eeriest experience I’ve ever had in the hospital.

And that includes the time that the elevator was open and waiting for me when I had to get an instrument up 3 flights of stairs to the obstetrics ward where the c-section room needed it.

And it was open again to go back down to get a different instrument.

And it was open again to go back up with the next instrument.

Hospitals can be creepy places.