I turned to see the head nurse standing behind me with an ugly glower on her face. I lost my balance on the chair and fell face down to the floor, striking my nose. I was stunned for a moment and lay there while the head nurse dropped to one knee and picked me up in her arms. She sat down on the chair with me in her lap and examined me closely. I looked down at my chest and saw that I was dripping blood all over my gown. After a quick check she decided I wasn’t badly injured and carried me to the examination room next to the nurse’s station. One of the doctor’s who was making late rounds came in the examination room and looked at my nose. Apparently the bone wasn’t broken, I had just bloodied it. After a few minutes it stopped bleeding and the head nurse asked me, “And just what were you doing in there?”
“I had to go to the bathroom,” I replied sheepishly.
“Why didn’t you call your nurse?”, she asked.
“I did, but nobody answered. I had to go immediately so I got out of bed,” I told her.
“By yourself? You could have been badly hurt!”, she told me.
“I see,” she said, “Let’s get you back to bed.”
“But the bathroom! I still need to go!”, I exclaimed.
“Do you? From the looks of it, I wouldn’t think so,” she said grimly, “Let’s get you back to bed so we can change your wet diaper!”
“Huh?”, I said stupidly, then looked down at the infantile garment I was wearing. She had stripped off my gown when we had gotten to the examination room and bundled the bloody garment into the trash. The diaper hung low on my hips and drooped dangerously. I must have wet it when I fell and not even known it. My nurse came in the room and said, “How is he? I just got back from the pharmacy and the unit clerk told me he was hurt in a fall. Is he okay?”
“Take him back to his room and change his diaper. Then I’d like to talk to you in my office,” I need to call maintenance.
My nurse took me back to my room and changed my diaper for the second time that day. I was miserable; my nose hurt and my ego had been badly bruised when they discovered that I had peed in my diaper like a baby. Worse, my nurse hadn’t taken the time to replace my gown and left me sitting on the crib mattress garbed in nothing but my diaper. It was humiliating. She saw the blanket and pillow in the corner of the crib and quickly deduced how I escaped my confinement. She took them out of the crib and made me lie on my back while she went to talk to the head nurse. A few minutes later she returned followed by two of the hospital maintenance men carrying what looked like part of a crib. My nurse lowered the side of the crib and took me out, standing me on the chair to put a new gown on me while the maintenance men raised the object they were carrying and set it in place on top of the crib. When she picked me up in her arms to put me back in the crib, I saw what they had done to the crib. They had put a steel top on the crib to turn it into a cage!