When I awoke again I was on an examination table at the University Clinic lying flat on my back. The sharp odor of a hospital filled my nostrils. Emergency room doctors and nurses surrounded me, bustling about as they tried to discover what had happened to my poor body. A technician came in the room and wheeled a massive portable x-ray machine over to the examination table. He took a film cartridge out of a storage box mounted on the back of the machine and put it under me. The doctors and nurses left the room temporarily while he prepared to x-ray me. Then he spun up the anode and fired the unit to take a picture. Then he put another cartridge under me and took a second shot. I remember him joking with the ER doctor saying that I was so small that it only took three x-rays to get pictures of my whole body. He said he was done and began wheeling the unit out of the room as the doctors and nurses rushed back in to take his place. One of the doctors told a nurse to get me gowned before they moved me to my room and she told him they were out of pediatric gowns. “Pediatric gowns?”, I thought in amazement, “Just how small have I gotten?” She told the doctor that she had called up to Pediatrics and they were sending a runner down with a gown for me. Then I swooned again and blackness closed in on me.
I awoke in a crib smelling the strong scent of baby powder. I was startled by the change and started screaming wordlessly in panic. A young nurse ran into the room and dropped the metal side of the steel barred crib I was laying in to take me out. She bent over me with a concerned look on her face and took me in her arms to lift me up. I felt myself being hugged to her chest as she patted my back comfortingly and made mothering noises at me to quiet my screams. After a moment, I regained my composure and realized where I must be. I looked over the nurse’s shoulder and saw that the tiny room had large picture windows on three of its four sides. As she paced back and forth holding me to her chest, I saw that the room itself was virtually empty. All it contained was a crib, a chair, a large yellow plastic garbage can with a biohazard label and a bedside table with a stack of white disposable diapers.
“Diapers!”, I thought to myself when I saw them, “Surely those can’t be for me!”
Then I heard a soft rustling come from my behind as the nurse patted my bottom. The plastic crinkling noise she was making could only mean one thing. I was already in diapers!
I began talking rapidly, trying to explain to the nurse that I wasn’t an infant. The nurse did a double take and said in shock, “You can talk!”
“Of course I can talk, nurse!”, I said reasonably, “I’m forty-one years old. Did you think I was a baby? Could you do me a favor and get something else for me to wear? I’m a little old to be wearing diapers!”
She looked stunned and said, “Well…..I don’t know. It’s the policy in Pediatrics that all patients four years old and younger must wear diapers at all times. I don’t know if I’m allowed to change policy on my own. I’ve only just started working here….”
I interrupted her, saying, “I just told you I’m over forty years old! Now get me out of these diapers!”
She looked nonplused and said, “I’ll see what I can do” and lifted up the front of my gown. Then her lips pursed and she said, “You’re right about one thing. These diapers are going to have to come off you right now! They’re sopping wet!”