“WET! Oh God, no!”, I moaned as she laid me back down on the bed. She pulled my gown up to my chest and began to unfasten the tapes that held the diaper around my waist. I was mortified. Then she lifted my legs with one hand while she deftly slid the soggy diaper out from under my raised bottom and replaced it with another. I wanted to cry. There I was in the Pediatric unit of the University Clinic being diapered as if I was a little baby. Words cannot express the depth of despair I felt at that moment. I had reached the nadir of my existence. My invention had turned me into a baby. Tears of humiliation and frustration began dripping out of the corners of my eyes. I watched her as she efficiently taped the new diaper up and said, “I’ll call your doctor and you can talk to him about the diapers. He left orders that he wanted to see you the minute you woke up. Why don’t you just lie here and relax while I see about getting him up here, okay?”
Then she tossed the drenched diaper in the yellow pail in the corner of the room and turned away to leave. She took about two steps and realized that she had forgotten something in the confusion of my awakening. She came back and smiled at me in an embarrassed way as she lifted the side of the crib to lock it in place. A moment later she was gone.
About half an hour later the lab-coated doctor arrived and came into the room accompanied by an older nurse with an air of authority. It was obvious that she was either the charge nurse for that shift or the head nurse for the Pediatric Unit. She put the metal clipboard she was carrying on the chair and began to drop the side of the crib so the doctor could examine me. The doctor lifted my gown and began listening to my chest with his stethoscope, saying, “How are you feeling, Professor Hawkins?”
“I’m not very happy about being treated like an infant,” I replied tartly, “Can’t we do something about these diapers?”
“We’ll see,” he said judiciously as he lowered my gown, “You know you wet the last pair of diapers you were wearing pretty thoroughly. Why don’t we see how you do with these before we make any decision, okay?”
He helped me sit up on the mattress and said conversationally, “Now, how do you feel? Any aches or pains? Do you have a headache? Is there any nausea? Are you having any trouble seeing?”
I shook my head no to his questions and he put one finger in the air in front of my face and said, “Follow my finger with your eyes.” He began moving his finger back and forth in front of me while I tracked its position with my eyes. “Good, good,” he said, taking a small white plastic penlight out of the breast pocket of his lab coat, “Now look up into the corner of the room and try not to blink.”
He shined the light in each of my pupils and then said to the nurse, “May I have his chart, please?”
He took the proffered clipboard from her and began to flip though the pages. I was amazed at how thick my chart had become in only a few hours, it looked like it was almost a half an inch thick. “Hmmm,” he said as he paged through the nurse’s notes and lab reports, “Everything looks okay. Can you tell me what happened to you?”
