Free Scared Stiff by Annelise Ryan Page A

page of her order pad, and stuffs it in her pocket.
    “Will do,” she says. As a new customer enters, she gets up and adds, “Gotta run, but it was good talking with you, Mattie. Good luck with the whole marriage thing.”
    It only takes me another minute to finish my ice cream because I manage to resist the urge to lick the bowl. Then I get back in my car and head for Mercy Hospital, my old employer.
    The hospital is an emotional place for me. Not only is it where both the birth and death of my marriage took place, it’s where I worked for over twelve years. A good portion of my adulthood has been spent there, and I have tons of memories, both good and bad.
    Many of the good ones are from my years in the ER. Things there can go from monotonous to chaotic in a matter of seconds, and it can be wonderfully, disgustingly messy—emotionally messy, blood-and-guts messy, and life-and-death messy. I left the ER to go work in the OR so I could be closer to my husband, David. But in the end, I lost two things that were very important to me: David and my job in the ER.
    These days I’m a topic of lively gossip at the hospital—the nurse who caught her husband playing tonsil hockey with someone else in one of the operating rooms; the nurse who was suspected of murdering the lipstick on the dipstick; and the nurse who now slices and dices in a whole new environment. Oh, yeah, and the nurse involved in the infamous nipple incident.
    It’s been a few months since David and I split and since then there have been other topics to occupy the hard-core gossipers. While those events offered some distraction, they weren’t enough to divert attention away from me altogether. I still get stared at and I swear I hear my name whispered in corners every time I go there.
    Hoping to minimize the scrutiny today, I bypass the main hospital entrance and go in through the ER instead. The ER staff is a little less judgmental than your average hospital worker. The scale of what’s weird, newsworthy, and important gets altered once you’ve cared for a man with a flashlight up his rectum, a condition that was later dubbed a “butt light.”
    As I walk through the ER doors, I can feel that familiar surge of excitement thrumming just below my skin. The air here always feels different. Today it sounds and smells different, too. Instead of the typical antiseptic smells, there is a distinct odor of feces in the air, and the low thrum of heart monitors, vital sign machines, and soft-soled shoes has been replaced by the sounds of a woman screaming like a banshee from behind one of the curtains. A nurse sitting behind the desk, a veteran ER warrior of some twenty-plus years named Debbie Hanson, greets me.
    “Mattie! Welcome to the madhouse.”
    I smile and nod toward the noise. “That sounds ominous.”
    “It’s a major Code Brown,” Debbie says, lowering her voice. “She’s been on Vicodin for a month without any stool softener and now her bowels are backed up to her eyeballs.”
    The screaming reaches a new crescendo and then suddenly stops, replaced by exhausted panting. A moment later, one of the ER techs emerges from behind the screaming woman’s curtain carrying the bucket from a bedside commode. Debbie hops up and walks over to the tech.
    “Let me see,” Debbie says.
    The tech proffers the bucket and a pungent fecal smell permeates the air.
    “Wow,” Debbie says with a look of respect. “I might have to give that one a name and an Apgar score.” She looks over at me. “Want to see?”
    “No, thanks.”
    Debbie hands the bucket back to the tech and says, “Don’t even try to flush that down the hopper without breaking it up first or we’ll be mopping for the rest of the day.”
    The tech nods, makes a face of disgust, and disappears into the dirty utility room carrying her prize. Debbie shakes her head with amazement. “I think that one might have set a record,” she says, stepping back behind the desk and plopping down in front of