Sirenita

I have this fairly menial job while I’m getting my teaching certificate/masters - I wanted something pretty easy to do that had good benefits, and besides my industry was a pretty fairy bauble that popped one day when people realized they didn’t really WANT to go look at the Purina Puppy Chow website, so I took this job where I work for researchers and doctors in the cancer wing. You knew that. Recently, I set up a giant shindig for a breast cancer research thing, and was given, as a token of their esteem, a glass vase with of course a stupid pink daisy and some pink flowers in it, which I accepted gracefully and then stuck on my desk. Next to the Cathy cartoons I cut out because they speak to me of my life.

So also: my office is in a building that is connected by a sort of skybridge to the hospital, and the patients sometimes go on little barebutted jaunts around in their gowns and IVs, and wander across the skybridge to my floor.

So finally: I got a hankerin’ for some coffee yesterday, so went downstairs to the cafe and got some. I took the elevator back, and as I got off, a patient wandered by, an older fat lady in a hospital gown, and oddly, she seemed to be wandering from the vicinity of my desk. I looked at her, and she was holding one arm kind of funny. I looked closer, and something pink was sticking out the neckline of her hospital gown. She looked furtive and crabwalked sideways.

“EXCUSE ME,” I said, in the strident voice of the rightous. “Do you have my flowers? In your GOWN?”

She said, “Uh.”

I said, “Those LOOK like my flowers.”

She stopped, and said, “uhhhhhh” again and tried to scuttle around me.

I stood in front of her and smiled a terrible smile.

Finally, she looked at the ground, hung her head, and pulled THE ENTIRE VASE OF FLOWERS out of her sleeve. Vase, stinky flower water, elderly crappy pink flowers, tag that said “To Terri and thanks for all your hard work, BoobieCare.”

“I thought it was for anybody to take so I took,” she said. “That is my DESK,” I said, and reached for the flowers. “I looked at your tumor thingie* and the flowers, they was just sitting there so I took,” she explained. I reached for the flowers, and she clung to them. “I was gonna give them to some lady who don’t got no flowers,” she said. “Then I wouldn’t got no flowers,” I said, ungrammatically, and took them. “What ELSE from my desk do you have under there?” I said, indicating her buttless gown. She looked hurt and trundled away.

So, I remain,
A Basher of Cripples and Nasty Person to the Ill, the Elderly, and the Infirm,
Yours,

Terri

* I have a threedee chart of breast tumors on display in front of my desk. One of them is the size of a doorknob. I would notice if I had a doorknob in my boob that I hadn’t had before, personally, or at least I like to think so.