Our hospital has magic tubes! Every room has a pipe with a small opening that travels up through the ceiling. You stick blood vials/lab orders in glass capsules, pop them in the tube, punch in a room number and the capsule magically zooms through the walls of the hospital and is plopped down in the room you sent it to.

I adore the magic tubes.

Or I did until 1:44 am Tuesday night.

Let's go back. . . I had been in the hospital since 7:50am, awake since 5am. It was my first night in the surgical side of the ER. (Israeli hospitals have multiple emergency rooms: surgical, internal, gynecologic/obstetric, and pediatric). And the ER was jumping.

The on-call surgeon has a teeny little office in the middle of the ER. Israelis are tougher than Americans, so instead of being wheeled in, or waiting in beds, they walk themselves on in to the office and then the surgeon decides if they're sick enough to need a bed.

Now- the little tiny surgery office closet is also home to the ER's only magic tunnel. Which means that about 7 times per interview the machine makes various groaning and clunking sounds and then loudly gives birth to a tube filled with lab results. And about three times per interview a nurse or doctor will run in, throw some tubes in a capsule and send them on their way, a process which makes about the amount of suctioning noise I imagine is necessary to vacuum seven to nine 747s up the tube.

This was fascinating and delightful to me for about the first hour.

Some of my favorite calls of the night:

Mr. M, a 30something Ethiopian immigrant who drank two liters (yes, two liters) of all-purpose kitchen cleaner. "The lemon flavored one," the nurse made sure to inform us. He entered the ER yelling and flailing and making as much of a scene as possible. This disturbed the surgeon, who clearly prefers anesthetized patients, so I was given the job of getting him to calm down and finding out exactly why he drank two liters of kitchen cleaner.

The calming down part I never really succeeded, but he readily volunteered that he drank the kitchen cleaner because he wants to die. "Why?" I asked. "No happy in tummy."

The orthopedist who happened to be walking by quipped: "well at least it's clean now."

Heh.

My favorite patient of the night was a 19 year old girl who'd been bitten on the lip by her Pekinese. She was unvaccinated. Her dog, all vaccinations up to date.

The facial surgeon took a look and advised that she get a few stitches to align her lower lip. She asked if needles were involved, we explained that it's difficult to insert stitches into skin without something sharp and pointy being involved but that we would numb her and she'd only feel one prick. She panicked, refused the stitches, and tried to get discharged. Her father literally dragged her back and said that she had to have the stitches because she was way too pretty to mess it up with a scarred lip.

After about 15 minutes of arguing she reluctantly agreed, and cried and screamed and squirmed through the entire procedure. Halfway through her father goes: "you didn't make this much of a scene with your breasts." Turns out, little miss terrified of needles has had two elective breast enhancements (they didn't turn out big enough the first time).

The thing that's the strangest to me about all this is that daddy payed for two breast enhancements, and vaccinated his dog, but she has received zero of her scheduled vaccines.

People are special.