22. Odd Occurrences In The Hospital
Reddit user Lilpin13 says, “When I was a Navy Corpsman, I worked on the inpatient surgical ward. Our ward was one huge rectangle, and one-half of it was the Same-Day Surgical Unit. It had also served as a POW ward after Vietnam. Several times on nights, the patient call bells in those empty rooms would go off. It didn’t happen every night, but it was often enough to get downright annoying while still being a bit scary. Usually, if a patient’s bell went off, it’d only be that room for that night. Other nights, two or three would go off. We’d have to get the keys from the Pyxis machine and go unlock the door with the call bell ringing.
“We found that if we just turned the bell off and relock the door, the ringing would continue sporadically all night. Whenever I had to go check out the bell, I’d pretend that I was talking to just another patient and tell the empty room that their ‘pain medication’ was here. I’d almost pantomime giving the patient pain medication in the hope that the bells would be quiet for the night. The bells would always cease for the rest of the night afterward. We’d also have wheelchair wheels that would spin all by themselves. These wheelchairs were always stowed in a little nook in the wall. The wheels would spin quite fast and for a long time, at a constant speed, too. That, luckily, was a rare occurrence.”