Last Patient of the Night by Gary Gerlacher

Author:Gary Gerlacher [Gerlacher, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY

“C’mon Deb, we need to get upstairs for the meeting.”

“We have time. It doesn’t start for another fifteen minutes.”

“We got things to do before it starts. Leave your coat. I have a feeling it’ll be warm up there. And grab that can of orange soda. Let’s go.”

We hustled to the 14th floor conference room, a beautiful room with a large mahogany table and $20,000 worth of padded chairs, where all the bigwigs had their meetings. It felt uncomfortably hot.

“Damn it, don’t they have AC up here?” Deb complained.

“They do, and it’s set on 68. But they’re not aware that I bribed Mike from engineering to switch control of this thermostat with the one in the ER. So, every time he turns this down, the ER gets cooler.”

“And every time they turn it up in the ER, this room gets hotter. I knew there was a reason we keep you around.”

“Hurry up, and grab a couple of cold orange sodas from the fridge, hide the rest of the cold ones and put the warm can from the ER in the fridge. But shake it up real good first.”

“And why am I doing this?”

“Because Lou always likes a cold orange soda during his meeting,” I explained, as I headed for the remote that controlled the blinds. I raised two sets of blinds, allowing the sun to shine in on the table and chairs on the far side. Then I opened the remote, turned the batteries around, and put the remote back in the center of the table. Deb and I took two seats in the shade, opened our ice-cold orange sodas, and waited for the others to arrive.

Folks trickled in, with Lou the last to arrive, believing that his time was more important than everyone else’s. He took one step into the room, noticed the heat, and immediately headed for the thermostat to turn it down another degree. Deb nudged me and whispered, “Gonna be a cool day in the ER.”

Lou headed to the fridge to grab his orange soda before taking his seat at the center of the table, directly in the middle of the sunbeam. A sane man would have taken his jacket off, but Lou probably showered in a suit. Sweat already shined on his forehead as he reached for the remote to close the blinds. After an amusing but futile fifteen seconds of his trying to lower the blinds, I suggested it might work better if he were closer to the blinds. This elicited a grunt from Lou and a kick from under the table from Deb. Lou walked around the table and spent another thirty seconds trying to coax the blinds down before giving up and returning to his seat. All eyes were on him as he opened his orange soda and sprayed it all over the table, soaking his papers. Now the meeting was ready to start.

The ER overview meeting, a monthly multi-disciplinary meeting that featured reports from various departments, was typically a time-wasting yawn fest, and this one proceeded without surprises until Lou put up a slide on the financials.

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