ALCOHOL? THERE'S NO ALCOHOL HERE.

Here's another story about my early nursing years. Hope you enjoy it.

Alcohol consumption was against the rules in the rehabilitation hospital. Still, it frequently appeared and was hard to keep under control. Most of the patients we cared for were young men who had their body images violently altered through accidents and injuries. In those days, doctors didn’t believe in medicating or sedating, so the patients did it themselves with alcohol.


The original buildings were built in 1888 and the wards I worked on were probably built in the 1930’s. They were long open wards with a nurse’s station in the middle, dividing it in two. Each ward held 60 patients. A hallway in the center connected our ward to the one next door and there were outside doors at each end, so it was easy for people to sneak in and out if they wanted to, and the patients had free run of the grounds until bedtime.

If we suspected a patient of drinking, we were allowed to search through all of their belongings and dispose of any alcohol we found. I don’t know how many bottles of whiskey and vodka I poured down the drain during those years, but it was quite a lot.

One man fooled us all, though, and it wasn’t until the day he was getting ready to go home that I got him to confess his secret to me. I joked with and cajoled him as he packed his belongings, and when he started to empty out his nightstand, he pulled out a large bottle of blue mouthwash and handed it to me. The label read Micrin Mouthwash, but when I removed the cap and sniffed, it was obvious it was pure alcohol. All the months he was there he’d managed to continue to drink by adding blue food coloring to vodka and keeping his mouthwash bottle full. No one was ever able to trick me with that one again.