The loss of a dear friend, Bunny Dunn, has me reminiscing today. My sweet, wise, older nurse friend, I will cherish the memories we shared always. Rest in peace, my darling friend, as you rub elbows with the other saints in heaven. Today, I share this amusing memory of my time at EMMC in your honor. 

Before the hubster started moving me around the country, I once belonged to a tightknit group of Labor and Delivery nurses at Eastern Maine Medical Center, (now known as Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center). These nurses were my teachers, mentors, and friends. They shared their knowledge and expertise with me and molded me into a kind, caring, effective, and efficient nurse.

Working in Labor and Delivery was my dream come true. I worked my way through three years of nursing school as a nursing tech in the unit, and I knew the first week there, surrounded by those strong, unique, magnificent women that I wanted to be a Labor and Delivery nurse, too. And as luck would have it, immediately after I graduated from nursing school, a highly coveted, full-time nursing job opened in the unit, and I was fortunate enough to be hired!

While my fellow nurses welcomed me with open arms, some of the older OB doctors were openly hostile squeamish around new nurse recruits, and one doctor in particular liked to test the mettle of the newbies. For the purposes of our story today, I shall call him by one of his nicknames, Dr. Shooby Dooby Doo. 

My first delivery with Dr. Shooby Dooby Doo went extremely well (or so I thought). I did everything exactly as I had been taught. Everything went fine as far as I could tell. Mom was delivered of a healthy baby girl with no complications. I got the patient back to her bed, did my postpartum checks and charting before tackling the job of cleaning the delivery room. 

The delivery had been a little sloppier than normal because just as the baby was born, the mother’s amniotic sac burst forth from her like floodwaters from a damn, drowning Dr. Shooby Dooby Do’s scrub pants in fluid and perfuming him in the slightly sweet aroma of amniotic fluid and the weird metallic tang of blood.

As I gathered the dirty instruments from the delivery table, I heard a furious stomping coming toward me and I turned to face the door. A pair of soused boxer shorts came flying through the air and I got my hand up just in time to bat them away from my face. 

“Thanks for nothing,” Dr. Shooby Dooby Doo shouted at me. “Now I’ve got to go purchase new undershorts.”

Picture a very young, and very green registered nurse wearing a shocked “deer-in-the-headlights” expression on her face as my colleagues came to investigate the stomping and shouting. 

“Why is he mad at me?” I moaned after the doctor stormed away. “I had nothing to do with his underwear getting wet. It’s not like I pushed him in front of the woman. He was standing there of his own accord.” 

“No, you didn’t,” one of my colleagues said with an unconcealed smirk. “He’s testing you. He does it with all the new nurses.”

“But I’m not new. He knows me. I’ve worked here for the last three years,” I said.

“You’re an RN now. It’s different. You’ve got to stand up for yourself and trust me, after that he’ll respect you,” the head nurse said. “He’s trying to figure out if you have a backbone or not.”

“Great. What am I supposed to do to prove that I do?”

“You’ll need to figure that out for yourself,” she said.

Figure it out? That was all the direction anyone was going to give me? Figure it out?

As I cleaned up the delivery room, my eyes kept returning to the wet bloody boxers on the floor. There had to be extremely creative consequences for someone having the audacity to throw their dirty underwear at me for something neither the patient nor I could control. How dare he?

While I scrubbed the instruments in a state of white-hot fury, it hit me! I returned to the delivery room, retrieved the boxers, and plunged them into warm soapy water. It took me ten minutes to scrub and scoured every trace of blood and amniotic fluid from the Dr. Shooby Dooby Doo’s undershorts and then I left them to dry in the nurses’ backroom work area. 

The next day when I came on shift, I was determined to finish what I had begun. I folded and wrapped the doc’s now dry undies in one of the clear plastic autoclave package sleeves and baked them in our autoclave until those puppies were nice and STERILE.

Since I didn’t have the nerve to actually hand them to Dr. Shooby Dooby Doo in person, I decided to mail them to his house. 

A week later, he stopped me in the hallway and asked to speak with me for a moment.

Uh-oh. He’s going to let me have it. I’m still on probation. Oh, I hope I don’t get fired for this.

I braced myself, but Dr. Shooby Dooby Doo didn’t let me have it. In fact, he did the most unexpected thing. He smiled at me and said, “Thanks for returning my boxers. My wife didn’t find it nearly as amusing as I did to find my shorts in the mail, and she suggested I might want to apologize to you.”

“Apologize?” I said. “For throwing your dirty underwear at me like a monkey throwing feces when he’s angry? Nah. Why would you do something that drastic?”

“Well,” said Dr. Shooby Dooby Doo, looking at his feet. “Basically, because she said I had to. So … I’m sorry. We good?”

“Yes. We’re good. Thank you.”

Dr. Shooby Dooby Doo spun around without another word and walked away, while I stood there in the hallway, stunned and very grateful to still have my job.

I learned a few really important things the week of the underwear debacle. One: Sometimes in life, I’ll have to prove myself to people because trust cannot always be given freely or blindly. Two: Sometimes in life, I’ll have to figure out what to do all on my own, and learn to trust myself. Three: A sense of humor makes everything life throws at you bearable. (Including dirty underwear). Four: When life hands you dirty undershorts, wash them, and throw ’em back clean.