Some days when I’m taking off my scrubs and putting on my own clothes in the changing room of whatever hospital I’m working at, I find several pens in my pocket, when I started the day with only one.
This is never the result of deliberate theft, I hasten to add, but I’ll need a pen, maybe to write some drug on a medication chart, or fill out a prescription form, and discover I’ve temporarily misplaced mine, in some random pocket of my scrubs perhaps, and so I grab whichever pen I can find lying around or in the supply cabinet, use it and then absent mindedly put it back in my own pocket. On other days, I’ll be a pen shedder, perhaps lending mine to a surgeon who needs to write a quick op note at the end of surgery, which is never returned – the surgeon absent mindedly putting it in their own pocket in turn – or just by leaving it somewhere on the anaesthetic machine or on the drug cart while being distracted by some other task.
I must confess that the cumulative effect over many months is a gradual but steady accrual of pens, all of which float around in the bottom of my bag, although often unable to be found at a crucial moment. Mysteriously, one or two of these pens will gradually dismantle itself over time, and I’ll end up with random pen parts appearing whenever I’m on the hunt for anything in my bag. Yesterday I found two of those tiny springs when looking for a lip balm, which meant more than one pen had dismembered itself in there, which was a sign I needed to do something about it. I tipped the contents of my bag onto the kitchen floor and ended up with eight intact pens and almost two pens’ worth of parts. Unfortunately there was only one tiny white plastic doodad that didn’t have a double amongst all the spare bits – probably choking a baby dolphin out in the ocean somewhere , or stuck up a turtle’s nostril as we speak. In any event, it was impossible for me to make two entire pens out of the spares I had before me, so a difficult decision had to be made. I must choose between the blue or the black ballpoint. It was no contest, really – I’ve valued black pens for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t until this morning I asked myself why that was, and the realisation struck me: it was because black writing faxes better than blue. Yes, I am really that old. After a day in private I used to fax a copy of the theatre list to my billing person, so she could invoice the patients, and if I used blue ink, it was often indecipherable when she got it. I hate to think when was the last time I faxed something – we got rid of our fax machine over a decade ago, surely? Perhaps I am an elephant. No, not grey and overweight with big ears and a long nose (maybe that last part) but I have a long memory.
