SLEEPY HOLLOW, NY—Amidst a barrage of serious allegations from hospital staff that, during a recent overnight on-call shift, she neglected a nurse’s request to check on a patient who was in distress and ultimately passed, Dr. Sarah Bennett continued to insist that she did indeed examine and properly manage the patient in question.
“I swear I saw the patient,” said a resolute Bennett. “As soon as I got off the phone, I got out of the on-call bed, raced to his room, recognized impending respiratory failure, immediately called Anesthesia to intubate him, and set up an ICU transfer. I remember it exactly because—and I’ll never forget this—for some reason, the anesthesiologist who showed up was my 2nd-grade gym teacher and the ICU resident was my 90-year-old grandma. Then the hospital room turned into my boyfriend’s apartment, and the floor turned into the ocean, which swallowed up the patient’s bed, causing him to drown, and sadly, that’s how he died. Luckily for me, a friendly narwhal carried me to safety, and I tried to send the narwhal back to fetch the patient, and oh holy crap…I must have been dreaming! I totally didn’t realize it then, but yeah, I see it now.
“I suppose I fell right back to sleep after ending my call with the nurse and then checked on the patient in my dream. Whoopsie. It seemed so real!”
As the embarrassed resident thought about it further, she realized that she’s been examining patients in her dreams all year long. A sense of relief rushed over her because this meant that all her friends, relatives and acquaintances she hadn’t seen in a decade weren’t really hospitalized with deadly diseases. She also finally understood why her dead grandpa kept getting admitted.
“It also explains why last week my baby still had a load of poop in her diaper in the morning when I distinctly recall changing her at 3am,” said a visibly relieved Bennett. “I guess I changed her in my dream…oops!”
Hospital administrators all looked at each other and broke out in hysterical laughter. “Yeah, we’ve all done that before. You’re good!” said Internal Medicine Chairman, Samuel Davidson, before, with a wink, secretly handing the drowsy resident a stash of speed and caffeine pills. “Here, take these before your next overnight shift.”
However, moments later the Chairman turned into the Devil and roared, “Just kidding! Your ass is fired!” The entire conference room then turned into a raging pit of fire and lava, which consumed all inside, and, holy crap, at press time, Dr. Bennett appeared to be trapped in some sort of never-ending Inception-like dream scenario. Too bad, because her pagers haven’t stopped ringing.
