Except - it's in an abandoned medical ward in a condemned hospital. Sound appealing? Yeah, I often wonder how many people died in the little hole in the wall that is my patient room - office, I mean.
The walls are white, but yellowing from age. The useless ceiling tiles are brown with leak stains, which can't be a good sign. I have it on good authority that no one has worked on the roof in years, or even looked up there to see how things are - if we have black mold, green mold, or corpses. When I get a cold it sticks with me for weeks and i feel it in my lungs.
If that wasn't bad enough imagine having your office directly below the in-patient mental ward, which is used regularly. The Death Star-like company that owns all the hospitals in town uses the condemned building to house everything unwanted, discarded like storage - rooms and rooms of storage - the suicide people - urgent care for whiners, daredevil kids, and the cold season rush. The only insurance companies willing to contract with the Death Star is Medicaid, an equally undesired contractor. They shoved the low paid residence in the hospital's residency program into a small, crowded clinic inside the poorly built, condemned building, and made it the go-to place for most Medicaid patients. The undesired are moved over here, far from the multimillion dollar pay checks of my fearless leaders.
Very often, mostly in winter, we'll get a transient or drug user come strolling into the abandoned surgical ward where my office is - thinking this is the back door of the urgent care clinic, and badly surveillanced drugs. Believe it or not old people make a very large percentage of drug abusers. They're old . . . it's reasonable to prescribe them pain killers and opiates, but they get a tolerance to it and crave the feeling they get when they're on the drugs. Some of them perform self-sabotage to give them more health conditions requiring drugs - I speak from experience.
As a caregiver I worked for an elderly woman who had a hospital bed in her room and was completely bed ridden, but there was nothing wrong with her. At least not physically. She was in a tragic accident probably thirty years ago and seemingly was injured and unable to walk or do anything. As a result she went through a ghastly number of doctors, accumulating prescriptions to stop her pain until she eventually got Fentynol, a powerful opiate given to cancer patients and people having heart attacks. One doctor after another him-hawed over whether they should cut the drug cord, but she would just find a different doctor. And I've seen her x-rays; the woman hoards everything possible,she has no injuries.
It's important to stay busy otherwise all of these things get overwhelming pretty damn fast. I didn't mention the ghosts - meh . . . later. I love stories so please comment to "out-workplace" my terrible workplace.
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