Ethel Melancon worked her ass off at the god damn hospital for these ungrateful shitheads. She didn’t want to be misunderstood; she loved being a nurse. But sometimes, nursing didn’t love her back.
Her floor was entirely heart patients. Mostly the old and infirm. On who knows what blood thinners and nerve pills. Keeping a quiet floor was of utmost importance. You never know what could set off someone’s next cardiac episode. So, you could hear a pindrop on Ethel’s floor.
But unlike how quiet her floor was, her patients were mostly onery. For many of them, it was their first major visit to a hospital. Only in their older years were they paying for the sins of the past.
But if you were nice and well behaved, Ethel didn’t judge. She just didn’t like the inconsiderate. And she thought she had dealt with everything. A man who refused to shit in a bed pan, so he would piss and shit his bed every time he had a BM. A woman who was so unhygienic, she kept her false teeth loose in her purse. She would pop them in, lint and all.
Yep, Ethel was jaded to say the least. But she was calloused. She thought nothing would break the shell.
She was wrong.
Chunk Boudreaux was a quiet man. Kept himself clean, and worked the sugar cane fields every day of his life. Till the day he collapsed in his tractor. Heart attack. If it wasn’t for one of his fellow cane farmers spotting the tractor stuck in a ditch, he would be dead.
And he knew it.
He just had his triple bipass and was in recovery. Grateful for a second lease on life.
But today, he had an additional mission.
His son Gravy was a shit head. He was the opposite of Chunk. Ran wild. Stole things. Did drugs.
And much like Chunk’s bad food caught up to his heart, Gravy’s wild living caught up to him. He was wanted for armed robbery, assault, and resisting arrest. Gravy had tried to hold up a liquor store with a shotgun. It went south. He got seen, but he managed to get away.
No one knew where he was or where he was going……no one but Chunk….
You see his daughter in law told him that he would visit him right after the surgery no matter what. So, after his morning nurse check-in, Chunk got out of bed and dragged his IV and monitors to the door. Chunk shoved himself, his IV, and monitors back against the wall, opposite the direction the door opened.
What happened next could only be described as complete chaos. Ethel was on the far end of the hall, making her rounds, when she heard yelling and crashing coming from the far end of the hall. She turned and looked in the direction of the noise.
She saw was Chunk Boudreaux on Gravy’s back, holding him in a sleeper hold. Gravy was running as fast as he could across the hall. Dragging his father around his neck, along with his IV and monitors across the ground.
Meanwhile, coming out of the elevators was Gravy’s pregnant wife Charise. She immediately started screaming in her high pitched whine “DONT KILL HIM! DONT KILL HIM!”
Gravy managed to make it to the door to the stairs and fell down to the first break in the stairwell. Ethel had told one of her fellow nurses to call the police, while the rest of the nurses tended the multiple codes and heart rate elevations that hit all of the patients down the hall at once.
Ethel got into the starewell, and Chunk locked eyes with her. The 68 year old man screamed “I GOT THE SON OF A BITCH! GET THE FUCKING SHERIFF”
Gravy is currently serving 10 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. His wife filed for divorce as soon as the conviction went through.
Chunk Boudreaux survived his ordeal and spent the rest of his days fishing off the dock near his house.
The heart patients managed to survive with no additional palpitations.
Ethel Melancon left nursing thereafter. She could often be quoted as saying, “Let dem god damn rednecks take care of themselves.”