Today, I decided to go down to the laundry room to get some scrubs since next month I’ll be doing night shifts when we are allowed to walk around in scrubs like the lazy surgeons do. The laundry was not what I expected, first of all the walk down there was basically eerie. There was a grimey staircase that smelled like an alley people pee in that led to a long, wide hallway which was poorly lit and lined in unfinished cement. The hallway became progressively hotter until you finally ended at a boiler room; which looked like something out of one of those action movies where in the final scene there is an epic battle in a room with pipes and smoke and boilers.
The laundry “room” to the left was more of a laundry stadium. The temperature and air down there is as I would imagine hell to be, if such a place existed. It was the kind of heat that sucks the air out of your chest and makes you question if you will ever breathe again. The room was filled with these extraordinary machines clumping, and slamming and screeching. Gigantic machines whirring away spitting out flattened coats and scrubs and sheets and pillowcases.
The most extraordinary thing in the place was the people working there. I imagine they are on their feet all day, likely get paid a minimum wage, work in sweltering heat and go completely unnoticed by the world upstairs no one realizing when they ask for a pillow or a towel just how much hard work and toil went into cleaning it.
I think I have never expected gratitude from patients but there have been occasions when a difficult patient who argues, complains and fights and in the end is completely noncompliant has aggravated me. But in all honesty, I think even that I will now take in a stride; because at the end of the day I am pretty fortunate to have the job that I do; especially when I consider all the people living and working in such difficult anonymity just below the surface.
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