After Hours (InterMix)(17)
Definitely not his woman, definitely not, because for one, he would totally say something like that. Going to see my woman, tonight, he’d say. And all his meathead caveman friends would probably call me that, too. I have a name, I’d say.
Then I realized I was getting bent out of shape over the way I might be treated by a man who quite possibly had no designs on me, in a theoretical romantic relationship I didn’t even want to share with him.
Clearly, I was still drunk. Only possible explanation. First thing I’d do on my day off would be to find a shiny new water bottle and make it a point to stay more hydrated. Yes, that’d solve my Kelly problems. Stay hydrated, stay sober, stay free of horny thoughts about my coworker.
It wasn’t long before that resolve was tested. I saw Kelly an hour later in the hand-off meeting. He said good morning to me, nothing in his expression or tone suggesting we’d forged some profound bond the night before. Since of course we hadn’t. He was firmly back in work mode, a big gray human wall of calm. If only parts of me didn’t have such a distracting urge to climb him.
The morning went smoothly enough, and I spent the first couple of hours shadowing Jenny again. Then at ten I headed across campus to the Warbler building for restraint training.
The class took place in a small gymnasium, a nice little setup with a basketball hoop, yoga balls, a weights set, sports equipment. A large senior nurse named Audra was leading the three-session course.
A stocky fortysomething, Audra proved herself surprisingly spry, kicking off the class by having a male orderly pretend to attack her, then breaking forcefully from his choke hold. I found the display more unnerving than reassuring, as all I could imagine afterward was being violently attacked from behind.
“Everyone awake now?” she asked through a laugh, face pink from the performance. “Good! I’m Nurse Audra, and I’ve been at Larkhaven for sixteen years, not a one of them as a patient, if you can believe that! I’ve worked in every single building and on every single ward, including the locked unit. Anybody here this morning from Starling?”
I was alone in raising my hand.
“Excellent, excellent. You’re all here for one reason—restraints. And if you came hoping this’ll be about straightjackets, well tough beans! We’re talking about the act of physically restraining a patient in order to sedate them. Lemme say first and foremost, de-escalation is always preferable to a takedown—safer for us and the patients, and you can imagine it makes for a more harmonious environment. But restraints are still skills we all need for those worst-case scenarios.
“Now the key to effective restraints and breaks is all in the technique, and I’m going to show you all how even a tiny little woman like . . .” She prompted me with a nod.
“Erin,” I supplied, annoyed by how many diminutives she’d employed.
“How even a tiny little woman like Erin here can protect herself from attacks by a resident, even one twice her size and suffering from a psychotic episode. Of course, ideally, none of you will ever find yourselves in that position without fellow staffers on hand to come to your aid . . .”
My attention wavered then, as Kelly and two other men entered from a side room, one of them carrying an inflatable dummy, the kind you might knee in his plastic groin in a self-defense class. Kelly and the third orderly were lugging what looked like a wrestling team’s worth of blue gym mats. Then Kelly’s eyes met mine for the briefest second and I snapped my attention back to Audra.
“We’ll start out gentle,” she was saying. “Let’s break into groups of four, three new recruits and one instructor apiece.”
I wound up in a group with two RNs, a perky young one and middle-aged maternal one. Audra was with another group, but shouted to the instructors to show us some “arm breaks.” Naturally, I imagined someone breaking my arm.
My team’s instructor—a far warmer and more reasonably sized orderly than Kelly—had us take turns grasping his arms, then showed us in slow motion how he could swoop his hands up between our elbows to get free. We did it ten times apiece, quicker each time, then he made us put him in headlocks. It was almost fun. Though I sort of wished I got to put Kelly in a headlock. Probably be my only chance to feel like I had the better of him.
After twenty minutes of drills, Audra gave a lecture about the importance of proper technique, horrifying us with statistics about how many patients wound up with dislocations and fractures and sprains from panicky staffers not restraining them properly.