I wish I'd written that! Dick Jones' Patteran Pages has a lot more of these excerpts from student essays. Check out his blog and his take on current events from the UK side of the aisle.
8:45:37 PM    Comments?()  

As the warden said in Cool Hand Luke - "What we have here, is a failure to communicate."

John H. went to the nursing home to visit his 79 year-old wife who suffers from Alzheimer's. On the way in, an aide stopped him and told him that there was a rumor that his wife had been raped. Raped? He immediately went to the nursing supervisor who called the aide into the room. The aide told a completely different story but, by this time, the whole family was involved and it was decided, at nearly midnight, to call the police who advised them to send her to the ED.

Lucille H. was pleasantly demented. She arrived by ambulance, accompanied by a family member. A rape exam is a long, unpleasant process for the patient and this was not made any easier by her mental state. The physician did the exam, gathered hair and skin samples for evidence. There was no sign of trauma, no witness, nor any proof that anything untoward occurred, but because she couldn't tell us what happened, she got the full work-up.

But there were a couple things that needed to be factored in. Her husband, the one who first encountered the aide, was very hard of hearing. "She's been raped" and "She's doing great" likely sounded the same to him. Now to the aide - she was also stone deaf. She wore two hearing aids, but, unfortunately did not wear either of them to work this time. So when she was stopped by John H., she tried to read his lips and figured he was asking about her condition. She told him that Lucille had "gained weight." The gap between what was said and what was heard led to the involvement of the police, EMS, the ED staff and who knows how many others.

Gained weight or been raped - as if life wasn't difficult enough already.
7:56:12 AM    Comments?()