108. The Hospital Orderly (1)

Jake was tired of his job. He’d been it for 10 years, and it wasn’t getting easier. He was a hospital orderly. That’s a title that covers many specific duties—some of which quite unpleasant. Whenever a patient threw up, for , it was Jake's responsibility to clean the patient’s and face, remove all the soiled clothing and linens, put fresh bed linens on the bed, put clean hospital clothing on the patient. After of such incidents, Jake still had not gotten to the odor and sight of fresh vomit. was disgusting. Every time he cleaned up vomit, thought to himself that he wasn’t getting paid enough.
Jake was also responsible for checking a ’s blood pressure, taking his pulse and temperature (usually , but sometimes rectally), and doing electrocardiograms to monitor heart condition. These chores used to be done nurses or technicians. Now they were done by . He fed patients who couldn’t feed themselves. He move patients from their beds to gurneys, or their beds to wheelchairs, and vice versa. Whenever patient died in his hospital bed, it was ’s job to zip the body into a plastic , put the bag on a gurney, and roll gurney into the elevator and downstairs into the morgue. Sometimes he stayed in the morgue, just .