November 16, 2008 The Sky is Falling

Last weekend, my dear friend Paige Turner had to visit the ER at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa. And as we were waiting in her room, a hospital worker passed by with a very tall cart. Just as he passed, a huge chunk of a ceiling tile fell from the drop ceiling. Initially, we thought something on his cart may have damaged the ceiling.

But then I saw it...the large, bare, hairy leg and foot retreating back into the ceiling. At first, my thought was "hey, a construction worker just accidentally put his foot through the ceiling." For some reason, it didn't occur to me at that moment that construction workers usually wear some type of shoe, along with pants, for that matter. In addition, as Paige pointed out, they also usually don't work at 10 pm on a Sunday night.

I stepped out of the room and took a much closer look up into the new hole in the ceiling, and saw TWO large, bare, hairy legs and feet coming from a hospital gown. So now I'm standing in the hallway inside the ER, saying somewhat loudly, "there is a patient in the ceiling with no shoes". (The "no shoes" part seemed important at the time. If it was just an ER patient crawling around in the ceiling wearing shoes, why, that would have been ok, I guess.) I continued... "seriously, there is a dude in the ceiling with no shoes." Now the ER doctors and nurses are starting to give me the "settle down, crazy woman, because we can take you out faster than you can say gurney" look. Thank goodness one of the doctors also spotted our ceiling crawler, which got me off the hook.

It was clear that we had a hospital escapee on our hands, and also clear that the ER drop ceiling was not going to support his weight for much longer. I was happy that he was, at least, crawling AWAY from Paige's room. I was safe, as I had taken the stand-under-a-door-frame-earthquake stance...however, Paige was in her hospital bed, and would not have been too pleased had the ceiling crawler dropped out of the sky onto her (unless, of course, he was very handsome and wealthy, and then it may have been ok).

He finally made his way down (thanks to gravity) and we heard later that he had travelled quite a distance via the drop ceiling. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get an iPhone photo of the situation, so I just took a photo of the outside of the ER (boring, I know). But, I have added another photo that should help with the visual. 

(P.S. I am happy to report that Paige is doing much better and is back at home. They were able to remove her hand from the bingo cage, and the puncture wounds from the giraffe bite are healing nicely.)