Nurse Kate Heals Mitchieville

My dear denizens of Mitchieville, let me start this instalment by sharing with you a bit of quirkiness from my job.

Now, it is well established that hospital food is near-inedible. Never in my life have I seen a place that can destroy something as simple as a sandwich or Jell-o. Seriously, how do you screw up Jell-o? However, it is a little known fact that food arrangements are meant to confound by their arrangement and not just their quality. For instance, the supper served to our hapless patients last night.

When I opened the top of the tray to assist an elderly gentleman with his meal, I was puzzled at the dish set before me. At first glance, it was a typical hospital meal: a fillet of deceptively solid looking salmon, potatoes pureed enough to be administered intravenously, and some green slop that may or may not have been a vegetable (spinach?). What puzzled me greatly about this was the piece of bread placed under all of this smack-dab in the middle of the plate. It could not be that the other constituents were meant be served upon this bread like an open face sandwich as they were all 50-60% off of the bread. It was more like someone had placed the bread in the middle of the plate, forgotten it was there, and placed the nights meal upon it. I looked at other trays to see if this was a one-off oddity, but the same thing was repeated with each room. I can only assume that we have some very, very odd people working in our kitchen that are given free license to create their own menu. Granted, this was better than lunches “Tuna Fish and Marshmallow on a Flip Flop”, but it still leads me to suspect that such food choices are made for the sole purpose of creating such a surreal environment that out patients feel uncomfortable enough to leave.

So, in the spirit of deciphering the undecipherable, I challenge you to figure out what the hell these signs are trying to say. I have my suspicions, but like all things in medicine, it’s always good to call in a consult.


I think this cat just told me to kill myself.


Who told you about my stickiness?


So....uh....who do I ask?


Truly, disco is dead.