Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-5542146-20181104100644/@comment-36815674-20181104110351

Look at how long this one paragraph is, it's long enough to be a story by it self. You have got to fix these paragraphs or no one is going to take you serious.

Its hard to read when its all jumbled together. Break them down some. It might make the story look longer but at least you can read it.

Brad and Jennifer were veterans of the ED. While Brad had gotten there a year after Jen, he had still experienced some fairly harrowing things, and with the commotion hurtling through the department, he destinctly remembered his anus puckering at the thought of what he, Jen and the others went through six months ago. One night Brad got to the hospital and they were dealing with what was at the time vaguely referred to as a 'perirectal abscess.' Needless to say, the entire crew was less than thrilled. Brad went down to the Emergency Room to transport the patient, and the only thing the ER nurse said as she handed him the chart was, "Have fun with this one." So, they'd got the lady off to sleep, put her into the stirrups, and Brad began washing off the rectal area. It was red and inflamed, but it was all pretty standard. Her chart had noted that she'd been injecting IV narcotics through her perineum, so this was obviously an infection from dirty needles or bad substances. But overall, it didn't seem to warrant her repeated cries of, 'Oh Jesus, kill me now.' Jennifer steps up with a scalpel, sinks just the tip in, and at the exact same moment, the patient had a muscle twitch in her diaphragm, and just like that, things went downhill. Unbeknownst to us, the infection had actually tunneled nearly a foot into her abdomen, creating a vast cavern of fluids that had seeped outside of her colon. This godforsaken mixture came rocketing out of that little incision. They all wore waterproof gowns, face masks, gloves, hats, the works -- all of which were as helpful was rainboots against a firehose. The bed was in the middle of the room, an easy seven feet from the nearest wall, but by the time we were done, bits of flesh pasted against the back wall continued to be found. As Jen continued to advance her blade, the torrent continued unrestrained. The patient kept seizing against the ventilator (not uncommon in surgery), and with every muscle contraction, she shot more of this brackish gray-brown fluid out onto the floor until. Within minutes, it was seeping into the other nurse's shoes. I was nearly twelve feet away, jaw dropped open within my surgical mask, watching the second nurse dry-heaving and the surgeon standing on tip-toes to keep this stuff from soaking his socks any further. The smell hit them first. 'Oh god, I just threw up in my mask!' The other nurse was out, she tore off her mask and sprinted out of the room, shoulders still heaving. Then it hit Brad, his mouth still wide open, not able to believe the volume of fluid this woman's body contained. He couldn't breathe, his lungs recoiled against his body's attempts to pull in any more. The anesthesiologist went down next. He was an ex-NCAA D1 tailback, but his six-foot-two frame kept shaking as he threw open the door to the O.R. suite in an attempt to get more air in, allowing Brad a glimpse of the second nurse still throwing up in the sinks outside the door. In all operating rooms, everywhere in the world, regardless of socialized or privatized, secular or religious, big or small, there is one thing the same: somewhere, there is a bottle of peppermint concentrate. Everyone in the department knew where it was kept, everyone knew what it is for, and everyone prays to their gods they never have to use it. Brad sprinted to the central supply, ripping open the drawer where a vial of ambrosia was kept, only to be greeted by an empty box. The bottle had been emptied and, by god, out there was an apex dickhead who had used the last of the peppermint oil, and not replaced a single drop of it. He darted back into the room with the next best thing he could find at that time -- a vial of Mastisol, which is an adhesive rub somestives used for bandaging. Not as good as peppermint, it would do considering that over one-third of the floor was now thoroughly coated in what could easily be mistaken for a combination of bovine after-birth and maple syrup. Brad started rubbing as much of the Mastisol as he could get on the inside of my mask, just glad to be smelling anything else. The anesthesiologist grabbed the vial next, dowsing the front of his mask in it so he could stand next to his machines long enough to make sure this woman didn't die on the table. By this time, the smell had permeated out of the O.R. suite, and down the 40-foot hallway to the front desk, where the other nurse still sat, eyes bloodshot and watery, clenching her stomach desperately. Brad stepped back into the O.R. suite, not wanting to leave Jennifer by herself in case she genuinely needed help. It was like one of those overly-artistic representations of a zombie apocalypse you see on fan-forums. Here's this one guy, in blue surgical garb, standing nearly ankle deep in lumps of dead tissue, fecal matter, and several liters of syrupy infection. He was performing surgery in the swamps of Dagobah, except the swamps had just come out of this woman and there was no Yoda. She and Brad didn't say a word for the next 10 minutes as she scraped the inside of the abscess until all the dead tissue was out. The front of her gown was a gruesome mixture of brown and red, his eyes squinted against the stinging vapors originating directly in front of him. Brad finished his required paperwork as quickly as humanly possible, helped Jen stuff the recently-vacated opening full of gauze, taped this woman's buttocks closed to hold the dressing for as long as possible, woke her up, and immediately shipped off to the recovery ward. As we they left the locker room, Jen and him looked at each other, and she said the only negative sentence he'd heard her utter in two and a half years of working together; "That was bad." The next morning the entire department (a fairly large floor within the hospital) still smelled. The housekeepers told him later that it took them nearly an hour to suction up all of the fluid and debris left behind. The O.R. suite itself was closed off and quarantined for two more days just to let the smell clear out. Brad laughs when he hears new recruits talk about the worst thing they've seen. While he'd seen this and other horror stories, Jen's personal encounters had been a bit more... psychological. "I'm wasn't a nurse, but I was a CNA and telemetry technician for many years," Jen said upon getting through that previous ordeal, "I floated from my 'home unit' of medical neurology to the ER at least once or twice a month when they were short." "We had a man drive himself to the hospital because he was having delusions, and decided it would be a good idea to cut off his own member. According to him, after said removal, he regretted the decision. To remedy the problem, he stuck a pencil through the severed member, stuck it back on the stump, and attempted to superglue the whole thing back together. He tried for a while, and then when it didn't work drove on over to the ER. He said that God had told him that if she completed this act as a sacrifice, he would stop global warming. I guess it was a noble reason for him to do it, and the next night when I returned to work, he had been admitted to my home unit and was one of my patients. Yay. He was a difficult patient to have for the next month because we couldn't seem to find a combination of medication to stop his delusions. When he was lucid, he was a well-spoken, kind, intelligent man. But, you could have a good conversation with him, leave the room for five minutes, and come back to a man screaming that he was going to do horrible things to you in graphic detail. He ended up having to be restrained. He escaped the restraints one night while I was working, knocked a nurse unconscious, and broke her nose. At that point, it was decided that he was 'well' enough and the hospital pressed charges on him for the assault, and he was taken by the police to jail." Brad shook his head. "Unbelievable, why the hell... nevermind." Jen chuckled. "Yeah! They were able, by some huge miracle, to reattach it to him. They didn't know if it would ever be 'fully functional' again, but he could go to the washroom." But another story, despite having not talked about it with anyone, she decided to share it. "We had a husband and wife come in, utter hysteria following, in the middle of a miscarriage," she didn't look up as she kept washing her hands, somewhat obsessively. "They took her upstairs to deliver the deceased... baby, and," she shook her head. "Her husband was a veteran and started having stress-induced PTSD flashbacks, and early tests showed signs of tuberculosis. You know what happens, then, right?" "Ya'll had to quarantine him until you could confirm its status." She nodded, starting to tear up a little.