15. meeting in the E.R/A&E au
This is a prompt fic from a Tumblr meme that I am hosting here because their lj-cut feature is broken and I hate longform text that's not behind a cut.
Around 1 in the morning Wendy finds Stan at the nurses' station. It's Saturday night, she's frazzled, and technically Stan is on his break and he's eating a Luna Bar Protein, cherry-almond flavor, and trying to through through the weekend. "There's a guy here," she says, "and he demands a male nurse."
Stan looks up, still chewing his dinner, only halfway through this 12-hour shift. Tonight was his 10-year high school reunion and he's missing it, sitting on a stool under the florescent lights of the St. Anthony ER. "Can anyone else do it?" he asks. Typically he'd do anything for Wendy, but he gets one 30-minute break and then he'll be on his feet until 7 a.m.
"Everyone else is busy," she says, fanning herself with manilla folders, her hair falling out of a butterfly clip.
"Yeah, that's because I'm on a break." He takes another bite of his protein bar.
"Look, this guy, he really needs help."
Stan swallows. "Yeah, that's because this is an emergency room."
She hits him with her stack of folders. "Yeah, I know! But, look, this poor guy, I think he really needs to calm down, his blood pressure's through the roof and he really wants a male nurse."
"All right, all right." Stan trashes the protein bar wrapper and grabs his stethoscope and a pair of rubber gloves. "You know, I haven't slept in like -- a long time."
"So? Join the club, Stan. Welcome to healthcare in America in 2015."
"Yes, I know, I get it," Stan says, shuffling off with her down the hall. "Where can I find this gentleman?"
"I stuck him in 5B," Wendy says. "Thanks for dealing with this. I gotta -- we need to start moving people out of here, before the stupid teenager alcohol poisoning rush."
"Is that before or after the gun violence rush?"
"Well, that's the problem, they're usually t the same time." She puts a hand on his shoulder. "Thanks. I mean it. I know how important it is for people to get a break."
"Yeah, yeah." Stan turns away and heads toward 5B. He wanted that break, but Wendy runs a tight ship. He wouldn't disappoint her.
In 5B -- just a corner of the department partitioned with a curtain -- he finds a man standing over the examining table, leaning against it with his arms crossed and a look of mild discomfort on his face. He's still clothing from head-to-toe in streetwear, and to get his attention, Stan says, "Has anyone directed you to change?" There's a hospital gown on a chair.
The man turns and Stan is surprised to see that he has a youthful face which is crossed with an expression of some embarrassment which ages him, slightly. He has sharp features, close-cropped hair on the sides that's longer in front, and he says, "Thank god," shaking his head. "They finally sent the right person." He's a redhead. Stan's always been curious about redheads. "Do I really have to change?"
"Well, it's sort of what we do here." Stan picks up the gown and sits on the stool. Wendy's left his chart on the counter. Stan picks it up, flipping through. The patient's name is Kyle Broflovski, he's only slightly younger than Stan -- they would have been in the same year at school -- and he's a diabetic with hypertension who has a dildo stuck up his ass.
Stan sets the chart down; he is very good about not making patients feel ridiculous, and he has certaintly pulled a number of odd froms from every kind of place -- marbles from kids' noses, Barbie shoes from ears, condoms from women's vaginas, and so on. This is the first man who's ever come up with something stuck up his ass, let alone something that was meant to go up there. The weirdest ER stories are the ones where something insane -- a Golden Globes statuette, a garlic press, a spool of typewriter correction tape -- gets lost in someone's body.
"Well," Stan says, closing the chart and putting it back on the counter, "at least you've stuck the right thing up the right hole. It could be a lot worse. What happened?"
"What do you think happened?" Kyle asks. "I was trying to pleasure myself rectally and I used too much lube, lost my grip."
"You should use one with a flared base." Stan tosses the gown onto the table. "You have to put this on."
"Do I really?"
"Well, yes, if you want me to get that out for you."
"Of course I want you to get it out! I just figured I could maybe pull my pants down a little."
"Put the gown on," Stan says, and I'll be back.
"Jesus, don't leave me," Kyle says, but Stan has to. He heads back to the nurse's station, where Wendy is filling out paperwork.
"Is there a doctor around? Or a PA?"
"Why?" she asks, looking up. "Is this about 5B?"
"Yeah," says Stan, "he needs a scrip."
"For what?"
"Probably klonopin. Maybe a muscle relaxant."
"Why?"
"Why? Wendy, he's got a dildo stuck up his ass and I have to extract it."
She start laughing, covering her mouth. "Sorry, sorry," she says. "What?"
"Oh, yes, it's very funny, interrupt me while I'm eating dinner and send me to go deal with the dildo guy, ha ha, everyone have a good laugh about it, send Stan the gay nurse to get a fucking dildo out of some dude's ass."
"I didn't know he had a dildo in his ass!" she follows Stan down the hall to the dispensary. "Bebe just told me he was demanding a male nurse!"
"Well, no kidding, poor guy, he's freaked out." Stan pulls a bottle of Xanax off the shelf and shakes out a 0.25. "This should help him out, right?"
“I would never imply that just because you’re gay you’d know anything about dildos.”
“You owe me a protein bar.” Stan heads back to the little partition, where Kyle is now standing in the same position in a hospital gown instead of his street clothes. The blue-green color is terrible for him and the way the drapey fabric falls does little for his figure. He’s breathing deeply, and Stan hands him the Xanax and the glass of water. “Can you stand up straight to take this?”
“I might, but it’ll feel kind of weird,” Kyle admits.
“How big do we think this dildo is?”
“In inches? It’s pretty long.”
“Can you estimate?”
“Fuck, I don’t know.” Tears are coming to his eyes. “Why is this what I’m doing?”
“Hey,” Stan says. “It’s actually normal, okay? There’s literally nothing weird about wanting to use one of these things. A lot of people use them. I use them.”
“You use them?”
“Well, yeah. On me, on other people. They’re fun. It’s nothing to feel weird about.”
“But I got it stuck in my own butt!”
"Well, now we're going to get it out, okay? It's not a big deal."
as a nurse, Stan tries to have empathy. While he fills out the paperwork and waits for the anti-anxiety drug to take effect, he tries to imagine what it would be like on the other end of the this equation. "I mean, I get it," Stan says, looking over the medical information Kyle's provided a second time. "No one likes going to the ER, and why would they? I don't even like it here, and I'm here voluntarily."
"Isn't this your job?"
"Yeah, but I don't have to be an ER nurse. Anyway, I'm just saying -- if you were here with a broken bone or if you were bleeding because you cut yourself or if you had to get your stomach pumped because you got loaded on grain alcohol before the school dance or whatever, we'd all treat it like it was just a normal fuck-up, even though all of those things are potentially way more serious that this, which is honestly no big deal. Like I bet you're uncomfortable right now, but you're not gonna die from a fake dick in your ass."
"I'm not?" Kyle asks. "Because I feel like I'm dying."
"The human butt can accommodate, um, a lot of things. Believe me." Stan pulls on a pair of gloves.
"Well, at least I'm in the hands of an amateur proctologist who knows what he's talking about."
"No, I'm just a nurse practitioner. But don't tell me you never, like, swiped your dad's copy of Backdoor Sluts 9."
"Even if I did I don't think that move was real."
"What do you mean, real?" Stan asks. "Are you not familiar with the porn industry?"
"Just get this thing out of me," Kyle whines.
It's not hard, just a sponge clamp and a little bit of pressure. Kyle screams when it's extracted, but then he slumps over the table and groans with a kind of relief Stan's never heard before, at least not out of an ER patient. It turns out the dildo is pink, sparkly, and rounded, which is nothing like what Stan was anticipating. When he imagined what kind of dildo Kyle would use, he imagined something really lifelife and articulate, or at least as lifelike as dildos get.
After he tosses the dildo, Stan grabs a hemorrhoid pillow so Kyle can sit down. "You did great," he says, rubbing Kyle's shoulder.
Breathing heavily, Kyle says, "Are you kidding? I shrieked like a girl."
"No, you shrieked like a dude with a dildo being pulled out of your ass." Stan stops rubbing Kyle's shoulders. "Do you need a painkiller scrip?"
"I don't know."
"Well, it probably wouldn't hurt." Stan washes his hands and chats idly: "Look, I can't even begin to tell you about the stuff we pull out of people in here."
"Oh, like what?"
"Well, like I said, I can't tell you, because of HIPAA. But, look, you can't dwell on this. It's out now."
"That dildo wasn't cheap," says Kyle. Now that he's looking up from where he's sitting, Stan admires his pouty lower lip and how messy his hair is.
Stan looks at the clock on the wall. His break is long over, and there are other patients to see. "I'll get that scrip for you," he says, hustling away from Kyle as he blushes at the memory of hunching down below Kyle's ass, of the clamp prying him open -- it's not erotic, really, or romatic; it would be wrong to say that Stan is turned on by extracting foreign bodies from dudes' butts.
But it was intimate, and something about Kyle's weary self-awareness and vulnerability haunts Stan to the point that he scribbles a note on the discharge papers: Be careful! Remember, sex is healthy and best practicied safely with a friend. -- Stanley. He finds himself fearing for the rest of his shift that it was a major violation of some code of nursing ethics to include his phone number.
~
Kyle never gets over it. He never gets over the idea that he and Stan met in the ER while Kyle had a dildo shoved in his ass. It's six years later and they're standing in Denver city hall making small talk with the clerk who's processing the payment for their marriage license and Kyle still hasn't come to terms with this when he's asked, without preamble, "How'd you guys meet?"
"Work," Stan says, which is perfectly true.
"Stan was a nurse at the ER I went to when I had a dildo stuck in my butt," Kyle says, which no one ever believes.
"Oh, you boys are such a riot!" The clerk slaps the counter; she's probably a Nebraska transplant with her big blond hair and way too much eye makeup. "I've heard so many crazy things today. I just issued a license to a couple-a guys who met because their wives were bridge partners, isn't that a hoot?"
"And a holler," Stan says.
They walk away with their license, each grinning.
"Some people get good stories," Kyle says, clutching Stan's arm. "We could have grown up together. We could have had bridge-partner wives!"
"The dildo thing is a much better story. I don't know that you should be telling it to civic employees, but you can't deny that it's a great story."
"Nobody ever lets me tell the best part of the story, though."
"Yeah?" Stan asks. "What's that -- the hemorrhoid pillow?"
"No," says Kyle. "It's the part where I was out 125 bucks because you through the dildo away, and you wrote your phone number on my discharge papers, and said, 'I wanna fuck you'-- "
"I don't think that's what I wrote?"
"Something to that effect, and I called you up and and you said, I've got something better than a dildo, and it's free. And you've been putting things in and taking them out of my ass ever since."
"Well," Stan says, "that part's true."
Around 1 in the morning Wendy finds Stan at the nurses' station. It's Saturday night, she's frazzled, and technically Stan is on his break and he's eating a Luna Bar Protein, cherry-almond flavor, and trying to through through the weekend. "There's a guy here," she says, "and he demands a male nurse."
Stan looks up, still chewing his dinner, only halfway through this 12-hour shift. Tonight was his 10-year high school reunion and he's missing it, sitting on a stool under the florescent lights of the St. Anthony ER. "Can anyone else do it?" he asks. Typically he'd do anything for Wendy, but he gets one 30-minute break and then he'll be on his feet until 7 a.m.
"Everyone else is busy," she says, fanning herself with manilla folders, her hair falling out of a butterfly clip.
"Yeah, that's because I'm on a break." He takes another bite of his protein bar.
"Look, this guy, he really needs help."
Stan swallows. "Yeah, that's because this is an emergency room."
She hits him with her stack of folders. "Yeah, I know! But, look, this poor guy, I think he really needs to calm down, his blood pressure's through the roof and he really wants a male nurse."
"All right, all right." Stan trashes the protein bar wrapper and grabs his stethoscope and a pair of rubber gloves. "You know, I haven't slept in like -- a long time."
"So? Join the club, Stan. Welcome to healthcare in America in 2015."
"Yes, I know, I get it," Stan says, shuffling off with her down the hall. "Where can I find this gentleman?"
"I stuck him in 5B," Wendy says. "Thanks for dealing with this. I gotta -- we need to start moving people out of here, before the stupid teenager alcohol poisoning rush."
"Is that before or after the gun violence rush?"
"Well, that's the problem, they're usually t the same time." She puts a hand on his shoulder. "Thanks. I mean it. I know how important it is for people to get a break."
"Yeah, yeah." Stan turns away and heads toward 5B. He wanted that break, but Wendy runs a tight ship. He wouldn't disappoint her.
In 5B -- just a corner of the department partitioned with a curtain -- he finds a man standing over the examining table, leaning against it with his arms crossed and a look of mild discomfort on his face. He's still clothing from head-to-toe in streetwear, and to get his attention, Stan says, "Has anyone directed you to change?" There's a hospital gown on a chair.
The man turns and Stan is surprised to see that he has a youthful face which is crossed with an expression of some embarrassment which ages him, slightly. He has sharp features, close-cropped hair on the sides that's longer in front, and he says, "Thank god," shaking his head. "They finally sent the right person." He's a redhead. Stan's always been curious about redheads. "Do I really have to change?"
"Well, it's sort of what we do here." Stan picks up the gown and sits on the stool. Wendy's left his chart on the counter. Stan picks it up, flipping through. The patient's name is Kyle Broflovski, he's only slightly younger than Stan -- they would have been in the same year at school -- and he's a diabetic with hypertension who has a dildo stuck up his ass.
Stan sets the chart down; he is very good about not making patients feel ridiculous, and he has certaintly pulled a number of odd froms from every kind of place -- marbles from kids' noses, Barbie shoes from ears, condoms from women's vaginas, and so on. This is the first man who's ever come up with something stuck up his ass, let alone something that was meant to go up there. The weirdest ER stories are the ones where something insane -- a Golden Globes statuette, a garlic press, a spool of typewriter correction tape -- gets lost in someone's body.
"Well," Stan says, closing the chart and putting it back on the counter, "at least you've stuck the right thing up the right hole. It could be a lot worse. What happened?"
"What do you think happened?" Kyle asks. "I was trying to pleasure myself rectally and I used too much lube, lost my grip."
"You should use one with a flared base." Stan tosses the gown onto the table. "You have to put this on."
"Do I really?"
"Well, yes, if you want me to get that out for you."
"Of course I want you to get it out! I just figured I could maybe pull my pants down a little."
"Put the gown on," Stan says, and I'll be back.
"Jesus, don't leave me," Kyle says, but Stan has to. He heads back to the nurse's station, where Wendy is filling out paperwork.
"Is there a doctor around? Or a PA?"
"Why?" she asks, looking up. "Is this about 5B?"
"Yeah," says Stan, "he needs a scrip."
"For what?"
"Probably klonopin. Maybe a muscle relaxant."
"Why?"
"Why? Wendy, he's got a dildo stuck up his ass and I have to extract it."
She start laughing, covering her mouth. "Sorry, sorry," she says. "What?"
"Oh, yes, it's very funny, interrupt me while I'm eating dinner and send me to go deal with the dildo guy, ha ha, everyone have a good laugh about it, send Stan the gay nurse to get a fucking dildo out of some dude's ass."
"I didn't know he had a dildo in his ass!" she follows Stan down the hall to the dispensary. "Bebe just told me he was demanding a male nurse!"
"Well, no kidding, poor guy, he's freaked out." Stan pulls a bottle of Xanax off the shelf and shakes out a 0.25. "This should help him out, right?"
“I would never imply that just because you’re gay you’d know anything about dildos.”
“You owe me a protein bar.” Stan heads back to the little partition, where Kyle is now standing in the same position in a hospital gown instead of his street clothes. The blue-green color is terrible for him and the way the drapey fabric falls does little for his figure. He’s breathing deeply, and Stan hands him the Xanax and the glass of water. “Can you stand up straight to take this?”
“I might, but it’ll feel kind of weird,” Kyle admits.
“How big do we think this dildo is?”
“In inches? It’s pretty long.”
“Can you estimate?”
“Fuck, I don’t know.” Tears are coming to his eyes. “Why is this what I’m doing?”
“Hey,” Stan says. “It’s actually normal, okay? There’s literally nothing weird about wanting to use one of these things. A lot of people use them. I use them.”
“You use them?”
“Well, yeah. On me, on other people. They’re fun. It’s nothing to feel weird about.”
“But I got it stuck in my own butt!”
"Well, now we're going to get it out, okay? It's not a big deal."
as a nurse, Stan tries to have empathy. While he fills out the paperwork and waits for the anti-anxiety drug to take effect, he tries to imagine what it would be like on the other end of the this equation. "I mean, I get it," Stan says, looking over the medical information Kyle's provided a second time. "No one likes going to the ER, and why would they? I don't even like it here, and I'm here voluntarily."
"Isn't this your job?"
"Yeah, but I don't have to be an ER nurse. Anyway, I'm just saying -- if you were here with a broken bone or if you were bleeding because you cut yourself or if you had to get your stomach pumped because you got loaded on grain alcohol before the school dance or whatever, we'd all treat it like it was just a normal fuck-up, even though all of those things are potentially way more serious that this, which is honestly no big deal. Like I bet you're uncomfortable right now, but you're not gonna die from a fake dick in your ass."
"I'm not?" Kyle asks. "Because I feel like I'm dying."
"The human butt can accommodate, um, a lot of things. Believe me." Stan pulls on a pair of gloves.
"Well, at least I'm in the hands of an amateur proctologist who knows what he's talking about."
"No, I'm just a nurse practitioner. But don't tell me you never, like, swiped your dad's copy of Backdoor Sluts 9."
"Even if I did I don't think that move was real."
"What do you mean, real?" Stan asks. "Are you not familiar with the porn industry?"
"Just get this thing out of me," Kyle whines.
It's not hard, just a sponge clamp and a little bit of pressure. Kyle screams when it's extracted, but then he slumps over the table and groans with a kind of relief Stan's never heard before, at least not out of an ER patient. It turns out the dildo is pink, sparkly, and rounded, which is nothing like what Stan was anticipating. When he imagined what kind of dildo Kyle would use, he imagined something really lifelife and articulate, or at least as lifelike as dildos get.
After he tosses the dildo, Stan grabs a hemorrhoid pillow so Kyle can sit down. "You did great," he says, rubbing Kyle's shoulder.
Breathing heavily, Kyle says, "Are you kidding? I shrieked like a girl."
"No, you shrieked like a dude with a dildo being pulled out of your ass." Stan stops rubbing Kyle's shoulders. "Do you need a painkiller scrip?"
"I don't know."
"Well, it probably wouldn't hurt." Stan washes his hands and chats idly: "Look, I can't even begin to tell you about the stuff we pull out of people in here."
"Oh, like what?"
"Well, like I said, I can't tell you, because of HIPAA. But, look, you can't dwell on this. It's out now."
"That dildo wasn't cheap," says Kyle. Now that he's looking up from where he's sitting, Stan admires his pouty lower lip and how messy his hair is.
Stan looks at the clock on the wall. His break is long over, and there are other patients to see. "I'll get that scrip for you," he says, hustling away from Kyle as he blushes at the memory of hunching down below Kyle's ass, of the clamp prying him open -- it's not erotic, really, or romatic; it would be wrong to say that Stan is turned on by extracting foreign bodies from dudes' butts.
But it was intimate, and something about Kyle's weary self-awareness and vulnerability haunts Stan to the point that he scribbles a note on the discharge papers: Be careful! Remember, sex is healthy and best practicied safely with a friend. -- Stanley. He finds himself fearing for the rest of his shift that it was a major violation of some code of nursing ethics to include his phone number.
~
Kyle never gets over it. He never gets over the idea that he and Stan met in the ER while Kyle had a dildo shoved in his ass. It's six years later and they're standing in Denver city hall making small talk with the clerk who's processing the payment for their marriage license and Kyle still hasn't come to terms with this when he's asked, without preamble, "How'd you guys meet?"
"Work," Stan says, which is perfectly true.
"Stan was a nurse at the ER I went to when I had a dildo stuck in my butt," Kyle says, which no one ever believes.
"Oh, you boys are such a riot!" The clerk slaps the counter; she's probably a Nebraska transplant with her big blond hair and way too much eye makeup. "I've heard so many crazy things today. I just issued a license to a couple-a guys who met because their wives were bridge partners, isn't that a hoot?"
"And a holler," Stan says.
They walk away with their license, each grinning.
"Some people get good stories," Kyle says, clutching Stan's arm. "We could have grown up together. We could have had bridge-partner wives!"
"The dildo thing is a much better story. I don't know that you should be telling it to civic employees, but you can't deny that it's a great story."
"Nobody ever lets me tell the best part of the story, though."
"Yeah?" Stan asks. "What's that -- the hemorrhoid pillow?"
"No," says Kyle. "It's the part where I was out 125 bucks because you through the dildo away, and you wrote your phone number on my discharge papers, and said, 'I wanna fuck you'-- "
"I don't think that's what I wrote?"
"Something to that effect, and I called you up and and you said, I've got something better than a dildo, and it's free. And you've been putting things in and taking them out of my ass ever since."
"Well," Stan says, "that part's true."