Love on Wheelz

This’ll be an ongoing series detailing all the incompetent, crazy and/or pathetic nurses I’ve had over the short time I’ve had the tracheotomy. You would think that the rigorous classes combined with the extremely hard test at the end would weed out the retarded ones, but this is not so. People are allowed to take the test as many times as they need. You would also think that they would do some kind of psychological screening to make sure these people, who are responsible for people’s lives are mentally stable, but this isn’t so either. Without further ado, I give you The Nursing Chronicles.
There are two types of crazy people in this world: The ones who are adept at hiding their crazy, and the ones you know are crazy within five minutes of meeting them. Enrique was the latter. I first met Enrique one day after school. My mom had brought him along to pick me up and we got to talking on the way home.
“In life I see myself as a cowboy, man. Like, like the matrix, with uh… with the trench-coat and the glasses, dude. I-I-I consider myself a rebel, a uh… a rebel, man. Tell me if I talk too much, man, my mom says, ‘Enrique, shut up, you’re crazy’ so tell me if I talk too much, but see that’s just her opinion see? It’s just her opinion and you can’t take crap from no one, man.”
“Uh… yeah, I agree with that.”
“Yeah, man, see you get that, man. You and me, we get that, man.” We pulled into the driveway and he pulled out a piece of paper.
“Do you know what this is?” he showed me the paper, it was a bunch of poorly scribbled ones and zeros.
“Yeah, that’s binary,” I said, “Where’d you get that?”
“Yesterday, I just got inspired, man. I started writing this down. And then it turns out you know what it is, it’s destiny man. There’s something going on here, man.
Yeah, there’s something all right.
Despite his obvious wackiness, he was a nice guy and, most importantly, a competent nurse. I thought I could let it slide, but I had no idea how deep the crazy ran.
Still, Enrique and I got along pretty well. He drove me wherever I wanted to go, which gave me a sense of independence I’d never had before. We also talked a lot on our way to those places, sure the conversations were mostly his one-sided rambling, but I enjoyed them.
“One time, man, I drove up to the hills right up to border, didn’t cross it though, and I brought a Mexican flag and there was a shack, my friend’s shack” I imagined a tiny wooden shack inhabited by a Mexican shaman. “So I grabbed the flag, climbed on the roof of the shack and started waving it and yelling, ‘La Raza!’ La Raza!’” He stopped and chuckled, “What are they gonna do, man? I wasn’t doing anything illegal, right?” I nodded. “So the border patrol came and the guy was like, ‘What are you doing?’ and I told him, ‘I’m just exercising my rights, man.’ So he left me alone. I think that we should open our borders, man. Let the people come in.”
But he was more than a budding Cesar Chavez, he was an entrepreneur.
For a couple of months I was obsessed with drinking Clamato with salt and lime. If you’ve ever drank this delicious concoction you’ve probably noticed that it makes your saliva extremely thick. This wasn’t lost on Enrique, “Hey man, I was changing the canister on your suction machine and I noticed the Clamato makes your saliva thicker. You ever notice that?”
“Uh… yeah.” I wondered where he was going.
“I think we can sell this, man.”
“Sell… what?”
“This substance… chemical bond… it can break down the molecules and stuff and we can sell this to companies and be millionaires. You want in?”
I had no idea what that meant. “Uh… no thanks, dude. I’ll let you have this one”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
So he grabbed a pen and paper, sat down at his desk and started working on his Clamato Saliva business plan. He wrote and doodled for a solid hour. I don’t think anything ever came of it, but that didn’t stop him from proposing more business plans. Each one crazier than the one before. I gotta give it to him though, he never lacked vision.

About a month later¹ we were on our way to the beach when he started on another vision he had.
“I had a vision… where… that you are the last human on earth and you are the savior of the human race…” He stopped, trying to bridge the gap between his brain and mouth, “And you’re kept alive by machines that do everything for you, and you’re working on your computer trying to liberate us…”
“I thought I was the last human?”
“No, see, only metaphorically. Because we’re all enslaved by the government, they have some kind of mind control, man.”
“Oh, I see. I see”
“And you’re gonna liberate us, man”
“That sounds like a plan”
I have to admit that he scared me occasionally. He rambled and rambled while driving, and, sometimes, I was afraid he would decide to purposely try some kind of suicide-like crash into another car. He would talk about a “destiny” and “life mission” a lot. Maybe these concerns were unfounded, but I had them anyway. I wondered what his reasons he had for going into his profession.
“So, how did you get into nursing?”
“I used to take care of my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“Yeah, he was paralyzed from the neck down.”
“Oh…” I’m such an asshole.
“We used to live in a very bad part of town and he got in with some bad people and they shot him” You fucking asshole. “But that didn’t slow him down. He used his mind, man. He used his mind to be like a general. He commanded the ‘troops’, meaning us, he gave orders and got things done. He told people what needed to happen and it happened. He said, ‘Do this, do that’ and he was able to accomplish it. So I took care of him until he died.” He didn’t say it with sadness, but a sort of pride. Pride for his brother. “So I wanted to help people like him.”
And he did, he gave me independence. Not many nurses are comfortable with driving their patients places. He also gave me someone to talk to. Eventually, we had to fire him when he showed up four hours late and said he had to steal a car to get here. He may have been trying to make a joke, but my parents didn’t want to take a chance.
So, here’s to you, Enrique. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
———-
¹ Events may not be 100% chronologically accurate

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