Fridae

When I signed up for a career in nursing, I was anticipating days revolving around life saving with defibrillator pads, syringes and hot doctors. Of course, they conveniently forgot to mention the constant work stress, relatives who berate you for no reason and patients who treat you like crap despite all the care that you provide them. Now I can safely add another to the list: molest. It was with this sentiment that I was caught off guard when a patient got a good 'grasp' of what the family treasures were like two weeks ago.

'Molest' as defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary is 'to make annoying sexual advances to'. In my case, I can assure you there were sexual advances. However, I choose not to see it as something annoying or irritating. Instead of making it a very negative experience, why not turn it around into one that's positive? Like an Aesop's fable, I take it that my encounter has a moral behind it, albeit questionable. But more on that later. Unless you consider the patient to be an animal of sorts, the only difference between this tale and Aesop's would be that none were harmed or even involved here.

It all began on one of the busy morning shifts when everyone in the ward was busy rendering assistance to the patients under their charge. It was with this intent to help, that I answered a call bell that was beeping away from the male toilet. Apparently, this fifty-plus guy whom I have never taken care of before had just had a shower on his own. I assumed that he had diabetic limb problems given that his foot had a dressing and a transparent plastic bag wrapped and scotch-taped over it.

So there he was butt naked, wet and a tad on the saggy side. From his well-defined features, you could tell that he was quite the hot guy during his younger days. Toweling him, we made small talk in a mix of mandarin and the Chinese dialect of Hokkien. Now in all my work experience, most of the male patients I take care of are a bunch of straight and married men. They try to avoid touching the male nurse as much as possible, which I assume is a sensible straight guy thing. This one however, helped himself to the touching like it was a free buffet. While helping him to put on his shirt, he grabbed my biceps in the most unnatural of ways and exclaimed, "Wah� You've got such strong arms!" I gave him a cursory reply about going to the gym and weightlifting. While assisting him in moving over from the shower chair to the commode (a wheelchair meant for taking patients to the toilet), he suddenly reached out for my arms and started inspecting it like a palm-reader would.

"Really� you've got such big veins!"

Compliments, I swear, despite them being very untrue, can get you anywhere. His flattering remarks in this case, reached deep down into my pants. My loins, being (literally) the narcissistic prick that it was, decided to rise to the occasion at that very moment. Wheeling the patient back from the toilet, I started cursing the hospital for supplying the male nurses with such baggy pants. While they provide comfort when it comes to movement, they not very practical when it comes to the concealing of the excited vital organs. I tried to administer some public censorship by sticking as close to the backrest of the commode as I possibly could. Not helping however, was that it was a small backrest and practically half of the bulge was poking into the patient's back.

I think the patient noticed because it was really an awkward moment when I helped move him back into his bed. This time, he wrapped himself around my waist when I lifted him from the commode. The alarms in my head were clanging away because there was something really amiss going on here. The next bit however, made me lose my cool.

I was trying to unwrap the plastic on his foot, tearing off the tape bit by bit. There we were, his foot precariously placed on my thigh, trying to avoid any contact with whatever was going on in my pants. I think he was trying to figure out something to break the ice because his next line was really irrelevant.

"Wah! Your pants are so big!"

That technically gave him an excuse to feel the fabric of my work wear. And THAT was when he felt the bulge. He went on to grab the whole package which consisted of both the royal scepter and the crown jewels. Instinctively, I brushed his hand off and stood up, albeit a little hunched. I was caught in a dilemma. I couldn't scream and shout and scold the patient because I was not exactly guilt-free at all. On the other hand, if I didn't say something, it would just make further encounters with this particular patient very awkward. So I decided to take the neutral ground. I told the patient in extremely broken and panicky Hokkien:

"Hey uncle. Please don't touch me again. You have yours and I have mine. So you touch yours, and I'll touch mine. Okay?"

I quickly wheeled the commode out, not even bothering to listen to his reply.

Later in the afternoon, I told one of my colleagues what had happened in the toilet over a cigarette at the hospital roof. Her reaction was the exact definition of 'scandalised'. You could see her pupils enlarging and glistening with every word that I fell out of my mouth. Being the gossip queen that she was, she spread the exciting news like an STD. By the end of the shift, practically the whole ward knew except for my supervisors. Suddenly, colleagues were coming up to me to encourage me to report to the supervisors regarding this matter.

But here's the big moral question: So what if I tell them and I get my 'revenge' for this little bit of sexual harassment? What good does it do to me or even the patient for that matter? It's not like there's a monetary reward involved each time a patient touches me inappropriately. And besides, I did my politically-correct part by telling the patient off so that the chances of such an incident occurring again are somewhat diminished. It was thus, that I decided not to pursue the matter.

The next day, the colleague with the glistening eyes came up to me with an excited look to inform me that 'your molester is discharging from the hospital today'. To my surprise, his entire family consisting of heartlander wife and filial adult son turned up to bring him home. An even bigger surprise would be the fact that he was actually able to hobble around by himself just before he went home. But the biggest surprise of all was that he managed to get one last feel of me when he was about to leave the ward. He put his hand on my shoulder which traveled all the way down to the butt. Glistening eyes colleague saw what happened and was laughing out so loud that her petite-sized frame was shaking from the inside.

I didn't bother with retorts or kung-fu moves. I just shrugged it off and gave her a miserable 'what to do?' look. When I recounted the story with a gay friend of mine, he shrugged it off like me too. "Really, what can you do?" he said. And it's true when I look at it from hindsight. If I were to make a big hoo-hah over the whole issue, it would involve loads of paper work, explaining and interviews. So much red tape, just to get some form of revenge and a problem resolved.

"Just take it at face value. Take it as a form of... charity. You're giving back to the less fortunate what they once used to have. In this case, it's your youth!"

Molest as a form of charity? That's the questionable moral of this story. That perhaps getting felt up by a total stranger never did anyone any harm. And so why kick up a big fuss over it which would not bring any great returns back, but rather more trouble and many other issues to tag along with it?

After all, it was more or less, just molest.

Jonathan Zhang, 22, has been gay for eight years and a nurse for four. You can read the combined average of the above in his blog at www.spankthemalenurse.blogspot.com. Ah Men! will be updated every other Sunday.