The Victors

Summers between my Freshman/Soph (78) and Soph/Junior (79) years at UM I worked in clinical labs at Mt Carmel Hospital in Detroit, mostly doing blood draws. We were not called "phlebotomists" back then, we were mere "lab techs." There were several ancient nuns who served as chaplains that had electric scooters to get up and down the long hallways. They charged them overnight in the basement across from the morgue. The labs shut down during the midnight shift, leaving only the "Stat Lab" open, with a regular, permanent full-time licenced tech and one of us "summer help" techs running it. It was also in the basement. I thankfully worked only one shift there in two years There was one guy, whose dad was a doctor there, that always volunteered, or was volunteered, for the shift. Every now and then we would get a complaint from the nuns that their scooters had run out of juice and stopped in the middle of a hallway. Turns out that he and the other guy in the overnight lab (and others) would get bored and have scooter races up and down the basement hallway, so that the scooters never got a full overnight charge. Everyone had a good laugh at the nuns' expense. Hahaha! I last saw him while waiting in recovery for my mom after her carotid artery cleaning years ago and years after that. He walked in, still in scrubs, calling for the family of so-and-so. He had become some sort of surgeon. I recognized him and his voice from across the room. I did not say anything.