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12/17/2003: "Bad Nurse"

It's generally not a happy experience to see a local institution on the national news, in association with a crime spree. The institution is a hospital, and the criminal is a nurse; one of his recent victims lived about a mile from me. It's a topsy-turvy world: Hospitals are not only places where the sick are healed and the broken mended, they are ghettos where the dying are sent to be isolated from the living. Where better for a killer to work in secret than a corpse factory? I think of the nurses, home health aides, therapists and health care workers I know, and of what fine representatives they are of their callings and of humanity. Some of them probably knew him or worked alongside him. Now, in his instant of notoriety, he has soiled them all with the blood he has spattered.