Flint, MI-Flint General Hospital's Stephanie Warnick, RN, has filed a $50,000,000 sexual harassment suit against the estate of Edgar Mulroney, a 79 year old patient, and Flint General. What makes this case so unusual is that Mulroney had been in a coma for 14 years since suffering a stroke.
"From the statement that we'd received from Nurse Warnick," confided hospital administrator Henry Redman, "she was bending over the patient to fluff up his pillow and Mr. Mulroney's index finger, which was right under her breast, began to twitch."
Nurse Warnick, the record went on to state, after slapping the miraculously revived patient, then pulled the plug on his life support ventilator, screaming, "Grope that, you old lech!"
Hospital officials were shocked. "Mr. Mulroney hadn't shown any signs of sentience since early 1986," laughed Dr. Bernard Hill, Flint General's Chief of Staff. "It's a shame that his first act among the living was to grope one of our nurses."
Mulroney's family was also stunned, albeit for entirely different reasons.
"I thought that you'd signed the consent form to pull the plug," said Mulroney's 42 year-old daughter Christine to her husband Derek.
"I thought you'd signed the consent form. He was your old man. The old geezer was a veggie when I met you."
"No wonder we've still been getting bills from the hospital and collection agency," says Christine Mulroney. "Well, we have Nurse Warnick to thank for saving us from having to make a potentially embarrassing decision. You know how it is, like when you don't take your dog to the vet for a few years, you're too embarrassed to bring it back to the vet's because you'd have to explain why you've been neglecting your dog? Well, this is what it would've been like, only not quite as embarrassing."
The only voice of dissent to be heard in the groundswell of support for Warnick is, ironically, from the Michigan State Board of Nursing.
"Obviously, everyone is missing the big issue here and it's an issue of professional conduct," said Laurie Moskovitz, the Board's Director. "Why did Nurse Warnick put herself in a position to be sexually harassed by this dirty old man, in the first place?"
Whatever the outcome of the civil lawsuit, hospital officials are already taking steps to ensure that such harassment never reoccurs.
"We're kind of going back and forth between subliminal sensitivity training and four point restraints for our sentience-challenged patients. Nurse Warnick has a history of being sexually abused. She's worked in hospice care caring for terminally ill patients, with others in full length body casts and full traction, and dressing mannequins in Wal-Mart's Men's Clothing department prior to her nursing career.
"Obviously," Dr. Hill concluded, "we cannot afford to set off a psychologically fragile Nurse Warnick through our inaction."