Behind Closed Doors: Functional as a Fruitcake

Make the most of your holiday gifts — regardless of what you receive.

Long before I was a tireless travel nurse and an acid-tongued humor columnist, I was a young brat taking in a crazy world and making memories that would serve as fodder for countless columns and yarns in the years that followed.

One of those memories involves fruitcake — a combination that sounds tasty in theory but often turns out uneatable in practice. As strange as it may sound to younger generations, it was once quite common to give fruitcakes out around the holidays. And no, unlike the way folks gift those adorable Christmas sweaters today, these fruitcakes weren’t gifted ironically, either. These unique culinary marvels were inexplicably seen as an appropriate gift, despite the fact that nobody seemed to enjoy these culinary atrocities. As a child, I remember my mother making fruitcakes by cutting up dried fruit with a pair of scissors. I can conjure this image at will and to this day, the thought makes my stomach turn — no small feat considering all I’ve seen in the OR.

While most of us will agree that fruitcakes make for crappy Christmas gifts, my twisted imagination has conjured up quite a few practical applications for these inedible objects right in the OR:

• A versatile positioning aid. A ring-shaped fruitcake is the perfect size for under the patient’s head — or directly under a certain area after a hemorrhoid surgery. The loaf-size model could fit nicely under the patient’s hip to bolster crucial padding. 
• A makeshift stool. We seem to always need a safe and sturdy stepstool to reach those pesky items up on the top shelf of the cabinet. A good-sized fruit cake seems to fit the bill pretty nicely. Or how about us vertically challenged nurses who need to step up to the field to hold retractors or to assist?
• A leveling loaf. Ever have one of those uneven back tables? It rocks just a little, maintenance can never seem to fix it and your department has plenty of other priorities before they can even consider buying a new one. Try this: Cut off a piece of that fruitcake and stuff it under that crippled wheel. 
• A fluid-management marvel. Here’s an example of the greatest weakness being a strength. A fruitcake — especially the ones my mom used to make — is dry enough to suck up everything, so you could position several of these bad boys on the floor around the sterile area to soak up all that irrigation used for messy procedures like shoulder scopes. 
• Needle-counting pad. Need a counting pad but can’t find one anywhere? No problem. Rip off a chunk of fruitcake, sterilize it and voila, problem solved.  
• Magic erasers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to use my fingers or the sleeve of my jacket to wipe down the whiteboard because somebody keeps running off with all the erasers. Solution: Pick off a couple choice pieces of the infinitely versatile baked good and wipe away. According to my cousin Rita, fruit cakes can even remove permanent markers with a little elbow grease. She would know. My mom once gifted her a fruitcake!

OR leaders and their teams always find ways to make the most out of what they get — even when it’s much less than what they really need. I’m constantly in awe of the creativity, ingenuity and problem-solving acumen of my brothers and sisters in scrubs. Here’s hoping you get everything you want this December, or if not, you find some fun ways to make the most of what you receive. Happy holidays, dear readers — I’ll see you in 2023! OSM