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Show Nocturne/ 4 statistics on the central monitor like people do in sports bars. None of them bet on their own patients. No one expected anyone else to take the lottery very seriously. Blair Smith, a phlebotomist-tumed-CNA, went home and told his roommates. He thought it was hilarious. There were the obvious choices, like the patients already in stage three with orders not to resuscitate. The nurses moved in and out of their rooms to prevent bedsores from forming, turning their unwieldy bodies from side to side and sometimes wiping the dead skin from their lips or sliding a bedpan beneath them. Uniformly, the nurses did not like patients who asked for superfluous things, exhausting the list of possible amenities available at the teaching hospital in the middle of the night. Other patients enjoyed favorite status on the floor. For instance, no one ever bet on Summer Smith, a young mother with leukemia. Her husband was too attractive and he liked to fill her room with ranunculus from their backyard. The nurses collected the stories Summer told about him. Ruth Pace, the nurse who once lived in Europe and could not get over herself as a result, claimed Summer's husband was British. But no one could hear an accent when he spoke. Brandie Rodriguez claimed the Smiths married secretly because his mother did not approve. She said they escaped in the night. No one knew his occupation. Michael Ferguson, who everyone saw as an authority on such things, claimed Summer's husband worked as a security guard, and a lot of the nurses believed it; but in another rumor he supposedly taught Russian Literature and spent most of the day reading Chekhov. When Summer's husband came to visit, none of the nurses asked him any questions, so no one could really verify any of |