If American nurses are our “Angels of Mercy” — and they are, believe me; especially military nurses — then our candy-striped teenage hospital volunteers must be the cherubim, God bless ’em. They’re pretty much restricted to fetch-and-carry work in hospitals today, but still, I think their mere presence has more than a dollop of medicinal benefit. Sometimes, just pulling smiles, even an occasional painful laugh, out of badly hurt patients seems to be their sole duty, and they’re certainly good at it!

One such candy-striper we’ll call Candy here, almost caused me to split my stitches. I could describe her more, but let’s just say with her red hair, freckle-flecked face and baby-blue eyes, I mistook her for one of my own Red Squad girls when I came out of a morphine fog and peeped her for the first time.

On one of Candy’s many “hangin’ out” visits, my surgeon had left my medical records on a side table in my room. The cherub was leaning on it when she commented that my file was the fattest she’d ever seen. I told her it was sort of a chronicle of “Life’s Lessons Learned”; representing the curriculum of the University of Hard Knocks. She smiled impishly, worth sixty mg’s of morphine, easy, patted it and said, “Gee, you musta learned a ton, Mister Connor! Can you graduate now?”

I splurted, ’sploded, knocked something over and people came runnin’. Good question, though … can I graduate?

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