For all of my nursing friends (and my non-nursing friends as well), in honor of Infusion Nurses Day on January 25.  Yes, I’m a bit late!!

I am probably the only nurse you know who actually had Colonel Sanders as a patient. Yes, the real deal, the real McCoy, the real Colonel Harland Sanders! It was in the late ’70’s, and he was a patient in the hospital where I worked in Louisville, Kentucky. The now famous chain Kentucky Fried Chicken was tied completely to his image and hadn’t yet morphed to just “KFC.” He and his second wife, who incidentally was his former mistress, owned a restaurant in nearby Shelbyville, Kentucky, called The Colonel’s Lady. I wonder if it is still there?

In those days we still wore white shoes, crisp white uniforms, and white caps with black stripes attached designating our rank as Registered Nurses. Every nursing school had its own distinctive style of cap. You knew where your colleagues went to school just by looking at their caps. That moment when you finally got to add that black stripe to your cap was a special day indeed. We spent hours washing, starching, and ironing those caps and then applying that black velvet ribbon with a bit of KY jelly as an adhesive.  I probably still have one or two of those now yellowed caps in some old box in the attic somewhere!

I primarily worked in the ICU, but if things were slow, we were pulled out to work on the “floor” for a day or a two. It was on one of those days working on the floor that one of my patients was the Colonel himself, complete with the trim little goatee. Instead of his usual white suit and black string tie, he had the de rigueur hospital gown with the open, airy back, just like the rest of the patients on the unit. For those of you not familiar with Kentucky, a Kentucky Colonel is an honorary title bestowed by the Governor of Kentucky upon people deemed worthy of that great honor. Harland became a Kentucky Colonel in 1950 and apparently decided to live up to that image for the rest of his life, growing the goatee and adopting his familiar white suit and black tie..

Unlike many of the “fake” Colonel Sanders seen on the TV commercials today, he was a crusty old gent with a highly colorful vocabulary which he could unleash upon anyone unfortunate enough to incur his wrath, from KFC executives to family, friends, or hospital staff. As a patient though, he was quite amiable and easy to get along with. The drawer of his bedside stand was full of, you guessed it, Kentucky Fried Chicken coupons, which he bestowed upon everyone from housekeepers to physicians. Apparently he had his own rating system for the coupons as recipients received anywhere from one to three coupons good for a fried chicken dinner. This was the original secret recipe, none of that extra crispy stuff or other alternatives! One of his big fights with the KFC executives after he had sold his interest in the company apparently focused upon their daring to modify his gravy recipe! Luckily my family and I enjoyed quite a few chicken dinners for several days there.

He was in his late 80’s then and suffering from many of the ailments of the elderly. However, that didn’t slow him down in the slightest! He was a pincher and a patter as several of the other nurses warned me. If you leaned over the bed to fluff a pillow or straighten the covers, you would get a surreptitious pat on the boobs. If you turned your back to him, you generally got a quick pinch. Usually a firm admonition did the trick, “Stop that, Colonel!”   A sheepish grin was the response. If you needed to ambulate him (That is nursing talk for helping him to take a walk down the hall with gown a flapping.), you were apt to be the recipient of a full-blown butt grab while helping him out of bed.

I think all of us in nursing have certain patients who stick in our memories through the years, and he was definitely one of those! A few years later we moved from Kentucky to Colorado. I later learned that he died in 1980 of leukemia and pneumonia. To this day whenever I see a KFC in the US or on my various travels around the world, I am reminded of that friendly and humorous old man! I wonder if he knows that his image and his franchises now spread across the globe, from the US to China to Kuwait and all points in between?

©2016, The Eclectic Grandma