legends · 4 min read ·
Linen Count
A hospital laundry receives more sheets than it sends, and the ward acquires a twenty-fifth bed.
**St. Gideon's Hospital — Laundry Department: Linen Reconciliation, Ward 7 (Surgical, 24 beds)**
*Sheets out to ward vs. sheets returned soiled. Reconciliation every Monday.*
- **Week · Sheets out · Sheets returned · Difference**
- 38 · 192 · 192 · 0
- 39 · 192 · 192 · 0
- 40 · 192 · 193 · **+1**
- 41 · 192 · 194 · **+2**
- 42 · 192 · 196 · **+4**
· · ·
**Supervisor memo (M. Oyelaran, 13 October)**
Ward 7 is returning more sheets than we send. This has never happened before. I checked the issue records. Sheets are marked with an indelible tape, sewn into the hem, bearing the hospital name and a four-digit number. I have checked the extra sheet from week 40. It bears the hospital name. The number tape is missing.
I thought we had a stray from another ward. I asked the other wards. None are short.
· · ·
**Laundry log (night shift, 20 October)**
Sorting soiled linen from Ward 7. Found the extra sheet from week 41. White, hospital issue, a standard single sheet. But folded, flat, in four, with the hem outside, the way a sheet is folded for the shelf.
The soiled-linen skip has no folding. Sheets arrive in a heap. This sheet was folded as if by a nurse at the end of a shift. It was clean, and it smelled of nothing. Not of detergent. Not of the ward. Not even of cloth.
I put it in the wash with the rest. It came out the same.
· · ·
**Supervisor memo (M. Oyelaran, 27 October)**
Week 43: sheets out 192, sheets returned 200. Eight extra sheets, all folded in four, all without tapes, all clean when they reach the laundry and clean after washing.
I walked up to Ward 7 and asked the ward sister. She said they had not been sending extra. She said the linen cupboard on the ward was in good order and that she had counted the sheets on the bed rails and in the cupboard. Twenty-four beds. Twenty-four sheets. Spare: none.
I asked to see the cupboard. She opened it. There was a shelf of fresh sheets, folded in four, with their hems outwards. I counted them. One hundred and ninety-two.
On the bottom shelf, behind a stack of pillowcases, I saw a smaller stack of nine.
· · ·
**Ward 7 sister's note (R. Banerjee, 28 October)**
I took the nine sheets out. They are standard issue. They have no marks. When I held one up to the light I saw that it was thinner than the others, nearly transparent, and that it was not quite white. It had a very faint colour in it, the colour of a sheet that has been slept on for years.
I put them back. I counted the beds again. Twenty-four. I counted the patients. Twenty-four. I walked round the ward at night, with my torch, and counted the people in the beds. Twenty-five.
I could not tell which of them was the extra.
· · ·
**Supervisor memo (M. Oyelaran, 31 October)**
Week 44: sheets returned 201. We have checked the figures. Every Monday the difference rises by one more than the week before. Ward 7 now has twenty-four beds and twenty-five sheets of the second kind.
The ward sister has requested to move the extra linen out of the ward. I have told her it will be done. But the sheets are not coming from the ward. I put a camera in the laundry's receiving bay on Thursday. At 03:14 the camera shows a bed pass in front of the skip. It is a trolley bed, with a patient covered to the chin. The bed is pushed by no one. At the skip, the patient lifts the sheet away and folds it into four, carefully, and lays it on the pile, and lies back down.
The bed goes on its way. The next day there is another sheet.
· · ·
**Linen reconciliation — Ward 7, week 45**
- **Week · Sheets out · Sheets returned · Difference**
- 45 · 192 · 217 · **+25**
*Note by supervisor: Ward 7 has 24 beds. The extra count is 25. The laundry has now been asked to return 25 sheets to the ward. They have been taken up. They have not been missed.*
*The ward sister reports that the twenty-fifth bed has appeared, in the corner, by the window, made up with a clean sheet, folded in four at the foot. It has not been used. It has been very carefully made.*