A Pennsylvania Nurse Worked a Surgery While Totally Wasted

There's a reason that a hell of a lot of people hate hospitals, or fear going to the doctor at all. Although receiving medical care should be a comforting experience, a relief from health concerns, it instead often equates to an anxiety-ridden house of horrors, punctuated with needles, mysterious tubes, and a sense that you're forfeiting control of your body to, essentially, a stranger.

But then, most of us tell ourselves this is nonsense, take a deep breath, and go see our doctors anyway. We even allow them to render us unconscious for bloody excavations into the deepest crevices of our bodies, under the assumption that when we awaken, we'll be better off.

Well, here's a story that you might not want to read if you're an extreme sufferer of "white coat syndrome." Those medical professionals gathered around your anesthetized physical form, jabbing you with scalpels and rooting around in your organs, just might be wasted.

A nurse from the VA Medical Center near Wilkes-Barre is facing charges of recklessly endangering another person, DUI, and public drunkenness, after showing up to his shift three sheets to the wind.

On February 4, Richard Pieri was on-call to work a shift at the hospital, but decided to hit the casino and threw back some booze anyway. When he was called in for an emergency appendectomy just before midnight, he made it in to work, alright—but not before stumbling through the parking lot in a state of total drunkenness and struggling to log into his work's basic computer system. According to court documents, Pieri also didn't correctly record the time required for the operation.

One of Pieri's concerned coworkers spilled the beans that he seemed trashed, and needless to say, authorities took the allegation pretty seriously. Although Pieri wasn't exactly going nuts with a scalpel during the procedure—his duties included prepping the patient, gathering the necessary materials in the operating room, and monitoring the patient's vital signs during the appendectomy—no one really wants a drunkard overseeing their best interests when they're being carved up by a surgeon.

"Patient safety is paramount. We want to be sure our patients are safe," VA Medical Center executive assistant to director William Klaips told local news station WNEP 16. "As soon as we were notified of the event, we made sure there were no unsafe situations for our patients and then we did the further investigations."

Pieri admitted to having "four or five beers" while he gambled the evening away at Mohegan Sun Casino, and wasn't expecting to get summoned to duty, as he had just arrived back at his house when he was called in. In fact, Pieri told police that he had forgotten he was on call at all. He has since been suspended from work as the investigation into the incident has continued.

On the bright side, the patient was fine. Ayy, nurses, double-check your schedules before you get lit at the slots!

Now, don't worry about a thing, take a few deep breaths, and count backwards from ten.