Got vacation days saved up? Not as many as the French workers, that's for sure: at one hospital in Paris, workers have accumulated over 2 million days off!

Here's the story of how a law mandating 35-hour work week backfired:

French workers get comped vacation time added to their base five weeks of annual leave if they work longer than the mandated 35-hour work week and apparently even the French can't take all of that time off in a year. Nevertheless, "By law, they must take those days off by the end of this year, but that could mean closing hospitals for months."

Just to put 2 million days into perspective, that's 5,475 years of vacation time. There's no indication of how many employees are sharing that pool of vacation time, but if it were just one, they'd just be finishing a stint of paid time off that started in B.C. 3467, that is just around the time when the Sumerians invented writing and the Sahara started turning into a desert.

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The hospital has now called police to try to evict Sheng – but he has welcomed the police involvement and asked them to investigate.

“I’m not leaving,” he said. “I’m worried that if I go out for even half an hour, the hospital will claim I had the tattoo done outside.

“But even if I wanted a tattoo, I wouldn’t want those characters and I wouldn’t want it on that part of my body.”

The hospital staff blames the marks on a possible allergic reaction. Link -via Dave Barry

The pearl got stuck in his right ear when Wright was 5 and roughhousing with his sister, Regina. The family lived in Chicago at the time.

“She had broken my mother’s pearl necklace,” Wright said. “I can remember (our baby sitter) picking them up off the floor – except for two, of course.”

Regina stuck those two missing pearls – either by accident or because kids do weird things – into her older brother’s ear.

A doctor retrieved one of the pearls from the child’s ear, but missed the other. Wright has undergone ear exams in the years since, but the pearl was never discovered until the nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital found it. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Merritt Melancon)

“So, I started moving,” Fugere said. “I did one, then two, then three, then four, then five laps. Then I started measuring the distance of a lap around the cancer ward and figured out it would take 144 laps to do a marathon.

“So then I figured, why not?”

Fugere called his hallway odyssey the “Box of Chocolates Marathon,” borrowing a line from Forrest Gump. (“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”)

“I want to show other chemo patients that you don’t have to accept the notion of lying in bed all day getting liquid Drano pumped into you,” Fugere said the week of the marathon. “Well, you do need to get the liquid Drano — you just don’t need to take it lying down.”

Fugere had to drag his IV pole along with him as he began his marathon. Read the entire story at CNN. Link

(Image credit: Kat Wade/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis)

If you’ve ever been to an emergency room, you’ve seen the chart they give you to help describe the pain you are feeling on a scale of one to ten. Allie redrew the chart to make it more descriptive of real-world pain. Link -via Buzzfeed

When the automatic doors at San Juan Regional Medical Centre’s emergency room slid open Saturday night, the pooch walked in, blood on his nose and paw, and a puncture hole in one leg, according to The Daily Times newspaper.

Animal control officer Robin Loev responded to a call from the hospital and suspects the puncture wound was from the bite of another dog.

Loev says the German shepherd mix appeared to be intelligent and calm – and knew enough to go to the right place.

Link | Photo: CDC

Doctors Without Borders is setting up shop in Haiti to provide medical services to those affected by the earthquake. They will use an inflatable hospital.

It’s exactly what it sounds like: a temporary hospital with inflatable components that can be deployed whenever needed. Doctors Without Borders has been employing them for years, including an impressive inflatable nine-tent, 120-bed center in Pakistan following a 7.6 magnitude earthquake there in 2005. The hospital post-and-beam frames can be made from the same fabric in inflatable lifeboats. Nylon interior and exterior walls leave space for air to create an insulating effect.

Link -via Cynical-C, who has a list of resources for sending donations to Haiti.

Eric Wahlgren of AOL’s Daily Finance has the story of medical tourism:

Like some 47 million other Americans, Nancy Sowa (pictured) doesn’t have health insurance. So when her doctors last year told her she needed a total hip replacement, the office manager for a non-profit did what a growing number of U.S. citizens are doing: She headed abroad. At Wockhardt Hospital in Bangalore, India, the 56-year-old was put up in a hospital "suite" far swankier than what she would typically find in the U.S., with a computer, fridge, cable TV, sitting area and an extra bed for her travel companion.

More to the point, the two-hour surgery in July, performed by an orthopedic surgeon trained in the U.S. and Australia, was a success. Four months later, the Durham, N.C. resident is feeling like her old self again, going for long hikes and planning her next vacation. The final tab for the procedure, including rehabilitative therapy and round-trip airfare for two? $12,000. That’s a fraction of the $45,000 to $90,000 she had been told the surgery would cost at home.

"I wouldn’t have been able to do the surgery in the United States," says Sowa. "I didn’t have to explore taking out a second mortgage or tapping family members because I had this other option."

Link

A 14-year-old girl with a history of serious health issues lay dying of pneumonia in a hospital room. But as her mother waited for the girl to take her last breath, an image of bright light appeared on a security monitor. Within an hour, the dying girl began a recovery that doctors are at a loss to explain.

But Colleen Banton, the girl’s mother, has an explanation. “This was an image of an angel,” she told NBC News in a story reported Tuesday on TODAY. She credited the apparition with saving the life of her daughter Chelsea.

Link -Thanks, Cassie!

The hospital’s director Tsai Tsung-chi opened the £2m (T$100m) hospital in his hometown after obtaining authorisation from the fictitious cat’s Japanese parent company Sanrio Co Ltd.

Describing the objectives of the hospital, he said: “I wish that everyone who comes here, mothers who suffer while giving birth and children who suffer from an illness, can get medical care while seeing these kitties and bring a smile to their faces, helping forget about discomfort and recover faster.”

Link -via Shiny Shiny

Below are a few of the (allegedly) haunted hospitals I found most intriguing – hopefully you will too.

Fairfield State Hospital (AKA Fairfield Hills)

photo from fairfieldstatehospital.com

Despite their best efforts, the city of Newtown, Connecticut has been unable to squelch Fairfield State Hospital’s eerie reputation. Then again, they have allowed it to be used for several decidedly spooky shoots, including Sleepers and MTV’s Fear.

The asylum has been in Newtown since 1931, but most of its buildings have been standing empty for the past 13 years. At its peak period of operations, it housed almost 4,000 patients.

Fueling the scary stories is the fact that its numerous buildings are all connected by underground tunnels. Were these simply for transporting patients during bad weather, or was it an easier way to dispose of dead bodies?

Glenn Dale Hospital

photo from The Glenn Dale Hospital Mission
Glenn Dale opened in the same era as Fairfield State – the 1930s was a popular time for mental institutes, apparently. Well, actually, Glenn Dale wasn’t originally used for that purpose – it was a tuberculosis hospital with one building for adults and one for children. Eventually the tuberculosis problem died down and Glenn Dale was repurposed. It closed in 1982 due to asbestos and structural problems, but before it closed it was (supposedly) home to the criminally insane. As with Fairfield State, the buildings are connected via underground passageways, which people have been exploring since the day Glenn Dale officially closed its doors.

Exploration might not be the best idea, though, and not just because of the asbestos (although that should be an obvious deterrent). One rumor says that when the hospital closed, the remaining patients were just turned loose. Having nowhere else to go, many of them simply broke back into the abandoned buildings and lurk there even today.

Another story goes that a police officer went to check out the buildings himself after getting a call that the buildings were being vandalized by a bunch of kids. After he went in, someone in the vicinity heard gun shots and called the police. When the police arrived, they found the first officer standing in one of the rooms, staring straight ahead at nothing. He had emptied his gun firing at something that no one ever found.

Norwich State hospital

photo from creepyconnecticut.net

Connecticut is a popular spot for haunted hospitals, I guess, because Norwich State Hospital can be found in Preston and Norwich, Conn. Oh, and guess what else? More underground tunnels. The mental hospital was built in 1904 and had 151 patients the very day it opened. By the 1960s, the hospital reached a record high of 3,186 patients.

Perhaps piggybacking off of the success of MTV’s Fear, VH1 sent contestants of the Celebrity Paranormal Project here but didn’t quite represent the place accurately: they fixed old, coverless couch cushions to the walls in a small room and told the celebrities that it was an old padded cell for the truly disturbed patients when in reality such a room never existed.

Waverly Hills Sanatorium

photo from ConspiracyofHappiness on Flickr

Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky, has been called the most haunted place in the U.S. Some reports put the number of deaths that occurred at this tuberculosis hospital at more than 60,000. While I had some problems digging up ghost stories from some of these allegedly haunted sites, stories from the Waverly Hills Sanatorium are plentiful.

When WHS opened in 1926, it was considered the most advanced TB hospital in the world. Still, at the time, not much was known about the disease and how to treat it, so a lot of the treatments were extremely experimental – these patients were more or less guinea pigs. Lots of them exited the hospital via the “body chute”, a tunnel that led from the hospital to railroad tracks that allowed for discreet corpse disposal.

In addition to the dying tuberculosis patients, at least two nurses committed suicide at Waverly. In 1928, the 29-year-old head nurse, pregnant and unwed, hanged herself in the nurses’ station. In 1932, another nurse who worked in the same room leapt off of the balcony to her death several stories down.

Creepy stories include a chef who still walks the kitchens (you can tell he’s present when you smell freshly baked bread), apparitions of a woman with chains around her arms and legs and blood dripping from her wrists, ghostly children wandering about and eerie red glows.

Troy Taylor, a paranormal author, visited Waverly Hills with Louisville Ghost Hunter founder Keith Age and experienced plenty of paranormal activity. In Troy’s own words,

“Keith was standing in the corner, looking at the changes on the meter scale, when an empty plastic soda bottle came seemingly out of nowhere and struck him in the back. As he turned to see what had happened, an overhead fluorescent light fixture suddenly came loose from the ceiling with a loud crack. With one end of it still anchored to the ceiling, the other end swung loose and hit Keith in the side of the head. The long burned-out bulb that remained in the fixture shattered when it collided with Keith and showered him with glass. Before he even had time to react, he heard the sound of a brick scrape across the concrete floor. The noise came from the opposite corner of the room and when he looked over, he saw the brick moving across the floor towards him. With a lurch, it shot directly at him and as he scrambled to get out of the line of fire, it hit him in the small of the back. Needless to say, he quickly retreated from the room. The other investigators had not seen where the brick or the soda bottle had come from, but they had clearly heard the brick move and had seen both objects strike Keith.”

You can read more about Keith and Troy’s experiences at PrairieGhosts.com.

Athens Lunatic Asylum
Giving Waverly a run for the “Most Haunted Abandoned Hospital in the United States” title is the Athens Lunatic Asylum in Athens, Ohio. After opening its doors in 1874, many of its first patients were Civil War veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

What has proved to be one of the most enduring stories from the Asylum occurred more than 100 years after its grand opening, however: on December 1, 1978, a patient named Margaret Schilling disappeared from one of the active wards. They found her body more than a month later in the top floor of ward N. 20, which had been abandoned for years.

The official cause of death was heart failure–probably due to her exposure to the December cold in an unheated section of the hospital. Her death isn’t the weird part, though – what’s weird is that her body left a stain that you can still see today.

photo from forgottenoh.com

One of the reasons ALA makes the Most Haunted Places in the U.S. list is because of its strange location. If you draw a line from each of the five cemeteries around Athens, the shape ends up being a pentagram with Ohio University being right in the middle, which is where ALA is located. I couldn’t actually find a map that backed this theory up, though – does anyone have one?

Like I said, there are a surprisingly large number of abandoned hospitals and asylums scattered across the country. Are there any in your town? Let’s hear your stories!