Gettin old.

Following up the subject of geriatrics.  While cleaning the bathroom yesterday, I managed to strain my back. I recall several prisoners who gave me various medical excuses for their misconducts.  One young guy explained to me that he got off his bunk during count, because he was sleep-walking.  He had the biggest grin on his face, thinking he had hit on a sure-fire defense.  Of course he had no previous history of sleep-walking, and no medical documentation of sleep walking.  Not sure where his optimism came from.
The opening of stores selling recreational marijuana reminded me of a guy I saw who got busted for a bad drug test.  He had THC in his system.  He admitted smoking weed, and said he was doing a 40-60 years, he just wanted to get away from it all sometimes.
I did so many misconduct hearings involving claims of injury, illness, etc. that I felt like a nurse or a doctor sometimes.  Which was ironic, because I used to get mistaken for the nursing supervisor sometimes.  She told me that sometimes the prisoners thought that she was me.  I told her that whichever one of us got to work first should be able to pick which job we wanted to do that day.
Most of the time these medical excuses were silly.  But I have to admit, as I got older, I was more sympathetic to older prisoners experiencing the usual "old people" infirmities.