Nina In New York: The Case Of The Duped British Nurse

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York.

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By Nina Pajak

Here's a WTF story: the unfortunate nurse working at the hospital tending to preggo Kate Middleton who was duped by two idiot DJs has apparently died in the wake of the "scandal."

Uh. What?

Photos: Kate Middleton, Prince William Leave Hospital

I know we Americans aren't always on the same wavelength as our cousins across the pond, but nothing about this makes any sense. Here are the facts:

1. Kate Middleton is pregnant.
2. So am I.
3. We are destined to be besties, and our concurrent pregnancies and child-rearing phases will only serve to solidify this inevitability.
4. She is due at least a couple of months after I, which will be great because in the interim I can help prepare her for what lies ahead and she can hang out and get some newborn practice in under her belt.
5. Kate is suffering from horrific, chronic morning sickness and was thus hospitalized for several days.
6. During this time, two idiot radio DJs in Australia made a prank phone call to the hospital pretending to be the Queen, in order to humiliate decent, naive, hardworking strangers and get classified and extremely personal information about a woman in a delicate situation.
7. Radio DJs are irritating, unoriginal, unfunny d-bags in every country across the planet, evidently. I wonder if the Australian "Morning Zoo" toilet flush sound effect goes backwards.
8. The nurse who took the call also took the bait and passed the DJs onto another nurse, who was more intimately acquainted with the Duchess's status and who was also completely fooled into releasing details.
9. Once the prank was revealed, the hospital supported the first nurse despite her embarrassing error.
10. Now she's dead in an apparent suicide.

Much speculation abounds. Was she mentally unstable, teetering on the precipice of madness at any given time, able to be pushed over the edge by a benign albeit humiliating episode that had no ultimate repercussions? Did the royal family give her hell and drive her to the pits of despair?

Why isn't the second nurse, who actually gave up the goods, going stark raving mad right now, too? Did she kill nurse 1? Maybe she was in on it the whole time, and this was the culmination of a very long con at the end of which nurse 2 became nurse 1 and cut her hair to look like her's and took her job and moved into her apartment.

Or, perhaps we've stumbled onto a royal conspiracy in which the Queen, unwilling to withstand any breach of privacy or public besting by a couple of Aussie dopes, had nurse 1 summarily dispatched in such a manner as to suggest a suicide, post haste and forthwith, chip chip cheerio, tallyho and so forth and all that. If the DJs turn up dead, too, we'll know what really happened here.

This is a British mystery that would make Agatha Christie jealous. Because most of England only exists in imaginationland for me, and I insist on conflating reality with every British novel and BBC miniseries I've watched, I think we all know who the only man for this job is: Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He lives at 221B Baker Street. Mrs. Hudson will let you in. Just be prepared, he's a bit churlish but he always gets his man. Just wait. It'll have been the livery driver the whole damn time.