LEWISTON – Like bobsledders beginning their race, four nurses grabbed onto hospital-bed side rails, gave them a yank and ran alongside as they picked up speed.

“Go! Go! Go!” shouted a woman in flowered scrubs. The bed accelerated across the parking lot and began to spin as it neared the first turn.

The woman on the bed squealed. She raised both hands in thumbs-up signs and burst into laughter.

Nurse Daryl Whiting watched and cheered as the bed crossed the finish, a yellow chalk line scratched into the pavement beside St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center.

But her cheers were a little subdued.

“Our team is in the hunt,” Whiting said, giving a nod to her teammates, three nurses who stood behind her.

They also clapped and smiled.

The event was titled “The First Annual Nurse’s Day Muster.”

Rosemary Henry, the new vice president of nursing and the passenger atop the bed, called it her initiation.

“We do some very serious business,” Henry said after her ride Thursday. “This is for fun.”

Nurses participated in prearranged shifts, so the hospital never ran out of people to tend to patients, who had filled nearly every bed on Thursday.

Dozens more hospital workers, many on their lunch breaks, gathered to watch the race. Hospital administrators, including Chief Operating Officer Susan Keilor, were drafted to either ride the speeding beds or serve as judges as nurses navigated the makeshift course, which included wheelchairs and IV poles as obstacles.

In all, 35 nurses competed in three phases. The bed race was the last – and least icky – of the phases.

The first was a bedpan race, in which contestants were charged with carrying bedpans overflowing with liquid (water, in this case) through the course.

Besides a bedpan bearer, each team had a cleaner-upper. A spill meant that the cleaner went to work, donning a hospital smock, gloves and spreading kitty litter to clean up the waste.

The second phase followed a similar theme – solid waste. A nurse walked the course as fast as possible, balancing a meatball in a spoon.

Whiting’s advice to the bearer: “Don’t drop the poop.”

The biggest cheers came when racers soiled the ground.

The event was meant to be a silly diversion for Nurses Week, which also included a storytelling session earlier in the week when veteran nurses talked about the profession’s changes.

The hospital also distributed gift bags to nurses. The winners of the games earned $25 gift cards for dinner.

In the end, Whiting and her team of nurses from the family birthing unit earned the prize, completing the three-phase course in 2 minutes, 19 seconds. They neither spilled nor dropped their cargo.

Their name: “Team Fast Delivery.”