What's New, Doc?

All is Vanity When I started my internship, I had very short hair, and sometime after, it became very fashionable to have long hair. Although I have naturally long hair, I could not wait for my hair to grow out. I decided that I wanted instant long hair, but being a struggling intern, I could not afford to go to a hair stylist to get this done. Also, in those days, there was no hair glue and all the items needed for lengthening hair as they have currently. So I bought a long hairpiece and carefully worked it into my short hair. Now I had a long fancy braid and I was so proud of it. Well, you know the saying, "Pride goes before a fall." Fast forward, a few weeks later, a patient suffers a cardiac arrest. Since I am on the cardiac arrest team, I rush into his room and begin performing CPR. The room is now filled with the Life Support Team, nurses, residents, attending physicians. And in the midst of all this, as I am doing cardiac compressions, my lovely braid becomes loose, and falls off RIGHT ONTO THE PATIENT"S CHEST!! You cannot imagine my embarrassment! I grab my hair piece, dash out of the room, yelling at another resident to take over the chest compressions. An 80 year old patient came for his clinic appointment, accompanied by a lady who appeared to be about 30 years old. I commented that this was the first time he had brought his daughter with him for his visit. His reply caused me some embarrassment, “She is not my daughter; she is my wife.” HOT, HOT Late one Saturday night while working in the Emergency Room, a middle aged lady came to the hospital with a foreign object in her bladder. Much to her dismay and embarrassment, she was being seen because the offending object had gotten away from her lover during foreplay. It turned out that the foreign object was a chili pepper. The urology residents decided that the lover had brought a new definition to the phrase, "a hot piece". Auto Pilot? I had completed my Residency in Surgery and was doing research in Lung Transplantation. Each week we had to drive some fifty miles upstate to a farm to procure animals for the project. The physicians and the technicians took turns driving, but there was a doctor from India, who never volunteered to drive. Well, one Friday afternoon, on the way back home, he surprised us all by asking to do the driving. He took the keys, started the engine, and began driving down the road, weaving all over as though he had been drinking. Immediately noting that all was not well, we told him to pull over, and asked him what was he doing. His reply was an eye opener, “I thought you said the car was automatic.” WRONG SEX I worked in an Outpatient Clinic for the Veterans’ Affairs. Since it was a small clinic, there was only one waiting room for both the scheduled and emergency patients. The patient, having been called, would then accompany the doctor to his office. It always bothered me that when the providers went to the waiting area to call a patient, only the last names of the patients were shouted out. So I called patients by giving them the proper title, for example, Mr. John James or Mrs. Joan Brown. This day was no exception. I went to the waiting room and called, “Mrs. Marjorie McFadden!” And a 6’ 4” male, weighing about 250 pounds stood up and approached me. I was mortified, and he was just smiling. As we walked back to my office, I apologized for my mistake. He later told me that he never did learn why his father insisted on that name, but he did get into many fights while he was in school because of that first name. Needless to say, after that incident, whenever I had a patient with a female name, I checked the administrative folder to ascertain the sex of the patient, before calling him/her. The thermometer will not tell a lie This incident took place before digital thermometers, when temperatures were taken either orally or rectally using a mercury thermometer. For those who have never seen or used a mercury thermometer, this was the procedure. The mercury was contained at one end of the instrument in a small thin glass bulb, and extending from this bulb was a thin threadlike space extending along its length, allowing the mercury to expand whenever it was warmed. Engraved along the outside of the thermometer, was a range of temperatures from 35 to 40 degrees, Celsius or 95 to 107 degrees, Fahrenheit. This represented a range of body temperature from below normal, through normal, to a fever. Before the instrument was used, it had to be shaken to bring the mercury back into the bulb. After the temperature had been taken, the thermometer kept that reading recorded until the mercury was shaken down once more. One evening when I was working in the pediatric department, one of the nurses was tired and wanted to go home, but she knew that the only way she could get off was to present with a fever, or some other symptom indicating an infection. She confided this to the ward secretary, who liked to have a good laugh. The mischievous confidant gave her a thermometer, and told her that she could warm it up to the desired temperature by placing it next to a lighted bulb, and then she would have the evidence she needed to be sent off duty. Shortly thereafter, the nurse returned with the bulb of the thermometer broken, and as the ward secretary saw it, she burst out laughing, “You didn’t!”