I’d never had surgery, and I was nervous. “This is a very simple, noninvasive procedure,” the anesthesiologist reassured me. I felt better, until … “Heck,” he continued, “you have
a better chance of dying from the
anesthesia than the surgery itself.”
When my three-year-old was told
to pee in a cup at the doctor’s office, he unexpectedly got nervous. With
a shaking voice, he asked, “Do I have to drink it?”
My wife, a phlebotomist at the Denver VA hospital, entered a patient’s room to draw blood. Noticing an apple on his nightstand, she
remarked, “An apple a day keeps
the doctor away, right?”
“That’s true,” he agreed. “I haven’t seen a doctor in three days.”
Three funny ER stories
-"Patient in to ER at 0400 with no complaints: ‘I have been having chest pain for 4 months but I am not having chest pain now. The reason I’m here now is because I heard that 4am is the best time to come cause there are not that many people.’ ”
-“Had a woman call 911 because she ‘had déjà vu in the shower and got nervous.’”
-"Got a frantic call from a woman who claimed she had overdosed and needed help immediately. We arrive on scene, and she hands us an empty mint container, saying she took them all. That night she learned that you cannot overdose on mints.”
My mother was rushed to the
hospital following a serious tumble. There the staff placed a band around her wrist with large letters warning: Fall Risk.
Unimpressed, Mom said to me, “I’ll have them know I’m a winter, spring, and summer risk too.”
My doctor took one look at
my gut and refused to believe that
I work out. So I listed the exercises
I do every day: jump to conclusions, climb the walls, drag my heels,
push my luck, make mountains out of molehills, bend over backward, run around in circles, put my foot
in my mouth, go over the edge, and beat around the bush.
