When I went back to the medical lab to have some blood drawn, I was greeted with a battery of questions from the technician.
“Has your address changed?” she asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Your phone number?”
“No.”
“What about your birthday?”Imagine my surprise when I went to Tipler Army Medical Center for a heart bypass operation and discovered my surgeon’s name was Dr. Eror.
"What a name for a doctor," I said, not sure whether to laugh or cry.
"Yeah," he agreed. "You can imagine the reaction I got when I was a major."Mark Twain warned: “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” The same can be said for these English-challenged notes doctors wrote on patient charts:
-"The patient is married but sexually active.”
-"When standing with eyes closed, he missed his right finger to his nose and has to search for it on the left side.”
-"She does indeed have a fear of frying and mental problems that she attributes to deep-fat fryers.”
-"The patient is a 53-year-old police officer who was found unconscious by his bicycle.”
-"Her father died from a heart attack at age 12.”They’ve just found a gene for shyness. They would have found it earlier, but it was hiding behind a couple of other genes.
My mother has tried her hand at several careers, some even concurrently. Imagine the surprise of both a hospital patient and my mom when the patient awoke after surgery and, upon seeing who her nurse’s aide was, yelled, "What are you doing? You’re the woman who helped me pick out interior paint colors!"
It was time for my dog’s annual checkup. Following the vet’s instructions, I collected a stool sample and dropped it in a plastic container before we left for his office. When we arrived, I handed the sample to the receptionist, who immediately cracked a smile. The container read "I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter."
