It Must Be True
June 2-8, 2014
By Jay Edwards
jedwards@dailydata.com
Hospitals are a good place to try and keep a sense of humor. KM and I spent a lot of time with my mom in the last half of 2011 and the early months of 2012, until we lost her in May of that year. It’s hard to believe it has been two years since I’ve seen her.
As difficult a time as she had the last year of her life, Mom always found reasons to laugh at something. One particular time she had fallen (Mom had an aversion to her walker) and was back in the hospital.
I had brought her a paper in the morning and while we visited a nurse dropped by with breakfast. He set it on the little tray connected to her bed and left. Mom didn’t look under the cover to see what was there, so I asked, “Aren’t you hungry?”
“Yes, but not for what they serve around here,” she answered. Mom was a great cook in her day. “Well, let’s take a look,” I said. I lifted the cover and we stared down at a shiny plate with nothing on it. “Well, that’s an improvement,” she said. As you can see, I come by my sarcasm honestly.
“I’ll go tell them,” I said.
Later that afternoon I dropped by again. There was a team in her room who had just performed some cognitive tests. The head doctor and I stepped outside her room. “How’s she doing?” I asked her. “Pretty good really, but there is some confusion about specific things. For instance, she said they are bringing her plates with no food on them.”
Yeah, crazy as a fox, that one.
My friend Jim Hathaway posted another good hospital story on Facebook recently. Since it was on FB, I’ll assume Hawkeye won’t mind me passing it along. Here you go -
We’re still trying to figure out what’s going on in my abdomen after a week of discomfort. There have been helpful suggestions from workmates like “female problems,” and while I’m not ruling that out, today I went into a local hospital for a CT scan to try for something a little more definitive.
The way this works is they do a base line scan, then have you drink a quart of some sort of lubricant drink, wait an hour, take another scan, then put contrast dye in through an IV and do a final scan. After the initial scan, one of the techs, a woman, comes out and says, “So, you’ve been shot before?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been shot? Like with a pistol or pellet gun?”
No, pretty sure I would have remembered.
“Surgery? Injury?”
“No” . . . but now I am wondering just what in the heck she thought she saw.
I don’t inquire further because I have to pull up my pants and shuffle into the next room for an IV and some yummy yellow drink. And what happens next sort of eases my mind because this tech is, well, to put it charitably, a Conclusion Jumper.
Now mind you, she’s in the process of inserting an IV, and I have a very firm policy of being nice to people who are jabbing needles into my veins. She asks me what I do and I confess I am a lawyer.
“I thought so,” she says, a little smugly.
“Why is that?”
“Your ID bracelet; your wife didn’t take your name. I bet she’s a lawyer, too.”
My jaw is dropping, but I just say, “No, she works in a hospital. Just. Like. You.” I am totally perplexed.
“Did it make you mad?”
“Huh?”
“When she kept her name.”
“Not as much as when she shot me in the gut with that .32, you silly twit.”
(Okay, that last response didn’t occur to me until about an hour ago, darn it.)
I am pretty sure this is why she isn’t reading my CT scan instead of a radiologist.
Thanks Hawk, hope you’re feeling better.
