Medical Madness

By -



Doctors can be cruel people. They can screw around with your head, in ways that none can. To illustrate:
(This happened to me last year, I fell down and hurt my arm, and had spent an hour and a half in the doctor's waiting room)
Doctor: Sorry about the wait. This is one of the healthiest X-Rays I have ever seen. But when we compare that with yours ... 

That's not right. As it is I was really scared.
This next incident was told to me by a doctor friend of my dad's. But a little info first. 
Going into anaesthesia is one of my favourite memories. They made me breathe this gas smelling like strawberries and you feel light headed for two minutes, then you have the best sleep of your life. 
Coming out, however, is not so great. You are alert, awake, and scared out of your mind. Anything startles you. 
My friend told me about this poor patient who went in for tonsil removal.  
Surgeon (To my friend recovering from anaesthesia)
Ah, it's good to see you waking up. A funny thing happened. You remember Dr. Tom, he referred you to me. In his handwriting, the words tonsils and testicles look the same. So when you came for tonsils removal...

My cousin told me this last story, and perhaps the most cruel one of them all. It involves my cousin and his old room mate from medical school. Incidentally, this guy hasn't talked to my cousin since med school. Perhaps what follows will tell you why. 
Room mate was a chain smoker. My cousin used to repeatedly tell him, " One day, you are going to cough your guts out". But this warning was never taken seriously, as, clearly, it was ludicrous. 
Once, as a practical joke, my cousin got a set of human intestines from the lab, and draped them across the bed sheet of the sleeping room mate. 
The next morning, my cousin went early to breakfast, to see his reaction.  
He came in, white as a sheet and shivering. 
Cousin: What's up, you look terrible. 
Room mate: Dude, you were right. Last night, I actually coughed my guts out. 
Cousin (stifling a smile) : I told you so. 
Room mate: You don't know half of it. I had one hell of a time trying to get them back in. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reductio ad Absurdium, or Something of the Sort

By -
Reductio ad Absurdium, or Something of the Sort I was talking to my friend, regarding football, when he said the most amazingly pragmatic, yet absurd statement of all time- "It's just wrong to see 22 men with no priorities in life running around with a ball. Won't it be more fair, if they could run around with 22 balls instead?" Actually, they run around with a total of 44, but that's not the point. (Pardon the crude double entendre).  At face value, the sentence is true, none can doubt it. These men have no sense of responsibility, towards themselves, or towards society. I mean, what is the point of spending your twenties and thirties, your most productive time of life, playing a game? Yes, I said game, for it is one, it is not a sport. A sportsman is one who has been tried and tested by life, and has come out on top. A gamer is a person wasting time playing for self gratification.  There, I am going to say it. Without meaning to offend anyone, I fe...
Read more

SevEar Trauma

By -
I must confess, I have this terrible habit, when I put stuff in my ear in an attempt to remove wax. My favourite excavatory tool is an old paintbrush that is ideally suited for the specialised task of de-waxification of the outer auditory canal.  Anyway, after one night of particularly vicious violation of my ear, I woke up today, not being able to hear out of my left ear. This was a serious situation, not just because of the various physical manifestations of partial deafness (inclusive of this pounding headache), but because my parents constantly warn me against my disgusting personal habit, lest something like this should happen. It seemed like a dangerous precedent to let them know that they could be right. So I quickly ran to the local hospital, where the ENT Doctor was my father's friend. When I got there, he was seeing a patient, and attempting to remove what seemed later to be a channa bean (fat lentil) from the nose of a five year old. I couldn't be bothered...
Read more

The Guy Up There Proposition

By -
(Note- written in October 2014; published in December 2017) I'll try to address the age old question- Do we have free will, or is everything in our lives predetermined?  It appears that we have capacity for individual thought, and can behave independently, but there are some that argue that our lives move as per the universe's plan. You have to admit, both camps do have features that appeal and make sense. The former lends some meaning to our lives, while the latter takes all pressure off us to do anything at all.  I somewhere heard an interesting tale, of a scientific experiment, where electrodes were plugged into a volunteer's brain, and he was offered some simple choices (like black or white, up or down, 3 or 4). The experiment revealed that scientists sitting in the adjoining room where able to predict his response, seconds before he gave it, bearing testament for the proposition that we truly lack free will.   To what level this is true, I don't know. M...
Read more