Techno-Warp 3.0: A Victim of Medical Science

Are you in a Techno-Warp?
Chapter 3.0
A Victim of Medical Science

It is a good thing that some people want to be in the medical profession. I was encouraged in that direction as a child. My parents gave me a doctor bag and my grandmother sewed me an authentic white doctor coat. I walked around somberly taking temperatures and heart rates of family members. It seemed that my path would lead me to becoming a real MD.

The deal went sour when I realized that in that profession I would be exposed to mucous, vomit, urine, blood and poop, and would be required to handle body parts of unattractive people I didn’t even know.

I get easily grossed out. Three times I have lost my "cookies" after seeing someone else lose theirs. I lost breakfast last week while dragging a smelly garbage can out to the street. I have to stop eating if someone uses a disgusting word such as “ears”, or “feet”. God forbid they should say “nose.”

I view people who spend their days wallowing in biohazards with a mixture of awe, respect and revulsion. I secretly think, “How many body orifices did you visit today? Did you wash your hands before shaking mine? I know you have to be smart to be a doctor, but if you’re so smart, why do you perform proctoscopic exams for a living?”

The complexity involved in medical science can create a teeming incubator for the techno-warp virus, a petri dish for the screwup bacteria.

For instance, it is amazing that anyone comes out of the hospital alive, even visitors. They keep sick people in there, for gosh sakes! What a smart idea: take all the local sick people, infested with a menagerie of invisible cooties, and store these people together in small, closely spaced rooms sharing the same air supply. Then, let the cooties hold a convention so that they can go to post-convention hospitality suites and pair off and create even more disgusting life forms.

I know what you’re thinking: “Let’s not go overboard. Hospitals have strict procedures for controlling the spread of infections and limiting the ability for cooties to hold conventions.” And I say to you:

1. Have you seen the procedure manual? I have. It takes five physical therapists to take it off the shelf.

2. Have you met someone who writes procedure manuals? I have. Forrest Gump was smarter and less boring.

3. Do you know anyone who knows all of the procedures? Of course not. They are unknowable. The task is too great for a human. Which brings me to my last point:

4. They have humans working at these places! Humans, known throughout the animal kingdom as most prone to independent thought. Just what you want in a place which requires procedural meticulousness. Humans! Humans who can’t remember how they tied their shoes from one time to the next: “Was it left loop over right?”

I have been blessed with wonderful health. A moment of sincere thanks here for the Creator. My exposure to the medical world is limited. Nonetheless, each time I get involved with medicine, something seems to happen.

As a high schooler I contracted a form of tonsillitis which was deemed viral, a medical term for “nobody knows how to cure it.” I spent a week in the hospital for observation. This was obviously before “managed care”. During this week I was fed a steady dosage of chewing gum laced with aspirin to relieve my throat pain, which was so considerable that I actually endured the horrendous taste of the gum.

A week after my discharge from the hospital, I discovered to my horror that my stomach was bleeding large volumes of blood due to the aspirin gum and I needed to return to the hospital for treatment for the effects of my previous treatment.

My parents adopted a risk management approach by changing hospitals. They thought it would be better to start fresh with a different place, since the first hospital was obviously negligent in informing us about the dangers of aspirin.

In the car on the way to the hospital, I was dizzy from loss of blood. The walk through the front door was a wobbly lightheaded stumble. I gratefully accepted a wheelchair in Admitting. They wheeled me into an exam room for a blood test.

The nurse drew the first vial, but neglected to remove the tourniquet while switching vials. For a guy who was down a few pints, I managed to shoot quite a stream of precious blood across the room, drenching the length of a white hospital bed in bright red. I knew then that my medical care would be at least as good as at the last place.

Tonsil problems run in the family. My daughter Yael had hers removed at age 8. Of course we used only the BEST hospital with the BEST anesthesiologist and the BEST tonsilologist (I made up that term, but this is how we talk on the North Shore).

In Pre-Op various scrub-clad professionals came out to meet Yael and demonstrate what in-tune child-friendly folks they were. One nurse came out with a pink anesthesia mask and showed it to our cranky, terrified daughter saying, “When the doctor puts this on your face, you will breathe a few times and then fall into a deep pleasant sleep. Try it, it smells like bubblegum!”

You would have had a better chance of putting the mask on a cornered wildcat. Yael ripped it away from her face and tossed it across the room. Her mom Marcy picked it up. Then the cutesy medical group wheeled her off. I think I heard them singing a Barney song on the way while Yael’s head spun like Linda Blair’s during the exorcism.

Marcy and I went to the waiting room, then she remembered that her purse was across the hospital at Admitting, so she left to retrieve it.

Five minutes later, a breathless nurse in full scrubs came running out of the stainless mechanical doors which divide the mysterious world of the “O.R.” from the rest of reality. She ran up to me, eyes wide, near panic. My heart did several Olympic-quality half-gainers.

“Do you have the mask?” She asked urgently.

“Uh, no, I think her mom has it.”

“Where is she?”

“Clear across the hospital getting her purse. I don’t think you should wait for her.”

“But what should we do? She’s got the mask!”

“Why don’t you get another mask? I asked, incapable of believing that only one such mask resided in the entire Mega-Medical-Health-Care-Center-Hospital-Pavilion.

“Get another mask?” She asked incredulously.

“Yes...Get...Another...Mask” I answered slowly, deliberately and firmly, feeling that I needed to do so in order to push thoughts of black robed Cost Control Inquisitors out of her brain and get her back on task.

She turned and scurried off, muttering “Get...another...mask” as if she was figuring out how to scale K-2 without a Sherpa.

My final story involves one of the body’s most private and sensitive areas, and it will be interesting to see if I can tell it without offending your sensitivities.

I developed hemorrhoids. A bad case. Particularly bad because I waited a few extra decades hoping for spontaneous self-cure. Instead, they worsened to the point where I had to have my trousers altered. Standing was uncomfortable. Sitting was a joke. Bicycle riding was out of the question. SAYING the word “bicycle” was out of the question. I was a raw nerve, petrified in fear of the next time nature would call, wondering in my terror if that next time would be the final time, and I would be found days later slumped over on the loo, dead from hemorrhoids.

With enormous reluctance I placed my butt in the care of a trained, degreed hemorrhoidologist who scheduled the dreaded surgery. I arrived on the appointed day, one parent under each trembling arm, donned the Surgical Pajamas of Doom, and was wheeled through mazes of hospital corridors past a Maxwell Smart succession of stainless doors. I was in Pre-Op, exactly in the same parking spot my daughter Yael was to throw her mask two years later.

The nurse gave me an injection “to relax me.” I thought that was a solid idea and began talking myself into thinking it was working. “Yeah man...this is some really good stuff, man. My whole body is lettin’ go, man. It’s real smooth, oh wow, man.”

Then the nurse in charge of clip-board-carrying came to me. In a businesslike manner she said words every hemorrhoid patient fears most:

“You are the double hernia, right?”

My stupor cleared. “What? No! I’m the hemorrhoid!”

She looked at the chart again, puzzled. ”Are you sure you’re not the double hernia?”

I didn’t know which body part to cover first.

In my panic I completely forgot that I had, until now, possessed the full blown identity of an adult, with worlds of experiences and forty six years of history. Instead, a primal survival force emerged from me, blowing away the identity I thought I had and replacing it with the only identity that really mattered.

I half-shouted “I am the hemorrhoid! I am the hemorrhoid!”

And as the injection increased its grasp on my brain function and my words slurred and echoed in my head, and as the cutesy scrub-clad Barney singers came out to wheel me into the cold, equipment-filled O.R., I didn’t know if it was the sound of my words or the sound of my thoughts repeating helplessly, echoing far in the distance,

“I am the hemorrhoid! I am the hemorrhoid! I... Am...The...Hemorrhoid! Coo Coo Ca Choo!”

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