Casper the Friendly Ghost

This happened yesterday.  

My alarm goes off.  I catapult out of bed, and see that it's 4:50 am.  You know you're on a general surgery rotation when 4:50 am is the latest you've woken up in 2 weeks.  Oy vey!  There are only 2 words bouncing across my mind, as per usual: neeeeeeeed fooooooooooooood.  I stumble into the landfill that I commonly refer to as 'my kitchen', and help myself to my usual breakfast-of-kings.  I mix 3 types of cereal, Kashi Go-Lean Crunch, Trader Joe's Lowfat Mixed Berry Granola, and All-Bran Bran Buds (which have 13 grams of fiber in a 1/3 cup serving...just throwing that out there!), and douse my meal in Vanilla Soymilk.  Zoinks, I ran out of bananas...sadface.  Oh well, by the time I'm done with Bingefest 2009, I still feel like I'm 7 months pregnant, despite the dearth of bananas.

I get to Holy Cross Hospital, and do my normal check-ups on patients whose legs I helped cut off the previous day.  I suspect that I have zero concept of what's normal these days.  I meet at the Holy Cross Breast Center at 7 am, just in time for a conference I'm required to attend.  Before I walk in the door, I see a handwritten note saying something about "Turkey Day Today".  Sweet!  I love Thanksgiving!  I hope there are still leftovers for breakfast #2 today.  Wait, it's July 24.  Mike, stop hallucinating, I tell myself.  As I enter the Breast Center, I realize that I'm not hallucinating.  First time for everything, I suppose.  I'm greeted by an unwrapped raw whole turkey chilling next to an Ultrasound machine.  I giggle and snap a quick photograph with the camera on my cell phone, just because.  Would it be weird if a doctor walked by me when I was taking a picture of a raw turkey, I wonder.  Oh well, it's worth it.  The mystery begins to unravel itself; after a few minutes, I'm instructed to use the Ultrasound to find an olive that's embedded somewhere inside of the turkey, and to take a core needle biopsy of the olive once I've found it.  If I had a nickel for every time someone told me to do that...I'd have roughly 5 cents.  I have the Ultrasound probe in my left hand, and the needle in my right hand, and delicately place my left hand with the probe on the gobbler.  A resident encouragingly and enthusiastically tells me to "cup the breast!" with my hand.  I take my biopsy.  "Hehe, that was fun!", I say.  The residents laugh at me.  "You know you've been in med school too long when this is your idea of fun on a Friday", I say.  

I look at the time; I'm running late!   I have to drive to Largo, MD to spend my morning at a  surgery clinic.  I get on the Capital Beltway going in the wrong direction.  Ugh.  I finally make it to the clinic after half an hour or so, wearing my dress clothes and white coat, and find the doctor that I'm supposed to work with.  She seems strange, I think, as I greet her and she immediately starts shaking her head and mumbling something about hernias.  The doctor turns to her computer to check the list of patients for the morning, while I'm standing right next to her.  And then it happens.  I fart.

  

Way to go, Mike.  Way to go.  Talk about first impressions.  As the result of what must have been a divine miracle, my fart is silent.  Thaaaat was close.  30 seconds later, the doctor starts starts sniffing.   Oh, shit!  The realization hits me: silent but deadly.  

Fuck you, Kashi!  Damn you, Trader Joes!  Go to hell, All-Bran!  I'm screwed, and see no way out of my predicament.

The doctor calls one of her nurses over.

"What the hell is that smell?  I need you to make a phone call for me", the doctor says.

"Mmmhmm", responds the nurse.

"Call the building's operator.  I think there's a garbage truck outside, and I think the air from around the truck is drafting in to our office.  Tell them to move the garbage truck, please."

The nurse looks confused, but she does as the doctor asks.

Meanwhile, I'm standing there, deer-in-the-headlights style.

The nurse comes back momentarily.  "Doctor, they're laughing at you", she says.  "There's no garbage truck outside, and all the air gets vented directly to the top of the building".

"Oh, well then", the doctor says.  "Something must have died out there."

I turn purple, and spend the next 3 hours trying to choke down my laughter.  Awkward!

Peppermint Schnapps

This one happened 2 days ago.

Ok, so I trip a lot.  I look at my sandals, and notice that both of them are pretty much totally worn through to the bottom.  In hopes that purchasing new sandals will solve all of my life's problems, I head out with a friend in search of a new pair.  Should be pretty normal, right?  Yeah, right.

H&M in Georgetown.  5 pm.  I don't like the sandals, so I do the next best thing: I try on a green shirt.  I look hideous.  Hmph, maybe it's not the shirt, I wonder, as I tear off the shirt and escape from the dressing room as fast as I can.  I meet said friend downstairs; she wants to purchase a shirt before we continue our sandal-scavenger hunt.  As we get in line, there's 1 person in front of us.  "Does this make me look prudish?"  I look up, and see a female creature looking back at me.  The 1 person in line was one of those people who could have been anywhere from 19 to 91 years old.  I've heard the phrase, "nothing is impossible" many time throughout my life; however, it was truly impossible to accurately label this creature on a scale of grape to raisin.  She was wearing an outfit that looked like she should be on her way to a Christmas party.  Oh yeah, it's July.  That's normal.  When I looked at her, only 2 words came to mind: candy cane.

"What?" I ask, thinking that I misheard what she said.

"Does this make me look prudish?

She is holding up a flesh-colored wrinkled skirt.  I have zero sense of style, but I intuitively knew that this was the kind of skirt that you need to meet 3 criteria to wear: 1. Your name must be Olga; 2. You must be a troll; 3. You must eat babies.

"Yes.", my friend responds, in a I'm-not-gonna-yank-yo-chain-or-bust-yo-balls kind of way.

The Candy Cane turns to me for a second opinion.

"Anything that you're wearing looks beautiful", I say.  I somehow manage to keep a straight face.  The next thing I know, I'm being hugged by a Candy Cane.  Not a quick hug, either.  It most certainly involved several pats on the back.  Was she drunk?  Sadly, I begin to suspect that she's totally sober.  She proceeds to purchase Olga's skirt.  To make things even stranger, she then begins to try on articles of clothing, one-by-one, from the pile that she placed on the counter along side the cash register.  She then asks the poor, poor cashier for her opinion of several of the items.  Phew, I guess I'm off the hook.

Or not.  Candy turns around again, this time holding a leopard-print bikini bottom.  Only the bottom.  I smile and say, "Now THAT makes you look prudish", in those exact words.  An odd honking noise comes out of her; I suspect it was a laugh.  She once again starts trying on various articles of clothing; my friend suggest that I take her shirt and walk to a different line, while she waits behind Candy.  I agree.  A relay-race!  Sounds fun.  I try not to glace at Candy...but it's somewhat like looking into the sun; you don't want to do it, you know you'll regret it, but you do it anyways.  Candy is looking in my direction, and smiling.  Hot damn, that's creepy.

I win the relay-race (insert gasp-of-surprise here), and friend comes over to my line to pay for her shirt.  We leave, luckily without any further minty encounters.  We go to Banana Republic, where I try on a size small green shirt with an elephant on it, because it's green and has an elephant on it.  The shirt is too big.  Hmph, maybe I'm not an elephant afterall. 

We go to Urban Outfitters.  The only sandals that fit me look like a zebra vomited on them.  I'm about to try on a shirt with a pelican on it, when my friend comes up to me and says, "I lost my earring".  She thinks it fell off while trying on a shirt back at Nanner Commonwealth.  We leave without buying anything, and go back to Plantain Federation.  We go straight to the cashier.  "Have you found an earring that looks like this?"  My friend shows the cash-lady the remaining earring.  

"Yes," the cashier says.  "But then I lost it."  And she was serious.