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!