Mr. Stupid Meets Dr. Death
By Joe Acton
It all started one morning after I let my alligator mouth overload my hummingbird butt.
My wife was going through her semi-annual case of the guilties because we only have one kid and "once we're gone who's she going to have?"
Well, for one thing if she has another slumber party I'll probably kill her myself long before I die, but for another she'll have everything we own now to keep her company plus the insurance money and she won't have to share any of it with brothers or sisters she'll have to pretend to like in order to get the grandfather clock.
Ah, but I digress — and ramble.
Anyhow, she buzzes into the bathroom while I'm standing in front of the mirror wondering how a simple thing like gravity can virtually ruin a perfectly good birthday suit in just 40 or 50 years or so.
You know you've been married too long when your wife tells you your pants are too wrinkled to wear to work and you have to remind her that you're not wearing any pants.
Anyhow, as I'm heading for the shower she says, "I think we ought to get a puppy for Erica."
"Are you kidding?" I said. "We ought to get at least a puppy for her. If we play our cards right, maybe we can even get a parrot and a small ocelot thrown in. But how do we go about finding someone that wants to trade?"
My wife caught the joke and made a gesture that I'm sure is anatomically impossible and I wandered off to the shower guffawing loudly.
Hey, I'm an only child. I can be fully-self amusing. I was falling down laughing at how clever I was.
And that's when I did. Fell down, laughing. In the shower. Just like in the movies.
When you're naked in the shower (what, as opposed to when you're fully clothed in the shower?) its hard to fall into a heap of anything. So since there was wasn't much of anything to fall into, I decided to fall onto something — my head. I was always able to think quickly on my feet — even when they're above my head.
So basically, what I'm saying here is that I whacked my noggin and neck on side of the tub on the way down. And everything hurt. Especially the next day. And by day three not only did it still hurt but now nothing moved. My wife, the ex-nurse, diagnosed me as having a serious case of Tub-lash. Now I know why she's an EX-nurse.
So off I go to our family doctor.
What you have to understand at this point is that when you're as deeply neurotic and disturbed as my family seems to be, your doctor never winds up being Dr. Kildare. No — if your family is really wacky, you wind up with a doctor that can handle a bunch of house apes that try to build sand castles in the sky and then rent them out to each other. Your doctor turns out to be a combination of 'Doc' off the old Gunsmoke series and 'Bones' off of Star Trek.
Okay, after he gets through laughing at me he tweeks my neck around until I threaten his life and he sends me off to get x-rays. Then I'm sitting in his office, minding my own business — not suspecting anything more than some pain and muscle relaxer pills, a neck brace, and maybe some physical therapy.
He comes back grim-faced.
"I have good news and bad news," he says.
Great. I've been going to this guy for years and today he decides to try out some new material on me.
"The good news is that you've broken your neck."
Right about then I started to have my very first out of body experience. You know the kind. The one where you're floating above your insurance agent as he's handing the check to your wife and then she walks out of his office wearing a dental-floss bikini that she'd never wear for you and gets into a new Jag with some Frenchman named Francois?
"The bad news is that it is only a minor fracture of the vertebrae and there is nothing I can do to treat you. I'll have to make my own car payment this month."
Well mea culpa, mea culpa. Next time I'll start on a ladder and go for a one and a half gainer with a lay-out into the tub.
A couple of months later while I watching a Saturday afternoon T.V. showing of the "Maltese Falcon" I started to make myself a roast beef sandwich. Just when Bogey is telling Sidney Greenstreet why Greenstreet can't kill him, I slice a hunk of very rare meat out of Mr. Pointer on my left hand.
Well, by now I'm all better from The Busted Neck Incident, so I call my doc. Mr. Bedside Manners. I tell him what's happened and he's very concerned telling me to come into the clinic as soon as possible and bring the sandwich with me.
Okay. Don't panic. He didn't say why he wanted to see the sandwich, but I know all about bovine hemophilia. Maybe he just wants to check the meat to see if the steer was infected. No sweat. I've been going to this guy for years. He's a Top-Doc. Nothing to worry about.
I get to the office and he glances at the blood soaked paper towel I've got wrapped around Mr. Pointer.
"Where's the sandwich?" he demands.
I hand over a paper bag and jerks the sandwich out, takes the bread off the top, examines the meat thoroughly — and then takes a T-Rex bite out of it. I mean, it's not like he ate the whole thing all at once — after all, he's a refined surgeon. But he took a bite out of it roughly the size of my kid's beachball.
"That was close. I haven't eaten all day — thought I was going to starve to death. Nice job on the sandwich. Bum finger, though. Hang on a second, I'll wash up and take a look."
Well no hurry pal I'm just leaking all over this rag and incidentally, the reason I made the sandwich in the first place was that I was also starving to death, a fact now considerably less important since I'm bleeding to death.
"Oh stop your whining — I'll split the sandwich with you. Come on, you drove all the way over here without loosing consciousness or running over any old ladies and you took the time to put the sandwich in a zip-lock baggie — it ain't like you need a transfusion or a transplant or anything like that. If you can stay away from sharp objects I'll have to pay for my own summer cottage."
Yeah, but what about this disfiguring gash in my finger?
Well, okay. So it wasn't that big a gash. And so it didn't even need stitches. And so what if he only put a band aide on it. He still ate my sandwich.
So then I got into running. And ran myself right into an ingrown toenail. You know the kind, every time your heart beats it feels like Phil Collins is working out on a set of drums with your toe stretched over the snare, like that.
So after trying everything in Mom's Book Of Self And Home Cure Remedies That Seemed To Work Just Fine When I Was Living At Home But Now Won't Fix Anything Except Constipation, it was off to see Dr. Wizard again.
"We'll have to operate," he said, without looking at my foot.
"What do you mean operate", I whined. "Isn't it customary to at least look at the injury before you send the patient into triage? I mean its not a chest wound that sucking air from across the room — what you think this is a MASH unit?"
"Okay, okay," he said. "I'll make you a deal. I don't like to look at infected toes unless I absolutely have to, like when I'm operating on them and even then I try to keep my eyes closed as much as possible. So you look at the toe and I'll describe it. If it's what I describe, we'll operate. If its anything else, we'll just cut it off. Okay?
I'd always suspected he was the one who had introduced an acupuncture cure for hemophiliacs, but this started to look like my first bit of proof.
"Look, we didn't shoot you the last time you came in here and we're not going to shoot you now," he consoled me.
"Yeah, but last time I brought you a roast beef sandwich," I reminded him. "This time you're flying solo — I didn't stop off at the deli on my way in."
"Well, its entirely up to you," he sighed as he walked out of the examining room. "No sandwich, no Novocain."
So to quote my good personal friend, Steve Martin (whom I've never met and wouldn't know if he walked in the front door without and arrow through his head) "Well, excuuuuusssse me" if I didn't break a land speed record getting to his clinic the next time I killed myself. Which was last week.
Mr. Pointer got in the way again. This time an Exacto knife with a brand-spanking new never-cut-anything-before blade, whacked off a bloody chunk next to the fingernail. Kinda looked like I was trying to sharpen my finger to write with.
Anyhow, I got the bleeding stopped by applying the usual paper-towel tourniquet and washed off the flap of skin I'd just cut off. So there I am, sitting at my desk with my finger on the one hand and a flap of it in the other. What to do — what to do.
Well, I'm broke again so I can't afford the $29.95 for an office call to Dr. Death so he can tell me that I've cut off a now useless part of my finger.
So, harkening back on my Anthropology 101 class that taught me 'adaptation is the keystone to a species survival' I took matters into my own hands.
I glued it back on with some super-glue.
Stuck on there just like it had been sewed back by a real surgeon. Who needs expensive office calls when you've got a little Yankee Ingenuity? Didn't even a need a band aide after the second day.
Looked real good, too, without a band aide. Until it started to turn black that is. Then it got hard. Then it fell off.
I've got an appointment tomorrow with Dr. Death. I'm not exactly sure what he's going to do. But I'm taking lunch just in case.
Sometimes it goes on like this for days and days. And then you cut yourself. And all the blood rushes out of your head and away from your brain. And that's when you decide you should have gone to doctor school. And then it gets worse.
By Joe Acton
It all started one morning after I let my alligator mouth overload my hummingbird butt.
My wife was going through her semi-annual case of the guilties because we only have one kid and "once we're gone who's she going to have?"
Well, for one thing if she has another slumber party I'll probably kill her myself long before I die, but for another she'll have everything we own now to keep her company plus the insurance money and she won't have to share any of it with brothers or sisters she'll have to pretend to like in order to get the grandfather clock.
Ah, but I digress — and ramble.
Anyhow, she buzzes into the bathroom while I'm standing in front of the mirror wondering how a simple thing like gravity can virtually ruin a perfectly good birthday suit in just 40 or 50 years or so.
You know you've been married too long when your wife tells you your pants are too wrinkled to wear to work and you have to remind her that you're not wearing any pants.
Anyhow, as I'm heading for the shower she says, "I think we ought to get a puppy for Erica."
"Are you kidding?" I said. "We ought to get at least a puppy for her. If we play our cards right, maybe we can even get a parrot and a small ocelot thrown in. But how do we go about finding someone that wants to trade?"
My wife caught the joke and made a gesture that I'm sure is anatomically impossible and I wandered off to the shower guffawing loudly.
Hey, I'm an only child. I can be fully-self amusing. I was falling down laughing at how clever I was.
And that's when I did. Fell down, laughing. In the shower. Just like in the movies.
When you're naked in the shower (what, as opposed to when you're fully clothed in the shower?) its hard to fall into a heap of anything. So since there was wasn't much of anything to fall into, I decided to fall onto something — my head. I was always able to think quickly on my feet — even when they're above my head.
So basically, what I'm saying here is that I whacked my noggin and neck on side of the tub on the way down. And everything hurt. Especially the next day. And by day three not only did it still hurt but now nothing moved. My wife, the ex-nurse, diagnosed me as having a serious case of Tub-lash. Now I know why she's an EX-nurse.
So off I go to our family doctor.
What you have to understand at this point is that when you're as deeply neurotic and disturbed as my family seems to be, your doctor never winds up being Dr. Kildare. No — if your family is really wacky, you wind up with a doctor that can handle a bunch of house apes that try to build sand castles in the sky and then rent them out to each other. Your doctor turns out to be a combination of 'Doc' off the old Gunsmoke series and 'Bones' off of Star Trek.
Okay, after he gets through laughing at me he tweeks my neck around until I threaten his life and he sends me off to get x-rays. Then I'm sitting in his office, minding my own business — not suspecting anything more than some pain and muscle relaxer pills, a neck brace, and maybe some physical therapy.
He comes back grim-faced.
"I have good news and bad news," he says.
Great. I've been going to this guy for years and today he decides to try out some new material on me.
"The good news is that you've broken your neck."
Right about then I started to have my very first out of body experience. You know the kind. The one where you're floating above your insurance agent as he's handing the check to your wife and then she walks out of his office wearing a dental-floss bikini that she'd never wear for you and gets into a new Jag with some Frenchman named Francois?
"The bad news is that it is only a minor fracture of the vertebrae and there is nothing I can do to treat you. I'll have to make my own car payment this month."
Well mea culpa, mea culpa. Next time I'll start on a ladder and go for a one and a half gainer with a lay-out into the tub.
A couple of months later while I watching a Saturday afternoon T.V. showing of the "Maltese Falcon" I started to make myself a roast beef sandwich. Just when Bogey is telling Sidney Greenstreet why Greenstreet can't kill him, I slice a hunk of very rare meat out of Mr. Pointer on my left hand.
Well, by now I'm all better from The Busted Neck Incident, so I call my doc. Mr. Bedside Manners. I tell him what's happened and he's very concerned telling me to come into the clinic as soon as possible and bring the sandwich with me.
Okay. Don't panic. He didn't say why he wanted to see the sandwich, but I know all about bovine hemophilia. Maybe he just wants to check the meat to see if the steer was infected. No sweat. I've been going to this guy for years. He's a Top-Doc. Nothing to worry about.
I get to the office and he glances at the blood soaked paper towel I've got wrapped around Mr. Pointer.
"Where's the sandwich?" he demands.
I hand over a paper bag and jerks the sandwich out, takes the bread off the top, examines the meat thoroughly — and then takes a T-Rex bite out of it. I mean, it's not like he ate the whole thing all at once — after all, he's a refined surgeon. But he took a bite out of it roughly the size of my kid's beachball.
"That was close. I haven't eaten all day — thought I was going to starve to death. Nice job on the sandwich. Bum finger, though. Hang on a second, I'll wash up and take a look."
Well no hurry pal I'm just leaking all over this rag and incidentally, the reason I made the sandwich in the first place was that I was also starving to death, a fact now considerably less important since I'm bleeding to death.
"Oh stop your whining — I'll split the sandwich with you. Come on, you drove all the way over here without loosing consciousness or running over any old ladies and you took the time to put the sandwich in a zip-lock baggie — it ain't like you need a transfusion or a transplant or anything like that. If you can stay away from sharp objects I'll have to pay for my own summer cottage."
Yeah, but what about this disfiguring gash in my finger?
Well, okay. So it wasn't that big a gash. And so it didn't even need stitches. And so what if he only put a band aide on it. He still ate my sandwich.
So then I got into running. And ran myself right into an ingrown toenail. You know the kind, every time your heart beats it feels like Phil Collins is working out on a set of drums with your toe stretched over the snare, like that.
So after trying everything in Mom's Book Of Self And Home Cure Remedies That Seemed To Work Just Fine When I Was Living At Home But Now Won't Fix Anything Except Constipation, it was off to see Dr. Wizard again.
"We'll have to operate," he said, without looking at my foot.
"What do you mean operate", I whined. "Isn't it customary to at least look at the injury before you send the patient into triage? I mean its not a chest wound that sucking air from across the room — what you think this is a MASH unit?"
"Okay, okay," he said. "I'll make you a deal. I don't like to look at infected toes unless I absolutely have to, like when I'm operating on them and even then I try to keep my eyes closed as much as possible. So you look at the toe and I'll describe it. If it's what I describe, we'll operate. If its anything else, we'll just cut it off. Okay?
I'd always suspected he was the one who had introduced an acupuncture cure for hemophiliacs, but this started to look like my first bit of proof.
"Look, we didn't shoot you the last time you came in here and we're not going to shoot you now," he consoled me.
"Yeah, but last time I brought you a roast beef sandwich," I reminded him. "This time you're flying solo — I didn't stop off at the deli on my way in."
"Well, its entirely up to you," he sighed as he walked out of the examining room. "No sandwich, no Novocain."
So to quote my good personal friend, Steve Martin (whom I've never met and wouldn't know if he walked in the front door without and arrow through his head) "Well, excuuuuusssse me" if I didn't break a land speed record getting to his clinic the next time I killed myself. Which was last week.
Mr. Pointer got in the way again. This time an Exacto knife with a brand-spanking new never-cut-anything-before blade, whacked off a bloody chunk next to the fingernail. Kinda looked like I was trying to sharpen my finger to write with.
Anyhow, I got the bleeding stopped by applying the usual paper-towel tourniquet and washed off the flap of skin I'd just cut off. So there I am, sitting at my desk with my finger on the one hand and a flap of it in the other. What to do — what to do.
Well, I'm broke again so I can't afford the $29.95 for an office call to Dr. Death so he can tell me that I've cut off a now useless part of my finger.
So, harkening back on my Anthropology 101 class that taught me 'adaptation is the keystone to a species survival' I took matters into my own hands.
I glued it back on with some super-glue.
Stuck on there just like it had been sewed back by a real surgeon. Who needs expensive office calls when you've got a little Yankee Ingenuity? Didn't even a need a band aide after the second day.
Looked real good, too, without a band aide. Until it started to turn black that is. Then it got hard. Then it fell off.
I've got an appointment tomorrow with Dr. Death. I'm not exactly sure what he's going to do. But I'm taking lunch just in case.
Sometimes it goes on like this for days and days. And then you cut yourself. And all the blood rushes out of your head and away from your brain. And that's when you decide you should have gone to doctor school. And then it gets worse.
