Posted On: Wednesday - August 15th 2018 11:01AM MST
In Topics: Humor Healthcare Stupidity
Nurse, strong coffee, 4 sugars, STAT!
Probably just best to get those 2 in the middle...
Since there's been some writing here about doctors lately, and bicycles, and doctors on bicycles, kind of a rare combination, it leads to a few humorous anecdotes.
As I wrote in the previous posts on the subject, doctors in general have to be fairly bright to get into and through medical school. Med school involves lots of rote memorization, but just to develop techniques to get through it all takes smarts. That does not mean doctors don't do stupid things. Having more money means more chances for some of these endeavors. The doctor in this post probably drank more during the time in question than most doctors, or at least most people. However, he could drive like nobody's business, better, in fact, when fairly drunk than most people with a blood alcohol level of 0 (and this was well before all the artificial stupidity, that is, the cell phones, was around). I could tell this because one night I thought he wasn't doing it right, and I grabbed the wheel and put the pickup truck and us into the ditch on the side of the dirt road. We couldn't drive it out ot fhere. Yeah, well, speaking of bikes, I had my bicycle in the back of the truck, so rode 2 or 3 miles, which sobered me up, to get a large automobile and a rope.
Now, this guy told me stories later on, when he'd already gotten the big-paying doctor job and the fancy sports car, about getting drunk enough to see double on the road. "I just couldn't tell which white lines to follow on the Interstate. I was seeing double, cause there can't be that many lanes. I tried to keep between the ones near the middle...." Again, the guy was not a hazard compared to the average driver anyway. However, even after being conscientious and sleeping it off in the car when possible (a sports car, remember), what was bound to happen finally did, and it took an expensive lawyer - no problem! - to get the violation changed to something like "reckless operation" or what-have-you. That was fine, but somehow due to bureaucratic screwage, my doctor friend ended up with no license for a few months. I realized during the middle of this that he was riding, what we call a motor-pecan, back and forth the short trip to the hospital. It's not even a scooter; it has pedals on it, and not enough power to require a driver's license, of course.
"No, no, you're not doing this right", I admonished him. "You pull up into the emergency room parking lot on this tiny $200 used motorpecan instead of your usual fancy sports car, yet you don't want the hospital to know anything?" "Why not ride a bicycle? There's a good excuse - yeah, 'after seeing all these sick people, that eat poorly and get no exercise, I remembered that whole 'Heal thyself!' bit, from the 1st day of med school'" "Yeah, that's the, errr, ticket ... no, I didn't mean ticket... uhhh..." Naah, he still putted along until a new fresh driver's license came in the mail. Exercise, psshaww, we've got pills for everything now!
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