Jokes 4 off topic:
My wholesome and respectable twin D’or went to medical school, and I have a story from him from when he was an intern.
One of the things a young doctor does to prepare for a life of arm wrestling administrators and insurance companies and now the government is to do something called CPR, or “Can’t possibly recover” when somebody dies. You probably know more about it than I do, but I have to take you back to when your grandparents were your age. Things change. The average success rate was about 20% in those days. D’or averaged about 80%. He always did things his own way. We used to shout, “Door. Stop.”
They call you to a patient who’s in trouble. At one glance you know the score. There may be this tall figure in black standing beside the bed.
There’s nothing spooky about it. You see it when you look at the patient. It’s got something to do with the skin color or a lack of muscle tone, but your brain sends you the message its own way. It’s faster.
The book says the next thing you do is pat him on the chest. “Are you all right?” Book makes a good doorstop. You grab his carotid with one hand, his femoral with the other and put your ear on his chest. That’s a waste of time, too, but it will look good on your report. One second, no pulse, no heartbeat, no breathing, no reaction. Show time. Grab him and drag him where you can get his head back. Time for mouth to mouth. If he’s a stand up comic, you put one hand like this and the other hand like this and say, “So looong.” Otherwise you waste another second and pull the sheet over his mouth. One breath. Start the heart. The book says be very careful not to break ribs. Your first pump will sound like this. “Crunch.” Pump, pump.
They didn’t have code blue in those days so you had to think of everything. “Get me an EKG. Call anesthesia. Get the defibrillator. Get the chart and read me today’s progress note and today’s labs. Read for speed. Call family.”
You’re going to work at it for half an hour, but flies will be laying eggs in ten minutes. You don’t even have that long. Maybe you’re saying, “Show me that rhythm strip … fine fib, draw up a milligram of epi and we’ll see if we can coarsen it,” when he arrives. The fetch. Soul reaver. Life thief. The anesthesia resident. There is this “click” as he opens his laryngoscope.
You stop while he goes around and tries to get a tube into the airway. (It’s boring.) He says check the lungs. You’re like, “You’re in the stomach again.” You lean on the corpse. You say, “Hey, cutie, how about a back rub when this is over? No? All right. I guess a front rub is out of the question, huh?”
One day D’or is like, “Chart. I can’t hear you…. What was that? Show me the page. Wrist band. Draw up 40 milligrams of K. Show me the bottle. All right, half in the bag and half in the line.” That’ll smart.
“Give me the paddles. Contact gel. Crank her up to 8 joules.” That’s about the energy of a beer falling off the top shelf and landing on your foot. “Clear.” Zap. “Check for pulse. Right!” The thing in the robe says, “I can wait.” You’re like, “Yes, but this moment is mine.”
Usually they don’t wake up right away. If they do, they don’t say much. Sometimes you get, “It was all light and love and peace. Why did you bring me back?” He has reached beyond the veil and touched the empyrean, no longer in love with reality; you will not be sending him home. In fact D’or never did send anybody home. They always died on somebody else’s shift. There was this one exception.
The guy said, “YES!” He’s grabbing D’or’s hand and kissing the defibrillator paddles. “St. Peter was saying, “And then you thought, ‘I should have said…’ Everybody thinks he’s a comedian.”
I said, “I don’t see what my fantasy life has to do with anything.”
“Your fantasy life is the only thing you control. For what you actually do, we just do a quick scan to see if you were a standup comic. If so, we can use the short form.”
He went on reading (and making disgusted faces.) Then he’s like, “Ooo, kinky. Very kinky. Yes. Do it.” (He started turning pages faster.) “Ooo, giggle giggle … You were a sick man.”
Then this little guy came up to the pearly gates and said, “Knock, knock.”
St. Pete said, “Who’s there?”
“Archie.”
“Archie who?”
“Archie gonna let me in?”
He laughed and opened the gates. When he came back I said, “Who was that?”
He said wearily, “That was God. He thinks he can tell a joke.”
Tracking number: