from the mouth of an eavesdropper

So eavesdroppers are the blight of the society ehhh? Dint your parents box your ears hoping that otalgia(ear pain) would be a good remedy for shameless deeds of auditory stimulation? But that never stopped you from doing it all your life. You just maintain a stoic facade of having dapper manners.

I am sure you all must have had awesome/gruesome eavesdropping- anecdotes from locker rooms/powder rooms etc. I think eavesdropping in the hospital, especially when the conversation is taking place between a frustrated intern and a cynical chief resident, working in a large urban phree-for- all hospital just uppes the pinnacle for gruesome/awesome standards a few nothces.

So, I was in the residents lounge after a 30 hr call, all of which I spent trying to figure the best physical posture for a better sleep. I was in dire need of some spice in my life and considering that I am writing this blog is a very solid hint of how un-spiced my life is.

Move to an animated conversation between an east european medicine female intern and her madrasi male chief resident. The subject of this heated yet animated conversation (source of heat is the intern- not her looks but her talk; and the animation is being astutely shown by the chief who is counting his days before he lands in a research driven cardiology fellowship in podunkland Iowa) is a 600 lbs (yes I dint miss a zero) woman with some not so obscure medical problem. The writer will henceforth refer to the subject as HE and the readers shall know what HE stands as they read along.

Now the intern driven by her usual east european socialist medicine instincts decides to run an MRI on HE. The chief is, as usual frustrated with listening to interns ordering tests like they were trying to do a frontal lobectomy on Bush Jr to elevate his IQ beyond his familial 60. So he okays the MRI... "yeah yeah just do it and tell me about the results". I guess by now our madrasi chief resident can smell the hot chocolate that I just got out of the vending machine. We all know chocolate does weird things to hormones.

I am by that time consumed with how to make my hot chocolate sweeter and fattier. I heard some words like- transfer her to the zoo. I thought may be they had some free fancy hospital for EH like patients. So out of boredom I asked madrasi if he said something about some zoo hospital.

Madrasi chief retorts in his trademark style- "yeah man- bloody 600 lbs.. so we are sending her to the brookfield zoo to get an MRI cos she wont fit in the normal MRI machines here. They have MRI in the zoo for elephants."

Whoa.....i was taken aback... not a lot cos i have lived almost 4 yrs in US evidencing the cholesterol chronicles.

In my usual cynical way I said yeah.... when u cross 600 lbs you are no more a human.. you become Homo Sapiens Elephanticus (instead of the usual Homo Sapiens), and then use an MRI for the animals.

I know a lot of you would take serious exception to my comments about the fat. Hey....this is a democratic country and I chose to be cynical about human suffering (which some people bring it upon themselves) sometimes. So if you are sharpening those fangs, please do so, I am ready with verbal antidote to your emotional venom.

Disclaimer: The above conversation does not violate the HIPAA rules laid out in my institution. Even if there was a violation, you should run and nail the madrasi chief and the east european MRI loving intern and not an Eavesdropper!

art buchwald lives on.....the tradition carries on....

SKK