Tonight after I took my shower and I was changing the dressing on my wound it got me to thinking about some of the funny things that happened in the hospital. One of my favorite funny things was when I finally got my surgeon, Dr. David Holt, to laugh. Don’t get me wrong - he is an excellent surgeon - all the nurses and med students and residents spoke very highly of his skill. But he was always just a little too serious for me and so I set out to try to make him laugh at some point while I was incarcerated…uh…in hospital.
My first attempt was when I had been assigned to use an incentive spirometer after the surgery. This is an instrument that measures how much air is going in and out of the lungs. This one was reverse from others I have used. In the past I have used the ones that you have to blow out and into and make the little ball go as high as you can make it go so I kept breathng into it and into it and the ball wouldn’t move. Finally one of the residents showed me that this particular instrument required my breathing IN instead of out and then I got the ball to move!
But they kept calling it an incentive spirometer so I was asking what my incentive was if I got it all the way up? What do I get if I do it? Most of the med students and residents just laughed at me but when Dr. Holt came in he asked me how I was doing with it so I asked him what I my incentive was - what do I win if I get it all the way up to the top. Well he had a good comeback. He said to me that if I could make the ball go all the way to the top and make the bell ding that I’d win a car (what you probably don’t know is that there was no bell on the instrument)! So I came back with an equally quick response and told him that I would find a way to make a bell ring on that instrument if it meant I’d win a car. He kind of chuckled at that one.
But later that day I was asking him about the big bump around my incision that was kind of hard and very sore. One of the med students told me it was where they had pushed back all my internal parts while they were putting in the kidney and that all of that tissue and other internal parts would eventually move back into place somewhere down the healing road. So later in the day I was telling Dr. Holt about it and the pain that was associated with it. I said to him “I know that’s where you tore me open and pushed back my internal parts but…” and he laughed out loud and said “Well I prefer to say it’s where I did my precision work of moving your internal parts out of the way!” And we both had a good laugh over that one.
Another story has to do with one of the interns who was taking care of Jaime and me the night before the surgery. He came wandering in around 11 pm that night and had to take all this information from both of us. He rolled his computer into the room and started asking his questions but about every 3 minutes his pager would go off and he’d have to use one of our phones to call in to see what the page was about. It got to be really funny to us (but not to him) and we were really giving him a hard time about it. He ended up having so much fun with us that he decided to hang out in our room for a little while because we were a lot of fun for him.
A whole bunch of people came to visit us the night before the surgery - we had a regular party in our room that night (and thanks to any of you who are reading this who might have attended - it really helped us that night). Nate and Karen Kauffman came in with little gift bags for each of us and inside the bags were cans of kidney beans! So we put the cans next to our beds and every time someone from the surgical team came in that night or in the morning we’d show them the can and tell them that if they botched up Jaime’s kidney that we had back ups ready for them in our cans. We got many good chuckles with that one.
All in all I tried to make it amusing whenever it was possible. Jaime, of course, was a great help in that as well.
Thanks for reading.
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