It's a hot, muggy day - too hot even to go fishing. I mowed the lawn last night when it was cooler, and I did my stint of paint scraping on the summer remodeling project this morning. It's too early for a nap; still, I just don't have the energy to do another heavy job, like unloading the dishwasher or tying a few trout flies.
At times like this, I usually look for column ideas by sifting through one of my miscellaneous letters files. Today I select the file marked "Horrors, miscellaneous." Bingo! Right away I find five stories about medical mishaps that fit together nicely.OK, so stories on this topic aren't so nice, but remember that they're almost certainly just legends. Here are my five discoveries.
- Melissa Crispin of Boston wrote story No. 1:
"I was at a cookout out on the roof (must be an urban custom) when a friend related this story. Seems a girl wanted her ear pierced, and she attempted to do it herself. Unfortunately, she happened to hit `just the right spot' that was connected to certain sensors in her mouth.
"The piercing effectively deadened her ability to feel pain in the mouth, and she didn't notice until months later when she went to the dentist and found out that her entire mouth was rotting out. She hadn't felt a thing."
- Story No. 2 is from Dr. Ed Friedlander of the Department of Pathology at Eastern Tennessee State University:
"I've heard only a few pathology legends, and most have to do with opening the chest at an autopsy and finding a beating heart. Sometimes the pathologist immediately clamps the aorta, and at times supposedly the patient survives, hideously crippled.
"But I also heard that during construction of Chicago's Water Tower Place a marble slab fell and crushed to death a young man who had just won a battle with Hodgkin's disease. He was on his way to the follow-up appointment to certify his cure."
- From Terry Gillespie of Flossmoor, Ill., I got my third medical horror tale:
"When my sister was about to undergo amniocentesis, a friend advised against it because someone she knew had the procedure and the energy generated by the machine had caused the amniotic fluid to boil, severely injuring the developing infant."
- Merium Malik of San Antonio, Texas, provided my fourth medical horror story. She often heard it told by a friend who has since passed away, not, I hope, in the manner described in the story:
"A priest made weekly rounds at a hospital, and one day he was visiting a parishioner in the intensive care unit. The man was connected to many tubes and wires, but he greeted the priest cheerfully.
"However, as the priest stood at his bedside, the man grew visibly worse and seemed to be fighting to breathe. Still, he could gesture for a pencil and paper from the table next to the bed, and he scribbled something and pressed the note into the priest's hand.
"The priest stuffed the note into his pocket and rang for help, but the man died before anyone arrived to render aid.
"That night as the deeply shaken priest prayed for the man, he remembered the note and pulled it out of his pocket. He uncrumpled it and read, `Please, father! You're standing on my air hose!' "
- Finally, from Paul Teeples of Richmond, Va., a medical story with a different twist. He heard it on a job site during his days as a sheetrock installer, and it went like this:
"Another sheetrocker started out, `Did you hear about the local high-school player who fractured his leg so severely that when they took him to MCV (Medical College of Virginia) they had to amputate? But the doctor accidentally amputated the good leg!'
"Everybody stared in disbelief, until somebody chimed in with, `They must have sued the heck outta that place.'
" `Nope, they couldn't sue,' the first guy said.
" `Why not?' we all asked.
" `He didn't have a leg to stand on."'
After reading that, I groaned and decided that unloading the dishwasher wasn't such a bad idea after all.
"Curses! Broiled Again," Jan Harold Brunvand's fourth collection of urban legends, is now available in paperback from Norton. Send your questions and urban legends to Prof. Brunvand in care of this newspaper.
United Feature Syndicate, Inc.