Also this week I read
Emergency Laughter: It Wasn't Funny When It Happened, But It Is Now! by MobileRead member Mike Cyra. This book is probably not for everyone, but I'm convinced that all those who have ever worked in the medical field will recognize many of the situations and find the book quite funny, very real, and in many places, plain out-and-out hilarious. I loved it.
Mr. Cyra, if You're reading this, you know those Chest Tube Blow Darts? I remember an incident while in training to be an Army medic at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas where we were practicing giving each other inter-muscular shots and were instructed to inject the needle "as if we were throwing a dart." Needless to say, one fellow in the room took that instruction all-too-literally! And the way "Mr. Mean & Nasty" was handled reminded me a a Sargent who came into our aid station thinking he owned the place and could boss everyone around. Turned out he had a dose of the clap. I was instructed to give him two shots of penicillin. In a variation on the method described in your book, I used two 5 cc syringes capped with burred 18 gauge needles. He got the prescribed dose of medication, but I used enough normal saline to completely fill both syringes with fluid. His reaction was nowhere near as spectacular as the gentlemen you describe in your book (he was actually pretty stoic), but I can tell you that when he came back for his second series of shots, he was one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. There's a saying in the Army that there are two classes of people you never want to anger: cooks and medics. He learned the hard way about the latter.
