Gross Male Physician Humor
It’s 2:00 am in the emergency room. That’s when the real doctor humor stories comes out to play. By now I’ve sent two patients home from the ER, one of which I spent 90 minutes discussing why chronic abdominal pain management needed to involve an outpatient supratentorial component and why coming into the hospital would be a highly disappointing experience. By now I’ve also admitted two patients to observation status, one of which is a guy with uncontrolled diabetes who remembered me from a year prior and thanked me for telling him nobody else was going to live his life for him and he needed to take responsibility for his poor actions in life. By now I’ve also brought two patients in for full hospital admission, one of which was placed immediately on end of life cares for end stage COPD, the other of which who’s son got the wrath of my smoking lecture.
Once the work was done, the doctor humor came out to play. And no doctor humor is better than the ER doctor humor. Those guys and gals always have the greatest stories. Take this great 2:00 am story told to me by one of Happy’s ER doctors:
I remember when I was a resident. My attending physician and I were walking down the hall when he saw a cricket in the hallway. My attending picked up the cricket and proceeded to rip off its legs. He then placed the cricket in an envelope, sealed it, and wrote “ADMIT TO CRICK-E-TAL CARE”, and dropped it into the hospital tube system for transport to the ICU. When the intensive care unit nurses opened up the envelope, there lay the legless cricket and a bunch of screaming nurses.
Now that’s funny doctor humor. These are the same doctors who take care of you everyday in the hospital and in your clinics. These are the same doctors at prestigious academic research hospitals. This is what medical school does to your doctor. It changes them. Perhaps into doctor humor only other doctors can appreciate. I kind of feel bad for the cricket. On the other had, that’s still some good doctor humor.
*This blog post was originally published at Happy Hospitalist*
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