An Interesting Visit to the Doctor...

I went to see my doctor Friday morning for a follow up visit and he told me the following story. I thought it was so funny, I had to share…

Dr Nowell had taken vacations to the beach before, but always to the gulf coast of Florida where the sand is white and fluffy and easy to play with. This year he, his family, and his parents decided to go to Hilton Head, which is on the east coast, where the sand is hard packed and brown, which is more difficult to play with. This is a very good upstanding family who are rather conservative and his parents own a large pharmacy just outside of Knoxville. Dr Nowell and his father are both pharmacists, and Dr Nowell later went back to school to become an osteopathic physician, (he is licensed and practices like an MD though their training has a bit different approach and focus to health and wellness).

They weren’t expecting the difference in the sand, so didn’t have shovels and buckets that would work. So, early Monday morning his parents went to Home Depot to get two heavy duty shovels, which were appropriate for digging a garden, but overkill for the beach. They would lug the shovels down to the beach and back, keeping them in the corner next to the door of their room.

They had a wonderful day on the beach and about 3:00 they were back in their room getting ready to go to dinner at a restaurant where they had to do more than knock the sand off their shoes. As everyone knows, hotels have to have the handicap bars in the showers, and the top support of the bar is about eye level to someone just under 6 feet tall. So, Dr Nowell was in the shower, when he shook his head to get the water off his face, when he hit the top edge of the handicap bar support just above his eyebrow and put a gash a little over an inch long in his forehead that went all the way to the bone. As is rather common for a facial cut, he couldn’t get it to stop bleeding, and because it was mixed with the water in the shower, it looked like there was much more blood than there really was.

His family was handing him towel after towel and everything else they could think of to stop the bleeding, which they finally did, but not before there was blood all over the place. The thought going through Dr Nowell’s mind is “great, now I have to go to the ER, just what I wanted to do“, when he remembers a buddy of his that interned with him has recently moved to the area, so he calls him. Dr Nowell asks him if he can bring a suture kit to the hotel, and invites him to bring his family to dinner:

“Um, Walker, I am a Cardiologist, I don’t know how to do sutures…”

“That’s okay, I’ll teach you…”

So his buddy brings a suture kit and his family to the hotel. The gather every moveable light in the room around a chair in front of a mirror and start exchanging light bulbs so they have the brightest ones in the lights around the mirror. They send everyone else to the restaurant to wait on a table and say they will join them as soon as they can get his head sutured.

They start the process and about half way through, they hit another little vein, and blood spurts all over the mirror, which his buddy goes to clean up in the middle of the procedure:

“Noooo, you’re sterile, we’ll clean it up afterwards!”

So they keep suturing. They get the last suture almost finished and the phone rings – their table is ready and they have to get down there now. They finish and put a bandage on it, and go to dinner.

When they come back to the room, there are about a half a dozen people in their room:

“Ummm, can we help you – you are in our room?”

About this time they realize that the people in the room are from housekeeping, security and management, when they look around and realize what the room looks like…

Blood (mixed with water) everywhere, all over towels and the mirror, a chair with all the lights around it in front of the mirror with lightbulbs laying on the counters, and two shovels in the corner with sand all over them… Needless to say, the maid was a bit concerned when she walked in to turn down the beds!

At this point, I am laughing so hard that I don’t remember the rest, but since he is not sitting in a jail cell, I assume they were able to explain what happened to the hotel’s satisfaction…