I was thrown into remembering my medical past while watching some program touting the advances of the medical arts this morning. My only serious problem with doctors is they practice medicine. They always practice on me. Can't we wait until they got it down? I've been practiced on so many times that I'm amazed that I still function. A quick history:
1974 - I was assigned to the Diplomatic Mission in Bangkok, maybe the best assignment in the military. My kidneys quit. Talking with doctors in the following years leads me to believe I was poisoned. The American doctors NEVER came to examine me. One morning the nurse put a toe tag on me and I was sent to a Navy hospital in Chicago. When I arrived, the doctor I was sent half way around the world to treat me examined me and said the only way he knew I was sick was that the 2 week old paper work said I was. I was cured before I left Bangkok. He admitted me anyway. Specifically, to the hospice ward. Everyone around was considered terminal. (Except the guy in the bed next to me. He had out of control hypertension.) Nobody, nurses or medics could figure out why I was there. There was nothing wrong with me. I ended up spending Christmas and New Years on the ward, not sick, because the doctor went on vacation and forgot to give my case to another doctor. The one advantage to being terminally healthy is that you can do just about anything you want. That guy on the bed next to me (in the same situation) shacked up with the swing shift nurse and didn't spend more than a couple of nights in that bed. I just got myself into trouble. As there were no doctors seeing me, I changed the name on the chart to E5 Banana, placed a banana on my pillow, and left to tour the area. When I returned, no-one noticed I was gone all day. A couple of days later I built a model Boeing 747, complete with paint and decals, and flew it out of the 5th floor window. One time I was called down to the detailers (the poor guy in charge of giving jobs to capable patients) office. He assigned some silly job to me and I laughed at him and told him to screw off. He tried to threaten me with judicial action. At that point I reminded him that I was on the terminal ward and his threats didn't carry much weight. And so on...
1978 - Germany. There was an early morning alert in the dead of winter. I got my section ready to roll. During the down time I went to work on one of my generators. While trying to start it, it backfired, yanking the pull rope from my hand. At that moment the order to roll out came and we did a training rail load. When finished that afternoon we went home. My section put everything away and I went to the 1st SGT to report we were all done. While in his office I took my gloves off and saw my hand was very swollen. I immediately went to the clinic, where the medic told me my wedding ring had to come off. The swelling was too much to pull it off so it had to be cut off. It was cutting my circulation off. No one in the clinic knew how to use it so I took it and cut it off myself. I then had to drive myself to a major clinic where I was xrayed and found that that tendons were ripped from my fingertips and would need surgery to fix the problem. I drove myself to the hospital on Ktown, admitted and rushed into the O.R.. The anesthesiologist decided a local was adequate and started sticking me in the neck (3x) and the armpit (5x). At that point I explained to the doctor that within the next 5 minutes one of us would be asleep.
It's getting late and I,m tired of typing. More later.
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