Tales from the Emergency Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

inconvenience but my roommate and I will ever be thankful for the bakery truck driver’s help.
    Right Hand Turns
    In my second year of college I acquired a car, the mouse-brown limousine previously mentioned. In my first year of medical school, my car had a run-in with some metal warning signs placed in the middle of Main Street. I knew that the left front fender was bent, but I didn’t realize the consequences of that until the next morning. After the accident, I turned right a couple of times onto my street and into my driveway. The next morning we realized that turning left was impossible with the damage done. This posed a problem as we set out for school. It took a long time to get there devising a route as we went along which enabled us to end up in the school parking lot having executed right turns only. Somehow we made it, probably by making a very wide left turn somewhere along the way. Bending the fender back toward normal with a crowbar permanently solved the problem so that I could round corners again in any direction.
    Bacteriology
    At one point in my high school study of physics I was doing poorly. My father and my physics teacher were very close friends and colleagues. From my desk in the front row I could hardly fail to see my father come into the room and immediately disappear into Mr. Wilson’s lab. I knew there was trouble afoot. At dinner that night, my father said, “You are not distinguishing yourself in physics.” No reply was forthcoming from me and my father never said another word about it. Since the time to take the New York State Regents exams was nearing, I studied a bit harder and thankfully passed the physics exam with a fairly presentable B grade. That was good enough to get into college.
    Many years later I was having trouble with a subject in the medical school curriculum. This time it was bacteriology/parasitology. The department chairman called me into his office essentially to put me on notice. During the interview he went to his files and brought out my folder. He said, after looking it over, “You are not distinguishing yourself in bacteriology.” Déjà vu. This time I was able to croak out a question, “Am I still in medical school?” It seemed that I was but that depended on how well I did on the upcoming parasitology exam. Once again, I studied a bit more, eventually scoring in the high eighties on the National Board Examination in Bacteriology, taken at the end of the second year of medical school. Saved by the book!
    I took parasitology the semester I got married and I didn’t much like the course. It seemed that I was always too busy to study the course material. Eventually, as it was important for me to do so, I passed the course. During the following summer while I was working in the bacteriology lab on a fellowship grant examining the role of phage viruses, professors, instructors and students all ate lunch together. The professors were not much older than the rest of us. We would have lively discussions of politics, religion, etc. Never one to keep my mouth judiciously closed, I once stated an opinion of mine in direct opposition to that of the parasitology professor. He looked at me and said, “Remember, Hermance, your grade is still in pencil.” That was enough to settle the argument in his favor.
    Pass the Pipette
    The summer before my junior year in med school, I worked for my bacteriology professor on a March of Dimes grant. He was doing research on phage viruses. My job in the lab was to do the busy work. I would use a glass pipette, suck the serum containing the virus (phage) to a measured point in the pipette and then deposit that onto an agar covered glass Petri dish. I was surrounded by glass tubes and Petri dishes. This was such a repetitive job (during which I only occasionally pipetted some material into my mouth) that I dreamed about it. One night I actually asked my wife while I was asleep to “pass the pipette”! She thought that was hysterically