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December 9, 2004
Adventures with Bruce - The Tongue Incident
My human pet Bruce has an unusual mind. For example, he talks to cats. On the other hand, he frequently learns valuable lessons that would not be available to people who understand what they're doing on a more or less continuous basis.
The lesson he learned from The Tongue Incident is that when you schedule lunch with an old school chum in a place relatively far from home, it is important to get the name and location of the nearest hospital that participates in your employer's health plan.
The reason for this is that when you run into an emergency room with blood dripping down your chin and shout "What's the name of this place and where's the nearest pay phone?" you are bound to get some pretty strange looks.
What happened was that he had a lump on his tongue from a prior injury (which reminds me: never walk into a wall while you're talking about differential calculus). During lunch, he bit into the lump and it wouldn't stop bleeding.
Another important thing to remember is that you need to call your family and tell them what happened before the emergency room staff wraps your tongue in a gauze bandage. See, the moment you submit yourself to the machinery of a modern hospital bureaucracy, your next chance to talk to somebody from the outside world could be anywhere from hours to days later.
Bruce was only gone for about 6 hours. Five of them were spent in the office of a maxillofacial surgeon.
I cannot stress this highly enough: if you want to get your face reshaped, it's best to know as little as possible about how it's done. Just 10 minutes trapped with a PowerPoint presentation on how they use porcelain and wood screws to re-design your teeth is enough to scar you for life.
Thankfully, Bruce did not need any facial carpentry. Instead, they used a laser to carve away the damaged part of his tongue. Now, if you are going to have laser surgery, the tongue is one of the worst choices. It happens to reside just underneath the nose, and Bruce says it smells just like an outdoor barbecue.
On the other hand, most people have never tripped over a flaming outdoor grill, so the barbecue thing may not be all that traumatic. Nonetheless, keep in mind that you're not going to be able to eat anything for at least half a day, so don't get your heart set on a char-broiled hamburger while they're carving a hole in your tongue.
Finally, keep in mind at all times that insurance companies are completely ruthless when it comes to laboratory work. The doctor is required to send all suspect tissue to a lab to check for diseases that could be grounds for a lawsuit. If the lab is not authorized by your insurance company, telling them that you were coming out of surgery and your tongue was the size of a golf ball is not going to make any difference.
Anyway, I hope you find this advice helpful should you ever need emergency tongue surgery when you're away from home.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Thu 1:23 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Adventures with Bruce | Tags: hospitals humor medicine
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