[Sethomas]

My jobs have been uncouthly mundane. One of my friends always complains that I'm full of random stories, so I've taken to just alluding to odd aspects of them off-hand instead of telling them. I guess this makes me more mysterious? I mean, at my second job, in my first week I was sent down to get something out of a room having been given rather innocuous details of where to find it. When I arrived, the signs said under no uncertain terms that to enter the room at the wrong time would bring death. It was a particle accelerator, which I learned never came to full construction and was thus turned into storage. When I asked about that, my supervisor was all like, "eh, never mind that sign." That's about all the adventure I've got on the workplace.

HOWEVER! When one considers that he's a mere radiological tech in suburban Indiana, my dad's job is rife in adventure. So, in an odd generational role-reversal, I'll live vicariously through him.

As a resident of the Hoosier state, the Tom Petty song "Mary Jane's Last Dance" is of particular significance to everyone I know. I've read many many interpretations of what it means, but only in one of hundreds of posts on that song meanings website did I find an allusion to the story that my health/PE teacher gave me in high school. It goes like this: Indiana girl leads a wild life, tries to escape the banal country. Somewhere in the process, she ends up institutionalized in Indianapolis in the very hospital where I was born. As a long-term, stable resident, she was allowed on a trip to the observation deck of what was at the time (and probably still is) the tallest building in the city. Obviously, they tried to be careful about not letting them near windows, but observation decks are built around that concern. Eventually, she excused herself to the restroom, wherein she found an unguarded window and promptly jumped out.

As it would happen, my dad was a young X-ray tech at the time. When the body arrived at the morgue, the powers that be decided that it was an invaluable asset to science for her to have a post-mortum full body scan. My father was the attending tech.

As he described it, every inch of her body felt like a sponge. The fact that there was actually anything to be put on the examination table and not just in a couple of buckets came about because she happened to land on a tree planted on the mezzanine ceiling before plopping to the ground like a slinky.

Oddly enough, a few years ago he came home from work and described what he said was the most unpleasant experience of his career. An elderly man was walking through a door and tripped, but tried to catch himself by grabbing the frame. His bones being brittle, his forward momentum merely pulverized his shoulder and all the joints involved and his arm twisted backwards. He came to the hospital that way, afraid to move it back into position.

Other clients my dad has had include virtually everyone now in the NFL, an Egyptian mummy of a 12-year-old, and the world's tallest living woman.


Oh! I just remembered that a long time ago I posted somewhere random on these boards the story of how my older sister (now a doctor, then a subintern or whatever they're called) described her day. I'll post that again!

An old woman came into the emergency room complaining of stomach cramps. My sister did the routine checkup spiel as the family in the room debated with one another about whether or not to sign the DNR (do not resuscitate) forms for her. When my sister put her hand over the woman's chest, she felt a gentle bump and realized that the woman had hemorrhaged. In a panic, she called for the attending (knowing more or less that nothing could be done) and at that, the family of the old woman started screaming at each other over whether or not to sign the (now virtually redundant) DNR forms. That was the last thing the lady heard before she died.