Medical Malaise

Unless you have a medical story to tell with vivid details, you might as well hide behind a curtain at your next social gathering. No one wants to talk to a medically boring person with no eventful tales of blood poisoning, near misses, close encounters with a crazed billy goat, or at least injury to a major artery. If you think your experience of going through labor and delivery is going to earn you accolades , forget it; it doesn't matter if your were in labor 12 hours and your baby had the head and shoulders the size of a Buick, and you did it w/o any pain meds, forget it sister. Unless you developed toxemia or had a on-call delivery doctor that resembled Ernest Borgenine, and spoke to you only in Cantonese, your story's' about as interesting as German shoe styles. The only medical excitement that I can even mention let alone hold an audience captive, is my regular fainting bouts anytime I'm on vacation in a foreign country. Most of the time its unexplainable except for low blood pressure, food poisoning or elevation change. While my family poses for tourist pictures, I'm spending time filling out forms in the local ER or clinic trying to communicate to the staff that I want my pants back. Yes, people want to hear how you removed a splinter the size of your femur from your palm while working on restoring the neighborhood church's pews. Go ahead, tell them how you nearly lost an eye from a flying sandbelt, and you'll have an audience pour their drinks on their shoes. Tell them how your Habitat for Humanity construction job nearly caused you to electrocute yourself while installing vanity bulbs into the Boys & Girls Club locker room; you'll get a phone call from the mayor with that story. You can try to mention how you were bit by an unknown insect and your throat swelled up the size of a toad while driving an 18 wheeler full of dairy cows; but unless you were aiding Homeland Security on your CB radio at the same time while following a suspicious car full of over dressed church goers in Utah, you might as well tell them you inhaled Press-On Nails adhesive, they'd laugh so hard.