Family Fun

Ms. Crouton: "Hello?"

Annie: "Hi, this is Annie, with Dr. Grumpy's office. I'm still working on getting your medication, Shnoodleblob, authorized, but in the meantime we do have samples you can pick up so you can get through the week."

Ms. Crouton: "You do? Oh, THANK YOU! That really helps. What time are you open to?"

Annie: "We'll be here until 4:30 today and..."

Ms. Crouton: "No... I don't get off work until 5:00 today, and I actually have to get off the phone now because my meeting is starting... can you call my mom for me? She knows I take this, and she's near your office anyway. She'll pick it up and I'll get it from her later."

Annie: "I..."

Ms. Crouton: "My meeting is starting! Please call her! 867-5309! Thank you!"

 

(click)

Annie sighs.

 

Ms. Crouton's Mom: "Hello?"

Annie: "Hi, this is Annie, calling from Dr. Grumpy's office. Your daughter, Ms. Crouton, can't get by to pick up her medication, and asked me to call you since she says you're near our office."

Ms. Crouton's Mom: "Can you please call my daughter back and tell her to go fuck herself? Thank you."

 

(click)

Annie sighs.

Never mind

Dr. Grumpy: "Any major illnesses run in your family?"

Ms. Dna: "Cancer, high blood pressure, type-2 diabetes... wait, do you mean in my family?"

Dr. Grumpy: "Uh, yeah."

Ms. Dna: "Oh, never mind then. They're all pretty healthy."

Back in 2023

But, until then, I'm again sharing my favorite Christmas song.

 

Saluting a colleague

Today's post is written to express my admiration for another local neurologist, Dr. I. V. Leeg, for his remarkable dedication to principles.

Dr. Leeg attended a well-known college and medical school. While the majority of people I've met who attended his school act like decent human beings, Dr. Leeg realizes that being in massive educational debt up to your eyeballs is worth nothing if you don't continuously remind other docs that they're road apples compared to you.

Dr. Grumpy went to public schools all the way up until medical school, when I went to a small private medical school no one else on Earth has heard of except for the 6 of us who graduated from there. My reason for going there? It was the only medical school I got into.

When I first met Dr. Leeg I tried to make idle chatter with him for a few minutes, and asked him what had brought him to this neck of the woods. Trying to be polite, he said "to improve the crappy quality of neurological care in Grumpyville."

Last year Dr. Leeg was fired from a hospital case because the family thought he was arrogant and condescending. They then asked for me to take over. In his sign-off note, he kindly put in the chart that he'd been "dismissed in favor of a physician of lesser education."

Recently a patient transferred care from Dr. Leeg to my practice, so I sent over a routine request for records. A week later we received them in the mail. At the end of the chart notes was a phone memo that said, "the patient has transferred care to Dr. Grumpy. I personally called to warn her of the risks involved in seeing a physician who is a product of public education. She understood, and unreasonably insisted on continuing with her plan to leave my practice".

So here's a salute to Dr. Leeg, for his remarkable devotion to making sure that us lesser physicians know our place in the world.

Open mic post

Doing some reading over the weekend, and came across this pic. I'm opening up the floor for caption ideas. Mine is under it.

 

“Pinch me again and you’ll need dental work”

 

 

"I'll never listen to Mozart the same way again."

Found this at Goodwill. I can only assume someone in OB/GYN marketing was trying to think outside of the pens & post-it notes box.

The personal touch

 Seen in a chart:

Random pictures

Time to hit the mailbag for stuff you guys have sent in.

Here we have an ad for a healthcare supply manufacturer.

Let's face it, if your most "innovative respiratory product" in the last 43 years is a cotton swab... I'm just sayin'.

Next, from the "hey, whose doesn't?" category, is this bumper sticker:

This license plate is presented without comment:

Next is this ER patient board item, which has either the wrong vowel or too many "r"'s. I'm not going to guess.

 

And finally we have this fortune cookie. Which probably means you've just been poisoned and need Ipecac.

 

Yes

Dr. Grumpy: "How are you doing?"

Ms. Random: "The morning is a complete loss so far. Truck empty. Overdoing it. Couldn't focus. Throwing things. Cats. Dogs. Crashes. Broken stuff. Shit. You ever have that kind of day?"

Modern technology

Mr. Galliform: "Annie asked me to type up my concerns and bring them in before my wife's visit."

Hands me a paper.

Dr. Grumpy: "Thank you, let me see. So sleep has been an issue?"

Mr. Galliform: "Yeah, she's often up pacing the hall and mumbling."

Dr. Grumpy: "Is she still driving?"

Mr. Galliform: "Yes, and I'd like you to discuss it with her, she's had all kinds of problems, and I think she needs to stop. I wrote some of that down towards the bottom."

Dr. Grumpy: "Oh, okay... she WHAT?"

Mr. Galliform: "Um, she's still driving, and it's causing problems."

Dr. Grumpy: "NO! Here, you wrote 'she frequently locks turkeys in the car'! When did that start? Why turkeys? That's a new one to me."

Mr. Galliform: "WHAT? Let me see... Oh, that must be autocorrect, it should say 'she frequently locks her keys in the car.'"

Pause

Mr. Galliform: "I have to admit, your version is more interesting."

Dr. Grumpy: "I bet."

Occupation

Dr. Grumpy: "Are you allergic to any medications?"

Ms. Golconda: "No."

Dr. Grumpy: "What kind of work do you do? Or are you retired?"

Ms. Golconda: "I'm a kept woman. And I'm very good at it."

Somewhere, across the sea, my readers write

Reader Alan K., from Israel, says his local grocery store recently had some issues with their "translate to English" website feature:

 

Little Shop of Horrors

This is Craig, reporting from the bakery.

For unclear reasons Local Grocery recently had a day where the store (for that matter the entire strip mall) was overrun with flies. We have no idea why. It was kind of like The Amityville Horror, but with a produce section and canned soup aisle.

Since this isn't exactly the kind of thing that attracts people to grocery stores, the management pulled out all the stops to get rid of them, with exterminators, zappers, No-Pest strips... everything short of calling Rent-a-Frog.

 

Hi, Ho. You rang?

 

Anyway, this particular night my shift-mate happened to be a girl named Marie (I kind-of know her, which can be kind-of embarrassing).

As the shift died down and closing time inched up, we began running out of things to clean, donuts to box-up, and cake orders to enter. So Marie decided to turn her attention to dealing with the flies.

She wandered off to get a fly-swatter, but came back with something entirely different.

Apparently, Local Grocery's floral & plant department had recently gotten in a shipment of Venus Flytraps for Halloween.

 

 

 

Oops, I meant Dionaea muscipula:

 

 

So Marie noticed them, piled them into a shopping cart, pushed it back to the bakery, and set them all over the counter, cake display, cookie island, and pretty much everywhere people looking for baked goods would be thrilled to encounter a carnivorous plant.

Marie, apparently having seen the Rick Moranis musical WAY too many times, was under the impression that the plants were aggressive stalk-and-ambush predators, capable of annihilating the store's swarm of flies in a matter of minutes (why they hadn't done so in the floral department didn't occur to her for some reason, and I learned long ago that arguing with her was pointless).

"I'm a mean green mother from... uh, the bakery department."

 

 

She got out her phone to film it, apparently thinking we were about to witness the Grumpyville Flytrap Massacre and it would really boost her YouTube channel. She was still waiting when the shift ended.

As anyone who's actually owned Venus Flytraps can tell you (like my Dad, who she apparently doesn't listen to), if they catch 1-2 flies a year it's impressive, the ones they do catch are the stupidest, slowest, ones of the swarm (it's called evolution, folks), and it takes at least a week to eat each one.

The store closed at 11. I got woken up at 3:00 a.m. by the morning shift donut & bagel baker, calling to find out why there were Venus Flytraps all over the bakery. I told him to call Marie and went back to sleep.

I heard her phone ringing in the next room as I dozed off.

Sigh

Dr. Grumpy: "Are you allergic to any medications?"

Mr. Protist: "Um... I got really sick once from amoebic dysentery. Does that count?"