Adult Notes

Two off-color but very funny incidents in the ED today:

Over the last few months I’ve been experimenting with growing a beard. Not a beard, really, but something called “designer stubble.” I’m striving to maintain that semi-hunky five day growth so that I look like I’ve been too busy saving lives to attend to personal grooming and so someone besides the nursing home patient with dementia will mistake me for Dr. McDreamy. (True story.) I’m being very careful to try to keep it short, not only for the McDreamy factor, but because I know that if I let it get much longer I won’t be able to ignore the sensation that there’s probably a piece of a Spaghetti-O left in there someplace. There are now four ED docs in the facial hair derby growing winter beards, which is especially strange when you consider that we are in Florida and today there was a record high for Daytona of 85 degrees.

I’m new at the quest for stubble, so I’ve been asking folks at work what they think of the current effort. The reviews have been mixed, about 50-50 for the clean shaven look or the current scruffy façade. But today one of the unit clerks suggested that I adopt a look which removes the stubble over the cheeks, leaving the hair around the mouth and chin in what is apparently called a “love patch.”

This was a new term to me, but not to anyone else in the ED. What was new for everyone was how easily we were able to transition the term “love patch” into the singular best composition in human history. I am, of course, referring to “Love Shack” by the B-52’s. So it was in tribute that soon we were rolling back and forth in our swivel chairs with the plastic wheels, chanting:

“Love Patch!
Baby Love Patch!
Cuz the Love Patch is a little ol’ place where we can
Get To-geth-er!”

We’re still working out how to handle, “Tin Roof! Rusted!” but we’re sure something will come to us.

Speaking of music and adult themes, regular readers of The Blog will recall that I’ve noted the tendency of our voice-recognition software system to interpret my pronunciation of the word cardiovascular (pertaining to the heart and blood vessels) as cremaster (pertaining to a muscle layer of the scrotum). I was dictating the results of listening to the heart when the alternate term showed up on-screen. This was noted by one of my esteemed colleagues, who inquired, “What does that sound like, anyway?”

After intense discussion, we decided that each person’s exam probably sings its own tune. In my case, with the spouse currently located 800 miles away and several weeks between conjugal visits, it sounds like a small male chorus singing “Please Release Me….Let Me Go!”