When Your Anesthesiologist is a Mean Girl

Did you hear the one about the anesthesiologist who made fun of her patient and added a bogus hemorrhoid diagnosis to his chart?  By now, almost everyone has. And we also know that our suspicions about medical personnel mocking us in the operating room when we're unconscious aren't unfounded after all. (Makes me really glad I got that mani-pedi before my surgery seven years ago.)

Here's the quick recap: this guy in Virginia goes in for a routine colonoscopy, sets his smartphone to record the doc's instructions and never turns it off. It winds up in his pants pocket, and the pants are placed beneath the operating table. After the procedure, headed home, he hits play...and finds out that the female doctor who put him under also put him under the microscope: she gave a running dialog on what she saw as his questionable manliness and low aesthetic appeal. Riffing like a 10-year-old, she lobbed insults ranging from his lack of courage when she was giving him the magic sleep potion, to intimating that a rash the poor fellow had was syphilis. She was the worst offender, but not the only one. A few other people in the room thought they were comedians, too.

You can guess what happened next: he sort of gave HER a colonoscopy. Well, he cleaned her out of $500,000, thanks to a sympathetic jury that probably imagined themselves the butt of some other doctors' jokes (sorry about that - it had to be said). It appears that her office is now closed for business, too. And I'm pretty sure that if she ever practices again, she will keep her big old piehole shut about the patients.

I'm kind of sorry about that, because I'm missing a great opportunity, and so is she. I would have let her make fun of me for $250,000.


© 2015 A Bit of Brie/Anitabrie