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

Sweet Baby James: Hymns for Agnostics

If you grew up when I did, and leaned more toward folk than rock, you probably wanted to be James Taylor if you were a guy, and wanted to be with him if not.

That voice - that easy, silky, rangy, fluid voice - was the backdrop to much of my teenagehood, along with the likes of Carly Simon, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack and Gordon Lightfoot.

The lyrics, too, were as comfortable as your favorite pair of sandals; they were simple and straightforward, and could lift your heart and soul without a lot of show. That's why, when I read a JT interview in a flight magazine two days ago, something he said popped out at me: that some of his songs are like "hymns for agnostics, an attempt at some sort of spiritual food, at finding spiritual satisfaction."

I've heard a few of the songs on the just-released album, "Before This World" (his first new collection of work in 13 years), and they don't disappoint...it's the same sweet, sweet baby James; clear and true and yearning. And once again, though he's not that cool young guy with the guitar coloring my daydreams, and I am not that fresh-faced young girl in a peasant blouse wondering where life would take me, I still want to be with him. 

© 2015 A Bit of Brie/Anitabrie