An Educated Man

[johnofgwent]

[color=var(--text_color_primary)]I may have posted this before. 

But it's a miserable day I'm off to the dentist and I need to remember funnier times. So here we go.

One of the strangest things a hospital nurse has ever called me is "an educated man"

I had very foolishly the day before, while fitting a new kitchen worktop in our newly extended home, taken off the eye goggles I was wearing to cut the hole for the sink to see better. I then knelt down, out my head into the sink base unit and squinted upwards to check the the sealant was properly applied where the sink sat in the worktop.

Some powdered fragments of the worktop board fell as fine dust ... right into my eye.

The problem was the material used to "glue" the wood components in that (MDF??) worktop decomposed to release ammonia.

I woke screaming at 5am or thereabouts.

Satan was jabbing my eye with his military grade pitchfork or so it felt.

My wife took me to the hospital where very quickly a nurse called for three or four pints of sterile saline as used for I/v lines, some plastic tubing and three big men.

Wondering what the **** treatment they were planning, I guess she read my expression of concern.

She explained that it was going to be necessary to flush my eye with ice cold saline using the I/v tube without a needle, but the stream of ice cold fluid was going to hurt like hell.... at least till the cold numbed the eye ..

Hence the big men ...

I was at that time doing work involving climbing radio and radar towers on a regular basis and while not likely to win any lumberjacking competitions ... She wasn't taking any chances.

I said I knew a fair bit about meditation and the like and if she waited a few minutes until I appeared to be wearing a silly grin .....

And off I went into the land of the gurus....

Ten minutes later it was all over. And the blokes seemed quite surprised they hadn't been needed. I told them about my meditation trick. They all said it clearly worked for me, but didn't fancy relying on that themselves .... But hey, it worked for you, so yeah, well done.

Packing away the kit, a little alarm chime went off on the nurses watch. Ah, she said, five to six. Five more minutes and I'm off shift, home to sleep, perchance to dream .....

Hang on, I said. Don't you know where that comes from.....

She said "vaguely. It's Shakespeare isn't it"

Yes, I said. It's part of Hamlets "to be, or not to be" sililoquy. And off I went, reciting from long distant memory of a script studied in my teens for English Literature and a school play for Drama.

So, I said, Hamlet, knowing his father was murdered by his ambitious brother who now wears the crown, wishes for death to take him. He ponders what blessings await him when the eternal sleep in the land from which no traveller returns comes to him ...

"Ah", my mistress of torture replied, "it's such a wonderful thing to have an EDUCATED man as a patient ..."

"... you threaten to strap them to a bed and have them restrained by rough men while you pour ice cold water into their eyes, and afterwards, they quote poetry to you ............."

And with that thought, I must be away to my dentist[/color][color=var(--text_color_secondary)]·[/color]