CHEST TUBE BLOW DARTS

(Kids, do not try this at home! I was a trained Health care professional when I started screwing around with sharp objects that fly through the air.)

The rear doors on the ambulance flew open. My partner, Tim, unlatched the gurney and pulled it out as I continued doing CPR on our elderly patient.

Coming down off adrenaline has never been easy for me. So after transferring our patient to the waiting hands of the emergency room staff and cleaning the blood and yuck out of the ambulance, there wasn’t anything to do since we didn’t have another call to go on.

I was bored and when I’m bored I get into things I shouldn’t.  Looking around the E.R. for something to amuse myself with, I immediately headed for the supply room.

Some people collect stamps, I go shopping in hospital supply rooms.

It is a wondrous place filled with every conceivable item and gadget that a hospital uses or that a wayward medic would want to steal, um, I mean use or restock his ambulance with.

A shelf full of chest tubes caught my eye and I grabbed one. Chest tubes are just that, tubes you stick into someone’s chest when they have a pneumothorax, aka a collapsed lung.

Chest tubes are two-foot long clear plastic hollow tubes that are open at both ends, like a giant straw.

Moving along the wall of carts I pulled open a drawer full of cardiac needles. These are much longer than the type of needle you get a shot in the arm with. Cardiac needles can be over five inches long.

I held both of them in front of me wondering why I was so instinctively drawn to these two items.

I felt fate had brought me here and all I had to do was figure out why. I knew from past experience that I was up to no good. Either I would end up breaking something or hurting myself or someone else.

The force of these two objects in my hands was overwhelming. What did Obi-wan Kan-obi intend for me to do with these things? I began to sweat heavily. I had to know.

I ripped open the sterile package containing the chest tube, wasting a $150.00 piece of equipment. Then I ripped open the sterile cardiac needle, another $50.00 down the drain. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do. Sacrifices have to be made and this was just too important to worry about trivial things such as cost or being wasteful.

I felt this just might be a turning point in my life. I could be on the verge of a great discovery that could change the practice of medicine, as we know it.

If it didn’t and I was wrong, well then I would deny everything and lie like a dog, saying I had found the very expensive supplies lying on the ground already opened.

I would say incredulously, “What was someone thinking, wasting perfectly good equipment when there are children in Russia who would give their last bottle of vodka for some chest tubes and cardiac needles!”

I studied the now un-sterile objects and thought, “If I were a chest tube and a cardiac needle, what would I do?”

Then I remembered a picture in a National Geographic Magazine showing a pigmy in the jungle holding a blowgun.

“Yea that’s the ticket!”

I inserted the needle into the end of the chest tube. It fit perfectly.

Now I was on to something. Now it looked like something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. That’s a good thing.

Holding it up to eye level and looking down the length of the tube, my eyes focused on Tim, twenty yards down the hall bending over some equipment, his big butt sticking up in the air.

I thought, “Nah, no way this thing could shoot that far and if it did, it would probably just bounce right off is ass.”

My quest for knowledge was far too great to turn back now. Besides, the hospital had almost $200 invested in my little experiment.

Without thinking I put my mouth to the end of the tube, inhaled as much air as I could hold and blew hard.

I knew as soon as the air left my lungs I was in deep shit.

I don’t think I have ever seen anything fly through the air that fast and with such force. I hadn’t even taken my lips off the tube when Tim let out a God-awful blood-curdling scream.

The intensity of the scream scared me so much I dropped the chest tube and frantically looked around for a place to hide.

I heard a tray of glass and metal crash to the floor.

An angry doctor yelled, “What in the hell?”

I heard footsteps running everywhere. I had to hide and fast, or at least look as innocent as possible! I scooped up the chest tube and ducked back into the supply room just as two doctors and a nurse ran past. I pressed my body up against the wall but then decided I didn’t look very innocent. I looked like I had just shot someone, which I had.

I relaxed by body and casually looked around the corner. There was my partner, his hands clutching his buttocks, desperately looking over his shoulder and turning in circles like a dog chasing its tail.

The horrified and totally bewildered expression on his face told me he didn’t have the foggiest idea what just happened to him. He kept turning around and around, looking in all directions for the five hundred pound bumblebee that just stung him. He didn’t know what the hell he was looking for but it was something terrible for sure.

I was instantly overcome by an uncontrollable case of the giggles.

By now the doctors and nurses had surrounded him and were trying to figure out why this stupid paramedic was standing in their emergency room screaming his head off.

One of the doctors bent over to examine Tim’s rear-end while two nurses tried to restrain him. Tim was still looking over his shoulder yelling, “WHAT THE HELL IS IT? JESUS GOD WHAT THE HELL IS IT?”

The doctor said, “Well it looks like the hub of a needle. How the heck did it get in there, did you sit on it?”

Tim’s voice rose two octaves, “NO I DIDN’T SIT ON IT, I DIDN’T SIT ON ANYTHING! I LEANED OVER THIS BACKBOARD AND WHAM, IT GOT ME!”

I covered my mouth with both hands to muffle my fits of laughter.

Another doctor bent down and looked at Tim’s butt closely then nodded in agreement with the first diagnosis. It definitely looked like a needle stuck in his wazoo.

Tim’s voice now sounded like a ten-year-old choirboy, “WHAT IS IT? TAKE IT OUT! FOR CHIST SAKE TAKE IT OUT!”

I decided this would be a good time to make my entrance. I waited for one of the doctors to touch the needle again and for Tim to scream bloody murder, and then I scurried around the corner in the opposite direction. I left the hospital via a side door and came back in through the ‘Ambulance Only’ entrance.

When Tim saw me he broke free of the nurses, limped over to me and nearly hugging me, sobbed, “Holy shit Mike, something’s in my ass, take it out!”

I swiftly turned him around, grabbed the needle and yanked it out of his buttock.

He let out a scream and cried, “Holy crap what are you doing?”

I held the long silver piece of metal up in front of his face and said, “Hey, this is a cardiac needle. How the hell did you get this stuck in your butt? What’d you do, sit on it or something?”

He grabbed the needle and hopelessly stated his case again, “NO Dammit, I did not sit on anything. All I was doing was bending over and…”

On he went about how he was just minding his own business and this needle suddenly materialized in his butt.

For the rest of the night I watched him, (with the beginning pangs of guilt) sit on one butt cheek and mumble, “I didn’t sit on it, I’m sure I didn’t. One minute it wasn’t there and the next WHAM! I don’t understand it.”

To this day, when I remember how high he screamed when the needle hit I laugh so hard I nearly pass out.

I never confessed to blow-gunning my partner. It is something that I will have to live with for the rest of my life.

Something the Saint standing at the Pearly Gates of Heaven will be asking me about (among a long list of other shenanigans) before he pushes a button and the stairs to Heaven collapse into a big slide and I take the big garbage shoot ride down to Hell.

I’ve used my chest tube blowgun since then, but only for educational purposes.