A traumatic death
Dr Aderhold has a famous speech entitled "Hill-Billys are Poikilothermic." The speech was first given some warm night when he was trauma chief, and the blood in the local hill-billy population was coursing with energy. Dr Aderhold is a very entertaining, animated speaker, and even more so when he is frustrated. The night of the inaugural poikilotherm speech, it had been very warm, and the local hill billy population was out in full force, with a small percentage (meaning a large real number) winding up in the ER under his care. I will not even attempt to recount the substance of the poikilotherm speech, since the effect is lost when it is not given by a bug-eyed, wildly gesticulating, eloquent trauma chief with hair and glasses somewhat askew. In any case, the tale will outlive Dr Aderhold's time with us which is set to expire in 5 months.
A week ago I was in the "how-much-longer-'til-winter-is-over-mood," otherwise known as the belief that global warming is mere wishful thinking. Then Saturday things got down-right balmy. I was told, though I never got out of the hospital to witness it, that temperatures were in the 70's. Unfortunately, the hill billys groggily emerged from hibernation, saw the beauty of the January day, sunned themselves on the rocks, and then began zipping around doing hill billy things.
Its still balmy and warm, but I'm not on call. Therefore I'm sunning myself on the rocks while my fellow trauma chief deals with newly energized poikilotherms.
On leaving my apartment to write this to you all, I witnessed a traumatic death right outside of my apartment. There was a brief struggle as the soon dead one was ensnared by numerous roaps. He struggled valiantly, beating frantically against both the roaps and the attacker. However, the winged dead one was soon subdued by the eight-legged arachnoid. I left with a few tears in my eye as the engorged spider feasted on dead moth.
What a world it is. So beautiful, yet so permeated by death.
A week ago I was in the "how-much-longer-'til-winter-is-over-mood," otherwise known as the belief that global warming is mere wishful thinking. Then Saturday things got down-right balmy. I was told, though I never got out of the hospital to witness it, that temperatures were in the 70's. Unfortunately, the hill billys groggily emerged from hibernation, saw the beauty of the January day, sunned themselves on the rocks, and then began zipping around doing hill billy things.
Its still balmy and warm, but I'm not on call. Therefore I'm sunning myself on the rocks while my fellow trauma chief deals with newly energized poikilotherms.
On leaving my apartment to write this to you all, I witnessed a traumatic death right outside of my apartment. There was a brief struggle as the soon dead one was ensnared by numerous roaps. He struggled valiantly, beating frantically against both the roaps and the attacker. However, the winged dead one was soon subdued by the eight-legged arachnoid. I left with a few tears in my eye as the engorged spider feasted on dead moth.
What a world it is. So beautiful, yet so permeated by death.
posted by The Mad Hatter at 6:51 PM
4 Comments:
oh my...such a sad ending. Just thinking of the moth getting wrapped up like that raises my claustrophobic panic level!
Dad
It makes me feel good, somehow, to see the brilliant trauma surgeon misspell 'rope.'
I'm relieved to hear the actual ending... that it wasn't a human.
It's been a long time since I've seen you. How are you?
Dorcas,
My spelling has deteriorated rapidly. See, doctors don't know how to spell, so they just scrawl illegible gibberish leaving others to sort out what the original intention was. While this has its down side with regards to communication with other hospital employees, it has its benefits when lawyers are trying to figure out what you wrote.
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