Take the Scissors Away

A first look at what Dr. White's hell is like.

Dr. White sighed, yet again, at the secretary who was talking to her friend Trudy. The doctor wondered how at someplace, somewhere, people were still giving their daughters names like 'Trudy' and 'Fanny.' Then, again, the ER's secretary was named 'Monica', a name that did not suit the woman who would look more in place at a 1940's diner as a waitress handing you and your date a milkshake, complete with two straws.

“Monica. Monica? Monica! Get off the phone!”

Monica held up a hand and continued her morning gossip.

Dr. White reached over and took the phone from her. “Sorry, she'll have to gossip with you later.” He slammed phone back on its receiver.

“Monica, how many times have I told you to not clog this ER's phone lines with your petty calls. You can do that on your own time, not this hospital's.” Monica was looking off in a direction that was not on the ER chief's face. “Monica, did you even hear me?”

Monica tapped her chin in thought, which must have been difficult for her. “I'm counting....”

“Wonderful.” Dr. White rolled his eyes.

It was a Friday, which was usually an eventful day in the ER, but with a full moon in the sky, even the little rat nurses were bracing themselves for the night's patients at nine-thirty in the morning. With the day being the thirteenth, weird things usually showed up, just to make things more interesting. Superstitious as this train of thought was, the doctor tried to pass it off as nothing to worry over to his staff, but at the same time he was praying for a sane night.

Dr. White decided now would be a good time to make the rounds. As he looked over the chart about a man with a busted, bleeding knee, he could hear Monica chatting away in a loud whisper. He glared at her, and her only response was to shrug her shoulders as if this was something she couldn't control.

“Okay, Mr. Hills, how did you do it this time?” Mr. Hills showed up at the ER quite frequently. He was one of those few who could survive the oddest of freak-accidents: scissors up the nose, falling into a porch up to his left thigh, random snake bites, severe burns from broken rotisserie equipment from infomercials. If it could happen, it would.

“I fell from a tree.”

“Doing what?”

Mr. Hills looked from side-to-side, like he was about to tell a life-changing secret. “This is going to sound stupid, but my cat wouldn't come down.”

Dr. White suppressed a grin, saying,”Why was it so important that the cat had to come down?”

“Well, she usually comes in at dinnertime, but she got so high that she couldn't figure out how to get down...and...I didn't really fall down from a tree.”

“What did you really fall from, then?” The freak part was coming earlier than usual.

Mr. Hill looked down. “...rafters.”

“In the attic?” The doctor was being hopeful at this guess.

“No, no, I don't have an attic. But I do have a basement. It's not finished yet, but in another month or so, I'm going to make it into a man cave, and-”

Dr. White was getting closer to the wacky truth. “We both know you don't need a man cave, because you don't have a wife to run from. Now, tell me, what kind of rafters did you fall from.”

“You know that big tall shop-like building in my backyard?”

“No.”

“I showed you last time you came by.”

“I have never been to your house.” Dr. White was getting tired of the word version of dodge ball. “Did you fall from the rafters in your shop?”

“You see-”

“No, I don't see.” After scratching out some quick doodles on part of the chart, mostly stick-figures screaming 'kill me now', the doctor sighed again, and said,”What possessed you to climb that high over a cat?”

“She's going to have kittens. I didn't want her to have them way up there, it's dangerous.”

Dr. White was screaming inside. “Of course, but you do realize it's also dangerous for you to be up that high, too?”

Mr. Hills scratched his head. “I guess.”

In Dr. White's reality, he had thrown the chart against the wall long ago, and was screaming at Mr. Hills, telling him he was a 'f*****g idiot.' But in everyone's reality, he wrote down how the dumbass had injured himself, and handed the chart off to the closest intern.

Pulling the curtain away from the next patient, Dr. White was greeted with the somewhat usual phrase -for him at least- ,”You ain't white.”

The doctor rolled his eyes. “I'm aware of my skin color-”

“You ain't no more white than I am!” The patient chuckled at himself. “You're indian. How'd you get a name like that?”

Dr. White sighed, and then responded in the increasingly normal manner,” A long time ago, some white people thought it would be a great idea to give Native Americans last names, like it would be easier to keep up with us or something. And since my ancestors were pleasant to be around, they were given the last name of 'white.' The end.”

The patient stared at the doctor for a moment, then said, “That's it?”

“That's it. Now let me look at your f*****g bleeding nose before I call on my dead relatives to curse you.”

Once again, we have veered of into the doctor's world. That is what he had wished he could have said, while packing the man's nose, but he just got to patch the patient and let him go. 

And, also once again, Dr. White wondered how med school ended up making him head of this ER and not someone else. Half the time he felt as though he was a preschool teacher trying to get his staff to color inside the lines and was failing miserably. Especially when someone's child made their way out of the waiting room with a pair of construction paper grade scissors, ready to cut his pony-tailed hair. After going around the nurse's station a few times, Dr. White finally manged to pick the kid up and handed him to the nearest adult in the waiting area.

“Someone take the scissors away from this kid, and keep him here.”

“Why keep your hair that long, anyway?” said an elderly woman nearby.

“For spiritual reasons, and because I enjoy making you people question things out of your comfort zone.”

In everyone's reality, he said,” Just keep him here.”

And this was only at ten-thirty in the morning.