Everyone says stupid things

"I can play hardball as well as anybody. That's what I did, cut people's hearts out. On the other hand, I do it to cure them, to heal them, to make them better."BILL FRIST, the Senate majority leader and a transplant surgeon.
As posted in the NY Times February 2, 2005

I honestly am fully aware that this quote came from a zealot asshole. I was aware that he is an asshole prior to this quote. I know my mother has sent him a pretty nice piece of chump change every year for the past few years. That being said, we still need to identify the problem.

Transplant surgeons are a rare breed, you see. I have a tale from a close relative about these particular specialists. My relative is prime for stories such as these. I relish having had such a good diarist available while I was growing up. Keep in mind this relative has perhaps scarred any capability I may have had for normalcy, by storing a morgue gurney in our garage, attached to my parent's cute mediterranean townhouse in Valencia, California. This gurney became a running joke around the neighborhood about the weird "@#$%& family". Such a tragic childhood.

Anyway, the story is that my relative, (we'll call him Midgie from now on)
spent a great deal of time in operating rooms as part of his career in medical equipment sales. Midgie grew to love physicians, nurses, and those that work in the medical field. He was still glad that he had bombed on his Harvard Med interview because he would've missed his experience as a Lake Tahoe ski instructor. (The scene at UC Berkeley: Wearing his recently permed afro, a wine colored polyester shirt open to right above the naval, and a pair of blue jeans that not only hugged his tiny rear, but quite unfashionably sported bell-bottoms in the late '70s. Imagine blue eyes, glassy and bloodshot from the previous night's experience with PCP, Pot, and Chablis. Upon being questioned by the Harvard interviewer about Midgie's racial designation on his app - Cherokee Indian- this able denizen of the UC system stated "It's all true, man."

My Midgie was in the operating room of an open heart surgery in the mid '80s. He had properly scrubbed, and wore his still-crisp feeling olive pajamas proudly. As Midgie watched the surgical team remove the rather-obese patient's heart, and carefully swap it for the rosy organ that had been loving stored on ice in the styrofoam igloo, he let out a deep exhale. Midgie wondered if the surgery, as viewed by the layman, was as momentous as he had felt it to be. Perhaps he truly had missed his calling as a practitioner of the medical art.

As soon as this thought had crossed Midgie's addled mind, a "whoops" was heard from the brave surgeon (assisting, of course) who had held the new, fragile, unmarred organ in his hands. Like the spaghetti in the Bounty paper towel commercial, the heart flung in a gentle arc through the air, and landed with a SPLAT on the sanitized tile.

The cardiologist, still hovering near the obese patient's chest, quickly pulled down his protective mask and stared at the other surgeon in horror. Three ominous seconds of silence passed. The cardiologist bent at the waist, picked up the defaced organ, wiped it off with a nearby swab, and plunked it in the patient's chest.

Midgie always laughs when he tells this story. He describes his confrontation with the Cardiologist later, as they are chainsmoking just outside of the ER entrance. Midgie smoked in silence, trying to formulate the best way to question the Specialist. After stubbing out his Camel, the Good Doctor said, "If anything happens I know you will help me out here. Your monitors are new this year, and we could always pass off a discrepancy as one of the lemons."

Bill Frist may be a Physician on The Hill, which in my mind is much better than any litigious personal injury attorney we stick there, but he hails from the wackiest breed of Doctors around. I'm glad he feels he can savagely tear someone's heart out, and opt not to replace it. I am not sure if he has just been hanging out with W for too long, or if he is just preparing for a second term of idiocy.