Whats New, Doc?: a collection of funny, poignant, and even scandalous medical stories

"Medicine can be raunchy!" is the comment a friend made when I shared some of my stories with her. Another friend stated, "These stories are outrageous!" and his statement gave me an idea for the subtitle. My reply to these friends is, "But they are all true. In fact, you should have heard the ones I rejected, in the interest of propriety." According to my three children, belonging to a family in which both parents are physicians requires a strong constitution. Stories shared at the dinner table were sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes carried a moral, and often involved gory details, which my children would have preferred we left out. One of the stories with a moral was that of a teenager, who hitched a ride with a man, who was driving drunk. In the accident, which caused the young man to be brought to the E. R., he sustained severe abdominal injuries and lost his spleen. That day the moral of the story was, "Do not hitch hike!" DUI, became the dinner topic on the day when an injured, drunk patient was brought in to the E. R. after running his car into a parked patrol cruiser. My stories are short and pithy. They will make you laugh. They will make you cry. They will make you shake your head, for whatever reason. They will make you wish you had shared a story. They will make you healthy, because laughter is good medicine.