Doctors Gone Wild!

I swear, fiction is nothing compared to the dramas of every day occurrences. Case and point, yesterday while sitting in an overcrowded waiting room at the hospital I saw the scariest thing. It wasn't the usual scary occurrence that seems to happen whenever I'm visiting General Hospital. Like the time I was waiting in optometry and a guy sitting next to me begins telling me about how he lost his eye in a car accident. He wasn't wearing a patch or anything over the hollow gouged out socket. He'd told me that after the accident he found the eye on the car floor, picked a few pieces of shattered glass off of it and put it in his pocket hoping doctors could reattach it......Anyways, no, I didn't experience anything like that yesterday. What I experienced wasn't seated next to me or on a gurney, but up on the waiting room television monitor. Local News.

After seeing the News about a major fire in the embarcadero Bart station the next story caught everybody's attention. Local Oakland police and Sheriff's deputies were at Highland Hospital in Oakland where a Top NeuroSurgeon had become aggressive and abusive when told he'd have to wait 2hrs to perform spinal surgery on a patient. A nurse called police and when they arrived the surgeon became even more aggessive, using foul language and raising his fists toward police in an aggressive manner. I picture a Robert De Niro looking surgeon staring down police while asking "You Want A Piece of Me?" Finally, after a scuffle, the police wrestled the surgeon down and arrested him for obstruction of justice or something like that. During the altercation police recognized alcohol on the breath of the surgeon but did not press charges of public intoxication.

Actually, there is no law against surgeons drinking alcohol before surgery, however, hospital policy prohibits employees working while impaired in any way by drugs or alcohol. Yeah, it does sound weird. My question was, where is the patient during all of this? Well the patient was still in the emergency room and thank God had no idea of the altercation. The patient's surgery was performed the next day by an unimpaired surgeon and was successful.

So the next time you go in for surgery you might want to have your surgeon take a breathlizer test as part of the pre-operative checkoffs. Because you never know when Doctor Feelgood has consulted with his colleagues Dr. Johnnie Walker or Dr. Jack Daniels before entering the operating room.

I just had to enter "Drunken Surgeon" into my web browser for kicks.