The Giggles

People often tell me I have a good sense of humor, and it's not because I'm necessarily funny myself, but because I laugh at everything. When I was in grade school, people used to say that if Fizzy didn't laugh at something, then it definitely wasn't funny.

In that vein, it is really inconvenient when I get a case of the giggles in front of a patient.

When I was on my EM rotation as a med student, this six-year-old kid named Justin was brought in by his parents. Justin had a toy gun stuck in his hand. It had this little wire antenna sticking out of it and this was the part that had mysteriously gotten through his skin and wouldn't come out.

Apparently, Justin had been begging for this toy all summer. But the store wasn't stocking them yet. Finally, at the end of the summer, the store got a shipment and his mother bought it for him. The gun had a little antenna with a red ball at the end of it. Literally, within fifteen minutes of him opening the gun, the red ball fell off and the gun got stuck in his hand. Except nobody, including his mom, could figure out how he managed to do it.

I don't know what it was. Maybe it was the exasperated and baffled tone in which Justin's mother told the story. Maybe it was the fact that nobody could figure out how that little piece of the gun got stuck in his hand... even his mom kept asking, "Justin, how did you do that?" Or maybe it was the image of the little six-year-old calmly sitting there with his new toy stuck in his hand.

In any case, when they were cutting the toy out of his hand, and Justin's grandfather said to the mother, "Well, he's not going to play with it anymore... is he?" I don't know, I just lost it.

It was SO BAD. I mean, I held it in, for the most part, but I really just wanted to bust out laughing. And that's probably happened to me at least a dozen times in my career.

Not funny, Fizzy.