Wrong Line of Work, or Are My Issues Deeper?

Mr. Keebler came into the hospital Friday for a partial lipid bypass---no laughing matter, right? Definitely not something you should take lightly. So we did a full pre-op workup, knocked him out, wheeled him off into the operating room, and three hours later he was waking up groggy and weirded out by the anaesthesia. (We had decided to go with a general instead of a local. Some surgeons would disagree with this, but I assure you, Mr. Keebler's body weight more than made it safe.) I was standing right beside his bed when he awoke, and he asked me how the operation had gone. Well, I thought for a moment, and then I took a deep breath, and I tried to describe to him how his flaboid count was at a manageable level now because we were able to tie off the superior wall of the anterior palpus with minimal difficulty, and how his Osment valve was now nice and firmly square with the lower stem of his cell flume, which was going to essentially make his left lung three to five years younger than it was as long as he didn't put any undue stress on his gludials....and then I just stopped and lost it, and started giggling. I had to be completely honest with him. I know it's the strangest and dopiest thing ever, but we didn't do any operation on him. We'd gotten him into the O.R. with every intention of performing the surgery, but for whatever reason, we all just started trying to explain to Nurse Easterly what "jumping the shark" meant, because she'd never heard the phrase or even known about that episode of "Happy Days" where the Fonz did that stupid stunt, and that progressed into us talking about our favorite episodes of "WKRP in Cincinnati", and then out of nowhere, Dr. McBeame said, "Hey, who here has absolutely ZERO interest in doing any stupid surgery today?" and all our hands shot up simultaneously, and that just made us all bust out laughing, and we just could not go on. And Nurse Easterly kept goading me, saying "Just tie up his robe again and push him right back to his room, it'll be hilarious!" So now, standing beside Mr. Keebler's bed, I told him the story, except I couldn't help but giggle through it even as I apologized to him, and his face got so red with anger, like an apple almost, that I got into another laughing jag, this one complete with tears running down my cheeks. I must have said I was sorry five hundred times to the man, and I swore on my grandmother's grave that we really would do the operation on Monday (which, no fooling, we will), and I backed out of the room.

Was that immature, what I did? I probably shouldn't be so irresponsible, right? The Board told me when I was growing sea monkeys in that one patient's I.V. bottle that I had one last chance to straighten up and fly right. They were serious, too, let me tell you.

Yeah, now that I think about it, the Mr. Keebler thing was really bad. All I can say is, it was a Friday.