My Funny Story

Well Brian, your persistence has paid off. I'll give you one of my favorite humorous events.

I worked on a Diabetic/Transplant Unit. We did transplants on about any age. One day, one of our peds transplant patients was in for some rejection problems. He wasn't my patient, but I could hear him yelling at the nurse and the doctor from the nurses station. The yelling had gone on for about 30 minutes when I decided to find out what the problem was. Well, the doctor, the nurse and the patient's mom were trying to convince this 8-year old boy that he needed an I.V. He refused. Another 15-20 minutes went by and he was under the bed, screaming at the 3 of them to get out. I approached them and said, "let me give it a try." I entered the room and asked him if he'd let me start an I.V. on him. Of course, he started yelling at me to get out. I tried to think of my Developmental Psych (something I had never seen a use for). This kid was 8, maybe 6 or so developmentally. So what do 6-8 year olds think is funny. Anything ANAL. I looked at the kid and said, "look, if you come out from under the bed and let me start an I.V., I'll sit in here and have a farting contest with you." He quit yelling immediately. He looked at me and said, "no way, you're just trying to get me out of here." I said, "Really. You've been under the bed for a half hour now. What's another half hour. We'll sit here and see who can make the grossest farting noises." He said, "you're not lying are you." I assured him I wasn't. He looked at me, held out his arm and said, "go for it." I put the I.V. in. We made a couple of farting noises. The doc, his nurse and his mother heard him laughing and walked into the room. The kid yells, "mom, we're going to have a farting contest." Mom looked at me, smiled, and said, "pretty good" as she pointed to her head. All ended well although his nurse could hardly tell the other nurses on the unit what was going on without busting out laughing herself.