TORONTO – As soon as lawyer Marlene Davidson was rushed to hospital after slipping and fracturing her tibia, the doctor took one look at the blood pouring out of her leg and the protruding fragments of bone before asking her if the problem was that she was actually just pregnant and didn’t know it.
“Look, I know you say you’re in massive amounts of pain from ‘splitting your giant leg bone in half,’” Dr. Steven White counselled the 35-year-old calmly, “but I’ve seen this kind of issue in women before, and nine times out of ten it’s lady parts-related. Trust me, this level of hysteria only presents when pregnancy hormones are involved.”
After Marlene attempted to point out the fact that she’d had a hysterectomy a year ago, the doctor pointed to the medical degree hanging on his wall. “See that? That took me a good couple years to get, especially since I failed a few courses because all that female stuff was gross and my gynaecology teacher was a real bitch. So I’m pretty sure that makes me the expert when it comes to knowing what’s going on in your body.”
Ms. Davidson was discharged from the hospital later that day after being given a handful of prenatal vitamins and a single Tylenol.
“I tried to explain that there was no way I could be pregnant and that I desperately needed surgery, but every time I asked him to look at my leg, the doctor just put his fingers in his ears and shouted ‘La la la, I can’t hear you,’” she said, attempting to drag herself towards a taxi on makeshift crutches. “The closest I got was when he took a quick glance at the blood pooling on the floor and then muttered something about periods.”
“This is even worse than the time last year that I got a concussion and the walk-in clinician prescribed six months’ worth of birth control for it.”
At press time, Marlene had died of blood loss from her leg after five subsequent doctors diagnosed her with needing to lose some weight.
