How to start a moral panic

10 Jun

This young doc walks in,Dr. Calypso. His parents gave him a god- awful first name to go with that. He’s black-Irish good looking. He’d been in earlier, but left when he had an issue logging in. Now Cindy was going off about a 54 year old guy she knows dying after his second MI, because El Camino Hospital told him he had bad insurance, and it would cost 50k at least out of pocket to ream out his coronary arteries. I said,”Yes, this is America where health care is a privilege, not a right.”
“Right.” he says,” Tax dollars going to pay for for every fat guy’s bypass…”
“His family needed him, he owned a home. He dies a month after El Camino told him to look elsewhere for surgery.”, I tell him.
He sits down on a low chair, his long legs wide with his knees apart. Cindy is still chattering, now about people offering her joints at the guy’s funeral in Lodi yesterday. Calypso asks if any of us smoked salvia. Marti is talking about the guilt of smoking cigarettes.”No no. None of that stuff” I said.
“How about Janking?”
“What?”
It’s huffing.”
“None of us are that bad.”
“Fecal matter in a big jar. Leave it out in the sun.Put a balloon on the top.” Everybody got it so he didn’t say more.
“Doesn’t it have methane in it?”
“Yesss.” he says, “Plus other stuff. Makes your breath smell really good.”
“What that really sounds like is a kind of twisted eroticism”
“Oh, you would bring that up!” yells Marti to me, across the desk.
“Where did you learn this stuff, Dr. Calypso?” asks Cindy.
I start to walk away. “I’m such a child!” I could hear him say. Every one was laughing then.
He put in lab orders for 2 patients. He wasn’t at the desk when I came out of the med room again.

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