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    Emergency Laughter: It Wasn't Funny When It Happened, But it is Now!
    Emergency Laughter: It Wasn't Funny When It Happened, But it is Now!
    Emergency Laughter: It Wasn't Funny When It Happened, But it is Now!
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    Emergency Laughter: It Wasn't Funny When It Happened, But it is Now!

    By Mike Cyra

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    About this ebook

    Real life medical drama is OK... but true stories of emergency medicine that make you laugh out loud are better!
    Mike Cyra's comedic storytelling style of writing is hilarious. Experience what it's like to drive an Emergency Vehicle through traffic. Learn how not to deliver a baby; how to fake unconsciousness; fun ways to chop your fingers off and why controlling your imagination is so crucial, when you find yourself alone in a morgue refrigerator, and the lights go out.
    Stare death in the face and live to tell about it at the hands of vomiting children, and old women who spit food.

    Laughter helps the mind, heals the body and is a critical survival tool for all who deal with death, dying and disaster up close. Emergency Laughter shows that it’s OK to laugh at yourself and the world around you.

    Mike Cyra spent twenty years working in Emergency Medicine and Surgery as a Surgical Technologist, an Emergency Medical Technician on ambulances, a Bering Sea Medic and an instructor of Basic Life Support and Maritime Emergency Medicine.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMike Cyra
    Release dateMar 15, 2011
    ISBN9781301199501
    Emergency Laughter: It Wasn't Funny When It Happened, But it is Now!
    Author

    Mike Cyra

    Mike Cyra spent twenty-years working as a Surgical Technologist, an EMT, a Chief Medical Officer on a ship in Alaska’s Bering Sea, and an Instructor of Maritime Emergency Medicine. Mike is the author of the #1 best selling medical humor ebook, "Emergency Laughter: It Wasn't Funny When It Happened, But it is Now!" His second eBook, "Emergency Laughter: Stories of Humor Inside Ambulances and Operating Rooms" is already an Amazon #1 bestseller in the US, the UK and Australia. Mike is also a contributing author in the medical humor anthology, "My Funny Major Medical." His humor has appeared in The Placebo Journal, Our USA Magazine, Nurses fyi Magazine, EMS1.com, Parenting Humor, (614) Magazine and HumorPress.com. Mike resides in Seattle Washington.

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    Book preview

    Emergency Laughter - Mike Cyra

    Emergency Laughter

    It Wasn’t Funny When It Happened…

    But It Is Now!

    By Mike Cyra

    Copyright © 2011 by Mike Cyra.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

    Smashwords edition: March 2011.

    Real life medical drama is OK… but true stories of emergency medicine that make you laugh out loud are better.

    Mike Cyra’s unique comedic storytelling style can turn the grossest thing that ever happened to him into a hilarious read.

    Emergency Laughter is a collection of his true life, adrenaline-fueled, near- death experiences at the hands of old ladies, small children, a morgue refrigerator and an out of control ambulance.

    These stories will make you laugh, cry and maybe not eat certain food groups. They explore how laughter helps the mind, heals the body and is a critical survival tool for all who see death and dying up close.

    Cyra spent twenty-years working as an EMT, a Chief Medical Officer on a ship in Alaska’s Bering Sea, a Surgical Technologist and an Instructor of Maritime Emergency Medicine. His humor has been published often in The Placebo Journal and has appeared in Our USA Magazine, Parenting Humor and HumorPress.com.

    The stories in this book are based on actual events. The names and places have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty and the embarrassed.

    Emergency Laughter will stay with the reader long after it’s put down.

    Contents

    Cottage Cheese: A Very True Story

    Delivering Babies: My First Woman in Labor

    Chest Tube Blow Darts

    Have You Driven An Ambulance Before?

    My Little Ipecac Girl

    The Honeymooners

    Stealing From Hospitals 101

    In Health Care News: A New Life Saving Technique

    I Know You’re Not Unconscious

    In The Back of an Ambulance

    Where did your fingers go?

    Don't Be Fooled By The Cold Blue Body

    Mr. Mean and Nasty

    Happiness is…

    Pushing Old Ladies Around

    I’ve Been Hit By Bigger Chicks Than You

    Lawnmowers and Fingers

    Only her hairdresser knows for sure

    The Gurney Ride From Hell

    I’m Having Trouble With My Vines

    Let’s Blame The Doctors

    Alone In a Morgue Refrigerator

    About the Author

    Cottage Cheese: A True Story

    Every once in a while, something happens to you that changes the way you think, feel and eat for the rest of your life.

    My life-changing event took place when I worked for a private ambulance company. My partner and I were called to a nursing home to pick up a cute little old lady and take her to the hospital for some tests.

    We stopped at the nurse’s station, grabbed the patient’s paperwork and headed down the hallway, weaving our gurney around wheelchairs filled with slumped over sleeping old people.

    When we arrived at the room, our little old lady was finishing her lunch. I walked up to the side of her bed just as she was pushing a huge spoonful of cottage cheese into her mouth.

    I waved and said loudly, Hello? She looked over at the empty space next to me, so I made a big giant wave, like I was in a parade and she saw me. I think.

    I asked her, Are you ready to go to the hospital?

    She didn’t seem to notice and looked back down at her cottage cheese.

    A tiny little nurse came in the room and announced, She doesn’t hear too good. She stood on her tiptoes next to our patient and in a voice that would make an Army drill sergeant proud yelled, These boys are taking you to the Hospital.

    I jumped back covering my ears and yelled, Good God!

    Her voice was so loud I heard it echo down the hall, take…take…hospital…hospital…hospital.

    The sweet little old lady didn’t look up but just nodded. She was intent on getting that last spoonful of cottage cheese in her mouth.

    Nurse Bullhorn opened her mouth to say something and I covered my ears again. But in her normal voice said, She’s all yours, and left the room.

    The next twenty minutes were spent yelling at the top of our lungs and jumping around like clowns trying to coax this little old lady to slide onto our gurney so we could leave. She, on the other hand, was more interested in finding the large curds of cottage cheese she had spilled on her shirt and getting each one in her mouth.

    On the way to the hospital I couldn’t help but notice that she seemed to be having trouble with something in her mouth. Something was stuck in a tooth or behind her dentures and she couldn’t get it dislodged with her tongue. Her mouth was in perpetual motion.

    I was going to ask her if she would like to rinse her mouth out, but my voice was hoarse and my throat sore from yelling at her earlier, so I just continued doing my paperwork.

    When we arrived at the hospital emergency room entrance, my partner and I pulled the gurney out of the back of the ambulance and set it on the ground. I bent over and asked in a normal voice, How are you doing?

    Then I remembered whom we were dealing with and I put my face directly in front of her face. Taking a deep breath and opening my mouth up wide I began to yell, HOW …

    That’s as far as I got.

    At times like this you have to marvel at what an amazing organ the brain is. Sensing imminent danger, my brain went into emergency mode. Time and space was now an ultra slow motion movie.

    In that split second period of time, I saw her mouth suddenly stop moving. Whatever she had been hunting for with her tongue, she had found it.

    I saw the tip of her tongue protrude just a little bit between her dry, cracked lips. Her cheeks puffed out from the increase of air pressure in her mouth.

    She looked up at the empty space next to my head and then…and then a huge curd of cottage cheese exploded from her mouth.

    In slow motion the curd came at me, like a huge asteroid tumbling through space, throwing off little balls of spit in all directions. Slowly, tumbling, towards my open mouth.

    I could hear my brain trying to warn me. In a deep, slurred, drug induced dreamlike voice, it said, Sheee hawked a looogey Mike. Cloooose yourrrrrr mouuuuth! Ohhhh NOOOOO! Close youurrrr mouuuth!

    Time raced back to normal as the cottage cheese asteroid entered my mouth’s atmosphere, became a cottage cheese meteor and slammed directly into the back of my throat.

    I immediately made the international sign for choking. Clutching my hands around my neck, I stumbled backwards and dropped to my knees, gagging and coughing, trying to dislodge the curd from the back of my throat.

    There are seven different types of shock. I was in five of them. This was the grossest thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.

    My partner had witnessed the whole thing and he turned white as a ghost. His hands instinctively made the international sign for choking around his neck and he too began gagging. This is known as ‘sympathetic choking.’

    I was now rolling around on the ground about to lose consciousness. Not from lack of oxygen, but from the realization of the enormity of the grossness of what just happened to me.

    I tried giving myself the Heimlich maneuver by throwing myself against the side of the gurney. This dislodged the curd from the back of my throat and moved it into my mouth. I could feel with my tongue the texture of the cottage cheese curd.

    This was the second grossest thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life. I wasted no time in spitting every molecule of moisture out of my mouth. But not before I reminded myself that this curd of cottage cheese had just been in that ladies 90-year-old mouth.

    I began to dry heave.

    My partner saw this, rolled around the side of the ambulance and also started dry heaving. That would be ‘sympathetic heaving.’

    A crowd was now forming around us. Doctors and nurses wondering why these two highly trained medics had abandoned such a sweet little old lady, and were laying on the ground heaving their guts up.

    One of the nurses came over to me and asked, Are you ok? In between heaves I sputtered, "Everything’s fine,

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