Things that make you...blink!

So after reading a wonderful post by AD I suppose I had medical things on my mind. The medical things in my memory aren't generally funny or even interesting. But then I read a Twitter update from a friend and it hit me. "The X-ray story! I need to subject more people to the X-ray story! Oh the wonderful thing of the internet!" Not really, but I'm feeling more like myself: jaded and snarky. Gotta love recovery.

**Names, location, etc changed to protect those involved... and to shield the fact that I may have forgotten names.**

Several years ago I was part of a Renaissance choir at my university. I say "part" but I was actually their costume person. I had been conned into sewing for them while I was dating a guy who sang. Silly me, but it was fun.

Anyway one of the girls in the choir had a sister and brother-in-law who lived in town. For some silly reason they actually liked it when we came over and so they would host small get-togethers for us choir kids.

At one of these events... I want to say it was a movie night... a couple of us were standing in that limbo area that isn't quite living room and not yet the dining room but isn't a hallway either parts of the house and I noticed what looked like x-ray film tucked behind a random piece of furniture.

"Hey, Ted. Why do you have x-ray film in the house?" Ted was an x-ray technician at the hospital.

"Oh yeah! Y'all have to see this!" Ted runs, pulls it out, and thrusts it into my hands.

I stare at it. It's a human pelvis. Male, I thought, based on the anatomy I'd studied for that paleo thing that I do. There was something odd about it though. A large blob of something was covering part of the bones. "Uh, Ted... wtf?" Ted turned the x-ray so I could see the circled area with a line drawn away from the center and a single word written at the end of the line. The word was, "vegetable." I blinked. Only one vegetable I knew of was that round shape and size.

"Ted. Is that a head of lettuce?" The other people in the house started making squeaky noises and groans.

"Yep. This guy came into the E.R. and the doctors had to surgically remove it." More grons and a couple of shreiks.

I kept staring at it and finally opined, "So do you think he used KY or ranch?" Lots of shreiks and laughter.

I will never forget that experience. I never did find out if "Ted" was breaking rules to have that x-ray in the house. I never wanted to ask any doctors in that one-hospital town what the rules were for patient x-rays for fear that they might figure out exactly which film I was asking about and figure out how I had seen it.