Humour at the Bottom
Then there was the aboriginal woman I picked up during paramedic preceptorship a few blocks from the notorious intersection of Hastings and Main in Vancouver. We found her lying in pain half on, half off her bed, surrounded by well used crack pipes, roaches, empty prescription bottles and a brand new box of needles she could only have stolen from a hospital. A stream of limp complaint poured slowly from her mouth. Her back hurt. Her head hurt. Her stomach hurt. She felt weak. She couldn’t walk upright. In the ambulance, I started a brief medical history, but ran out of paper before it was half done. She had diabetes, hypertension, depression and asthma. She was in an abusive relationship. “My kitney’s are no koot. My heart’s no koot either. My liver’s no koot.” (”Big surprise,” I thought.) “But my onions are OK.” My pen hovered over the paper as I pondered what organs she could possibly be calling onions, and I looked up just in time to catch her sharing a knowing grin with my preceptor. She nodded in my direction. “Blondy’s a little slow on the uptake.” The car errupted in laughter at my expense, and we traded jokes for the rest of the trip to St. Paul’s, most of them too off-colour to post on a Catholic blog. We left her to entertain the ER nurses, and for the rest of the shift, no one called me by my Christian name: ‘Blondy’ was more than sufficient.