"A Needle Filled with Nothin'"

 

A Needle Filled with Nothin'    

     The usual “Fella-goes-into-a …” joke might start like this:

     “Fella walks into a bar and ankles up to the counter. ‘Bartender,’ says he (with a stutter), ‘I’ll h-have a t-tall, cold glass of S-Septic S-Sweat light, and m-make it s-snappy!”

     ‘S-sure,’ says the bartender, also with a stutter, ’C-coming right up.” The barkeep goes to get the beer. As he’s pouring the beer in a glass from the tap, the thirsty fella is thinking it over.

     Then he says, ‘S-Say, are you making f-fun of the way I t-talk?’

     “N-no way. No s-sir!” says the guy behind the bar.

     ‘Well, o-k-kay.” Reluctantly the customer decides to let it go. A pretty blonde comes into the bar.

     “Bartender,”

     ‘Yes ma’am.’

     ‘I’d like a tall cool glass of mellow Septic Sweat Light.” She has a deep, sexy, female voice.
In a deep, sexy, male voice the barkeep says, ‘It’ll just take a second, ma’am.”

     Immediately, the first customer calls the guy behind the counter over to him and gets in his face, ‘You w-were, too, you were, t-too making f-fun of m-me!’

     The bartender whispers in the first man’s ear, ‘I w-was not! I was n-not making f-fun of you! I w-was making fun of h-her!“

     That’s how it should go, but …

     This is how it went. A fella(me) goes into Emergency at Riverside County Regional Medical Center. The lady behind the window says, “What’s up?”

     I say, “Chest pains and very fat.” My wife is with me.

     So, okay, I’m in for a listen to my chest and an ekg. They musta figured I wasn ‘t too bad off, so they sits me in the waiting room for six hours. Later that night, they find I’m still alive, so they puts me in a room with a woman in pain but allergic to morphine. I am tempted to offer to take the morphine for her -- I‘m that kinda guy, you know. And it’s not bad stuff, but my wife is with me, so I stifles my instinct to be a wise guy.  Not for long, though

     A little later, a pretty nurse comes in and sticks an IV in my arm. I asks her, ’What’s it for? What you gonna put in me?”

     She says, “Nothing. It’s just in case.”

     So I says, “Okay, I’ll probably be better off with a few cc's of nothing’ in me. My doctor says it’s the too much something in me that’s my biggest problem.” Actually, my doctor doesn’t say much about it any more; probably thinks it’s a waste of time. Besides, he’s Moslem, and I think he’s already earned Paradise by helping me. It’s one of the five pillars of Islam, helping the hopeless wise guy.

     The nurse might have thought I was flirting with her, but I wasn’t. My wife is small, but the way I sees it, she could have taken the nurse in the top of the second round even with one rubber glove tied behind her. You know, after all the needles I see that day, now that I think of it, I’d much rather be the victim of a hyperdermic needle than the kind they always come at me with. The other style -- hypo -- kinda gets under my skin, if you know what I mean.

      As I’m lyin’ on the gurney with nothing else to do but listen to the beep beep beep, I starts to think: I wonder if hippos get hippodermics or the silent Marx brother got a Harpodermic?

     Anyway, they walks me over for an xray. Then they loses me in the Nurse’s station, but -- hey, nobody tells me I’m lost.

     While I’m sitting there, feeling kinda out of it, a cute blonde with a wrapped up foot sits down next to me and starts telling me her life story. Seems she works for some old geezer as a home health aide, but the help he wants(and gets) occurs when both of them are under the sheets. What can a girl do? You gotta have a job, right? I figure, another casualty of Obamacare. By the way, she says, she’s single and looking for the right guy.

     Suddenly, I get the idea I might be lost. So I asks, and I am lost! I finds my wife with some help and listens to the old lady in the bed on the other side of the curtain, snoring from whatever they gave her that was better than morphine. Later the doctor wakes her up to ask her about the infection in the wound she has for her colostomy bag. She says her doctor took three years to tell her she had cancer, and by then she had to have all her insides out. But it’s okay; it doesn’t hurt right now.

     Then a pretty doctor tells me they can’t find nothing’ wrong with me(my wife did not make a face at this.) The doctor asks do I want to go home. I says sure.

     So here I am at home. And I’m happy, because it doesn’t hurt right now. But I’m wondering was somebody making fun of me?
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