What Has Been Seen....

Just down the street from the station is the house of one of our regulars with some psychological issues. We got called over there most recently by his family because he was unresponsive on the floor of his room. However, when we arrived he was standing in his bathrobe in the middle of the living room. Now, while I was standing on the porch waiting for someone to open the door I had set my equipment down at my feet. I was the second one to enter the house and as I bent down to pick up my gear I heard our patient say, "Hey, wanna see something gross?" Usually this is a bad sign, and this was no exception. I was already bent over and involuntarily looked up to find him standing directly in front of me with his bathrobe open and, right at eye level, were his testicles that were swollen to the size of a cantaloupe. Fortunately he closed his robe immediately as we were followed in by the police.

As to the report of unresponsiveness, he tried to explain that he had been faking unconsciousness as an April Fool's Day practical joke on his family. When we pointed out that it was October he said that he had not done anything on the actual first of April so he was making up for it now. We informed him that we would like to examine him and that he might have to go to the hospital. He was not at all happy about this and proceeded to pace laps around the room ranting about a whole host of nonsensical and bizarre things. He wasn't behaving in an overtly threatening manner and, eventually, he seemed to be losing steam, so all we could do was watch the spectacle. He finally ran out of ravings and stopped, leaning against the living room wall. In a delicious stroke of timing, he stopped directly beneath a clock at exactly the turn of the hour. As he completed his last lunatic statement and leaned on the wall, the clock over his head chimed in with what we were all thinking, "Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!". The beauty of it was that the humor and serendipity of this was not lost on any of us and I don't think anyone held in their laughter.


The ambulance arrived and the patient was 5150ed by the police. We wound up having to restrain him onto the gurney. The ambulance medic, who had not been witness to the earlier flashing incident and didn't know about the testicular malady wound up leaning on and across the patient's lower half to secure the seatbelt and restraint. As you can imagine, this elicited quite a reaction from our patient who screamed out in pain at the very confused medic.

There's one police officer who still thinks I'm the one who leaned on the patient and he frequently tells the story of this call.