One of my friends is an obstetrician. We have him over for dinner fairly regularly. He tells pretty good stories, especially when you’ve plied him with enough beers.
One night, he leans over towards me, “Envidula,” he says. “You’re not going to believe this one.”
“You always say that, and it’s always a bust at the end,” says I.
“No really,” he says. “This one is unbelievable.”
“All right,” I say. “Say on!”
It’s a little ritual we have before he tells me a whopper, kind of like saying, “Once upon a time.” Only this time, he wasn’t lying. I mean, he may have been lying about the facts, but he wasn’t lying that I’d find it truly unbelievable.
My friend—let’s call him Oscar… no, wait… Vincent… no, that ain’t right either. Hmmmm. Ok, dunno why, but let’s call him Vangock. You’ll see why in a bit.
Anyway, Vangock had been naval doctor when he was in the early stage of his career. He’d actually been rather good. How good, I didn’t know until then.
It was like one of those spy movie things, he said. I was woken up in bed—we were living in Annapolis at the time. Hustled down to Patuxent River. They poured me into a flight suit and sent me off in an F-15 before I could even wake up.
Sunrise kept chasing us, but couldn’t quite catch up until we landed—I’m not supposed to tell you where, but you can pretty much guess.
They hustled me into an operating suite, and without even warning me, pushed me up next to this strange looking woman who was in labor. One look at the ultrasound, and could see why they needed me so bad. I was—at the time—the preeminent in-utero surgeon in the armed services. I also had a pretty high security clearance. A lot of water under the bridge since then, eh?
He looked at me and I nodded. When it was discovered he was a bit mentally unstable, they’d thrown him out of the Navy, and he’d turned into a drunk for a decade or so. I met him long after that. He continued:
“I was looking at what appeared to be a normal baby at first, except it seemed to have some growth on it’s head. Kind of like a halo, except there were all these… I don’t know… strings or lines attached from this halo object to the baby’s head, and to the walls of the womb and,.... get this.. through the womb into the woman’s heart! It was breaking the blood barrier!”
“Is that kind of like the sound barrier,” I quipped. I don’t think he even heard me, so engrossed in his tale he was.
“It was clear (to me at least) that we couldn’t do a cesarean. But it was equally clear that this baby could not be birthed in the normal way, if it were still attached to the “halo.” Everyone started calling it that. Clearly, they wanted me to detach the halo growth from the baby’s head so it could be born normally, and so the halo could remain in the woman’s body, and not hurt her heart in some way.”
“That was how I lost my ear. This is the story you’ve been wanting to hear for so long.”
“You see, it was the strangest thing. The mother and child were under sedation, and I was starting the separation process, when labor started all on it’s own. It’s as if a labor machine had taken over the woman’s body. There was nothing we could do to stop it. I had barely enough time to remove the laser before the baby was born. Actually not enough time. Somehow, the baby kicked and the laser flew up and lopped off my ear and cauterized it all at once. Happened so fast, I didn’t even notice it for a while.”
“And here’s what’s so unbelievable.” He looked at me meaningfully. “When the baby was born, there was no halo or anything else on it’s head. It was perfectly normal. And just as strange, those lines attaching the halo to the mother’s heart and all—disappeared. Like it must have come out with the afterbirth, except we couldn’t find any signs of it no matter what we did.”
“You’re kidding!” I said.
“Would I kid you?”
That was our standard ending. Kind of like saying, “and they lived happily ever after.”
I had a million questions, but I never did get any of them answered, because he fell asleep right then, and when he woke up, he wouldn’t talk about it again. Took that story to his grave, in fact. But that’s another story for another time.
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