Nothing But Iron: Recordable Olympic Hardware, Forks, Desperate Interns & Basketball by Steven R. Lagman, M.D. C.A.S.W. March 7, 2006 Hold on to your GPS folks, we are all over the map today . . . I liked the design of medals for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games the first time I saw it. There was a subtle warmth and familiarity about the shape and the size of these coveted disks that seemed unrelated to the thrill of victory or the ownership of precious metal. It was almost as if, maybe in a past life as a world class athlete, I had once held one in my hand. The association remained vague until a late evening trip to the movie return box at Video Station. It was then that I began to put gold and silver together. The enlarged image (see right) of Bode Miller holding Chad Hedrick’s silver medal says it all. (Hedrick let him hold it for a dollar.) As for Miller, I want to extend my gratitude. Thanks to his Olympic shenanigans, I have another stack of material from which to teach my children to be strong-minded men. There are few safe substitutes for someone else’s real-life failures. I appreciate Miller’s contribution to my lesson plan. Speaking of real-life failures, I found out why you don’t use a fork to scoop ice cream. I share this experience because I know you have been wondering, and because NBI is committed to public service. I found some leftover berry cobbler in the refrigerator this morning. When such discoveries are made, I take definitive action by eating them. I grabbed the nearest clean fork to start the consumption process, but suddenly realized that the cobbler was incomplete without ice cream. Not wanting to dirty another utensil, I shoved the fork into the ice cream carton and pried out an unusually square scoop. Two scoops is the minimum allowable for the cobbler portion I had, so once more I plunged the fork into the frozen mass. This time I was impeded by a more solid chunk, so I did what any committed desert eater would have done. I applied more pressure to the fork. Abruptly the fork drove deeper into the ice cream, through the side of the paper container and several inches into my index finger. Well, I suppose it was but a few millimeters, but it felt like several inches. In any case it bled, so I deserve a lot of sympathy. (Be assured that next time we serve you ice cream at our house it will be served in round scoops from a brand new container and not the blood-tinged one, which I will take to work to offer non-NBI-readers there.) Any of you watch Desperate Interns (commonly known as Grey’s Anatomy) on Sunday evenings? I do. As a current anesthesiologist who was once an intern, shows about internship and residency capture my interest. The hilarious, sometimes familiar, often irreverent interplay of characters in this one has made me a subscriber. It wasn’t until three episodes ago, that I decided it was time to write about DI. Up to that point, the scenarios conjured up by the show’s writing staff were practically believable, although I distinctly remember one contradiction relative to my own experience: Internship as I knew it was a lot more about sleep deprivation than it was about sleeping with other members of the medical staff. In fact–no offense to anyone in particular I might have slept with–I remember the sleep deprivation most of all. (Just kidding about that last part. I was a married intern, which is way different than desperate.) Three episodes ago things on DI got wacky, as if someone spiked the writers’ salads with hallucinogenic mushrooms. Here was the scene in our family room: I am seated on the couch. To my right is Connor, my thirteen year old. On the television, a man is rushed into the ER with a big bleeding hole in his chest. His hysterical wife is finally calmed enough to tell a desperate intern how the hole got there. The guy’s buddy shot him with a home-made replica bazooka during a two-man World War II re-enactment. (That’s carrying authenticity to an extreme, I would say.) O.K., I suppose it is feasible that a bazooka blast would create a gaping chest wound and a hysterical wife, but from there the story got downright weird. I’m not talking Tim Burton weird. I’m talking Tonya Harding weird. The bazooka shell (round, bullet, bomb--whatever you call the projectile thingy) doesn’t pass through the man’s chest, then through a parked vehicle and a couple brick walls before exploding into a million pieces, it lodges intact in the guys chest, where, according to the script, the slightest movement, not counting the guy’s chest going up and down every time he would breathe, could cause it to detonate. Connor shoots me the quizzical look of a kid who has never worked in a trauma center. "Dad, could that really happen?" I want to tell him that bazookas were designed to pierce tank armor. I want to say that the likelihood of someone surviving a point-blank bazooka blast to the chest, let alone the chance that the man’s chest would retain unexploded munitions would be about that of Iran applying for U.S. statehood, getting it, then electing Rush Limbaugh as its governor. But guilt prevails. I think back to the Monday after one Easter Sunday when Connor caught me eating from a bag of chocolate eggs that matched exactly the ones the Easter Bunny had supposedly brought. I consider Santa, the Tooth Fairy and my long career as a shooting guard in the NBA. In the name of honesty, I had snatched each of these precious fantasies from his innocent grasp; I am not about to ruin Grey’s Anatomy. "Sure, Son," I reply, "I saw that all the time in med school." When I tell you I watched the second installment of this two-part episode, you will probably make judgements about my intellect, which is clearly subordinate to my curiosity. The plot thickened, twisted, then turned bizarre shades of audible orange and purple. (I switch to past tense now, but I am not sure why.) The anesthesiologist, fearing the prospect of becoming "pink mist", got scared and bolted, turning over the care of this critically-wounded patient to a green paramedic. With her left hand she kept the man alive by squeezing the ventilating bag. The right hand was deep inside his chest, next to the bazooka round, compressing the breached major vessel thereby preventing fatal hemorrhage. After awhile, the paramedic grew pink-mist-o-phobic and weary of this dual role and fled too. That left desperate intern Meredith Grey, who had ignored evacuation orders to stay and help. Dr. Grey was shoved her own hand into the wound, and eventually removed the tenuous explosive and transferred it to the care of the soon-to-be pink vaporized bomb squad guy, who had the common courtesy to carry it out into the hallway before letting it blow up. Oh, I forgot. Before the bomb came out, as fabricated horrible luck would have it, it was discovered that the operating room table was right over the hospital’s main oxygen line, necessitating a treacherous move to another room. Over cracks and bumps no less. It was modern day version of the old western scene where the heros are driving the nitroglycerin-filled covered wagon over rough terrain. Dr. Grey, who had earlier suffered a premonition of her own death, followed the bomb squad guy into the hallway like a zombie to a horror movie victim. When the bomb did explode, Dr. Grey fell violently backward, bouncing her occiput (the back of her head) on the floor two or seven times in slow motion. Unlike the bazooka round, the premonition was a dud. She didn’t die. She didn’t have a severe head injury, or a broken neck or burns or internal bleeding or hearing loss. But she did get awfully dirty, so her intern friends gave her a shower with her scrubs still on. In my mind that was a novel approach to treatment for a blast injury, unless you are being treated by the product of script writers on illicit drugs. Lately, things on DI have been back to normal: sex, the solving of occasional overly-dramatic patient care dilemmas and the portrayal of anesthesiologists as stupid, self serving and in need of direction by omnipotent fake surgeons (real surgeons really are omnipotent) taking time out of their busy sex lives to operate. Just for the record, if you happen to have the misfortune of getting shot with a bazooka, retaining the unexploded round in your chest and surviving to hospitalization at my hospital, I promise to stick around until the round is removed and the bleeding is stopped, or one or both of us are dead. That, in real life, would be my job. On to the relatively mundane world of desperate basketball. If the end of the Badgers’ season had been an Olympic figure skating event, there would be no shortage of ice crystals on their butts. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the handful of clean triple-triple combinations, and it doesn’t mean the immediate future will not dazzle us, as it has many times before. All the negative talk I have heard about Wisconsin tells me that a perspective check is in order: 1) 19-10, 2) a winning conference record, 3) fourth-seed in the B10T. 4) a lock for an at large bid in the NCAAs, 5) Alando Tucker (19.3 ppg), 6) oft-sutured Joe Krabbenhoft, 7) out-of-nowhere Kevin Gullikson, 8) Bo Ryan. We could also go into the whiny stuff about youth, ineligible players and foreshortened benches, but we at NBI don’t make excuses, except when our wife, who is five years younger than us and has more time to practice and isn’t playing with excruciating chronic appendicitis pain and other debilities of middle age, beats us in tennis. In short, let’s get a grip. Good basketball could be just around the corner. Every year we see teams that suddenly get hot. Often this defies logic, like it did in 2000 when Wisconsin made it to the Final Four after an 8-8 conference record. In two days Kelly and I are off to the B10T in Indianapolis. It’s a long drive, but the reward, I am told is an ideal venue. Unlike Chicago, where travel to and from the United Center is a headache, the hotels at Indy are within walking distance of Conseco Field House and many eating and imbibing establishments. That should make for a more relaxed experience away from the court. Our seats in the arena are on the corner. Could be worse. My friend Brent has seats behind the "f----n’ basket." He claims that Iowa has been assigned the end zone for six of the last eight tournaments, although I think he forgets that they are at least not seated behind the same basket in each of those years. Sometimes it’s the other basket. I tried to console him with this note: I say it's time to play the race card. Say, what is your race anyway? I don't think Iowan is a minority, except in certain parts of Chicago and LA. But really, you should do what other victims of our society do: hire a high-profile lawyer, sue the Big Ten for discrimination, and next thing you know, you'll be sitting near Kelly and me. (How do you think Mr. Filipino gets great seats year in and year out?) In the meantime, I heard about these cool binoculars on amazon.com that can, purportedly see through thick metal, foam padding and Ed Hightower's butt. I ordered a pair for you. If these don't work, I will send you periodic text messages with information about what just happened. Remember, it takes a village to see a basketball game. One of my colleagues told me that Wisconsin got a bad draw. I disagree. First of all Wisconsin got the draw that it earned. I have no problem with that. Indiana, on many days, even though there has been a resurgence of sorts since Mike Davis’s resignation was announced, is infinitely beatable. That it’s a virtual home game for them is not bothersome to me, unless we lose and I have to see all those smiling Hoosiers fans walking around the concourse. Ohio State proved that it is the best team in the conference, but at least the Badgers have a working formula for beating them: get Dials in foul trouble and outlast their perimeter shooting. Who knows if this formula works outside the Kohl Center, but it would be fun to get the chance to try it. Note that Wisconsin or Indiana will not be OSU’s first challenge. Northwestern is the rabid Chihuahua of the bunch. I myself would be just as happy to see UW get another shot at the better-than-record-suggests Wildcats. The bottom half of the bracket–that which contains potential champions Iowa, MSU and Illinois and Michigan is completely crazy. On paper this looks to be one of the most balanced tournaments in B10T history. Let’s hope it’s the same on wood. Controversy: Does OSU get a number one seed? I predict not. Does OSU deserve one? Of course. Ask yourself this question: Had the Illini or the Spartans won the Big Ten, would either of those teams have been awarded a top seed? Of course. ____________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports and other stuff column. The author would like to thank the cast of Desperate Interns, the members of the Academy and his fourth grade modern literature teacher for the honor of providing free entertainment to people like you. ©2006 DrTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.