There are a lot of fun, interesting, and some times gruesome stories of life in a hospital that are told in the medical terminology class. There are about eighteen students, most of whom are employed by this particular hospital-system: for them, it’s in-service training. A handful of us are not (yet) employed in the medical field … one woman, a transcriptionist, is taking the class to get more work; another is considering a possible change of careers when she retires from the postal service in three years (she told me she will have worked for the USPS for forty years at that point).

Last week, the Sister teaching the class brought up a rather disturbing story regarding the MRI machine. She explained that since her job had little to do with the MRI she hadn’t really done any research on the machine or its dangers until after this incident — seems that a not-so long time ago, in a hospital far, far, away, a five year old had brain surgery to remove a tumor. A year later, he came back for an MRI to make sure his brain was good and tumor free. Somehow, an oxygen cansiter had been left in the room, and was hurtled by the powerful magnet into the boy’s skull, killing him.

None of the people I worked with care. “Eh. Um. That’s cool?”

One of the things about working in a pizza shop is that you’re working mostly with single men, many with a variety of drug dependencies, who spend most of their down time eye-fucking every hot piece of ass that saunters past the store front. Heck, even the married guys do that. One of the other things about working in a pizza shop is that stories are valued — when I say stories, I don’t mean “A long time ago…”, because very few people who work in pizza shops know how to read, much less do it for fun, much less read fiction for fun. The best stories are the real and gruesome: there’s nothing better than finding out Gary left a party drunk and fell asleep in a poison ivy patch, or that Mark got arrested for the third time because he was defending his jerk-off brother, or that the new kid decided to try to sell mushrooms to a customer who turned out to be a plainclothed cop.

So the story about the kid getting his skull cracked was good … but not great. It just wasn’t resonating. What you’re ideally going for with a story is that your coworkers hear it, gasp, and quickly begin repeating it to other people. It’s a competition.

So I changed the story — first, I told them about the machine and its incredibly powerful magnet. I told them about the questions patients are asked before they go into the machine — any tattoos? Any metal in the body (i.e., replacement hip or a pacemaker)? This is true: a majority of tattoos contain metals — go into the machine with one of those tattoos, and you’ll be leaving with 2nd or 3rd degree burns.

With the story set up, I told it, and the reaction was just what I hoped for — I told two stories, one each for the different stores. At the indy, she was a seventeen year old girl (rich, Paris Hilton type) who didn’t want to tell her mother she had a genital piercing. This plays particularly well at the Indy since we’ve got Midget Porn Girl working (weekends now with school back), and last month she was bitching because her parents were making her sell her Mercedes SUV and she had to get – gasp! – a used BMW. I doubt she realizes this, but that’s not really the thing you want to tell people who mostly live paycheck to paycheck, spoiled whore. Anyway, so in the story, this spoiled Paris Hilton, er, Midget Porn Girl type goes into the machine, it was turned on, and the piercing was ripped out of her skull at sixty miles per hour. (At the other job, because one of the guy there claims to have a piercing down there , the story became a seventeen-year old boy with a similar piercing).

Mind you, I have no idea how an MRI actually works: I don’t know if it actually gets turned on, or if its always on. For the purposes of the story, the patient was standing, but I don’t know if they stand or sit in reality. No one picked up on these nits, of if they did, they were too happy imagining Midget Porn Girl’s piercing getting ripped out of her body they didn’t say anything about it. Which isn’t to say anyone actually wants to see something bad happen to Midget Porn Girl, its just that when she comes into the store and moans that Daddy is only going to pay $1500 off her credit cards this month … y’know?

Exasperating.