Dissociated Press presents:
The Fording Report
Weekend Edition
Friday, February 23.
Tonight I bring you a sad tale, a story filled with desperation and shame. A story so bad, that if it weren’t for the enormous boost in rating expected, I wouldn’t even cover it. It involves corruption and betrayal in one of the most trusted fields of human society: surgical medicine.
Witnesses say that Vukanic was distinctly heard to call “shotgun,†thus asserting his place on the patient’s right side…
The story centers around one of the oldest questions of medical procedure: when you have two surgeons and one patient, who get the coveted right hand operating position and who is relegated to the left? This question was at the heart of a recent tragic medical conflict in Belgrade involving two surgeons, Dr Spasoje Radulovic and Dr. Dragan Vukanic.
The surgeons had nearly completed a long and taxing upondectomy when they paused to take a “coffee break†which eventually grew to involve four and half pots of coffee, two bottle of vodka, and dozens of medical stories about the “patient that got away.â€
Problems started when the doctors returned to the surgical theater. Witnesses say that Vukanic was distinctly heard to call “shotgun,†thus asserting his place on the patient’s right side. Radulovic, who had been operating from the right up to that point, denied his demand, claiming several hours of surgical precedence. Things quickly escalated until both doctors left the operating room, and the unconscious patient, to settle their differences outside.
Shocking? Yes.
Unprecedented? No.
Sadly, this sort of rivalry seems prevalent in hospitals around the world, with tragic consequences for the patients involved.
Following a similar bout of surgical pugilism, a Brazilian women was left carrying a scalpel in her innards for over twenty years.
Even in lesser developed areas, lacking the refinements of modern medicine, surgical shotgunning often leaves patients embedded with crude medical implements and doctors nursing swollen knuckles and bloody noses.
As for Radulovic and Vukanic, they entered a hospital sponsored mediation therapy program, where they will receive counseling and be trained in more mature forms of conflict resolution. I am speaking or course, of the time honored method used in the decision process of countless modern professionals: paper/ rock /scissors.
For the Fording Report this has been Herman Fording. Goodnight.
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