Joe Gregorio
Due to suspected food poisoning I checked into the local emergency room last night around 2 AM, trusty 13 gallon plastic garbage bag in hand, because, I've been throwing up. Once they get me into a room the nurse offers me a shallow pink plastic pan in exchange for my plastic garbage bag, and I'm thinking to myself, "Really, have you never seen anyone vomit in your entire life?". Why on earth would you offer me a shallow round bottom plastic pan as an alternative to a 13 gallon plastic garbage bag? This is vomit we're trying to contain here. This reminds me of a previous visit to the same ER with my son when he had appendicitis, this time we came in with a kitchen garbage pail and the nurse laughed at us and handed him a small metal kidney dish. My son held it in his hands, looking at it perplexedly for about five seconds before he started vomiting again, turning it from a kidney dish into a shiny metal parabolic broadcast spreader of vomit.
I don't know what to make of this phenomenon, as I thought that working in an ER would expose you to a lot of puking people, and thus you'd know better than to give someone a kidney dish to throw up in. I can only come up with two possible conclusions, the first that the ER folks are just aren't quick learners and haven't picked up on the association:
kidney dish : vomit :: broadcast spreader : grass seed
The other possibility is that my family is unique, maybe my wife and I are both descended from long lines of projectile vomitters, a long and honorable tradition of high velocity emesis, and that the rest of population is filled with polite, low volume, low velocity vomitters. If so, you people make me sick.