Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (26 page)

I
am Publicity Director of the local hospital. In June 1993 I received a call from one of the local radio reporters asking that I help him confirm a story. As he told it the story went like this:

A couple in a neighboring city ordered a pizza from the local Domino’s. It was duly delivered and eaten. After their meal the couple received a phone call from a man identifying himself as the delivery person. He said he was doing a follow-up quality check and asked if they had enjoyed their pizza. They told him yes, at which point he said, “Good. Because I ejaculated on it and I have AIDS.” The couple panicked and—out of embarrassment—came to the hospital in our city for examination. Once there they had their stomachs pumped and it was discovered that there were traces of semen in the stomach content.

I checked our ER and lab records and no such incident was reported.

The Burger King story came in a letter from Robert Pomeroy of Tampa, Florida, in 1989. The Domino’s story is from Tim L. Cornett of Pineville, Kentucky, writing in 1993. Folklorist Janet Langlois discussed this cycle of contamination legends in an article published in
Contemporary Legend,
vol. 1 (1991). Other foods sometimes mentioned are coleslaw, beans, and tacos; other contaminants include sweat, saliva, and urine, and other specific fast-food chains include Hardees, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. But the majority of the “Hold the M…!” legends have concerned Burger King and Domino’s Pizza, both of which have been targeted since at least 1987. When the unfounded rumors became rampant, I wrote a short piece for the Domino’s Pizza in-house publication,
The Pepperoni Press
(April 13, 1990), outlining the usual careers of such negative stories and suggesting how to cope with them. Evidently, I did not help the company much, as the stories broke out again all across the nation in 1993, usually in the version quoted above, in which the pizza defiler telephones his victims to reveal his guilt. Recalling that the Corona Beer Scare mentioned in the introduction to this chapter also began in 1987, we must judge it a bad year for food products, but a good year for contamination legends.

Medical horror legends
come in two forms: highly technical stories, bizarre but supposedly true, and widespread accounts of horrendous supposed incidents in the process of “health care delivery” that are in layman’s language. Typical themes are weird injuries and accidents, hellish ERs, inaccurate diagnoses, and treatments that are worse than the original ailments. Often the screw-ups are said to have resulted from human failings like faulty recordkeeping, flopped X rays, overworked hospital personnel, and officious hospital or clinic administrators. Clearly, in these legends there’s the feeling that doctors might sometimes do more harm than good, despite their Hippocratic oath.

Sometimes the apocryphal stories stem from simple ignorance about how things work. For example, a reader wrote me, “When my sister was about to undergo amniocentesis, a friend advised against it because someone she knew had the procedure, and the energy generated by the machine had caused the amniotic fluid to boil, severely injuring the developing infant.” (What about the mother?!) Another medical legend uses a simple plot to deliver the message that babies, even unborn ones, can be real fighters. It’s the story that babies are sometimes born with an intrauterine birth-control device clutched tightly in their tiny fists. Gynecologists assure me that it cannot happen, since an IUD is always outside the bag of waters containing the baby.

Another hospital story, sent to me by an Ohio reader, cautions volunteers to keep patient information confidential. Supposedly two candy stripers (young female hospital volunteers who traditionally wear striped uniforms) were speaking indiscreetly on an elevator about the patients with whom they were working. One of the girls mentioned an old man in the ward that everyone liked, and the other girl said very sadly that she had just heard a doctor say that the man was expected to die soon. Suddenly another passenger on the elevator fainted. It turned out that she was the old man’s daughter (or wife) who was coming for a visit, and the doctor had not yet explained his condition to her.

One of the classic medical horror legends involves an accidental patient death caused by a hospital visitor or worker. Merium Malik of San Antonio, Texas, sent me this one in 1991:

A recent variation on this lost-patient story started circulating on the Internet in July 1996. It was credited to a South African newspaper’s report of an incident in a hospital there. Here’s the verbatim wording of one such version:

There
was
such a story in the
Cape Times,
but the version that got on the Net failed to include a sentence that mentioned that the incident had not been confirmed. Also, it ignored the fact that the Cape Town story was datelined from another city, Bloemfontein, and the Net text punctuated as actual quotations some of the general information from the newspaper’s account. Arthur Goldstuck, Johannesburg journalist and author of three books on urban legends, tracked down the source of this story and posted his findings on the Net. The
Cape Times
got its information from an article in Cape Town’s Afrikaans-language newspaper,
Die Burger,
which had clearly stated that this lost-patients story had been a mere rumor for the past two years and characterized the event as an “alleged incident.” This example illustrates how the Internet may virtually “create” an urban legend by circulating in doctored form, so to speak, an already doubtful news item. There’s more to the story, which you can look up for yourself at http://www.urbanlegends.com/medical/hospital_cleaning_lady.html.

Finally, from reader Paul Teeples of Richmond, Virginia, a medical horror story with a different twist. He heard it on a job site during his days as a sheetrock installer:

A story like that (technically, a “catch tale,” not a legend) gives the term “sick humor” a whole new connotation.

“The Kafkaesque Hospital Visit”

A
man came to the general clinic of a university hospital complaining that the frames of his eyeglasses were crooked and wouldn’t sit straight on his face. To have anything done about the glasses, he had to be seen in the Ophthalmology Clinic. Hospital rules required that no one could be referred from the general clinic to a specialty clinic until a complete physical examination was done.

When the intern did a rectal exam as part of the required physical, a mass was found. Since this took priority over the problem with the glasses, the patient was referred to General Surgery Clinic for a proctoscopy. During this examination, a benign polyp was found and removed, but the intern performing the examination accidentally perforated the man’s colon with the proctoscope without realizing it.

The patient was finally given his appointment for the Ophthalmology Clinic and left, but he returned to the Emergency Room in the middle of the night very sick indeed. He had emergency surgery for his perforated colon. In spite of this, and despite massive antibiotic treatment, he developed peritonitis and a host of other complications and had to spend several weeks in the intensive care unit.

He finally recovered in time to be discharged from the hospital by the same intern who had originally seen him in the general clinic many weeks earlier and who had now rotated into the General Surgery service. On his first day there the intern immediately recognized the patient by the crooked way his glasses sat on his nose.

Sent to me by Dr. Charles Gauntt of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1986. A related story lists in detail the escalating costs of a hospital stay as the patient stays on and on while trying to complete required hospital paperwork before discharge, all the while being billed for a seemingly endless array of supplies, equipment, and services. Problems with the proctoscope (a much-dreaded diagnostic tool), according to legend, usually involve a spark generated by a loose wire that ignites intestinal gases and causes an explosion in the patient’s lower abdomen. Explosions have actually occurred, though rarely, during inspection or treatment of colon polyps. If you want the details, just run to your nearest medical school library, get volume 77 (1979) of the journal
Gastroenterology,
and check out pages 1307–10 for a fascinating and illustrated article titled “Fatal Colonic Explosion during Colonoscopic Polypectomy.” The case described there happened in France, which is about as close as I want to get to the subject. Evidently, this is a famous case, since four different doctors, including my own, have forwarded me copies of this article.

“Dental Death”

M
y elderly dentist told me that it was a standard joke in his dental school that if a patient should die in your chair, you should carry the corpse out to the restroom and leave him there to be discovered.

But how could someone die just from having dental work?

Well, another person told me about a dentist who had twin treatment rooms in his suite, and one time he decided to work on two patients at the same time, since both of them would be under anesthesia. But after he had both of them out, one patient started to react badly, and while the dentist was trying to help him, the other patient died. Then when he turned to the dead patient, the other one died too.

A reader wrote me about a dental death-and-rebirth story he had heard. A dentist who had a patient die in his chair late in the day when few other people were in the building did actually hoist the corpse onto his shoulder and head out for the bathroom. The men’s room was one flight down in the building, but the dentist managed to get there unseen and to leave the body on a toilet. He returned to his suite to tidy up and calm himself before going home, but a few minutes later he heard the door open, and he turned to see the “dead” man walk in, dazed but very much alive. Apparently the repeated bumps of being carried down the stairs had provided a sort of accidental CPR and jolted the man back to consciousness.

This is a summary of all the dental death stories I have heard during two decades of collecting urban legends. Considering the fear and loathing that most people harbor for dentistry, it’s surprising there are not more such legends. At least I hope they’re legends.

“The Relative’s Cadaver”

I
overheard this in a conversation between two students. One student told the other that last semester he heard that there was a girl taking an anatomy class, and when the professor unveiled the cadaver, the girl realized it was her aunt, whose funeral she had just attended two months earlier. The girl was unable to cope with the thought that she would be studying the body of a relative, and she dropped the class.

When I was in high school a friend who was a pre-med student enlightened me to the fact that first year med students are required to dissect a real human body. “Furthermore,” she said, “there was one busy young med student halfway through his first semester when his mother called to tell him that his grandfather had just passed on. He flew home to attend the funeral, then hurried back to school. Shortly thereafter, the students were led into a room filled with sheet-draped corpses all ready for dissection. When the young man lifted up his assigned sheet, he was horrified to see Grandpa! No one had told him that the old man was leaving his body to science.