Colossal Fuckup in an Oldham GP Surgery

Here's another urban legend from another colleague.

A doctor's surgery somewhere in Oldham: oversubscribed and underfunded. The doctor is of Asian origin, possibly Bangladeshi. A patient enters, possibly from a similar region of West Asia, although not the same country. They speak the same language, but the patient isn't fluent in English. It's some time in the afternoon after a slew of patients; the doctor's edging on tired. The resident recently moved into the neighbourhood.

The GP performs a general checkup. He applies a motorised band to the upper arm of the patient to test the blood flow. Normally, the machine it's attached to beeps in time with the patient's pulse. This time, there's no sound at all.

This man has no pulse, thinks the doctor. He's about to die. Right here in my surgery.

He panics, and immediately phones for an ambulance. The patient waits, bemused.

The paramedics arrive, slapping on powdered rubber gloves and dropping satchels full of instruments on the clinic floor. They do a basic check which the GP failed to administer: they roll back the sleeve of the patient's shirt. His arm is a slightly different shade of dark brown to his facial skin tone. It has a rubbery, plastic feel.

It's a bionic arm. The doctor just didn't think to check the arm. He didn't look, or try the other arm, i.e. the real, remaining one. Nor did he ask about it. And the patient, well, he didn't think to point out to the doctor that the arm he was checking wasn't even real. He probably didn't even know the function of the device strapped to his prosthetic limb.

I guess it goes to show that, no matter how intelligent we might be, whatever that means, we're always going to be capable of making the dumbest of mistakes.