The Boy Who Cried Lice

The little trickster. :)

When we were newlyweds, Michael would tease his parents every week when he called home by acting like he had something really great and important to say, and asking them, "Did you hear the good news?" At first--okay, probably ONLY the first time--they seemed suspicious that we had THE good news that is many parents-of-newlyweds' dream, but waited excitedly (and wisely) for him to tell them that they were soon to be grandparents. We did not have that kind of good news for them, though, so Michael would fill it in with something like, "The Jazz beat the Lakers" (which would be good news, but that's beside the point). Months went by with every Sunday evening call having some form of "good news" teasing from Michael, but never THE actual good news. Of course, even if we had had the actual good news to tell them, they would never have believed us.

Recently, he did it to me. Twice. The first one was when he was at the hospital and he called me on his lunchbreak but I missed the call. It's really a 50/50 on if you should ever allow a call to be missed from Michael. He may leave you a harmless random message that makes you laugh out loud in Barnes and Noble, making everyone stare at you, or he might leave you a message saying he's "Jim Calhoun from the county fair" and "You need to come pick up your hog that you purchased" and somehow do it so convincingly that you're actually, well, convinced, and race for a pen and paper to jot down Mr. Calhoun's number so you can straighten out this huge mistake. The message he left while at the hospital was a convincing type.

"Hi, Anita. Um, there was a gunman here in the hospital and I'm okay, but they have us in lockdown until things get figured out, and they told us to call our families and just let them know we're okay, so, yeah. I'm okay, but it's kind of crazy here. Gotta go. Bye."

You might think it sounds a little far-fetched, but earlier in his rotations there actually WAS a gunman who came into the hospital ER and shot himself. Fortunately, Michael wasnt working at that hospital that day, so while he hung out at his hospital, the trauma team he was working with was at the other place when this happened. When I listened to the message from Michael, I was out running errands so I had no way of checking the news or finding out what was going on, but I was so concerned about him I called a couple family members with the intent of asking them to check for me while I was on my way home. None of them answered, though, and a few minutes later Michael called and was really just on his way home from work and if I had answered my phone the first time, he was going to tell me he got out early that day.

Recently, Michael convinced me I had lice. Our nephew had them and we had been with him, so we checked each other for nits and felt itchy for a week, even though there were none to be found. But Michael seriously examined my hair and gravely declared that he thought I did have some. He was so disgusted by it that I actually believed him until, after 20 minutes of my asking, "Are you serious? You're joking, right?", he submitted, "You wouldn't believe me either way." I think I sensed a hint of sadness in his voice when he said it, but I knew I didn't have lice, at least. Phew.

Now, after all these times of faking me out, I had learned my lesson. Don't be quick to think something crazy is true; wait for evidence. So when he texted me on a Friday afternoon, the day before he was supposed to fly out to Philadelphia for his big test, and said, "My flight to Philly has been cancelled," I wasn't exactly quick to look for solutions to this, "Ha, ha. Very funny." problem. Which turned out to be a problem, because when he got home from work around 5:30 and said he was not joking, but was actualy telling the truth, we ended up scrambling to get a flight for him so he wouldn't miss the test. "Scrambling" included being on hold for an hour--seriously, 60 whole minutes, searching every travel website for the cheapest flights that would get in to Philly before 8:00 pm on Saturday (when they planned to shut down the airport for Hurricane Irene), not getting Darwin dinner on time (equaling a sad, crying baby in the midst of the chaos), and generally freaking out. In the end, we found him a flight for a pretty penny, fed Darwin dinner, and went for a drive for take-out and ice cream.

I'm still not sure if the moral of the story is don't "cry wolf," or if it's "believe everything he says until proven false," but I suppose it may be safer to do the latter.

    

The stress of the last month was too much for Michael. I came into the bathroom one day to find him trying on my headband. Ha. Apparently, Darwin was stressed out, too, and decided to try on a whipped cream container. And lastly, Michael texted me this picture on the way home one day, saying that a patient had gotten angry and punched him in the face. He was "crying lice"--really, he just had a run-in with his own stethoscope. Ha. Gotta watch out for those!