April Fools 2016

I was having one of my usual brain freezes this April Fool's Day and decided to Google medical pranks and foolishness suitable for the day. The best trick that I found was to put Surgilube on stethoscope earpieces which I thought was kind of cute.

Here is an unintentional, but true prank that I was an unwitting victim of. In nursing school our uniform inspections were very detailed and Miss Bruiser, our instructor always found some fault to humiliate a lowly student. We were always supposed to have our clinic shoes buffed up to a gleaming shine, but sometimes the white laces were neglected. I can hear Miss Bruiser's shrill voice, "You forgot to bleach your shoe laces and have just earned yourself a demerit." Shoe laces could be bleached in dilute Clorox solution several times with acceptable results.

My roommate had been called on this issue and was carefully bleaching shoe laces in a plain old drinking glass. Someone saw the glass filed with dilute Clorox and white shoelaces, thought it was milk (we used to smuggle milk back from the cafeteria like this all the time using this method.) The proper place for a glass of milk was the refrigerator which is where it went.

I saw what I thought was a glass of milk in the refrigerator and being half-awake dumped it on my cereal the next morning. The bubbling and gurgling of the cornflakes in the cereal bowl should have been a tip off, but not this time. I stuffed a big spoonful into my mouth. My tongue started to sting and a smokey substance erupted from my nose. I suddenly realized that I had ingested a toxic substance and quickly spit it out. The "milk" was actually a  solution of  the shoelaces bleached clean of hospital grime . After a few aggressive rinses with Listerine, I was fine. I will never forget that noxious taste and always viewed Clinic shoelaces in a different light after that episode. Maybe it was actually a boon to my immune system because I never got sick in nursing school.