Sunday Funnies, Vol. 4 (Easter Edition).

It was Easter Sunday, 1967. I was a nineteen-year-old Navy Hospitalman stationed at Beaufort Naval Hospital, Beaufort, SC. I had received orders for there at the completion of Field Medical Service School at Camp Le Juene in early February. It would turn out to be only a six-month posting before further orders to 5th MARDIV, Camp Pendleton. All of the guys who lived hundreds or thousands of miles away, were of course on liberty. Given that my hometown of Savannah was only 45 miles away, I had duty. I was pulling duty in the treatment rooms in the ER. Typically, in the late afternoon and early evenings of Sundays, we would see a lot of dependent kids with UCHDs (“usual childhood diseases”) who really should have been seen during normal business hours in the peds clinic, but cluttering up the ER on the weekends was more convenient for the parents. The first person you would see upon entering the ER was the corpsman at the triage desk. In the typical non-emergent situation, the duties of the triage corpsman were fairly simple: check ID’s and write a simple description of the patient’s primary complaint. This would usually be a one-liner, i.e., “Pt. C/O (‘patient complains of’) cough and sore throat.” Usually, the guys who pulled that duty assignment were people who had shown a somewhat less than stellar aptitude for clinical duties. That Easter Sunday, the triage corpsman was a good ol’ boy from Mississippi named Maynard. I can’t remember his last name, but he was one of only two people named Maynard I’ve ever met, so his first name sticks with me. Maynard’s regular work-a-day assignment was down in the hospital’s linen room where he kept track of bed sheets and pillowcases. For folks of Maynard’s clinical aptitude, it was generally either the linen room or checking out bicycles and camping gear at the “special services” locker. There came a point when I opened the swinging doors to the treatment rooms and called for the next patient. A woman stepped forward with her little boy about four or five years of age. It seemed that the child had received a pet rabbit that very morning. At some point, while the child was holding the rabbit, it had leaped out of the child’s hands. In the process, the palm of the child’s hand had been slightly lacerated by one of the rabbit’s claws. When the woman handed me the form from the triage desk, I saw that Maynard had described the primary complaint thusly: “Pt. C/O small rabbit prick in palm of right hand.” Photocopies circulated around the hospital for days.