Sickly

There's a lot of bad things associated with having a cold. The coughing, the sniffles, the inevitable raw nose from all the snot wiping, etc etc. As a surgeon with a cold, the following two tend to top my list:

1. The number of people that make the stupid comment about me needing to go see a doctor. "No wait, you are a doctor! You can go see yourself!" Hardy Har Har! Boy that one never gets old!

2. You're in surgery and you sneeze. Thankfully your mask catches all your sneeze germs from going into your patient's wound. However, now you're stuck with a disgusting mask filled with sneeze and snot until you either finish the case or get a nurse to get you a new mask.

I try hard not to sneeze for that very reason.

On a side note, I've sneezed multiple times with my eyes open just to prove that a person's eyeballs will not pop out with a forceful sneeze. There is no physiological basis for that rumor. I don't have an explanation of why the body closes the eyes when it sneezes, but I know it's not done to prevent the ejection of the eyeballs from the skull.

I proved this point to a friend of mine while driving to lunch the other day. Initially, he looked a bit freaked out after I sneezed, I couldn't figure out why. But then I put 2 and 2 together and realized that I was driving when I sneezed. Had my eyes popped out as dictated by rumor, it would have caused a bad driving situation and we would probably have wrecked.