ARMAGEDDON !!

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I worked as a teacher in the field of English in medicine. During those challenging but enjoyable years, I met some wonderful Polish doctors, surgeons and nurses, most of whom remain close personal friends. Their collective humanity and humour are things I will always treasure and remain an inspiration in my daily life.

Inevitably, along with the daily disappointments and sometime tragedies, some truly great anecdotes emerged from contact with these wonderful people. I managed to supplement these during my material research and I’d like to share the best of these with our Party Krakow readers.

The ones that are definitely true will be marked “Definitely True”. Those that are down to simple good humour and imagination will be left to you to judge.

This one is definitely true and comes from a report in a Los Angeles newspaper that I came across some years ago:

From an article in the Los Angeles Times :-

“In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake, but I was only trying to retrieve the gerbil”, Eric Tomaszewski told bemused doctors in the Sever Burns Unit of Salt Lake City Hospital.

Tomaszewski, and his homosexual partner Andrew “Kiki” Farnum, had been admitted for emergency treatment after a felching session had gone seriously wrong.  ”I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum and slipped Raggot, our gerbil, in,” he explained.  ”As usual, Kiki shouted “Armageddon” my cue that he’d had enough.  I tried to retrieve Raggot but he wouldn’t come out again, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking the light might attract him.”

At a hushed press conference, a hospital spokesman described what happened next.  ”The match ignited a pocket of intestinal gas and a flame shot out of the tube, igniting Mr Tomaszewski’s hair and severely burning his face.  It also set fire to the gerbil’s fur and whiskers, which in turn ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestinal tract, propelling the gerbil out like a cannonball.
Tomaszewski suffered second-degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.

P.S- have a look at the video at the top- this one comes from a radio show (John Boy and Billy) and is read by Robert D Raford who loses it in the end while trying to read the story