An emergency room visit featuring awkward jokes, irony and X-rays

Maybe some nursing students can help me out with this.

I want to know about the standard procedure for small talk with patients, specifically if you are taught that the stock answer for when a patient greets you and asks how you are doing is "Better than you!"

I had three staff members at the East Alabama Medical Center give me that same exact joke when I was getting X-rayed recently for what turned out to be a broken clavicle.

I imagine that if this line of dialogue is in a text book somewhere, there's probably a disclaimer stating, "Do not use this for any patient suffering an injury more serious than a broken clavicle. Do not tell transplant patients you're doing better than them. They won't laugh politely like the doofus with the broken collar bone."

Just before I went back to take my X-ray, the technician invited me back in an odd way.

I don't remember his name, so we will call him "Stephen," but he said, "Hi, I'm Stephen. Let's go to the back. We're going to take some pictures."

With that statement I imagined hearing the motor and seeing the flash of a Polaroid camera, and as my eyes adjusted post-flash I would see "Stephen" shaking the small, black square. He would then sharing with me the information that "This is going to be a good one."

I hope I'm not subconsciously remembering his name, and it is indeed Stephen, or else my use of these quotation marks is all for naught.

It is rare that I break a bone, so I almost asked if I could get a copy of my X-ray, so that I could have a souvenir to remember "that time I hurt myself."

I restrained myself, not only because it appeared that the hospital had done away with printed X-rays, instead showing me my broken bone on a widescreen computer monitor they had turned sideways.

I also did not ask for it because I realized that the only people who ever keep their X-rays are those who have found themselves with screwdrivers or nails lodged into their brain, survive and are planning to appear on "Ripley's Believe it or Not!," and my X-ray simply did not stack up.

Dean Cain would not be impressed, and nobody wants to let down Superman.

Besides, the people on that show need some proof if folks are going to "believe it" as the title suggests.

But the truth is, "Stephen" took a mighty fine X-ray, and all the people I encountered in the emergency room process where doing their best to get people in and out.

At my hometown hospital, you pretty much had to cancel all of your plans for the foreseeable future if you had to visit the emergency room, but I got out of the EAMC in two and a half hours.

Probably the most interesting part of my journey was that I hurt myself on April 1, so everyone I called to give me a ride to the hospital thought I was joking or pulling a prank, which I do have a history of doing.

People who doubted my sincerity laughed at me through the phone as I described the pain I was in, and then I laughed at myself with them, because of the April Fools' joke the universe had played on me.

To my friends and family, I was the boy who cried collarbone.