ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- A Kazakh man who was electrocuted and buried has shocked his friends and family by turning up for his own funeral feast.
The man was wrapped in a cloth shroud according to Muslim tradition and buried in a shallow grave after apparently dying while trying to steal power cables in eastern Kazakhstan, local media reported.
But two days later he regained consciousness and rose naked from the ground, Express K daily said.
The paper said he had difficulty flagging down a vehicle to take him home.
-- Reuters news service item, as posted on CNN.com
I was planning on writing this week's column about how embarrassing modern medicine can be when I ran across this completely true news story. Life just works out really wonderfully sometimes; the humor columnist gods were smiling down upon me, no?
This piece absolutely takes the cake. Imagine how Mr. Power Thief felt to wake up, buck naked, in a medium-well state thanks to his little electricity faux pas, groggy because he had been a coma two days, with dirt on top of him and worms probably in his mouth. Something tells me this had to be a little bit startling.
Then -- talk about embarrassing -- he had to walk to a road and flag down a vehicle.
Now, let's analyze why "he had difficulty flagging down a vehicle to take him home." Most people waking up after only one night of good sleep look horrible enough to scare boulders. Imagine what this guy looked like.
And it was all because someone forgot to make sure he was DEAD before he was buried.
While this mistake is fairly rare in the United States, the American medical system still manages to embarrass the hell out of people in many other ways, the primary one being the medical gown.
Who the hell invented this thing, and where I can I find him/her to do some pummeling? There is no need to design an article of clothing that leaves a gap all the way down the middle of a person, leaving normally private body parts out for all the world to see. What medical purpose does such a thing have? If anything, it leaves the gown-wearer open to drafts, which is not very medically prudent, if you ask me.
I had the freaking privilege the other day to wear one of these stupid things, when I had a stomach X-ray taken as a precautionary measure (everything's fine). Apparently, the gigantic machine that was taking X-rays -- which can see through skin and bone -- couldn't possibly handle looking through the polo shirt I was wearing, so they put me in one of the butt-crack displaying garments. They then made me turn every which way as I laid on a platform while the machine took X-rays. To top off this dignity-defying experience, they made me drink a barium milkshake, which is one of the most disgusting things to slurp on this planet.
It was like I was a horribly dressed supermodel who was posing horizontally. Except that I was actually eating something.
Even filling out medical paperwork can be an embarrassing experience, for crying out loud. My mother and I recently accompanied my father to get a biopsy of a tumor on his larynx. As he checked into the surgery center, a receptionist gave my father a bevy of paperwork to fill out.
My dad smartly read all the paperwork carefully, and he ultimately came across a form that he found to be perplexing. The form, in no uncertain terms, informed him that the procedure he was going to undergo would probably end up leaving him sterile.
He went up to the receptionist and asked her how in the WORLD a larynx biopsy would result in THIS -- and the nurse, for the entire waiting room to hear, read the contract back to him, as if it should be obvious.
"I am not gonna sign THAT!" my father retorted.
A few minutes later, an embarrassed nurse emerged to explain that the receptionist accidentally gave my father the contact for women who are going to get their tubes tied. The receptionist was new, she explained.
Ah, what an embarrassing incident. Not as embarrassing as having to flag down a car, naked and half-baked after emerging from your premature grave, but embarrassing nonetheless.
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan who wishes everyone a very merry Christmas. Jimmy's column appears here Tuesdays, and a column archive may viewed at www.geocities.com/jiboegle.