20 Best Cordless Drill For Home Use

Best Cordless Drill For Home Use in 2023

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What's Up, Doc?

"Two days ago my husband ripped his elbow half off on a rusty nail. Yesterday, he cracked his skull and puffed-up his eyebrow with a power drill."

As we sat at the kitchen table with our morning coffee and my spiraling cigarette smoke, Winifred frowned at me and, shaking her head, spoke as if someone had entered the room. "In two days my husband destroyed himself."

I looked behind me. Seeing no one, I shrugged, sucked on my cigarette, blew a smoke ring at her nose, and played her third person game. "Your husband has an exciting life, Fred."

My wife hated smoke blown in her face. Worse, she hated her name shortened, but, ignoring me because she figured talking to the Maltese staring up at her reaped better results, she continued. "Two days ago my husband ripped his elbow half off on a rusty nail. Yesterday, he cracked his skull and puffed-up his eyebrow with a power drill."

She sipped her coffee and petted our Maltese, "Now my husband walks around in a daze . . . dizzy."

"Only if he moves," I said.

"He needs his head examined."

"Not necessary. Shrinks are out."

"He will see our doctor . . . At least with one eye."

"Oh, that doctor."

"Yes, that doctor," she said, as if answering the Maltese. "My husband's left elbow looks like a rotten tomato, so he needs a tetanus shot. And my husband's head. . . ." She reached up toward my puffy left eyebrow.

I ducked. "Don't touch! It hurts."

"It should. You drilled a hole in it."

"Did not. The drill only fell on my forehead."

"Well, the lump is too big to be your brain," she snorted. "So our regular doctor can handle it. Besides, you need a physical."

"I had one."

"Yeah. Three years ago."

"I'll get to it," I said, meaning later.

Meaning now, she picked up the telephone. "I'll make an appointment . . . For both of us."

Soon, I overheard half a conversation.

"Yes," she smirked. "This is urgent. His brain is hanging over his left eye . . . His elbow looks like something the butcher throws away at the meat market . . . And he hasn't had a physical in three years."

I heard a gasp from the other end of the line.

"Yes. Can you believe it?" She rolled her eyes. "Three years."

"Big deal," I mumbled.

"Thanks," my wife said. "He'll be right over."

"Damn," I muttered, heading for the shower while Fred made her own appointment for the following week.

When I arrived at the clinic, the waiting room resembled a coed library, except for the noisy children who raced from wall-to-wall, crawled on the floor, or hung inverted from the available seats. As I closed the door, some patients peered over their outdated magazines to check the health of this new arrival. One old, toothless guy, wearing a faded veteran's hat, scanned the lump on my head. He grinned, nodded, as if his own head had been there. I nodded back, and then, looking to the right through an oblong window, I nodded at the receptionist who forced a smile at me.

"We've been expecting you, sir," she said. "We'll look at that eye and elbow right away." Turning, the receptionist passed my health records to a nurse behind her and whispered from the side of her mouth. "He hasn't had a physical in three years."

The nurse's brow shot up. Her eyes enlarged as she mouthed the words. "Three years?"

The receptionist forced another smile at me. Then, pointing at an open doorway beside her window, she told me, "Follow the nurse, sir."

When I passed through the doorway, I heard the waiting room stir. Resenting my special attention, the reading patients slapped their magazines on the table and in unison everyone moaned. "Geez." I shrugged in innocence as I followed the nurse down a short, white corridor into a room 10 by 10 feet. While the nurse scurried around preparing the room for the next patient--me--we ducked and danced and bumped into the sink, the doctor's desk, the examining table, and each other. As she closed the door, she said, "Take your clothes off . . . Except your skivvies. The doctor will be right in."

"After I turn blue," I mumbled.

"What?"

"Eh, thank you."

After I undressed, my skin invited goose bumps to the party. To help forget the chill, I played with the wall-mounted electronic eye and nose instruments. Then, bored with that, on the flat sink beside an open box of plastic gloves, I spied a tall jar filled with wooden tongue depressors. I took one, laid it on the back of my tongue, gagged, and almost puked. That was fun, I thought, as I tossed the stick into the wastebasket beside the desk. Although I was tired of waiting, tired of amusing myself, I resisted exploring the desk drawers. Instead, I sat and shivered my naked body on the noisy paper that covered the weird looking bed with the pull out metal footrests. I told the room. "And they don't understand why three years elapses between physicals."

I had read the dozen wall charts twice and stacked my third set of enlarged goose bumps when an attractive, over forty African-American rushed in wearing a doctor's white jacket and a swinging stethoscope from her neck. As my family doctor examined my puffed-closed eye and damaged elbow, she commented. "Three years, huh?"

"Yes, Doc," I told my favorite examiner. "I've been waiting here three years."

Ignoring my sarcasm, she cleaned my elbow and head wounds and taped a medicated compress on the back of my left arm and a bandage over my left eye. After she made me gag and almost puke on a tongue depressor, she took my blood pressure. Then she pushed and shoved against each goose bump until I grunted. When my skin flinched with each move of her cold stethoscope, I wanted to ask how long she stored that instrument in the freezer. However, I kept quiet while she listened to my inner machinery. Because she chewed her lower lip, when she dropped the stethoscope to her chest, I asked, "What's up, Doc?"

"Blood pressure . . . a little." Motioning me off the papered bed, she recited those fearful words. "Drop your skivvies. You sound healthy. Now we'll see if you feel healthy."

I lowered my skivvies to my knees and stood exposed. After she told me to cough, twice, she squeezed bumps as she looked for cancer lumps. She said, "That feels good."

"Easy for you to say, Doc." As I hurriedly pulling up my skivvies, I grinned.

She grinned wider. "Oh, no! Not so fast. Drop 'em."

I exposed myself again.

"Are you still smoking?" She asked, as she raised her left arm straight up. With her right hand, she pulled a lubricated glove over her fingers and left hand, and then held the glove sleeve stretched as if waiting for my answer.

"Yes . . . I'm down to three packs a day."

She let the glove sleeve snap against her brown forearm. Her dark eyes twinkled. "This is punishment for smoking. Turn around, bend over and rest your elbows . . . at least your good elbow . . . on the table." She pointed at the papered bed.

After I did what she told me, her finger reminded me why three years wasn't long enough between physicals. I thought she could find an easier way to probe my sinus cavity.

"Your prostate is normal," she assured me. "You can pull up your skivvies." Then she asked. "Any trouble peeing?"

"No."

"Good. Take this to the men's room." She passed me a vial small enough to check the eyesight of my good eye and the steadiness of my undamaged arm.

"Got anything smaller?"

"Sorry. An accident destroyed the larger ones. All you have to do is. . . ."

"I know," I interrupted. God, I thought. Why do those six dreaded words follow me around? I quoted what she started to say. "Fill the vial and take it to the Lab. Get a blood test."

"You passed my memory test, too," she mocked. "I'll call you at home if the Lab reports suggest problems. But first. . . ." A hypodermic needle punctured my arm before I realized she had anything in her hand. The second needle ignored my surprised yell at the first needle. "Antibiotic and tetanus," she explained. "Get dressed. Go pee."

Groping my way into the men's room with my left eye bandaged, I straddled a commode that resembled a shallow birdbath. I prepared myself for the task, turned my head sideways, and tried to focus my right eye on the vial in my hand. Once I started peeing, I couldn't stop, and my aim needed major adjustment. I hit my forearm, missed my wrist, drenched the wall, worked my stream back to the toilet seat, into the commode water for a spatter or two, and then dribbled into the vial between my thumb and finger. The vial received less than if I had spit in it twice.

Since I had exhausted my supply, I let the urine on my forearm drip into the vial. I'd let the janitor get the rest, I thought, as I washed up. Then I carried the urine vial down the short corridor where, through the open doorway, I saw the old, toothless guy wearing the faded veteran's hat still waiting behind a magazine.

When I reached the Lab, a nurse stood in the entrance as if waiting for me. I proudly passed her my urine sample. She held the vial up in disbelief, and smirked. "I need more than that."

"There's more on the men's room wall."

She shook her head, pouted, and motioned me to a chair inside the Lab. I sat and watched her insert my name-labeled vial into a tray with a dozen other urine samples. Then she slid the tray onto a low cart, placed an open container of used hypodermic needles next to the urine samples, and rolled the cart into the corridor just outside the door. Back in the Lab, she motioned to an orderly who worked in a far corner. "When you finish there, push those samples to urology . . . And dispose of the trash needles."

Returning to me, the nurse tied a bungee around my right biceps. Tightening the bungee until my good eye bulged, she punctured my good arm with what looked like a blunt nail with an attached milk jug. After the jug filled with my blood, she replaced it with another. When the second jug filled, she withdrew the blunt nail from my arm and gently covered the bloody wound with a gauze pad.

"Bend your arm," she smiled. "You're done."

Hurrying from the Lab with my right arm bent, I focused my right eye to avoid the door frame. I didn't see the urine sample cart on the left that still waited for the orderly. Hitting the cart with my left hipbone, the force sent the cart rolling down the white corridor toward the waiting room entrance and the magazine table beyond. With the vials rattling against one another, and the wheels thumping on the serrations of the tiled floor, the noisy cart quickly called up the attention of the waiting patients. Over their lowered magazines, their eyeballs expressed pending doom, but no one moved as their open-mouth stares froze on the rolling urine cart. I wondered if they were petrified or just listening to the music from the rattling vials.

The rattling ended, suddenly, when the urine cart front wheels hit the raised threshold at the waiting room entrance. With that sudden stop, the rear of the cart flipped, flinging vials, spattering urine, and catapulting hypodermic needles in multiple directions. When the urine vials and hypodermic needles went airborne like a medieval war arrow launch, the old, toothless guy, wearing the faded veteran's hat, remembered to yell. "Incoming . . . !"

Before finishing his warning, he dove under the magazine table. I never saw who become urine drenched or a hypodermic target. I ignored the yelling commotion, eased my way around the bodies scurrying around the waiting room, vaulted over the children playing on the floor, and opened and slammed the clinic door. Outside, in the quiet sunshine, I shook my head. I couldn't stand that every three years.

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