SCENE FROM A HOSPITAL

 It is midnight. A sedan pulls up to an ER in a hospital in Northern Florida. 

Dramatis Personae: An ER Attending Physician; a Patient; his "clerk"

DR: Mohammed: Good morning. I am Dr. Mohammed. The ER resident has spoken with me. You have a high fever and persistent cough. Your oxygen saturation level was 92 when you arrived and it is currently 89, which is dangerous.  We are waiting test results, but we are pretty sure you have Covid. There is a treatment protocol I would like to begin now with a common steroid and a series of IVs you may have heard of: mono-clonal antibodies. 

Mr. X: Well a couple of questions first [cough, cough]. If you do not mind me asking, are you an American? 

DR: No. I am a visiting physician training American doctors in pulmonology and immunology. I was formerly the chief of Pulmonology at Hospital Universitaire Pitie Salpetriere. It is considered the best hospital in France.

Mr. X: Well with all due respect, there is not really covid. And I would like an American doctor. Foreign doctors don't train Americans. I mean America invented x-rays and blood transfusions and discovered that germs cause disease and we discovered penicillin and the list goes on and on. 

DR: Actually, every discovery you mentioned was by a doctor or scientist in a country other than America. For example, X-rays were discovered in Germany. But the people who saw you in the ER are new residents, meaning they have been doctors for less than six months, while I have been a doctor for thirty years. 

Mr. X: Well, lets talk about [cough, cough] what is wrong here. If I do have Covid, which is just a mild cold, there are plenty of great treatments that most doctors don't know about or won't give. Don't you have like a former NFL or NBA player working here who may know more about this than you? Down the street from where I work there is a liquor store and the woman who works there has a friend who supposedly got Covid and they used this horse medicine that worked along with these homo-opopathy-something pills. Now I don't go for this trans-gander people who violate the Lord's words, but those medicines were really researched by Aaron Rodgers, who is a Super-Bowl winning quarterback for like, five hundred pages. So he really knows about this stuff. So let's try that.

DR: I think you're referring to Homeopathy, and while it doesn't refer to the sexual preferences of the practitioners,   there have been over 1800 studies that have concluded it does not work.  Now, may I ask if you have been vaccinated against Covid.

Mr. X: NO! This is doctor-patient privileged, okay? The young woman who drove me here is my clerk, but I am getting divorced and we are going to be married and want a family and she has a friend who has a cousin who went to a wedding and six months after the wedding the husband, who was vaccinated, had a swelling in his nether regions and cannot get his wife pregnant. Now I believe in the bible and the lord said go forth and multiply.  And right now my clerk. Candy-Mae, and I are able to have sex and I do not want that to stop. 

DR: Well, if you're married and having sex with this young woman, the first thing I would recommend is that all of your sexual partners get a Covid test, not withstanding the Tenth Commandment about coveting your neighbor's clerk. 

Mr. X: Well as it turns out, I am a Justice on the Florida Supreme Court and now that you mention the Ten Commandments, as soon as we get a case, we are going to allow the Commandments to be in all public buildings. 

DR: So it's Commandments yes, Masks, no?

Mr. X: You know doc, [cough, cough]  I am starting to like you. 

COMING MONDAY: Letters From A Miami Courtroom. When Judges see a wrong, how many of them have the courage to right it? Not many it seems.