Newsworthy

Picture Ron Burgundy: smarmy news anchor, but forward to 2011. Make him a reporter for Fox CT and put him at the Smilow Cancer Center trying to get a news story.

I first heard him when Donna left the examining room to get sick and left the door ajar. As he yammered on about lighting his voice carried from down the hall. Then his voice got louder as one of the physicians lead him to the examining room directly across the hall.

“Oh, yeah, this is great! Wow. This room has all the bells and whistles. We like bells and whistles!”

He continued with some inane comments and goofy laughter, as if he were on a f**king class trip and this were a science museum, not a functioning clinic with patients in the rooms, anxiously waiting for scan results from their oncologists before heading off to have chemotherapy drugs infused through ports in their chests or their heads, chilled to the bone sitting in johnnies on examining tables wrapped in paper fighting nausea, or in the bathrooms throwing up because the nausea had won.

Donna came back in and we resumed waiting for Michelle, the nurse practitioner, while Mr. Smarmy went back down the hall to discuss with the doctor this new piece of medical research he heard about on the national news (a week and a half ago) about lymph node removal, which he was trying repackage as a local news piece.

But I could still hear him, as if he were on the other side of the curtain in the examining room that separated Donna and me from the door.

A little while later, after Michelle had examined Donna and gone to consult with an oncologist, and we were waiting again, his voice got louder again. A peek out the door revealed that he had set up his tri-pod right outside the door, in the hallway, and was focusing the shot, recording the doctor and himself—doing his “stand-up piece”— in the room across the hall with aforementioned “bells and whistles.”

He rehearsed his “stand-up piece” twice about the controversy of removing lymph nodes which have a biological purpose, while Donna and I fantasized about sabotaging his shot in various ways (if only we could fart on cue!), and then said to the doctor after she complimented him, “Yeah, I’m pretty good at bullshitting.”

*#$&#(@)*@&$)@!!!

I was done fantasizing about ruining his shot and was a nanosecond from going out and shoving his tri-pod up his ass while saying something like, Listen douche bag. This isn’t bullshit and these bells and whistles are pieces of medical equipment that the cancer patients behind these doors rely on to get well! The last thing they need is to listen to a cheese dog like you trying to get a story! Shut the f*ck up!! Oh-so-kind and mild-mannered Michelle coming back in the room and apologizing profusely stopped me from my melt down.

Stay classy, Fox News, stay classy.