Q: A man and his son get into a car accident. The father is killed, while the son is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. When he arrives, the doctor says “I cannot operate on this boy! I do not belong in a hospital. I’ve never even been to medical school—this whole thing is a prank that got out of control. See, my buddy Daryll was getting his appendix out and I thought it would be funny to dress up as a doctor and say like ‘The ball removal operation was a success’ when he woke up, to freak him out and stuff. So there I am in scrubs at his bedside trying to shake him awake, when this orderly comes in and says something about I’m late to my surgery and what the hell am I doing. So I think, fine, why not go check it out, but it turns out I have to do the surgery so I’m standing there while this orderly is yelling at me about gangrenous kidneys and I’m just trying to remember where the kidneys are (in the front?) but eventually I think, you know what? Maybe I’ll be a natural at it, like how mothers can lift cars off their kids if they love them enough. So I say yes of course, where’s my scalpel, and the orderly says don’t I have to wash my hands and get gloves first, and I say oh yeah that’s right. So I do all that, get my scalpel, make a little cut where I think the kidneys are, and you know? Completely wrong. The patient bleeds out pretty much instantly. Everyone’s mad at me, and I’m kicking myself because it would’ve been awesome to realize surgery’s my hidden talent but here I am taking a life for the first time. But the family is oddly calm about the whole thing—turns out what the patient really wanted was to have a doctor-assisted suicide, and I was a kind man for letting them have their final wish. So then I get called into the boss’ office, and I’m thinking the jig is up. Instead she shakes my hand.

‘Nice work in there,’ she says. ‘Not a lot of doctors would be brave enough to do what you did.’

‘Just doing my best,’ I say, hoping in the back of my mind that Daryll’s still knocked out because I still want to prank the sucker.

‘So,’ she says, ‘how’d you like a promotion to head of surgery?’

And, well, I don’t know anything about being a doctor but I know enough to know the insurance is good, so I say yes. From there it’s a whirlwind of surgeries, some more successful than others—they all died, of course, but the families had different levels of acceptance re death. But the guilt’s eating me up, and I just wanna come clean. I’m not Doctor Medicine, world-famous surgeon. I’m Bobby Howard, college student and part-time bassist. I think Doctor Medicine was the name on the costume’s name tag. Anyway I’m so sorry, but I can’t do this surgery.” How can this be?

A: The father crashed his car because he was drunk driving.