Wardrobe Malfunction of the Third Kind

The tale you are about to read was jogged from my repressed memory museum on Sunday, when I popped in to read Tammy's Message in a Bloggle and see what she had percolating in her weekly Improper Poll.

Let's get the ground rules out of the way first. In Val's terminology, wardrobe malfunctions are classified thus:

Wardrobe Malfunction of the First Kind - a wardrobe malfunction is spotted on another person at a distance of 500 yards or less. Such as when the job counselor at the unemployment office wears one brown shoe and one black shoe to work.


Wardrobe Malfunction of the Second Kind - physical traces of a wardrobe malfunction are found. Like when you find a pair of panties in the wastebasket in the Sonic bathroom, and surmise, "There's one pair of undies that is not going to be creeping up the wearer's crack anymore."

Wardrobe Malfunction of the Third Kind - when a person actually comes in contact with her own wardrobe malfunction. See below.

Many years ago, shortly after the birth of my youngest son, I was attacked by my own gallbladder. It was quite a painful ordeal, necessitating my slow-speed rush from the classroom by way of my aunt's Lincoln Town Car to a local emergency room. A nurse without protective gloves jabbed me for a blood sample and created a crimson Old Faithful at my inner elbow. Results in hand, as well as ON hands, shoes, and white pants, she started an IV of saline solution while the doctor on duty figured out what to do with me.

Because the ER was ER only, I needed transport to a full-service hospital. I was advised that I could wait for the ambulance to return to the upper reaches of the county and scoop me up, or I could travel by private vehicle. The ambulance might take a couple of hours, but I could leave in the IV and have pain meds in it. Private vehicle would be quicker, but the IV would have to be removed and re-started at the hospital. Oh, and no pain meds until I was evaluated at New Hospital.

Perhaps you have not had the misfortune of gallbladder auto-assault. It is quite unpleasant. The pain is worse than childbirth. Worse than a broken bone. Worse than a torn cartilage. In the back of my mind, I knew that the offending organ had to be removed. So I did not see any benefit in lolling about waiting for my sirened carriage to haul me to New Hospital. Hick had arrived from work, and decreed that he would drive me. I signed out somewhat against medical advice to hightail it to the full-service hospital.

Bear with me. I'm getting to the wardrobe malfunction.

They were expecting me at New Hospital. I was quickly gowned, and an IV and pain pump were installed on my left forearm. The nurse was impressed by my pain tolerance, what with my amylase levels being too high to schedule surgery. According to her, most people with that level were not walking around, coherent. But enough bragging about my superior bullet-biting pain threshold. I was assigned a bed so I could hurry up and wait for the amylase levels to fall into a surgically acceptable range. At least that's how I understood it. But then again, I was on a Demerol pump. So for all I know, Captain Unicorn rocked me in a porch swing under the rainbow until the owie went away.

An ultrasound was ordered to discern whether the gallstones might pass and put the kibosh on that whole surgery scenario. The nurse told me to make sure I was only wearing the hospital gown, and made a hasty exit. Which was kind of a problem, because in our haste, we had slapped on that gown with my bra still in place. My plan was to take off that bra and slip it through the gown sleeve and off the end of my arm. The arm which was attached by two tubes to a metal IV tree on wheels, by way of a bag of saline solution and a wonderful narcotic-on-demand box.

I was a gamer. I finagled that bra loose, even though I had to use my right, non-tethered arm to unhook it single-handedly. A task usually done with my left hand. Then I was stumped. There was no way that bra was going to slip over those mediciny obstacles and that metal stand. I thought it through like a chimpanzee contemplating which twig to use as a termite fork. I would have to slide the bra down my arm, over the two tubes, and up or down that metal stand. It was worse than a Chinese ring puzzle. Oh, how I wished for a chimpanzee to show me what to do. But there were none in my wing of the hospital. Go figure.

The sensible thing to do would have been to ring the nurse with the call button, and tell her my predicament. Which would have meant either taking out the tubes at my inner elbow and thumb-wrist area, and then reinserting them after the recalcitrant bra had been removed...or using scissors to snip the offending undergarment off my arm. I do not fear needles. But I had no desire to incur a fifth and sixth stabbing of the day.

So I did what any sane woman with a bra malfunction and a squirt of Demerol every fifteen minutes would have done, and I chewed through the plastic ring thingy that held the strap to the bra proper. No removable strap looped through a slotted doodad for my bra. Nope. The end of the strap was stitched tighter than sixteen-year-old boy's eyebrow after a collision with a gym wall.

Yep. I destroyed one of my favorite bras rather than undergo two more skin punctures. And I saw no need to announce the predicament to the nurse in order to allow her to cut through Brazilla with a pair of tape scissors. It was only fitting that I sever Brazilla myself.

Which was a Wardrobe Malfunction of the Third Kind, orchestrated by a Demerol-addled Val.