“It’s always something,” Gilda Radner’s Saturday Night Live character Roseanne Roseannadanna was wont to lament. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
That’s the way it is for some people. Things just go wrong for them, sometimes in rapid succession, with little nuisances and minor inconveniences piling up until what started out as a little problem has suddenly become a big one.
And we do mean big.
Imagine you’re a paramedic and the dispatcher sends you to a rehabilitation center to transfer a patient with coronavirus symptoms to a hospital. You get there and you find out that the patient weighs more than 400 pounds. The dispatcher should have warned you about the patient’s excessive weight in advance, but maybe the dispatcher didn’t know.
Still, you’ve got your EMT partner with you. Between the two of you brawny guys, you should be able to get the supersized subject onto a stretcher and lift the stretcher into the emergency vehicle. That is, you should have been able to do those routine tasks, were it not for the fact that your partner that day is working with an injured shoulder and is not able to assist in lifting the stretcher.
Why is the partner working with an injured shoulder? How is he supposed to perform all the duties of his position in that condition? Good questions.
But, hey, there’s an airbag suspension system on the emergency vehicle that will facilitate the lifting. Or it would have, had it been working. So, what do you do? Do you abort the mission, or do you try to lift the morbidly obese patient by yourself?
Reinhold Haussecker Jr. chose the latter option, suffered a hernia, and is now suing his employer, Concord EMS, for $1 million in damages in Harris County District Court.
That must be some hernia. We don’t know what the going rate is for hernias, but surely it’s not a million dollars.
Something tells us that the suit won’t turn out well for Haussecker. If it’s not one thing, it’ll be another.