Fightingforsammy’s headaches on another thread (and many of the hilarious proposed solutions to deal with annoying co-workers) brought another Bernie story to mind. I didn’t want to hijack her thread, so I’m posting the story of his latest offense against society here instead.

There’s a little background setup for this, and it involves letting everyone in on something my wife Diane (aka Maximutt on these forums) and I have been dealing with for the past year. We wanted to keep it quiet while it was happening, which is why I never posted this story before. Last spring, Di was diagnosed with breast cancer. We didn’t want to talk about it because there’s enough worries about cancer around here, and although it was an aggressive strain of the disease that required equally aggressive treatment, she came out of it OK and the doctors are confident that she’s been cured. We’re past it now, and aside from Diane impatiently waiting for her hair to grow back to its former length, all is well. But one of the few high points of her treatment process was this story, where Bernie bin Laden reached a new low in the annals of offensive behavior.

Di’s treatment involved chemo (the TCH protocol, for those familiar with it), which involved a major dose of chemo drugs every three weeks. The treatments took a few hours, and were done in a nice center where every patient gets their own little room along the edges of the central area where the nurses sit and monitor everyone. Di had a great nurse named Barbara, who likes dogs a lot. She mentioned that every now and then, people bring their dogs to the treatments. To make sure other patients aren’t bothered, the patient and dogs are put into a room where one of the walls is made of glass, keeping the dogs contained but still allowing the nurses to keep an eye on things. Di dismissed the idea at first, since the thought of letting the combined hurricane that is Linda and Bernie loose in a hospital seemed like a really bad idea. But I wanted to do something to boost Di’s morale, so I secretly contacted Barbara and arranged to bring the idiot twins in as a surprise during one of her big treatments.

I went all out for this surprise. That morning, I took the dogs to the beach and wore them out as much as I could, in the forlorn (and, as it turned out, futile) hope that it might make Bernie so tired that he’d behave himself. Barbara had Di placed in one of the glass-walled rooms, so the stage was set for our arrival. I had even gone on e-bay and purchased a couple of inexpensive dog vests that had “Therapy dog” stitched on the sides (probably one of the biggest lies I’ve ever told, since prolonged exposure to Bernie usually causes people to go into therapy). So when we showed up at the hospital, I breezed right through the doors and upstairs to the treatment center without anyone questioning me, although a few people probably thought that these were unusually unruly therapy dogs as we passed by.

Di was very surprised to see me show up with the mutts, and they were a huge hit with the nursing staff. After moving Di’s I.V. drip stand so Linda couldn’t knock it over and yank the needle out of her, and convincing Bernie that mom’s lap wasn’t the best place for him during a medical treatment, the dogs sort of settled down. Sort of. All the nurses, of course, had to come in and visit Linda and Bernie, who were having the time of their lives with all these people paying attention to them. All in all, a usually tedious treatment session was turning into a fun time for everyone.

Then Bernie bin Laden had to show his true colors. One of our visitors was Regina, the center’s nurse practitioner (which is a sort of senior supervisory nurse position about halfway between a nurse and a doctor). Consequently, she didn’t dress in the same scrubs the nurses did. Regina always dressed a little nicer, usually wearing her white medical coat over a dress, nylons, and heels. Bernie made her regret that. While Regina was standing there talking to Diane, Bernie wandered around behind her. And then, completely without warning, he used his head to flip the back of her skirt up and jammed his nose right where the sun don’t shine.

Regina jumped about a foot in the air and let out a high-pitched squeak, and I saw the nurses on the other side of the glass gasp and go into hysterics. Barbara later told me that if it hadn’t been for the fact Regina was wearing pantyhose, she would have mooned the entire room. As it was, Bernie left a big wet nose print on the panty part. Regina quickly yanked her dress back down, clamped her legs together, and bunched her skirt around her knees to avoid further intrusions (a wise precaution, since Bernie attempted another assault a few seconds later).

It was all I could do not to fall on the floor laughing uncontrollably. Regina looked mortified. Diane looked like she wanted to crawl under her own chair from embarrassment. Bernie just looked pleased with himself. Linda ignored everything, since as usual she was busy spelunking in the trash can looking for scraps of food.

Much to our relief, Regina was a fairly good sport about the whole thing. She did point out, however, that she usually expects a guy to buy her dinner first. Not surprisingly, she excused herself quickly, presumably to take a cold shower after enjoying the advances of our hairy little Casanova. Bernie seemed satisfied after she left, and curled up in the corner to go to sleep. Maybe I should have offered him a cigarette.

And ever since then, Diane has never seen Regina in a dress again.