Mouse Heart Transplant Surgery

I've been so busy concentrating on whitening my teeth with those horrendous-tasting strips and watching "Dancing with the Stars" that I almost forgot to keep the blog going. I figure it's time for an all-time favorite story. I swear to you this is true. (The mouse here is NOT the mouse of the story but plays the real mouse on TV. Never mind.)

Anyway, I was at this "team-building" training for work.

(I'm not telling you which employer as that could lead to problems. You'll have to figure it out yourself or ask one of my closest 100 friends. I will give you a clue that it is one of my jobs in the mental health field. That should tell you a lot. It's a fine line between staff and client.)

Team building--You know what that means--sitting around, doing stupid exercises, pretending to care about each other, pretending to care about what anyone says, doing more stupid team-building exercises, praying that someone pokes your eyes out so you can leave. So, we're doing this exercise where we are each supposed to say something we are proud of from our childhood. One by one, we tell our happy memories--normal memories of proud childhood moments. We're smiling and nodding and listening. I will be the last person to talk--I follow after our boss. So, I'm sitting there, thinking about how I am going to talk about how I was elected to be the Lieutenant of the Patrol Squad in sixth grade (you know, the nerds who stand on the corner wearing those orange belts--nerds helping people cross the street). I'm smiling and listening and ready to tell my story, when my boss says, "I completed successful mouse heart transplant surgery when I was ten years old."

Silence.

I am telling you--this REALLY happened and this lady REALLY said this!

We are stunned into silence. Successful mouse heart transplant surgery? At age 10? In the basement? In 1965? Did they even know about heart transplants in 1965????

Suddenly, my stupid story about being the Patrol Squad Lieutenant seemed so pitiful. How was I supposed to say that after someone just said she completed successful mouse heart transplant surgery?

For some unknown reason, no one questions this, even though we are a very well-educated group. Perhaps it is because no one wants to challenge the boss. Perhaps it is because some people at the team building meeting actually believe this crap. Perhaps it is because people are TOO STUPID to realize this is impossible.

Mouse heart transplant surgery! Successful, at that!

I want to scream out, "you've GOT to be kidding me! You are FULL OF SHIT!" I'm sitting there thinking about these teeny little mice, with their even-teenier little hearts and this lady sitting in her basement lab, pulling one teeny little heart out of one and sewing it into another. How many zillion mice did she have to kill to do this? Was there a pile of dead mice next to her work area? Where did she get the mice from? Where was the Humane Society? How did she keep the heart beating? How did she get the heart beating in the "new" mouse? Where were her parents? Did she have to do mouth-to-mouse rescue breathing? What happened to the mouse once the surgery was complete? How does she define "successful," anyway?

Yet, no one says anything. A few moments of silence and I say, "Boy, being the Lieutenant of the Patrol Squad in sixth grade sure doesn't compare to successful mouse heart transplant surgery." What else can I say?

Obviously, the team building is over. There is no team building when someone says she has done such a monumental thing. It shatters the very reason for being at the training in the first place. We leave, with not one of us challenging the ridiculous story. Our team is not built. It's destroyed. (Um, there is no "I" in team but there is an "M" and an "E"....in MICE.)

Every once in awhile, one of us will bring the story up and we laugh and we lament why we never said anything. We make little CPR-ish movements with our hands, like we are reviving Stuart Little or something. We draw pictures of dead little mice with little hearts flopping all around the table. I draw Mickey Mouse with stitches running up and down his chest. Heck, you can't have a bad day when you are laughing about successful mouse heart transplant surgery. And so, we laugh.