This story was recently related to me by an old shipmate we’ll call Bill (obviously not his real name).

Bill was a Second Class SeaBee, stationed in Bahrain during the first Gulf War.  The desert heat did a number on him, and he didn’t drink enough water to stay ahead of dehydration.  Before he knew it, dehydration had given him a sore throat, and the sore throat rapidly progressed into Strep.  Sick as a dog, Bill ended up at the Mickey Mouse medical facility that Bahrain was making do with in those days.

He had to take his shirt and tee shirt off for the examination, and – following diagnosis – a nurse asked him to drop his pants for a Penicillin injection in the fantail.  Bill wasn’t altogether comfortable with the idea of dropping-trou, as he was already half-naked, and there was only a gurney and a flimsy plastic privacy curtain between him and the waiting room.  But, he felt too rotten to put up much of an argument, so he loosened his belt and bent over the gurney as directed.

The injection went quickly, and was no more painful that shots in the rump usually are, so Bill figured that his ordeal was nearing its end.  The nurse stayed with him for a minute or two, just to make sure that he didn’t have a bad reaction to the injection.  She must have assumed that he was okay, because she quickly left the room to attend to other patients.

Still holding his unfastened pants up with one hand, Bill reached for his tee shirt, which was lying on the gurney.  He fumbled and dropped the shirt.  Almost by reflex, he leaned over to grab it before it hit the floor.  The act of bending over caused funny colored lights to flash in front of his eyes.

Bill was in the initial stages of an allergic reaction to the Penicillin.  He’d never had a problem with Penicillin before, so he didn’t realize what was happening.  He did, however, realize that he was losing consciousness.  He made a flailing grab for a couple of stainless steel medicine cabinets, sending them crashing to the floor in wild his attempt to keep from falling on his face.  Somewhere in the middle of everything, he let go of his pants, and they dropped to his ankles.  A split second later, after having announced his pending entrance by loudly overturning a couple of big metal cabinets, Bill fell through the curtain.  The gurney thoughtfully rolled out of the way, and Bill lay face down in the crowded waiting room, naked from the ankles up and totally unconscious.

He came to several minutes later, under the urgent ministrations of a Doctor.  It took Bill’s mind a couple of minutes to muster enough clarity of thought to realize that he was lying naked in a room full of stunned onlookers.  Someone did eventually have the presence of mind to cover his naked body with a sheet, but not before everyone in the waiting room got the show of their lives.