Trying to be courteous, I once offered to get a chair for a patient's mother. She scowled at me and said, “I'm not her mother. I'm her sister!”

On another occasion I asked a woman with a rounded, protuberant abdomen when she was due to deliver. You guessed it: she was not pregnant.

After successfully keeping my foot out of my mouth for a few years, I walked in to see a young man with a sprained ankle. He was lying on a gurney and was kissing a woman of similar age who was lying on top of him. When they saw me walk into the room, they stopped kissing. She slid to his side and nuzzled into the crook of his neck. I introduced myself and asked if his girlfriend could sit in a chair while I examined him. She responded, “He's my brother, not my boyfriend!”

Think that's bizarre? A nurse told me about a case in which she walked into the room of a 21-year-old man and found that his sister was giving him a blowjob!

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