Hard working professionals often enjoy hobbies, such as gourmet cooking, on their down time...
Dr. Carver’s Delicious Stir Fry
Dr. Carver sighed as he turned away from the table. It had been a long surgery, and for a while there he had almost thought Fido Smith would have many more years of crapping on the carpet and gnawing on the furniture in his doggy future. After nearly two hours of his best efforts, though, the Great Dane's heart had finally signaled "Game Over".
"Death by Rubber Ball," his technician Jenny grumbled as she stared disconsolately down at the steel kick bucket. The once gleaming and pristine vessel now contained nearly a gallon of bloody saline, in which floated several feet of Fido's small intestine and the offending rubber ball.
Fido had swallowed the ball approximately two weeks ago, and his owners had waited until rigor mortis was the only symptom of illness the dog hadn't developed before finally breaking down and bringing the mutt to a vet. There had been precious little intestine left in Fido's belly that hadn't degenerated into a blackened, necrotic mess.
The moment he had opened the dog up, Dr. Carver had realized that Fido would only survive with the aid of divine intervention. Still he had tried, hoping for that miracle.
Jenny left the room, returning with a large body bag. Pulling the bag over Fido's head, she struggled to wrap the dog's carcass, prior to taking it downstairs to the basement freezer. As Jenny was all of five feet nothing and weighed considerably less than Fido, this looked to be a bit of a losing battle.
"Jen," Dr. Carver said, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder, "Eight p.m. has come and gone. You head on home and I'll finish up here."
After a token protest Jenny allowed Dr. Carver to smilingly shoo her out the door. After she departed, he put on a pair of gloves and, taking a scalpel, carefully cut out pieces from several sections of Fido's intestine, most from the necrotic area and a couple from the small amount of healthy tissue that still remained. These he dropped into small jars of formaldehyde and labeled.
Turning the body over, he efficiently peeled the skin away from Fido's hindquarters, then cut away the two large muscle masses that formed the dogs haunches. These he dropped into a large freezer bag, which he sealed tightly and tossed into his briefcase. The formaldehyde jars he left lined up on the counter for Jenny to send out to the lab in the morning.
Afterwards, he finished bagging Fido's carcass and the contents of the kick bucket and bundled them down to the basement freezer. Then he went into his office to call Fido's owner and break the bad news.
That done, he opened his briefcase again, fishing for his address book. He opened the book, running his finger down a page, then picked up the phone and dialed.
"Hello, Sarah, it's Joe Carver," he said into the phone. "How would you like to come over for a late supper tonight?"
He glanced at the freezer bag in his briefcase.
"I'm making stir fry."