The danger of a high C

While about to take blood, I noticed a thin scar running along the left elbow of my elderly patient in exactly the place I would have liked to venesect him. I asked him how he got the scar and was bemused by the reply: “That is from when I broke my neck playing the ‘Tiger Rag.’ I questioned him further. The events occurred in 1945, when he was posted to Burma. Shortly before the war ended, he was travelling in a jeep that came off the road and rolled over. Apart from a deep cut in his left arm, he recovered quickly and was discharged from the field hospital after a week of convalescence.

While he was on leave awaiting transport back to Britain, he heard the sound of music from a dance hall, and when he went inside he came across a rather morose dance band in rehearsal. The trumpet player, they explained gloomily, had been killed on duty—they still had his trumpet—but they were due to do a concert and were lost without the trumpeter. My patient explained that he had a passion for the trumpet, and was actually rather good at playing by ear. The band recruited him with glee, and all went well until they came to rehearse the opening number, the “Tiger Rag.” At a certain point the trumpet player has to hit a deafeningly high C. When this point came, he played the note, and the next thing he remembered was waking up in hospital.

Unbeknown to him, the original jeep accident had caused him to fracture two vertebrae, which remained relatively stable until the extreme pressure of the “Tiger Rag” caused them to destabilise. He was in a body plaster for four months, and it was a while before he returned to trumpet playing.

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