Truths: (1) immaculate conception and (2) chocolate worms

Yesterday at the pharmacy, where I work one day each week, I informed a couple of very intelligent technicians about an actual immaculate conception that really occurred during the American Civil War. Technician Jessica looked at me in the eye and said “bullshit.” I had first heard about the incident from a Tom Waits record, and it was confirmed from another source that I don’t remember. So, here’s what I found out from an actual internet website:

Doctor of medical sciences, Professor Igor Moiseyev comments upon the fantastic fact [my emphasis]: “It is astonishing but incidents of the kind have been already registered in the history of medicine. A “bullet conception” of the same kind was registered in Wiksburg (Mississippi, the US) during the civil war between the South and the North in 1863. The incident is mentioned in the American Weekly Medicine Journal in 1864. A bullet went through a testicle of a man and got into a woman’s stomach; as a result, the woman delivered a boy. A doctor who described the mysterious phenomenon 140 years ago said it was the evidence of the might of the human reproduction system.

Secondly is my good advice to beware of the existence of “chocolate worms” in candy. I looked in Wikipedia, but no article existed yesterday. However, a general Google search yielded photographic evidence–Hershey’s kisses, H.’s chocolate with almonds bars and others—all with worms.

Absolutely true story: When I worked for the infusion pharmacy, “Optioncare,” perhaps 8 years ago, one of the nurses had snatched some Halloween chocolate from a bowl in reimbursement (from a charming woman who once worked for the famous company, “Rounder Records.”) Unwrapping a Hershey’s kiss, taking a bite, and our RN discovered a cream-colored worm, perhaps a quarter-inch long, perhaps a 16th inch thick. I kept the chocolate worm with a fragment of chocolate and some water in a pill bottle, even naming the small beast to honor a psychopath corporate manager. I took the worm to church for a formal blessing, then it died. Not right away, weeks later. The following year the minister complained to a newspaper reporter that someone had brought in a “maggot” to be blessed. That’s when I questioned the sincerity of the ministerial blessing. That minister knew damn good and well it was a chocolate worm, not a maggot.