Happy
colonoscopy to one and all
by
Robert LaFrance
As I write these words, I want to
extend my best wishes to my friend Flug who is kind and brave beyond measure,
besides being good-looking, but not as good-looking as I am. Goes without
saying.
Flug is just naturally kind, and he
is ‘brave beyond measure’ because in mid-December he underwent a colonoscopy
which is a medical procedure that shows most of one’s intestinal tract on a TV
screen for the viewing pleasure (?) of a doctor and three nurses.
Flug was as anxious about the
‘scope’ as if it had involved the amputation of several limbs and his left ear,
plus the replacing of five or six organs with latex computer mice. His family
doctor had been saying to Flug for three years: “Hey, bud, you’re over sixty
now; get your (butt) in to that hospital. You watch TV? Katie Couric had one on
her daytime show. If she can do it on TV you can do it in O.R.”
“I never said that my doctor said
that,” said Flug, who had been reading over my shoulder while I was typing. “I
said that he had suggesting it for years and I finally said yes, go ahead and
kill me. You know you want to.
“He said that he himself, not being
a colorectal surgeon, would not be doing the actual killing,” said Flug, “but
that his heart would be right in the O.R. with that surgeon. He hoped I
wouldn’t suffer too much.”
Of course, since Flug is a worrier, every possible
delay took place. He was supposed to go under the knife (actually hose) on
December 10 and the day surgery person called four or five days earlier to say
it had been postponed until the 17th.
To make a long story short(er), Flug
easily made it through the procedure (with high praise for the nurses and
doctor) and as far as he knows, all is okay, but, being Flug, he will worry himself
into a small dirty ragged ball of sheep wool because he likes to worry.
****************************
On a similar subject, we have all
heard how the North Korean government brought the Sony Movie Corporation to its
knees by ‘hacking’ into their system, but I don’t believe a word of it.
Only weeks before the event, Sony
laid off a whole whack of IT (information technology) workers, and I mean elite
tech workers who were capable of pulling off this hacking routine with their
eyes closed. Oh gee, what a coincidence! Blaming North Korea was the easy part.
If a wheel fell off a truck in Four Falls – blame Kim Jong-Un.
****************************
Back to reality, or what passes for
reality in New Brunswick, MLA David Coon of the Green Party has suggested that
the NB voting age be lowered to 16 from its present 18. Hearing some of the
comments on this notion has been interesting, with the usual one being that a
16-year-old doesn’t know enough about the political process to be a responsible
voter.
The person making this comment was
implying that the average person going into a voting booth these days knows all
the issues and is making a responsible choice. He did not go on to mention
Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
My suggestion is that the voting age
be lowered far below 16 and Flug thinks that when a child passes the rigorous
exams of Kindergarten and goes into grade one, he or she should be allowed to
vote.
*****************************
As I often do, this morning I was
reading from the writings of E.B. White. This book is a collection of his
columns from the New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 1976. As I looked up from my
book and out the window at the bare field and my summer garden, I thought: “It
won’t be long now before I will be planting my peas and lettuce.” White was
also thinking about his garden.
Naturally he couldn’t just get seed and plant; he
had to quote Voltaire the philosopher and author whose most famous book
‘Candide’ I used to enjoy in my younger days. “Il faut cultiver le jardin,” he
quoted.
All this means is we better cultivate
our gardens but White decided to overthink the whole thing: “What is meant by
this? Perhaps that one should cultivate sense and weed out nonsense, or that in
the garden of the world, one must weed out the vile for the desirable to
flourish and survive, but arguments could be made for other meanings and
implications.”
I thought: “Holy smokes already!
Just plant the blasted garden and get it over with!” So I sent my seed order to
Vesey’s and decided to read about rutabagas for a while.
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment