The
surgery waiting-room was a virtual morgue.
Lots of old people, sitting silently, looking down at
their knees as if
willing themselves to rise and walk. The
Lazarus act just won’t GO! — “I don’t like cherries, mummy!” bursts a young lad standing between his
father’s legs. — “You will one day, son.”
says the father quietly, ripe with double entendre that escapes the boy. His parents blow the age-curve
of those of us waiting in what is, fundamentally, a clinic for people with the
problems of advancing
age. The boy blows the curve yet
again.
Surgery
is simply the British word for doctors’ offices. This one is more dreary than most. It’s aging badly too.
The boy’s remark conjures a vision of cherries forming on trees in the cemetery. Last year’s fruit was juicy and sweet. — I love
cherries. — The vision is
a charming diversion from my purpose here.
I’m in the bowels of the University hospital. I am meant to be an object lesson for future
doctors. My anaemia can’t be explained. There’s no evidence of bleeding, neither on my outsides nor on my insides. Yet, I’ve been bleeding profusely every day
for more than a year. The blood is the
colour of dark red cherries.
Waiting, I humour myself with the
British pronunciation of die-version. This might otherwise be the melancholic
version of my life’s story in which I die of boredom. As I spell the word out, D. I. E., my
German-speaking ancestors haunt me with their very own pronunciation, dee.
The the word. As if I require a reminder that this is the definitive
version of my life.
A nurse
comes to draw my blood. — “A small prick’” she says. It’s the shorthand of someone with experience
for someone with clear sight of a long needle.
As she becomes crusty with experience, I imagine that she will have
dispensed with the nicety of a preface, and will lead simply with “prick”. As I become crusty with age, I suspect that
this will be an apt characterization of my personality.
I am already perturbed at having had to give my ‘details’ often, and,
publicly enough for an identity thief to have confirmed them. I feel my willfulness increasing. — “Maybe,
this time,” I tell myself, “I won’t tell them what drugs I’m taking or allergic
to.” I should print cards for my next
visit to the hospital. I am deaf and dumb,
it will say and have the implied context of How could you not know this already!
The needle
glides in. I imagine Biblical camels
passing through the eyes of needles. I refuse the flow of blood. It’s a party trick
that I learned, having to suffer through clinical examinations as a child. I’d been subjected to all sorts of prodding,
poking and pricking as doctors sought reasons for my malevolent migraines. It was an era when children were still
thought as likely to be affected by poltergeists as by physical affliction. — “Doctor, I can’t find a pulse.” exclaimed one
nurse. “I think he’s dead.” she winked. It was encouragement enough. I’ve been trying to refuse blood-taking ever since. Nurses
have their own party tricks in response to mine. — “That’s strange.” they often
mime curiosity. Then, they jig the
needle as if it was a rubber tube, and, they were stealing petrol through a siphon.
My doctors
regard the body as a globe. It’s an
adequate characterization given the shape of the old men and old women in the
waiting room. The neurologists who tried
to understand my migraines — how one half of my tongue fell numb while the
other still felt pain — they divided the globe into right and left hemispheres, to
match those of
my brain. My
present doctors shift their attention to my northern to my southern hemispheres.
Their Amazon, their Congo is my colon.
I have
trouble concentrating on the answers I must give to their questions. I find myself distracted by medical
terminology spoken with a British accent.
I hold onto their pronunciation like a child made to linger over the
meaning of the present in one’s hands. ‘Colon’ is just one of
several distractions. Co-Ion, the British say. Co-LON,
I tease the word out between my lips and teeth. Co-LON-Don. I think of the conductor of the morning train announces
our passage to LON-Don. And, I smile, in turn, remembering my best friend in
grade-school. We’d just discovered sex
in the form of printed porn left in our forest encampment. Thereafter, he wanted the role of Long Dong
Silver* whenever we played pirates in the woods.
In LON-Don , I ride the Tube, which is the very Co-LON of LON-Don.
I have lost myself in the diversion. My doctors must be thinking of calling in the neurologist to assess my
repetition of the word. CO-Lon, I shift the accent. This not only throws the switch on a light in my
brain but blows
the bulb as well.
Pop! It’s a moment of discovery. — “Well, I‘Il be damned!” I can hear
myself. “I do have co-Ions. Big and
small ones. Intestines.” One of the
doctors has a dumb founded expression. — “Oh, sorry!” I exclaim, aware that I’m within an explanation of being
called away in a white jacket. “I’m
American. We have coI-ons and inn-test-inns. We pee you’re-in
rather than your-eye-in. I
pause to see if he’s okay. The
explanation is making things worse, especially when I feel compelled to add, “I
suppose, you have in-tes-tines here?” At
least the other doctor is laughing nervously.
David
says that I have away with doctors. I
make them nervous. Before we left
Florida, I went to my doctor complaining of symptoms of appendicitis. There, I was left to await the doctor in a
small room with a small bench, the doctor’s chair, a narrow bed, and plenty of
open floor. I suppose that he’d never
entered a room and found the patient curled up on the floor. It must have thrown him. He quickly dismissed my symptoms as arising
from General Tso’s chicken. I would see him twice more with the same
symptoms before landing in Britain. Each
time, he’d fidget as though locked in his own skin, with a cannibal caressing
the surface, making hairs stand on end.
David reported his experience of the doctor as
of a wholly different man, one at ease with both doctor and patient. British doctors removed my necrotic appendix
a little more than a year later. I was
overjoyed with the
British National Health Service.
I’ve
come to today’s appointment having now learned a new lexicon, not just new
pronunciations. I now dare to visualize wooden Galleons
sailing through the Straights of Magellan, the back passage between my Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on the force
of the wind. I find it odd that a people who can speak so
di-rect-ly about urine,
need to take refuge in metaphors for the opposite hemisphere. When the doctor comes to review my history,
I tell him that Stanley’s already met Livingstone. Tethered cameras have ventured down my throat
and wormed their way into my gullet, while equally invasive cameras have
spelunked through my back passage, not once but twice. They’ve found nothing.
Nothing unexpected in the deep, dark continent of me.
But,
doctors are a literal tribe who otherwise speak a language devoid of metaphor. It comes as a shock when they ask me yet
again to describe the colour of the blood that I am losing, and, prime me with
“Bright cherry red?” — “Cherries, maybe.”
I say, “but deep red cherries.” Like the
child in the waiting room, my response twists the curve. — “That’s impossible,” they say. “The kind of blood you describe. No. It’s
got to be bright red.” I’m
perturbed. — “Why did you ask?” I demand,
“if you’re not going to listen to my answers . .
.” I resolved upon previous dismissals to take
an evidence-based approach. — “I have
pictures!” I say triumphantly, “want to see?” I pull
out a kind of photographic colostomy bag.
A photo album labelled “Blood Diary”. I’m still surprised that they agree to see the
images, when I hear the words that will vindicate me. — “Is that BLACK?!” they say. I can hear myself gloating, “Yes, I am a medical mystery.” — “You should be dead” a colleague whose mother is a
doctor tells me. Black means that the blood is oxygen deprived. On my tombstone, I want these words
inscribed: I loved cherries. Deep red cherries.
* Long Dong Silver, the porn star, was actually our age. For all I now know, my childhood friend may have grown into a career as Long Dong Silver. But, let's face it, it doesn't take a pubescent boy very much time or forethought to make the short linguistic leap from the pirate, Long John Silver.
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