Grand Guignol

I am far too squeamish to contemplate my own anatomy for very long, especially when someone's been poking around inside it, retouching and remodeling irreplaceable bits and pieces. Those organs seem so alarmingly fragile in pictures, like little blood bubbles that might instantly pop if tapped with a pin, never mind a scalpel. And they're all wedged in there with absolutely no wiggle room, almost as if the entire system were spring-loaded, primed to explode all over the operating room if the wrong rib is accidentally disturbed during a procedure.
Indeed, considering the number of components in our human bodies, their convoluted design and awful sliminess, it is amazing that more surgical disasters do not occur. No doubt we can thank technological innovation for this lack of tragedy. For instance, so futuristic was the equipment at M.G.H that I remember wondering whether I was still on the operating table in Boston, or if I had been abducted by aliens from an advanced civilization and was now aboard their flying-saucer space hospital. Either way, I knew that I was in safe hands, no matter whether those hands belonged to an Earthling, or were the long-fingered claws of some little green extraterrestrial heart specialist with a five-brained head that looks like a squid's head.
Of course, our descendants in 2050 will hopefully regard today's surgical techniques as barbarously primitive. They will consider modern open heart surgery to be as gruesome as Victorian amputations with a hacksaw appear to us. Alternatively, it's also possible that surgery could be so expensive by then that hospitals simply won't bother performing it anymore, unless the patient is super-rich. Everyone else will just be told to take it easy and sent home to drop dead when the fatal hour arrives.
So, on the whole, I am grateful for having had my bypass now, even if the experience has, at its low points, felt a little like being Dracula waking from eternal slumber when a stake is removed from his accursed heart.

Comments

[Laurent]

"...even if the experience has, at its low points, felt a little like being Dracula waking from eternal slumber when a stake is removed from his accursed heart."

Unpleasant as that must have been, it's highly amusing to read about it formulated like this.

[Mike]

It is discncerting to see your own insides, esp. in the fine detail that e.g.,an MRI permits. Until the moment when I saw my own spinal MRI, for all I knew I could have been as solid as a potato all the way through. I was perfectly happy that way, too. The structures look so damned vulnerable and delicate when seen in high definition.

[Giric]

The pharmaceutical companies would have us believe, we will, like Star Trek, take a pill and grow a new kidney. In reality we will probably grow a third eyeball, which will not be of any use or function but they will think is a positive milestone in our evolution. As for myself, the brain scan in high school was interesting, but the radioactive isotopes I had to swallow made me throw up for three days.
I think the worst procedure in my life was the barium swallow I had to do for my upper G.I. I don't think swallowing barium, was such a good thing, doubly so since they couldn't find anything the matter and so on top of the original pain, I had its discomfort added to it. Watching myself swallow gunk clear through to my lower intestines was really gross, not a thing I would like to repeat. It's like watching a snake swallow a mouse on x-ray. Sick! Sick! Sick! In the end the stomach pain was due to a pinched nerve in my spine which a chiropractor fixed.
For the most part I believe the cure can be worse than the disease, but in your case I am glad they were of help. You will no doubt feel much better when you have fully recovered from their invasion of your inner workings. I suppose one can be glad they didn't leave behind utensils or give you extra parts.

[Giric]

I love your, "Guignol," reference. Do you feel like him? That you are just a puppet to be fiddled with at will and that your doctors are the great Laurent Mourguet? Or is it that you are made to feel like the more modern French reference, "Guignol," a mere buffoon? I know once the doctors got their paws on me I certainly felt like a puppet on a string. I only wish I could have hit some of them with a stick, like a good, "Punch and Judy," show. It might have made things more bearable.

[American fez]

I was thinking of the nineteenth century Parisian horror theater rather than the puppet meaning, but all interpretations are fine with me.

[Mike]

An apt response, Mr. Fez.
The Grande Guignol was apparently revived for a short time in the late 1960's, or so I remember reading in Time Magazine. At the time, of course, Time Magazine was generally worth reading, unless the article was about the Vietnam war or the Hell's Angel's gang, two subjects which seemed to inflame Time's reporters beyond all reason. Newsweek has fallen just as far (I'll buy that for a dollar!)

[Mike]

I note that the "Across Difficult Country" website has fallen silent. I am considering a hostile takeover, but would much rather that someone went over there and shook Mr. Carter awake.

Perhaps he wrote too much about the mysteries of Whitby, and they have finally gotten to him?

[american fez]

Of course, it is very possible that Mr. Carter IS the mysteries of Whitby ...
He'll probably post several pieces in quick succesion by the end August and then nothing again until November

[supra shoes for kids]

He is a good friend that speaks well of us behind our backs.

[ran ban wayfarer]

Bay Bridge, on the airport access road from the Oakland Raiders offices to the airport, and hither and yon through the highway and byway systems

[fitflop sale]

ads are working. Raider tickets are being sold as a result. Now that's advertising at its most unbelievable. And you can't help Fitflops but wonder what Skullman thinks of all this. According to George Raine's story in Sunday's Examiner, the new ad campaign has helped spur a tripling

[belstaff españa]

when haunting words came across the radio. A fisherman had found a body in a life