Slippery Shit

Slippery Shit!

This ain’t the most delicate subject to talk about, but I think it’s time to take the surgeons to task for their ineptness in completing their tasks. These carvers can slice you up every which-way from Sunday with their scalpels and now even with laser knives and such. Then they clean up their mess with nice little blanket-stitch embroidery so it looks neat and put the patient up on a shelf to heal himself for the next six weeks.

I’d like to see how they’d howl and complain if their mechanic would fix a flat tire on their fancy cars that way, or the water pipes in their houses, or the sewer system on their street. Oh no, you take them things apart to fix and they’d better be glued back together again before you leave the work.

But surgeons don’t operate that way. They razzle-dazzle you with their skill in cutting and slicing and putting patches here and there, but they haven’t figured out yet how to make everything stay in place. So they wash their hands of it and give that part over to the patient. If something pops open or breaks, it’s the patient’s fault.

They’ve developed a pretty specific set of instructions for the patient too. He/she, the patient, must slow down to very basic movements. No heavy lifting over about two pounds, no excessive exercise, no straining or groaning – basically, nothing other than the heartbeat needed to sustain life – for six weeks after surgery. They’ve thought of everything too. They’re particularly concerned with “going to the bathroom”. Well they don’t mean going to the bathroom to brush your teeth or to shower or shave. They refer to it as the discharge of fecal matter that accumulates in the body as the result of food ingestion as a natural function of bodily activity. In other words, you can’t even go for a good poop! But they’ve got help for that. They tell you to get a good supply of prune juice.

Imagine that. Prune juice. That’s what makes shit slippery. Well that’s layman’s terms for surgeon’s excuses to remove the last vestiges of human dignity from old geysers that have already lost most of it already anyway. It’s all in aid of alleviating any potential bodily strain.

It doesn’t matter what end of you they operate on, as long as they do any surgery, they give you prune juice along with the painkillers. Whether it’s cataracts or prostate surgery or kneecap replacement, prune juice is the first line of defense.

Well, is it any wonder? First they fill you full of Warfarin or some other blood thinner because your ticker isn’t ticking like it used to, or your veins are too clogged up with the residue of the food you ate. So instead of blood, you’ve got some watered down liquid pumping through your body. If there’s any kind of pressure that causes a leak somewhere, it could all flow out and you’ll bleed to death for God’s sake.

When you get up in age, there ain’t much satisfaction in life in the first place. Nothin’ works like it used to. Your legs have got so long you can’t even bend over far enough to do up your own shoe laces. The store that used to be a block away is now about a mile distant. Even the coffee maker has got so heavy it shakes when you try to pour out a cup of coffee. And now this insult over top of injury!

There’s more to having a good poop than just getting rid of fecal waste, you know. The satisfaction of using your own physical power to extrude the crap out of yourself extends far beyond the time you flush the toilet. The sense of accomplishment from this simple and necessary act stays with you most of the day. But if it runs out of you with the aid of prune juice, it’s just not the same somehow. No, the surgeons have made a serious mistake here. They have completely missed the opportunity to finish the job they started. They should be working on a glue that will permanently close their incisions. Jeez! If welders can do it with iron and steel, and carpenters can do it with wood glue, what are the surgeons missing in their arsenal? Somebody is abdicating his responsibility here.

I’ll tell you, getting old ain’t for sissies, and that’s a fact. And the surgeons ain’t helping anything either. They got to take the human condition into account. After all, a person wants to have a good solid poop before he goes along with the grim reaper.

At least, that’s how it seems from up here on the top shelf.

Just sayin.