Letter Fron The Other Side; From Cynthia.
Medical Matters.

Dear Del,

My mind has been involved with medical matters these past few weeks. I suspect this will be so for some time and much of it you will not wish to know about. However I have found no matter what gruesome procedure is being contemplated by doctors, surgeons and the unfortunate patient, somehow humour even of the darkest kind is sure to be found.

I was sitting on the hard chairs of the doctor’s waiting rooms last week contemplating if I dared to touch the crinkled and worn magazines. Most of them were of no interest to me and as they were tired and tattered by the many hands which had turned their pages, I decided I would probably be risking being infected by the amount of dangerous bacteria which were crawling all over them.

So I kept my hands on my lap and relaxed as much as I could while envying the only person in the room who had the foresight to bring a book to read.

Seated near me were three very large women. Like everyone else in the waiting room I pretended I could not overhear their conversation. The longer we remained waiting, the louder and less censored their conversation became.

The group was an obese mother with her two obese adult daughters.

Daughter number one had evidently had some small procedure that day which affected her right knee which she constantly complained was ‘giving her hell’.

Also because of what had been done to her painful knee she had been required to fast. Food, which must never be far from her thoughts, was on this particular morning very much on her mind.

‘Oooohh I’m starving.’ she groaned.

‘What are you going to have for lunch?’ her mother asked.

‘Oh, maybe fish-n-chips, or Moroccan pasta.’

‘Why not a sweet and sour chicken?’

‘Naaah! That stuff makes me puke.’ The daughter pulled a face.

A lady sitting opposite me glanced up at me and raised an eyebrow. I replied with an eyebrow twitch of my own.

For the next half hour we sat listening to menu choices, all of them take-away food. The ebb and flow of the merits or dislikes and in some cases distain for the suggestions put forward by all three. A weekly women’s magazine was taken from the pile on the table and all of the recipes discussed at length and commented upon. ‘Yuk!’ Who’d eat that rubbish!

‘Ugh, nothing but vegetables and stuff. Not in my place thank you very much.’

The book was thrown untidily back onto the table and the discussion returned to the lunch menu and the evening menu.

I felt relieved not to be living under their roof as a lodger or elderly parent.

The decision seemed to have been finally settled with a frozen lasagne from the supermarket and a large helping of double choc ice cream. That is, until a forth member of the family walked into the room. She was younger but well on the way to becoming as obese as her siblings and mother. Her first question after showing them her latest tattoo and of course displaying it to the rest of us, was to ask ‘what are we having for dinner?’

The woman opposite me broke into silent laughter, the newspaper a man was hiding behind started to shake and thankfully I heard my doctor call ‘Cynthia!’

‘Thank you Mark.’ I replied and rushed to his room.

The second amusing time was when I was lying on my back in the hospital ward bored silly and wanting to be home.

The woman opposite me was to have an operation and her church minister was visiting her. Her doctor came bustling into the ward. He is a well known specialist, a marvellous doctor and inclined to be a little eccentric.

He is one of those men who still like to use a razor to shave his face. That particular morning he must have used a blunt razor because he had nicked his face a couple of times and put tissue on the wounds. Rather like the Norman Gunston character on our TV’s used to do, much to the bemusement of many of his guests.

The minister introduced himself to the doctor and they talked briefly. All the while I could see the ministers eyes focussed on the still quite bright red tissue patches on the doctor’s face.
‘Shall we pray together?’ he asked, not giving the doctor time to say ‘Yay’ or ‘Nay’ and he closed his eyes put his hands together and prayed for the patient’s full recovery and then very forcibly for the skill and steadiness of the doctor’s hands.

I lay giggling to myself for ages afterward with no-one to share my silly humour with until Teddy came in to tell me about his latest invention.

This one came about because his friend Barry broke his ankle and couldn’t get his wheel chair up the three steps to his front door.

It is made from three large (sack size) dog food bags, an old fan, some bits of steel and wood and all this has been cobbled together to make a platform which you stand on. The fan blows the bags up and raises whoever is standing on it up to a height which gave me vertigo, but allows Teddy to reach things in the garage which have been put up on the rafters etc. It works very well and when the power is turned off deflates very gently.

Obviously my absence allowed him to get on with important things in the shed. I hope the dogs were fed; they are still alive so they must have been.

We are going away again next week. I know we have not long had a break but this is for a twofold reason, one for us to relax and the other to seek a new home. We are thinking seriously of moving back to the country and will be travelling up to the mountains to see if we can find somewhere suitable for a couple of old folk who took themselves out of the country because it seemed sensible, but the country hasn’t taken itself out of them.

I can’t wait to see Mount Buffalo again. Unlike everything else it is unchanging and always beautiful in all its moods.

I know some of our friends will be exasperated with us as we have taken up more space in their address books than most with all our changes but one can’t live one’s life on ‘ifs and buts’ and worrying about what might happen. It is for living and squeezing everything you can out of it.

Until next time,
from your wandering ‘flower child friend’
Cynthia.