Like many other people I know, I have an aversion to things medical. I can’t watch heart transplants or any other such gory performances on TV without feeling somewhat faint. I also have a great deal of trouble listening to people’s vivid descriptions of their illnesses and the resulting tortuous operations which put them back on their feet. My head starts to spin, my stomach starts reacting, I perspire and my face turns from pink to bone white.
Now this is not, in the regular course of a day, any kind of problem worth complaining about. It’s pretty easy to flick the TV to another channel when a medical procedure is being depicted or to slide out of a conversation with someone whose doctor recently shoved four feet of plastic tubing down his or her nose with a camera on the end of it. (The tube, not the nose.)
But seated at a table in a restaurant with a full-course meal on the way is not such an easy situation to get out of.
[the_ad_placement id=”top-of-page”]
This unhappy circumstance came about last Friday night when I was out dining in a very crowded establishment. Asked if I’d mind sitting with strangers, I very co-operatively said I wouldn’t and was led to a table where a woman was seated with a man whose one entire arm was in a cast and a sling.
I sat down, introduced myself and began perusing the menu. But, out of a corner of my eye, I could see one of the man’s thumbs, which had turned various colors and which was stitched from tip to joint. Paying scant attention to this, I minded my own business and ordered the roast beef special.
But by the time it came, my dinner companions were part way through an enthralling story about how he had become injured. A window he was installing slipped and the glass shattered and tore into his arm and hand.
“You’ve never seen so much blood in your whole life,” he said at one point, during a vivid description about how the glass split open skin, muscle and veins from his shoulder to his wrist.
My meal arrived somewhere between the time his friend stopped the bleeding by wrapping a tourniquet around his arm which had spewed out about 10 gallons of blood and the doctor wheeled him into surgery to put him back together again, piece by bloody piece. Fortunately, he was able to recount every detail of the operation, so vividly I felt I was there.
As hungry as I had been a few short moments before, I was now feeling in need of a doctor and a touch of surgery myself. But, when things couldn’t seem to get any worse, my injured storyteller shoved his battered thumb across the table to have me examine close up. I agreed it was a sorry-looking sight and hoped it would mend real soon.
A lull arrived in the conversation, and as uncomfortable as I usually am with quiet stretches when talking to strangers, I was willing to let this one ride.
But, alas, there were more tales of personal injury to come.
When her husband had finished spinning his gruesome story of bodily damage and repair, the woman across from me had some real, bad news of her own.
Though she appeared to me at that moment to he physically sound, apparently looks really can be deceiving. It happened that shortly after her husband’s unfortunate accident, she fell down her basement steps, leaving her back and her “backside” a regular colour chart of blue, black and purple. I was encouraged to imagine the sight of her multi-coloured southern hemisphere and I am afraid by that point I was unable to think of anything but. Had our dining venue been a little more private, I don’t think she would have had a problem partially disrobing and showing me the evidence to reinforce her story.
The conversation eventually moved out of the operating room and onto less bruised and bloody subjects. But by that time the damage was done.
Next time, I am going to insist on a place by myself in the corner. People with slings and stitches and four-foot tubes with cameras on the end will not be welcome to sit with me.
©1992 Jim Hagarty
[the_ad_placement id=”top-of-page”]
