May this man’s Adventure in the Far East make me a New Man, for the trumpet shall sound and we shall all be changed. Listen!.
30 minute free dance with weights and cardio!
Yesterday at Queen Mary was a slog.
One media lie about public insurance: the media image of standing in queue with strangers (some of whom might be eek black folks) in a one-dimensional line. So in all mixed systems such as Britain and Hong Kong the rich man can walk past the queue and into the ER before your children (try to image in contra media, what that would mean in a natural disaster).
But the reality even in a purely public “Communist” system where it would be illegal to buy entry is triage, and people are scored by computer, so a grievously ill child precedes a codger like me. The science, for once, is but precise common sense and dignity…labeled by goons and hysterics as death panels.
It’s not a queue it’s a tree, dammit.
Anyway, I was coded as not urgent, so not only was the initial ER wait two hours, their were further waits, at Station 11 to see the doctor, at 12 to wait to see the nurse for the actual treatment and at the pharmacy. Big deal, I had a book.
Unseeing impatient Yuppie man
Don’t give me that look:
For I have a book.
Internally I felt a great deal of serenity and security, probably because when I was a kid in the fifties, hospitals were happy places to me where Mom and Dad worked and the nurses made a fuss over me.
Chinese nurses don’t fuss over me. I described how I was treating the skin rash that had developed at the site of my nodes, washing it, placing a Mannings alcohol pad over it and gritting my teeth. The nurse was horrified but didn’t say “so brave”!
They pull off dressings slow: I show ’em how. Even if there’s hairs under the dressings you pull ’em off in one swift motion, taking the pain. They fail to be impressed.
For my self medical care is based on kill or cure, like the Royal Navy. Poor little Peter, my son, had a fever. So I used ice water like Mom had. The poor little perisher did not like it but the fever went down quickly and I held him in my arms singing the Dutch National Anthem (15 verses, puts ’em to sleep like a light). He awoke the next morning with an enormous dump in his pants happy as a clam. He was good!
Listen!
My remedy for stomach flu? Throw up your guts and chomp on ice chips. All things must pass.
However, the nurses frowned at using Tiger Balm and alcohol on a rash. More generally my self-care has to become less crude, since any pathology may be a result of my cancer.
My sciatica pain now well managed so instead of a cab, I took Crazy Minibus back to Central in the night after everything was done. I looked at the streets with fascination as if Dad had decided to practice for the British Army after his residence and I was growing up in Hong Kong.
Arriving at IFC, I felt internal serenity, but sudden anger: I was trying to cross the street but there was one of these metal fences that prevent you from getting to the sidewalk in Hong Kong’s car-dominated, pedestrian and cyclist hating environment.
I exploded when I made it across, doing a Bruce Lee on the fence.
I went through the fancy mall to the Lamma Island ferry and I was itching for an old fashioned fight.
You never see a man abusing a woman today although I did get to run downstairs when my wife and I were on Orrington Street next to a hotel and a guy was whaling on his wife in the open air cafe and calm him down.
I wanted an excuse to whale on some prick out of my anger over my diagnosis. I was actually hoping to see some bespoke suited drunkassed Brit who was old enough to have gone to public school before “fagging” was eliminated under Blair because “fagging” is legitimized bullying…see the film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence for an example: the plot is David Bowie’s failure to stand up for his little brother in “public” (posh and actually private) school and how he amends for it in a POW camp.
I have a superior gaze that can start a fight and I was itching, owing to this onset, to use it. At the same time I was thinking, whoa, what the hell is this?
It’s me absorbing the diagnosis is what and possibly a stilnox side effect. Bears watching.
In an interview, John Cleese said of his character in Fawlty Towers, which Mom and Dad loved, that Basil was good in the War and rather useless thereafter. Here he is using an ancient British symbol of male dominance on a car which is, when you think of it, completely useless without petrol.
If I see a man abusing a woman I will jump his ass, sciatica and all. But these negative feelings are toxic and my father’s spirit which needs to be released.
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love–
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Sometimes I wonder if this is such a big deal, this diagnosis. According Dorothy H Crawford (The Invisible Enemy, A Natural History of Viruses) one in three people have cancer.
I do not buy the admonition that I should zip it because so many people are in pain. That social suffering creates the pain. But whaling on upper class Brit bankers is OUT.
(She’s OUT. What time you want me to bring the bitch home…).
There’s a very strange novel by Tom Dulac, published years ago: The Stigmata of Dr Constantine. A researcher in a lab where animals are tormented to make cosmetics, a careless man, is stricken with the wounds Christ received on the cross. He lays in his flat in agony for days and, if memory serves, is released by his female assistant who loves him.
He becomes a homeless man and filled with the Spirit raises his still bleeding hands in the middle of Times Square. Nobody notices, hey, ya see everything on Broadway.
He laughs his ass off for he realizes that what comes to one comes to all and wisdom cries out in the streets:
Wisdom cries aloud outside; she raises her voice in the open square:
She cries in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she utters her words, saying,
How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity? and the scoffers delight in their scoffing, and fools hate knowledge?
Proverbs 1:20
Edward G. Nilges, “An Androgynous Awareness at Tung O Wan”, pencil, pen, computer enhancement, copyright (c) 2012 by Edward G. Nilges. Moral Rights asserted.
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