Speccie Medical Procedure
 

Do you know for the first time I actually forgot to send in my entry. But the winners were better anyway. Bazza was as good as he usually is, our Australian associate, Janet, won again. Janet, this is becoming a habit. And Robert Schechter was mentioned in dispatches. Well done those people. And now, obviously just for me. I have no idea what 'you are invited to supply' means.

I've got a new computer with Wndows 7 which is the work of the devil. Get me some more of the old. But my old machine was getting confused, according to a technowhiz. I know how it felt.

NO. 2718: medical record
James Michie (Jaspistos) wrote a poem entitled ‘On Being Fitted with a Pacemaker’. You are invited to submit your own account, in verse, of a medical procedure undergone (16 lines maximum). You are invited to supply. Please email entries, if possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 12 October.

You don't suppose she meant supply "a specimen"? Or was she just taking the piss?

Anyway, Sam's already written a better one - as I recall, it was published in the Hudson Review a few years ago.

Frank

Well, if I were Sam, I'd give it a whirl. As the great Les Murray said, publication n different continents doesn't count.

Somehow I don't think Ms. Lucy would care for "Before Prostate Surgery."

Perhaps not, but my deplorable mind immediately defaulted to rubber-gloved, orifice-probing comedy. I predict a plethora of entries about dentists and medicos who work the other end.

Procedure

It goes like this, the doctor said,
You must lie down upon this bed
Erected in a place apart
And we will open up your heart.
I asked, re-buttoning my shirt,
But will I die and will it hurt?
He laughed, don’t even think of it.
It will not hurt one little bit.
And for the other, my oh my,
I guarantee you will not die.
A month or two, you will be fine.
I signed upon the dotted line,
He seemed a pleasant sort of bloke.

It did hurt and I didn’t croak.

Wow, John. This has the impact of a heavyweight prizefighter's roundhouse -- as poems about matters of life and death should have -- and it achieves its effect with such finely calibrated understatement.

I could debate for hours over the question of "and" vs. "but" in the final line. I'm pretty sure you made the right choice there.

Do doctors actually give ironclad guarantees that a patient isn't going to die in surgery? Would it be better to reword that line so he's hedging his bet a bit? Would that even make the final line stronger? The thing he states as a sure thing (no pain) doesn't happen, while the thing he phrases merely as a likelihood (survival) does happen.

Do they guarantee you will live? No they don't. It is policy that they give percentages, odds if you like. The odds of my sort of thing going wrong are about 2% - the same odds i got a couple of years previously for a cataract operation. . But of course that depends on other things. How old you are - I wasn't very old. How sick you are generally - I was perfectly well in all other ways, or pretty well. The skill of the surgeon - mine was the best, and he was pretty conscious of that. Actually in the end another surgeon did the biz, but Saint Thomas's in London, opposite the Houses of Parliament is the best we have. I might have gone to some hospital nearer to me which was less good, or even rank bad. They call it The Postcode Lottery, but in my case it was another slice of luck, that my heart surgeon in Canterbury had all these London contacts. So the surgeon gave me to believe that there was very little risk. I simplified for the sake of the poem.

We prep and place you in
A sort of braising pan;
We add warm water, then
We x-ray and we scan
To find your little stone.
You’ll feel the tap-tap-tap
Of lithotripsic sound.
You’ll likely take a nap.
Meanwhile, we blast away
While guided by our screens,
And soon your little stone
Is smashed to smithereens.
It shouldn’t take too long.
Your meds will see you through.
All this will quickly pass.
Your little stone will, too.

A medical procedure?


Breech Birth

Within their blissful water world,
most swim headfirst, and drawn to air,
when slapped, they cry, begin to breathe.
But flipping back, some stroke against
the tide, a futile flight from being
born. And breeched, buttocks bruised
to bluish black when forceps grip
and rip them out, they sorely sense
their end. Muting mandrake shrieks,
they join the legions born headfirst,
all swiftly borne from breathless wombs
through air to dry and airless tombs.

RearView Ralph