Friday, November 11, 2011

Remembrance Day 11/11/11

To every soldier standing tall,
on distant lands, where heroes fall
so far removed, the honored brave
lie exiled in a foreign grave,
who heard a higher call.

A spirit lost in serving all
is now a name writ on a wall
for some, a need to serve and save
in blood their names are signed.

Remains placed in a hallowed hall
each death still casts a bitter gall.
No vengeance do the fallen crave
for sacrifice they gladly gave;
but never solace from the pall
for those they left behind.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Not Just Another Pretty Face

This has been such a busy week for me and for the family. Jerry had a gallbladder attack recently and was found to have a gall stone, so had to have surgery to remove the stone and his gallbladder. The whole process was particularly difficult for us as a family. It wasn't so much that Jerry was in pain and had to have surgery, because, let's face it, he wasn't donating a kidney or anything so he healed up rather quickly. Rather, it was the fact that gallstones usually occur in women overweight and over forty, so I was rocked with feelings of both guilt and gratitude that it wasn't me. Jerry came through like a champ, and even asked the doctor to let us keep the gallstone so that we could sell it on Ebay if it resembled a religious deity or Elvis or someone else in high demand. Smart thinking since our social security money was already spent before we were born.


Jerry has been trying to rest and heal from surgery, so that has allowed me time to catch up on various activities, not the least of which is reading the news online. I enjoy perusing different news websites and learning about all of the nutty things that go on in the world. My interests are random and diverse, so I read about everything from freezing places to pleasing faces, which is how I got to this point in the first place.


With Jerry resting in a drug induced stupor, er, like a trooper, I took the opportunity to catch up on everything that I had missed in world events. A headline caught my eye, 'Here's Looking at You.' My first thought was that some idiot was going to remake Casablanca so I clicked on the link, determined to devote my life to stopping such horror from taking place, but I was confronted by a different horror altogether. There, on the screen, was an ultrasound picture of a tumorous testicle, containing what appeared to be a human face in it! An not just any face, but a face that looked like a sinister mash up of Rodney Dangerfield, Marty Feldman, and Abe Lincoln. I'll call it 'Maybe Drinkin.'


I was so creeped out that not even drinking would help me. Nothing would make me unsee Jack in the sack, the ghoul in his jewel, the SMUT IN HIS NUT!!!!!! And as upsetting as the sight was for me, I am sure that the Planter's Peanut guy is really having a hard time facing this.

This seems to have started in Canada when a patient sought medical advice for pain in his groin, specifically, in his, um, badoobies. So he agreed to an ultrasound to determine the cause of the misery, and the doctors were confronted with what they could only call 'the face of testicular pain.' One doctor was quoted as saying, " It looked like a man screaming in pain, which I thought was hilarious, considering the clinical picture of the poor guy." So, ignoring any moral implications (as I often do), Dr. Jack Kervorkian spent eight years in jail for trying to end the suffering of terminally ill patients, and this urologist is laughing at what appears to be a man screaming in pain in some poor guy's ball bag?

The urologist went on to say that he briefly considered that the face might be that of a religious figure or mythical deity, such as Min, the Egyptian god of male virility, and that name is the only thing in the doctor's whole news, er, release, that is even remotely appropriate. Let's face it, the poor patient is in pain. And I don't mean like a paper cut or stubbed toe....he has pain in his cojones, and now he finds out that he's toting around a tumorous face in his scrotum. And does he get the face of Brad Pitt or some other hottie? No, he gets the testicular equivalent of the one-eyed Jack and the medical James Bond reject, Dr. No He Dint!

After reading this gem of a story, I was actually relieved that Jerry's gallbladder surgery turned up nothing more than a gallstone. No Sly and the Family Stone, no Stone Phillips, no Kid Rock. That's good, works for us. And as for our Canadian friend, a hospital spokesperson said that he isn't terribly interested in his rad nads. Still, he could try to say that it's 'Bally Idol' and sell it on Ebay....

"Balls have got a face, he's strangely out of place, Balls have got a face...."

Nah. That's just nuts.