adelaidemedblog

The songs off New Buffalo’s (only?) album, Somewhere, Anywhere, really get me in the mood for blogging. Hahaha… that’s funny. I really do recommend the album. If I had to compare her to anyone… dunno actually, I guess I don’t listen to that much music in general. Calm and peaceful somewhat catchy piano vocals… “This is a song… about singing… about being… about feeling…”

Her music reminds me of the Cranberries, kind of, but when you say you don’t listen to that much music there isn’t really much music on the radio like that. Music that my mum wouldn’t complain about listening to because she hates the constant rhythmic beat of drums. (–Mana)

Mr. D, I’ll call him. It’s really quite comical. I’ll have to ask him tomorrow about his stories so I can write them down, seriously. They’re great. I’ll come and finish this tomorrow. Haha!

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I imagine a patient comes into his consulting room, possibly embarrassed, and so it eventually turns out that they suffer from rectal bleeding. Mr. D, an imposing six foot two South African white fellow does a PR and finds out they have haemorrhoids. Says they may need a haemorrhoidectomy. Tells them a story, that goes something like this.

He says, “You know when you’re at a party, you’re having a great time, and you’ve drunk a fair amount of alcohol. You feel you need to go to the toilet, but at the same time, you know you can hold it in. You just know that although you’ve got a lot in there, you’ll be able to hold it in for just a while longer. Then later, you’ve reached a stage, a time when you realise you can’t hold it in anymore, deciding to rush to the toilet, vaguely excusing yourself. You enter the men’s toilet and see the step that you need to take in order to relieve yourself in the urinal pan, and you think, “If I take this step, I’m gonna piss all over my pants.”

And the patient laughs and slaps his knee and says, “Yeah, yeah I reckon I know what you’re talking about,” and Mr. D laughs and says “Well that’s great,” then adding, “Can you tell me the difference between those two feelings? Describe it to me.” And the patient stops laughing and thinks for a while and says, “No, I can’t…”

Mr. D sits back and says, “Here’s your bladder, and it’s somehow telling your brain with absolute distinction the difference between wanting to go to the toilet, and needing to, and it can do it so easily, so that you know exactly what it’s talking about, as soon as it says it. And yet, you can’t sit there and explain to me what the difference between the messages is.”

“Let me continue” he says. “When their children are small, all mothers make the exact same mistake, no matter who they are or where they come from, they all make the same mistake, and that mistake has to do with potty training.” He sits out of his chair - “The mother is happy to leave a kid to do his or her own stuff when they are small, but when they reach around six or seven years old, every one can remember their mother telling them at some stage ‘Go to the toilet before we go to Aunty X’s house please. Go NOW.’ I can remember my mother telling me the same thing, and my wife telling my kids this as well.”

Mr. D sits back again, as if temporarily satisfied with the air of mystery in the consulting room, “This sows the seed. It tells all of us that we need to ‘make it happen’, and in susceptible people, this will cause them to carry a habit of ‘making it happen’ every time,” he scratches his head and scrunches his nose with distaste, “and this misconception is reinforced by medical people, as well as magazines and the media. People are asked, ‘Are You Regular?’, so they think that this means once-a-day, 10-minutes-a-day, etcetera, when what ‘regular’ actually refers to are a variety of factors, such as consistency, colour, size, the presence of pain, among other things, as well as frequency of bowel movement. And so,” he pauses, “people think ‘regular’ means make it regular.”

Mr. D surveys the scene - a patient, in the throes of knowledge; they know what’s coming, they just don’t know how, yet. He continues, “You play the piano? How about the violin? Do you play basketball? How about football? So, you suppose your hands are pretty clever, right? Let me ask you one question,” and Mr. D sits forward, knowing he’s onto the clincher now, the patient equally sensing his or her foreboding doom, “if I put a solid, liquid, and gas in your hands, would you be able to let the gas alone out the bottom?”

The patient wipes his brow, head down and shaking now, while Mr. D sits there on the edge of his chair, motionless, watching like an eagle. Without loss of any momentum, he seizes the moment - “I want you to do two things for me from now until we do the diagnostic colonoscopy. Whenever you go to the toilet, I want you to take a timer with you, a watch, and egg timer, whatever, set it for one minute and watch it. If one minute passes without anything happening, pull up your pants and leave. The next time you want to go, go, and do the same. The other thing I want you to do is to never close your mouth when you sit on the toilet. And that’s it.”

Mr. D made a triumphant point of saying that his patients often returned without any sign of their haemorrhoids, so the operation would be canceled. Alternatively, many who went ahead with the operation had no further problems, and did not have problems afterwards, signifying that they had resolved their bad habits.

He said, “People need to learn to trust their rectums,” adding, “next time I’ll tell you about what I say to vasectomy patients.”