My Christmas Eve morning started off with a phone call from my doctor at the VA. A call from your doctor never really portends a good omen. A phone call while you are asleep is usually not good one way or the other either, so I just let it ring and listened to the voice mail message from my doctor after I got out of bed before calling him back.
The news I received was not really unexpected. I had some routine tests done the other day which include a fecal occult test which — despite sounding like some kind of investigation method to detect devil worshipers — actually finds blood in one’s stools. Like I said, I expected it and mainly so because of the stress that the methadone I take for chronic severe pain puts upon my lower GI system. There are, of course, a number of reasons — most of which are rather ominous — why blood may show up in your feces. Among these reasons are colon cancer. While not worried, per se, at this time about cancer I nonetheless will go through the unpleasantness of a colonoscopy just as soon as the VA can schedule one for me.
After years of interaction with medical professionals this one has been more involved than normal and I would rather that not be similarly the case in 2008. But when one reaches more than five decades of life more and more visits to the doctors can be expected along with their poking and prodding you in the most creepy of manners and locations.
So all I can do now is sit back and hope for the best next year and try to tell myself things will get better. That’s not easy for a seemingly born pessimist like myself, but I don’t suppose you can go rolling skating in a buffalo herd. So to cheer me up and perhaps it will cheer you up as well, I offer one of my favorite Christmas stories, the David Sedaris piece Six to Eight Black Men which I first read in Esquire and later in his collection Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
Esquire played up the piece by touting the below teaser:
“A heartwarming tale of Christmas in a foreign land where, if you’ve been naughty, SAINT NICK and his friends give you an ass-whuppin’
Unlike our Santa, SAINT NICHOLAS is painfully thin, dresses like the pope, and tops off his robes with a tall hat resembling a tea cozy.
In addition to a great Christmas story, THE DUTCH have thrown in legalized drugs and prostitution. What’s not to love about that?”
If that doesn’t whet your appetite then I don’t know what will. Have a merry Christmas!