BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

In a little over a month, I will be 50.

Yay. Half century. Big 5-0. Surfboards, waves, syncopated Polynesian Hippie Music. Book ’em, Dano…

Actually, I’m sort of excited about it. After all, 50 is technically the new 30. Life should be just really starting to get interesting for me. Not that The Redhead hasn’t made it plenty interesting all along…

At any rate, one of the reasons 50 is the new 30 is advances in medical science, up to and including early detection of disease so that it can be treated before it REALLY gets to be a problem. Therefore, when you hit 50 the first thing the doctor tells you after pulling his hand out of your a$$ – prostate exam, folks… prostate exam… – is that you need something ELSE jammed into your bung hole, that being a 3d Imax Camera.

Okay, so maybe not a 3d Imax Camera. More like a  camera on a rope…

And so, you make your appointment to have a colonoscopy. This is important shit right here, no pun intended. Colon cancer isn’t pretty, and this is the sort of thing that can save your life. However, Dave Barry beat me to the punch on the whole Intestine Spelunking Blog… And Harry Smith had his done live on national TV. I offered to live stream mine on Facebook, but my fans said no. They are more than happy to read one of my books about a serial killer doing truly horrible things to a victim or two, but when it comes to poop they get a little squeamish. Go figure…

But anyway… Or should that be Butt Anyway? No matter, the real deal is that it’s been done. The benefits of having a colonoscopy have been espoused by much bigger names than me, so I’m not about to be a copycat.

I am, however, about to throw down a major bitch about this whole thing… You see, in order to properly film the poop canal it must first be free of poop. Makes a certain sort of sense. I mean, that way the Doctor doesn’t have to keep telling Mister Hanky to move out of the way so he can see, right? And so, in order to do this they write you a prescription for Colon Blow… Okay, so that’s just what I call it. In point of fact it is “Suprep: Bowel Prep Kit.”

Cool, eh? I mean just look at it. A box of awesome. Make you clean as a whistle, it will. But wait… There’s more…

Here’s the bill.

Yes… You read it correctly. $71.43… AFTER the insurance kicked in a twenty. Without insurance it would have been $93.09…

Yeah… For some stuff to make me shit my brains out and feel completely miserable for about 18 hours. Okay… it’s medical progress. It’s the sort of thing that can save my life. Of course, I won’t have any money to live on, so I might as well be dead, but hey, what the hell.

Here’s the rub… For less than 20 bucks I could pick up a box of Dulcolax and two bottles of Citrate of Magnesium, and it would do EXACTLY the same thing. I know this because I’ve been down this road before, plus I verified it with my buddy Dr. Gina, who is, in point of fact, a real doctor, not just one on TV.

So here’s my thing… To celebrate my 50K Exhaust System Check I am pretty much flushing about 75 bucks down the toilet.

But what the hell… You only turn 50 once… Since my ass is getting raped, I guess my wallet should, too…

More to come…

Murv

Honestly, this is probably one of those “had to be there” sorts of stories… Be that as it may, I’m going to go ahead and tell it. Why? Because I was there. I can’t help it if the rest of you didn’t check your schedules and missed it… So, anyway…

I’m getting up there in years. I’m not what you’d call old, although most of the O-spring’s friends think I am. I’m actually right there at middle age. Just a couple of months shy of that half-century mark, where life really begins. However, as we age, even if we are simply reaching our prime, other bullshit goes on inside us. Things like our immune systems getting tired a little more easily. So, to boost things, we do silly stuff like get flu shots. I know some folks out there who REALLY think it’s silly and refuse to get flu shots at all. More power to them. They just need to stay away from me with their germs, because the simple truth is, nobody is really as immune to common illnesses as they think they are. I guess the long and short of what I am prattling about is this: I get a flu shot every year, and 2011 is no different – especially since I am about to go out of town to a gathering of bunches of people where I will be signing books, shaking hands, and being exposed to all manner of bacterioviralmorphingpowerranger pathogens.

As it happens, the insurance that covers our family is of the sort that covers such immunizations 100%, so I recently headed out to the post office, dropped off some stuff, then continued up the block to the local Walgreen’s and got myself into the queue for a flu shot. As I waited, an older lady possessed of a white cane arrived with a friend, and they got themselves into the queue as well. While we sat waiting – it was a hell of a busy day at the Walgreen’s – I couldn’t help but overhear the older woman talking about how nervous she was, and how she was going to scream when they gave her the shot.

Eventually the pharmacist came out, packing a gihugic hypodermic that looked like a hunk of telephone pole with a sword sticking out of the end… Okay… not really. But I’m pretty sure that’s what the blind lady was imagining. As it happens, I was first up, and it had taken quite a while before the pharmacist had been able to come out to the “inoculation area,” so she was a bit harried about finding a place to give me the injection. You see, oddly enough the blind lady and her friend were sitting behind the blind where they normally do this sort of thing. I told the poor gal to just, “Grab, Stab, and Plunge,” adding. “It’s just a shot, not surgery.”

This elicited a ton of laughs from people who were in line for various things, up to and including more flu shots. However, it’s not the part you had to be there to appreciate.

Upon hearing my comment, the blind lady called out from behind the blind, “I don’t know how you can do it. I’m going to scream like a little girl.”

I replied with a serious question, “Would it help you to feel better if I screamed, too?”

“Maybe,” she said with a nervous chuckle.

Moments later the pharmacist had, in point of fact, Grabbed, Stabbed, and Plunged. Me, not really seeing shots as that big a deal, I didn’t even realize she had done so until she was sticking a band-aid to my arm. I asked, “Oh, so you’re done?”

“Sure am,” she replied.

Not wanting to disappoint the lady on the other side of the blind I said, “Hang on a sec…”

Then I screamed.

Yes.

In the middle of Walgreen’s.

Employees came running, shoppers peeked around the endcaps of nearby aisles, and everyone in the immediate vicinity who had been “in on the joke” burst out laughing – especially the blind lady behind the blind.

On my way out I wished her and her friend a good day. She chuckled and said, “You, too… And thanks for the entertainment…”

Another satisfied customer.

More to come…

Murv