Thursday, April 8, 2010

Could I...? No

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10636989

One of my best friends, who currently lives in New Zealand sent this on and has suggested we start a collection to buy me a kidney. It's all the rage for Kidney Diseased Kiwis, desperate for a new organ in a country which rates very poorly when it comes to giving the gift of life.

Personally I don't like the idea of my surgery being performed on a rock in some jungle, with nothing but a few bottles of vodka for an anaesthetic and some class of a tribal leader slicing me open to work a bit of black magic and voodoo, with some two-bit translator trying to handle the communications between us.

Me: "They're sure it's a kidney, yes?"

Translator: "You got the liver from the goat, yes?"

Tribal Chief (grinning proudly): "Our finest pancreas from our finest mountain llama"

Nor do I feel comfortable with paying some poverty-stricken individual the price of a second-hand, third-rate motor vehicle for one of their vital organs. I'm not a great believer in karma, but even I would spend my life waiting to be struck by a bolt of lightning if I went through with that.

I would however like to see the look on my doctors' faces when I just dropped off the dialysis radar and they received the following postcard a few weeks later from Outer Exotica Land:

"Lads, I'm sorted. Went for a more direct route for a new kidney. The surgery was a bit hairy at times, but nothing the HSE wouldn't certify as above-board. Will be home soon. Weather great. Regina

PS It's normal to be paralysed from the waist down for a few weeks, right?"

5 comments:

  1. I came across your article in the IT. Must admit I was desperate for reading material. It was interesting though.Well written. Since been thinking of lines in a poem. you may want to look it up. Inspired by another theme but it's clumsily figurative. Wislawa Szymborsk
    'Nothing has changed. Except the run of rivers, the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers...

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  2. Francis Hunt - you obviously appreciate good, wholesome, black humour!

    Theoneyouhurtyourselfinto - That's an interesting name you've got there. I hadn't ever heard of that poem, but I shall look it up. Thank you.

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  3. Er, the name is from another poem. Seamus Heaney this time. Not a cry for attention. I swear.
    Excerpt here
    http://randomscribbler.blogspot.com/2006/03/extract-from-poem-by-seamus-heaney.html

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  4. Theoneyouhurtyourselfinto - keep the poem suggestions coming. I'm not a scholar of it myself, but I can appreciate it.
    "The power of power not exercised". Great line.

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