A week of emo-ness is a week too long. Sorry.
A story from days of yore, just to round out this odd week.
I was in Grade 7, only a month before my 13th birthday, when I needed to get my tonsils removed. The whole procedure was not as bad as I expected. Except the cold cream of mushroom soup they fed me every morning for breakfast. And the fact that I had to stay in the kids wing and some kid next door cried and screamed all night long. There was a big TV, an unlimited supply of popsicles and two weeks off a school. (I had to miss the track and field gym unit. And didn’t have to run the 1500m…darn) The procedure seemed relatively routine and I recovered quickly.
The summer following my first year of college, I worked at the hospital in the Medical Records Department. (Go with me…it all connects. I promise.) My job was to convert all the hospital charts to a provincial wide numbering system. (It was a relatively boring job, but again there was an unlimited supply of popsicles.)
I, of course, also took this summer to look up all of the hospital records of everyone I knew. There was the chart when my dad had pneumonia, when my brother was born and my emergency room trip when I cut my finger off (maybe that I will tell that story on another random Friday.) And there was the chart from my tonsillectomy. And there in black and white the first sentence on the chart was “Tonsil removal due to abnormally large tonsils.”
Abnormally large?!? If they were just really big, couldn’t my doctor have used another word besides abnormal? Like, extremely, tremendously, enormously, exceptionally, exceedingly. Abnormal just makes them see weird, as if they should be in some museum. Synonyms for abnormal are: unusual, irregular, strange, odd, deformed. Do you see where my self-consciousness about my tonsils comes from? I know I should move on. I had them removed almost 13 years ago, but I still wonder every once and while what was really wrong with my tonsils. And are they in a tonsil museum somewhere?
1 comment:
Denise,
I am sorry about your abnormally large tonsils. To make you feel better, I will tell you that when I had my tonsils out at age 7, they took my adenoids out (what is an adenoid?) Then, my adenoids grew back, so I had to have those out again. It is highly likely that I have them right now!
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