64% of breast cancer cases are diagnosed at a localized stage (there is no sign that the cancer has spread outside of the breast), for which the 5-year survival rate is 99%.
“You’re such a word guy!”
The doctor who provides me with most of my necessary medical services — and who, in the vernacular of the times, I call “MY doctor” — was laughing behind her mask as she approached me; I was sitting on the examination table that she had asked me to “hop” onto. When she gave me that instruction, I responded with the “business” that I give my roommate, my youngest daughter: “Why do we ‘hop?’ Why do we ‘hop,’ or ‘jump’ into the shower? Why not step, or climb or walk?” My daughter sighs, hops into the shower; my doctor laughed.
After the nurse had taken my vitals, Dr. Curry knocked on the door to the examination room. (I always love that she grants me that brief ownership of that space where she labors daily.) I sat in a chair beside her desk and watched as she assaulted her keyboard, pounding it into compliance. She laughed at my comment on her form. “You learned to type on a manual typewriter,” I said, continuing that, with a manual typewriter, we have to strike the keys with enough force to lift the type bars to drive them into the inked ribbon to leave an impression on the paper. She laughed again, and kept hammering her keyboard.
Dr. Curry’s indictment of me as a “word guy” did not offend, but set loose some memories of moments in “wording.” My grandson is 16 years old, a student at a private school in New Jersey. When he was about 12 years old, he sent me a text, then lamented to his mother, “I think I sent Cool Papa (me) a run-on sentence.” In a recent conversation with him, we joked, and he laughed in a way that I characterized as a snort. He responded that it was “a sharp exhalation of breath through the nostrils.” This is so good, to me. I love words, but I also make up my own.
My second bride had an embarrassing moment with our son, when he cried out in a crowded movie theater, “But mom! I have to move my bowels!’ She laughingly told me that she hated that I had taught our children the correct terms for excretion. But I was taught the terms, when young, and when I had children, I taught them. My children did not pee; they urinated. They did not poop (a word that makes me cringe); they moved their bowels. But I have fun with my oldest granddaughter, who is now 12. When I was staying with their family during for a period, and I woke Imani to prepare for school, she rose from bed, sleepily. When I asked her if she had to “urinoscipate.” She did not hesitate: “Yes.”
I watch a PBS Kids TV program with my youngest granddaughter, for whom I am the daily caretaker. “WordGirl” has super powers and a super vocabulary (and a monkey sidekick) and though Myah, at 2.5 years old, does not understand all the words, I want her to hear them. I think that Myah is receiving an early introduction to “code-switching,” understanding different ways of expressing similar words and phrases. She demands privacy when she is filling her diaper, telling me to “Stay there” when I approach her as she stands in a corner. Myah’s mother will ask her, “Are you pooping?” Myah will respond, “No; I’m fine.” I will follow up a few minutes later: “Are you moving your bowels?” Myah will squeal, angrily: “I’M FINE!”
“Fine,” for the word guy, is the new “poop.”
cjon3acd@att.net