THE BLOOD MAN

THE BLOOD MAN

Tomorrow I’m going to see Dracula. My main concern about seeing a vascular specialist is that just under the skin I have a tube which runs up the side of my neck before looping down to somewhere in my chest. He is undoubtedly going to want to examine this and I am equally sure that to do this he will ask me to put my head to one side and peer closely. Here’s my problem. If he has just one tooth, that is the slightest bit pointy, I am going to be having a laughing seizure on the surgery floor which will distribute my blood clot to all points north and south. There is just no way that I will be able to avoid this and I really don’t want to hurt the poor chaps’ feelings. As if this wasn’t difficult, I know me well enough to be able to predict that I will subconsciously use the word "bloody" at least twice in each sentence.

Human hydraulics seems at first glance to be a strange sort of speciality to devote your life to, but the more I’ve thought about it the same can be said for just about every other medical discipline. I have already discussed the Cancer Wizards at length but what about Gastro-Urinary surgeons for example? What traumatic experiences do they all have suffer that causes them to wake up one day and think "Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to ……." I can’t for the life of me understand people who have a foot fetish, but to want to be a pedicurist who spends their life examining and treating what tends to be the most rotten and smelly part of the human anatomy is just beyond me. I’m not even going to start on gynaecologists.

What is it that sets these people apart from the rest of us? I toyed with the "screw loose" theory but surely it has got to be more complex than that. In my own experience I know that this definitely applies to most of the guy’s who work in the very advanced post op setting of the mortuary (I met quite a lot and they are as mad as hatters), but how do we explain away the people who deal with us whilst we are still breathing? I cannot think of a single kind of medicine which I could contemplate practicing, so there must be something fundamentally different about medics. To the naked eye they seem to be the same species as the rest of us. For the most part they have parents. They went to school with us. They drank with us, laughed with us and made idiots of themselves with us but then one day they just mutated into something different. That’s it. It’s genetic. Something is seriously buggered up with their genes and at a certain stage in life they begin their mutation into medics. Well it’s either that or the "screw loose " theory.