Digested week: Doctor, doctor, it’s okay to make fun of my kidneys | Lucy Mangan
Monday
Dame Maggie Smith has gone to the great green room in the sky. My father worked at the National Theater at a time when the canteen was run by two women, Rose and Nellie. Rose was zaftig, exuberant and did most of the serving, accompanied by lots of loud commentary and cheerful conversation. Nellie, thin and worn, was rarely heard from. She spent most of her time scrambling around in the background with pots and pans, or bending over the sink full of dishes that came from whipping up fifty or more hot lunches thanks to two battered household stoves.
A pre-damehood Smith stood in line one day with a friend, who watched for a while as those in front of them were served before leaning over to Smith and saying, “Isn’t Rose wonderful!” “Yes,” Smith agreed. ‘But Nellie is the part.”
Tuesday
Tory leader hopeful Robert Jenrick has revealed his daughter, born in 2013, was given the middle name Thatcher. He thought “it was a good way to remind her of a great Prime Minister”.
There’s a lot to unpack here. There’s a lot to unpack, if only we had the world and time. But for now, let’s ask the very first and simplest question: Dear GOD, man – why not “Margaret”?
Wednesday
The medicalization of the human condition continues apace. (I’m all for it, by the way. Give me pills for everything. When I first read Brave New World, my only real concern was whether soma came in both liquid and tablet form, because I wasn’t very good at taking them of the latter. I didn’t know anything about slow release capsules at the time and it sounded like you wanted a steady infusion rather than a quick hit.) Now we have “emophilia”. The rock and blood disease jokes of the 90s have all been made, so it’s the tendency for some people to fall in love in no time and then be devastated when it ends, before they just as quickly and with fall in love again just as quickly. next time loosen a foundation, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Drama queens as it was back then. Your most tiring friend. Your least favorite, most exhausting sibling. The emotionally incontinent, when you are in polite company. Damn idiots if you’re not. I hope that officially naming the phenomenon helps – both for themselves and for the people around them who have been violently and much more deeply affected. I long for the day when, instead of spending hours, days and weeks accompanying X or Y through a new heartbreak, I can say curtly, “Oh no! You’re having another emophile attack! Poor you. Here, let me find your medicine” and then drop a small white pill down the affected person’s throat and clamp my hand around his or her jaw until he or she has swallowed. Just like deworming a kitten, but much more satisfying.
Thursday
I’ve been to several appointments lately about some lumps and bumps on my kidneys and today it was finally clear that they were cysts. “Some of it calcified, some of it jelly,” said my dear doctor. ‘But they’re just cysts. You’re just – quite cystic!” I was happy to know that at least my insides have a hobby. But he suddenly closed his mouth and looked shocked. My first thought was that he had read the wrong form and was about to tell me I had cancer after all, but then I realized he was just panicking because he had been joking.
No one – but especially doctors, who are already so burdened with trying to pretend that they and the patient are equal in all things, up to and including medical expertise, and that there are no power dynamics at work – is allowed to joke about serious things anymore. We’ve lost the ability, mainly thanks to the Internet, to distinguish between laughing at something or someone and laughing at something or someone, so it’s best to stay far away from both.
So I laughed extra heartily and threw in the hobby gag for good measure. I don’t know who was more relieved by the outcome at the end of that appointment.
Friday
Today the worst thing in the world happened. My computer died. Anyone who knows nothing about computers knows the pain I went through. Thoughts of finding a new one, talking to salespeople without a shared language between us, installing Microsoft Word, trying to minimize expensive antivirus software rip-offs (I’ve long given up hope of avoiding them completely)… Unbearable . I fell to my knees and prayed to all my gods (Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez and Jane Lynch) to help me.
And they did! After much crying, waiting in line at various stores, and talking to over a thousand patient, 12-year-old assistants in their technology departments, it turned out to be just a dead battery. The charger stopped working without me noticing. The sweet child who finally identified the problem offered a new problem. It was £127. That’s more than I paid for this computer, I said. Please give me a chair and some smelling salts.
The child looked at me for a moment as I stared at the price tag and tried to adjust to it. I felt a spirit rise and move within him. ‘You could,’ he said finally, ‘buy a slightly older copy. We still have a few. But they are not the latest version.”
“’Not the latest version’ is my motto, little boy. Please tell me the price.’
“£34. But it’s really old, not even last year.”
“But it will still do everything I ask of it? Everything the newest one does? Is there no fundamental difference in effect or usefulness between the two? No? Then I’ll take it, my love. And please let this be an awakening for you to the relentless cynicism of Western capitalism.”
I’m absolutely certain it was.