Thursday 29 April 2010

Beware the one legged Ophthalmologist!

IXL rang very upset. She was home alone and suffering ‘flashes of lightning’ in one eye. Her only computer is at ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ where she makes delciious goodies for the Noosa Farmers Market, so she asked me to look it up on the net. Diagnosis? Detached retina associated with floaters. (Bits of debris and/or blood in the eye). Natural degeneration associated with being over fifty. Nothing life threatening, but in need of treatment, usually laser tacking of the retina back into place. Sounds easy. But it reminds me of a Monty Python scrap where the media person describes playing the flute. ‘You just blow in one end and move your fingers up and down the outside. Next week, I’ll tell you how to do brain surgery.’

Yes, she had a floater ‘shaped like a fish hook’ so yesterday I buzzed over to her place on my Hyosung (99CC, $2,500 brand new on the road) and drove her to the docs where Tom, her GP, arranged for her to be seen by an ophthalmologist immediately. Verdict? ‘No surgery required yet and maybe it will settle down. Come back in two weeks.’

That verdict took about an hour to arrive. Meantime, I caught up with the latest gos on Hollywood goings on, who is pissed off with whom for sleeping with their best friend and who is in Africa gathering babies to adopt. Agents must bust a gut keeping their faces in No Idea and its imitators.

In about ten minutes I had renewed my acquaintance with Pammy’s implants and was left staring at the opposite wall where the word OPHTHALMOLOGIST had been Araldited to the wall in bas relief. At twelve years old I studied Latin for a whole year. It failed to drag my attention from mucking about in boats, but it did provide a tool for analysing word structure so I put it to work.

Op = getting along on one leg.
H (silent) as in hat. ‘I left me ‘at at ‘er place.’
Thal = Biblical direction meaning DO IT, as in Thou thal not covert thy neighbour’s wife. If you see her uncovered, take a look but leave the blanket off.
Mol = Lady of easy virtue, which seems to indicate she finds it easy to be virtuous but in fact she doesn’t.
O = shortened version of ‘of’, of Celtic origin, as in John O’Groats, funny name for a village closest to Dunnet Head, most northerly tip of Scotland where you can get a ferry to Orkney or catch a cold.
Gist = the meaning of stuff. As in ‘getting the gist’ of something.

So, I went in and dragged her out. Who wants your favourite grandma being examined by some one legged bloke who’s knows a lot about prostitutes!

23 comments:

  1. I'd hate to see your translation of ornithologist - ha,ha.

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  2. That's too easy! Ornithologists play the drums. A bit cryptic, but if you've ever worked with one, or married one, you'll know. Ha!

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  3. You've lost me there Stafford.

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  4. Here's a word for you -- enumerator. I see that you've been written a good number of posts.

    Please do check out Siobhan Magnus' performance of "Paint it Black" in the LIFT at the end of my recent post. Random unimportant meaninglessness, that. Maybe the main post topic will be the focus of your comment there.

    Seriously though, hope IXL's eyes are doing okay

    !!

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  5. Apologies and correction: I see that you've been 'writing' ... It is wonderful to read all your well written posts. Looking for more.

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  6. Gabrielle, Drummers are notorious for coveting females of any species and sometimes confuse feathered ones with unfeathered ones. Ha!
    Now, Qwkdrw, any word you put up must be translated by YOU!

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  7. Thanks for the wishes. IXL is a brave and resourceful person who never gives in and is adjusting to this latest little hiccup.

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  8. I share your enthusiasms(!!) re the literature available in surgeries. I've never yet met a doctor or specialist who looks like the kind of person who'd read the crap they make available to their patients. And my feminist leanings forbid my suggesting that maybe it's the doctors' receptionists who choose the reading matter. But then, who does buy that stuff? I'd like to think the mags come as part of a cheap set of 'doctor specials' - maybe all remaindered. But the fact these are all 'popular' titles makes that unlikely. Someone should tell doctors we resent their assumption that we patients are all literary idiots. But then we might get Swarovski Crystal catalogues, Business Review Weeklies or Modern Boating Magazines. (I've actually seen all of these in our ex-doctor's surgery. And though that alone wasn't the reason we changed doctors, it would have been a good thing if we had taken a hint from his taste in mags and got out then!)

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  9. Oops! Just realised you'd probably be happy with Modern Boating Magazines in surgeries....though the issue I remember was more about boats as the ultimate acquisition than it was about boating!

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  10. Chartreuse, you are forgiven. Just over a week ago I drove IXL to Brizzy to see her foot specialist. His waiting room had unpteen copies of the same edition of Motor Magazine, which pistons me off big end, and Australian Geographic which I scanned cover to cover and found not one semi naked starlet. But it gets worse! No idea and Women's Monthly at least have crosswords and Soduku. MM and AG have neither so I was forcded to sit and think of new ideas for my blog. Extremely dangerous!

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  11. Maybe this is the right time to confess sheepily that I was once a staff writer on Women's Monthly (back in the days when it was a weekly). Hey, I could write a post about how that came about....thanks for the idea. I may get back to blogging on that one!

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