The Run to Gitche Gumee by Robert F. Jones

Author:Robert F. Jones [Jones, Robert F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Travel, Special Interest, Adventure
ISBN: 9781592285082
Google: qxi__mKStesC
Goodreads: 609887
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2002-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

PART II

THE SAME RIVER TWICE

(Autumn: 2000)

Old men ought to be explorers . . .

—Eliot, “East Coker”

1

TIMOR MORTIS

Like many doctors, I am reluctant—no, downright averse—to subjecting myself to an annual physical. In the first place, or so goes our reasoning, I am myself an ordained physician, fully capable of diagnosing whatever might ail me, prescribing the proper protocol to correct the problem, administering said treatment in the most efficacious manner, and thus in the fullness of time . . . of healing myself. This despite my seemingly limited medical specialty, which is the human eye in all its aqueous good humor.

In the second, I know that if I submit my frail flesh to the scrutiny of a colleague, the bastard will certainly find something wrong with me. This in turn will only lead to a lot of what my Jewish colleagues call tsuris. Once you’re in our clutches, we never let you go. Not until the last shovel of dirt falls on your coffin lid. You can’t really blame us, though. It’s what we’re trained to do. And, too, many of us are just in it for the money.

And I’m proud to admit that I made a bundle of it over my forty-year career as an ophthalmologist. By the time I retired from practice last year—the last year of the ultraviolent twentieth century (lots of ocular trauma!)—I’d salted away nearly a quarter of a gigabuck, most of it paper money admittedly, from market investments, and lived disgustingly well in the process.

After graduating from Marquette University med school in 1957 I served out my internship and residency in the U.S. Navy, first at the naval hospital in San Diego and then on an attack transport, the USS Talladega (APA 208) attached to Phibron Seven, home ported in Long Beach, California. On the Douche Boat, as we called her, we cruised the western Pacific, stopping at such exotic ports of call as Sasebo and Yokosuka in Japan; Inchon, Pusan, and Wonsan in South Korea; Taipei on the ChiNat island of Taiwan; Iwo Jima; Okinawa; and Guam, not to mention my favorite liberty ports, Dingalan Bay and Zamboanga and Olangapo-Where-the-Sewer-Meets-the-Sea in the sunny Philippine archipelago.

Most of the medical emergencies I dealt with in the Navy were of the gonorrheal persuasion, though now and then a whitehat would knock a shipmate’s jaw adrift from its moorings, or fall down a ship’s ladder in heavy seas, sustaining minor fractures and contusions. Once, in the midst of a typhoon en route from Pearl Harbor to Midway, a first-class bosun’s mate named Boynton reported to sickbay with a bad bellyache.

The poor guy was running a temp of 103 and already starting to hallucinate. Classic signs of acute appendicitis. I palpated his hairy lower abdomen and discovered that the peccant appendage was about to rupture, flooding the poor salt’s innards with poison. I sent a corpsman with word to the officer of the deck that I wanted to perform an emergency appendectomy before it was too late. Emergency surgery

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