Velociworld

The Power of Suggestion

The Senator awakened once, when I was a high schooler, with a brilliant shiny knot upon his forehead. Centered between the eyes, but higher. Right in the classic cyclops region. Now, no one was expecting a spontaneous third eye to manifest itself, of course, but he found it troubling, and therefore we kids found it troubling. My mother found it troubling.

As days passed it grew, and seemed to harden, and change texture and color. In fact, it appeared to grow a kind of wandering lidless white eye that looked sometimes this way , other times thataway.

The Senator was afeared of only one thing, and that was Cancer. He'd watched his mother succumb to it, and the horror of it, and it terrified him. And he was convinced this was some kind of brain tumor, or melanoma writ ominous.

He had my mother concerned, too, of course, as the thing was now bomber-marble sized, and she finally made an appointment with the doctor, and forced him to go (he being a scaredy-cat like me, who would rather perish in ignorant bliss than stare down a possibly terminal diagnosis, and deal with it in the hopes of recovery).

And So: the Senator went to the doctor, who examined the opprobrious cyst/wen/carbunkle/tumor with great care and much harumphing, before asking the Senator to lie back on the examining table. He asked him to close his eyes and relax, he was going to operate.

We kids learned this part of the story later, of course, but we knew the old man had gone to see the Learned Physician for Bad News, and we were anxious, dreadful, and snotty-nosed.

Well, I was. My older siblings had passed beyond snot-nosage. I was snot-nosed until I was a junior in college, for some reason.

Anyway, the doctor weant to work hammer and tongs, so to speak, wielding scalpel and clotcloth with urgency, precision, and, may I add, not even a whiff of anesthesia. Ole Doc was taking it to the beast mano-a-mano, right then and there.

He finished in a surprisingly short amount of time, and asked my father to sit up.

"I put a suture in there, it should come out in a few days," said he.

"And then what?"

"Well, next time you get a goddam zit that huge, pop it before it gets too bad," doc replied.

Oh, the relief! How the angels danced on pinheads! And how the pinheads, scratching themselves, were oblivious to it!

Anyhow, much ado about nothing, after all. Ain't that a pisser.