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My Life
Through a Broken Windshield
By Mel
McConaghy
GETTING OLDER
The human body is a wonderful creation and if you’re lucky it just
goes on year after year. Women seem to have a little problem with
theirs, it’s called, ‘the change’. When my wife went through the
change I thought that maybe she might really change and that might
be for the better.
Now us men over 40, usually find out about a little gland that
we have in our body from our Doctor. I found out when my Doctor
asked me, one day. “When was the last time you had your Prostrate
checked?”
“My ‘WHAT’?” I ask.
“Your Prostrate Gland,” he repeats, “when was the last time you had
it checked?”
“I don’t know Doc, are you sure I have one and if I do, I guess I
should have it checked, if you think so. What do we have to
do?”
“Well first I want you to drop your pants and shorts and lean over
the bed there.” He said as he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. I
think that at this point I detected a slight hint of glee in his
voice.
I won’t give you a blow by blow description, but I will tell you
that I was humiliated.
“I don’t feel any lumps on it, no sign of cancer, but it is a
little enlarged. I think you should see an Urologist and have it
checked out. I’ll have my receptionist make an appointment
for you.”
I got everything pulled up and went out to the receptionist desk
to wait for her to get an appointment for me. I could tell by the
hint of a smile that she knew what the doctor had been doing to me.
I left the office with all this newfound information running
through my head; Prostrate, Urologist and of course the dreaded
cancer.
On the designated day of my appointment I went to the Urologist
and he started asking me questions.
“Do you find yourself getting up a lot during the night to
urinate?”
“Yeah, but isn’t that normal for a man, my age?”
“Do you find that you have trouble urinating straight and some
times dribble on your pant leg?”
“Yeah, but isn’t that normal for a man, my age?”
“Do you find that you don’t have the pressure you used to, when you
urinate?”
“You bet your rubber gloves, I don’t. When I was younger I use to
be able to write my full name, all 26 letters in the snow bank. Now
I have to put a stencil between my feet just to write Mel.”
“Well we had better have a look,” he said and I heard the dreaded
snap of the rubber gloves. Oh the humiliation of it all.
After he finished his look or should I say feel, he got a little
plastic model of a prostate, down from a shelf. He had plastic
models of all different parts of a person’s anatomy. ‘Wow!’ I
thought to my self, someone makes a living, making all these models
of prostates and things. He explained to me that the urine runs
down through this tube from the bladder, through the prostate and
out (you know were). All they had to do is to run this reamer up
through, you know what and ream out the prostrate.
‘Holy cow!’ I thought, ‘That’s like re-boring a V8-Chevy
through the tail pipe’. The sweat was running down my forehead as I
was thinking, ‘the pain’, while this Doctor is Rotor-Rooting my
privates.
I decided to go through with the (quote/unquote) operation. The
day I checked into the hospital I was almost petrified with fear of
what was going to transpire. ‘Oh the pain,’ I thought, ‘I hope I
don’t breakdown and cry.’
All this worry was to no avail, no pain, a little discomfort,
but no pain. The operation was a total success and this winter I
expect to be writing poems in the snow and with enough coffee, I’ll
sign them.
Maybe when I retire, I’ll make little plastic prostrates.
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