So…back from a series of health problems that finally centered in on an incorrectly diagnosed abscess. Can you say threatened septicemia? But after an operation and a whack of antibiotics I’m my old chipper self.
What it did bring to mind was a game my teenage daughter and her friend were playing the other day – who would still be alive if we lived in an age before modern medicine.
Our family got decimated pretty quickly. I would never have had this abscess because I probably would have died from one of my two bouts of pneumonia many years ago. My wife would have died from blood loss giving birth to our son. Our son would have died from a threatened liver infection that we caught in time a few years back. My daughter may or may not have made it through a string of minor infections she had as a child.
And does that give me a story this week? Naw, not really. Nothing jumps out at me though I could probably force it by doing something like picking up on the private lives of any of the health care professionals I was in contact with these last two weeks. (And God bless Canada – our health care system may be glacial for non-urgent matters, but when you need care now, it steps up to the plate fast.)
But instead, let’s just peek at the front page of the paper. More on Japan’s radiation scare. A bit on the death of Elizabeth Taylor. And cherry blossoms in bloom on Yew Street in Vancouver. Also this piece I read in a news magazine last week about new breakthroughs in fighting age-related cellular breakdown.
So…let’s say that Ms. Taylor, having successfully fought off her congestive heart failure and begun a new series of age-reversing drugs that has her contemplating a return to the big screen, visits Tokyo in the earthquake/tsunami aftermath.
Stick in images of cherry blossoms struggling to bloom.
Liz helps the displaced and homeless, using her returning youth and vigor to work alongside rescue workers, using her charm and ageless beauty to inspire the weak and soften the hard-hearted.
But I want to make this a story with some pathos because all that death and dying contrasted with spring and a rescued, rebeautified Elizabeth Taylor, just calls out for that.
So how about one of the children she’s helping is a young Japanese girl who keeps wanting to leave the rescue station Liz had helped set up and run. Finally Liz goes with her to help the girl find her parents and they end up in a shattered town near the burnt-out nuclear reactor in Fukushima. The parents had sent the girl to her grandparents immediately after the earthquake. The grandparents died. Now the parents are dead too. And Liz, after wandering around the restricted area looking for them with the little girl (Liz’s charm will get her anywhere!), contracts radiation poisoning which is ironically worsened by the youth therapies she’s taking. (The little girl’s fine.)
Liz will be dead in days, but she’s truly lived and gets to watch the budding cherry blossoms before she goes.
Ahhhhhh.
