Insurance Salesman
You had to be diplomatic when they told you their
medical history,
trouble with his ‘prostrate’ he said. To me it was a bit
of a mystery.
But they needed to know for underwriting purposes. It seemed a
bit daft,
what was a ‘prostrate’? I looked it up, he meant ‘prostate’. I
laughed.
I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s famous book
Love In the Time of Cholera (nice title), you should take
a look.
It starts with an old man lamenting how he used to pee like a
horse
but age reduced him to a dribble. Prostate trouble, of course.
The book had an unappealing yellow jacket,
and the talk of horse pee, well I felt I couldn’t hack it,
it had a disturbing mysteriousness,
so when my own symptoms began appearing I went online to assess
their seriousness.
What worried me wasn’t so much the ‘pee’ word - more the ‘c’
word,
‘c’ for ‘cancer’. How would I know? I asked my doctor. Seemingly
undeterred
he put on a latex glove, said ‘lie down, drop ’em, face the
wall, draw up your knees, don’t feel stressed’.
I thought ‘What a bad place to put something that might need to
be suddenly accessed’.
The upside is never having to say ‘no’ to a urine sample, things
are sort of slow
and just when you think you’ve finished, you feel you need
another go.
Here’s a tip, in case you should ever need it, sitting down
helps.
But perhaps that’s too much information for some of you younger
whelps.
Have you seen the NHS advert, which says if you see the merest
trace of blood in your wee
you should get yourself down, tout suite, to see your GP?
I’m OK so far, but as you get older that’s valuable
intelligence.
So take my advice you men who are getting on a bit, do the due
diligence.
Will my prostate eventually have to come out from where the sun
don’t shine,
blinking into the light of day, or will I continue to be fine?
The odds are at some point that I’ll end up in a hospital bed,
prostrated by my prostate (ironic, or
what?) or perhaps even dead.
Thank you for your sympathy. The End. Nuff said.
Philip Dunkerley
If you have any thoughts
about this poem, Philip Dunkerley
would like to hear them
