Bowels, bones, and beyond

Thoughts after reading “Mouse turd on the Communion Table” RealLivePreacher 9-4-2008

When the ghost of Jacob Marley visited his partner Ebenezer Scrooge, Scrooge could see through him the buttons on the back of his waistcoat. Dickens writes, “Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.”

Adventures in orthopedics

Surgery, my hobby, has taught me that bowels are no laughing matter.

Whenever I get a little bored, or  have a pile of money lying around, I call up my orthopedic doctor and complain about a vertebra. It’s a sure fire way to get some excitement in your life, rips up normalcy, robs you of any illusion of control, makes bill pay software go berserk, and (one of our culture’s myths) always does some good.

After my most recent jaunt to the bone yard I emerged from anesthesia, convinced terrorists on the TexMex fronterizo had captured me.

Support your local orthotist

The high point occurred, however, several years ago. Pre-surgery you visit your orthotist. Mine is Tarif Zaki, owner of Virginia Orthotics, Chairman of the International Association of Prosthetics and Orthotics. A proud American, in 2005 with a team sponsored by Physicians for Peace he traveled to Amman, Jordan, to assess prosthetics and orthotics training needs at the King Hussein Medical Center.

 Zaki is a 70+ year old gem of a gentleman who’s built me three or four leg braces and four body casts. These are exoskeletons. The orthotist wraps your torso in casting material and makes a hard plastic version fastened with Velcro that immobilizes your spine following surgery.

Only after this surgery, lying in bed, did I realize I hadn’t made a body cast. Tarif cast me front and back, requiring the help of five others to turn me without damaging the newly reconstructed spine. There I lay, 100% naked, with people standing all around, figuring out how to turn me over.

I wouldn’t trust anybody but Zaki to effect this maneuver.

Besides helping you identify real pros who really care like Zaki, surgery does other things. In each of my 11 spine or joint surgeries, the general anesthesia slowed the body down. The fun day comes two or three days post surgery when your bowels wake up. If they don’t, having a BM becomes paramount. This is where I connect with my friend Gordon Atkinson at RealLivePreacher recent piece called “Turd on the Communion  Table.”

Speaking of turds

I got to digging into online etymologies of some of our most useful words. (Check out dictionary.com.)

Root words meaning cut off or separated from:

• turd from Old English tord (before 1000 CE);
• crap from late Middle English (1425-1475 CE) word meaning chaff;
• shit from German from Indo-European word meaning to split or divide, cousin to words science and conscience from roots meaning to distinguish, divide!
• excrement, from 1533, a Latin root meaning discharge

Another pair of words include:

• dung from before 1000 CE, kindred Germanic Norse words meaning muck, heap. A light went on in my brain when I made the connection between dung and dungeon, the latter maybe originally an underground cell made of dung in the castle. The insight makes you appreciate Paul’s prison letters.
• feces, attested 1425-75 CE, from Latin roots meaning grounds, dregs, sediment.

What can I say? Wordslingers have a passion to know words, how they came to be, because it gives you some insight into how the human brain operates. If you know how the brain operates, then you get a glimmer of reality now and then. We need to cut off some things in life. We have our own private dungeons.

So what?

Here are some gleanings:

1. I recall Frederick Buechner’s description of the “steamy sweet smell of manure” in the cave where Christ was born. I’d never smelled the birth of Christ before.

2. Seward Hiltner, pastoral care leader, who I’m told treated his grad students shitty, observed that the minister’s tools are water and manure. He based the insight on this parable:

A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ Luke 13:6-9 (NRSV)

 3. Julian of Norwich

A man walks upright, and the food in his body is shut in as in a well-made purse. When the time of his necessity comes, the purse is opened and then shut again, in most seemly fashion. And it is God who does this, as it is shown when he says that he comes down to us in our humblest needs. For he does not despise what he has made, nor does he disdain to serve us in the simplest natural functions of our body, for love of the soul which he created in his own likeness. (Julian of Norwich, Showings, 6^th letter, long text. [Paulist Press, 1978, p. 186]).

4. “Alle thingis … I deme as toordis, that I wynne Crist.” John Wyclif, Phil. iii.8, 1382

Image source: Andeas Vesalius  (1514-1564) Imagesofsurgery.com