Ostomy Memories of Dr. Adze

ON MY WALK YESTERDAY I ran into Dr. Adze, the surgeon who did my ileostomy.  “I thought you were dead,” I told him.  “No, I just quit doing surgeries,” he said,  “because it was beginning to get to me.”  “How do you mean?” I asked.  “Well, the stress, you know, and you had to be so precise wielding a scalpel.”  “You sure did a job on me,” I said, but I could tell from his lack of reaction that he didn’t catch my double meaning.  “So, did you just retire?” I asked him.  “No, I went to work with my brother the butcher.  He had a nice wholesale meat business.”  “At least you were in a related profession,” I offered, adding, “although I guess meat cleavers took some getting use to after scalpels.”  “I felt free, actually,” admitted the doc.  “I could chop away, and I didn’t have an anesthesiologist and a surgical nurse peering over my shoulder all the time.”  “Big difference between a dead steer and a live person, huh?”  “Not as much as you’d think,” he admitted ruefully.  “That’s the beauty of anesthesia.”  “I wish I’d been under anesthesia when you yanked all that bandaging off my belly the next week.  I think I cleared the bed.”  “Sorry about that,” he said, “but doing it slowly just prolongs the agony.”  We reached a corner where he was turning and I was going straight.  “Are you still cutting meat?” I asked him.  “No, that finally got to me too.  So I made a big decision.”  “What was that?” I asked.  “I became a vegetarian.”  

By looking at her, you’d never know my surgeon cuts people in half and puts them back together again.  

You gotta have a certain type of personality to do that for a living, whatever that is.  I guess it's better than being a coroner.