A couple of basic and short and sweet fables for today, but then aren't they all.
This first one has a moral which I'm certain we've all heard at one time in our life though, I guess I wasn't sure where it came from, I always thought it had a Shakespeare feel to it. After reading the fable though it struck home to a couple of similar stories that actually happened to me.
Once I had gone to my GP and he was so distracted with his own bad back and his own complaints that his insurance didn't cover the surgery that would help him, that I'm sure my needs were wayyyyyyyyyy down on his priority list. I wasn't happy with him.
Another more pleasant time that I thought of this saying was when my jaw kept swelling whenever I would eat. That's right, my left jaw would swell to the point of m teeth not coming together when I chewed, but then after I would give up trying to eat by a 1/2 hour or so, it would return to normal. After a few days of this, my hunger forced me to head into urgent care, there was no way I could wait a few weeks for my GP to see me. The attending physician came to greet me wearing a neck brace and I thought, "How the hell is this guy going to help me when he can't help himself?". After telling him why I was there, he said without batting an eye or even waiting a beat to process it, as if this were something he saw every day, he told me I had a calcium deposit in my salivary gland and it was blocking the duct from where the saliva should flow. If I would just go to the store and buy a box of lemon heads and suck them, the sourness would force the duct to dilate large enough for the deposit to escape and not block the salivary flow.
I asked, "You're prescribing candy?". He said, "Yup.". I stood, shook his hand, thanked him and told him that he was the best damn doctor I had ever met. Within a day of following his instruction, I was fine. I never thought about his neck brace again and this moral didn't apply.
"The Quack Frog"
One fine day a Frog ambled out of his muddy home in the marsh and perched himself on a lilly pad, announcing to all who could hear that he was a great and learned physician skilled in all drugs and able to cure any disease. A skeptical Fox heard and asked the Frog, "How can you promise to aid anyone else in their ailments when you can't even fix your own warty, wrinkly skin or wobbly way of walking?
MORAL:
"Physician, Heal Thyself"
"The Raven and the Swan"
A Raven perched high in his tree, looked down admiringly on the swans swimming in the lake. He admired greatly their beautiful white plumage which seemed to give them the air of majesty and sophistication, and decided his own black feathers could be just as strikingly white if he just cleaned them in the lake as they did. He abandoned his home and well being and hunting ground of his lofty nest and came down to the water to wash his feathers and match the swans. He scrubbed and scrubbed for days and weeks, never changing the dark color of his plumage, never resembling the swans and eventually starved to death by removing himself from his own habitat.
MORAL:
"Change of Habit, Cannot Alter Nature"
Talk to you soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment