The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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All original content on MoreThings.com copyright 2008 Albert Barger or the respective authors
September 02, 2006
I hate Herbert Cushing I hate Herbert Cushing. He really thinks he's somebody.
First off, I'll admit that he's an excellent doctor. Dr Herbert Cushing is a big time professor of infectious disease medicine at the IU hospital in Indianapolis. He knows his stuff.
I had been laid out with an ugly infection in my leg in 2004. I'm lucky to still have that leg attached to me. I went from the local Fayette Memorial Hospital (where Bargers crawl off to die) to IU, where they got me about halfway right after a couple of weeks and sent me home.
But I still wasn't right, and went slowly backwards for months before I finally got hooked up with Dr Cushing. He's the one that finally had enough know-how to set me right. My dad was real impressed with him as a personality as well when he met him, describing him at one point as being "common as an old shoe" - his highest praise.
In the course of our visits, I had been explaining to him and some of his nurses about home, Franklin County. One particular favorite point of color was that my old grade school in Andersonville as late as the early 1970s never had indoor plumbing. We had an old outhouse with a tin roof. Throwing gravel up to rattle down that tin roof and startle classmates inside was my favorite first grade game in 1968. Poor Miss Jesse had to whoop my heathen ass repeatedly over that. I just couldn't resist. But really, how could you?
Here's where we get to why I hate Cushing so much. There's no getting ahead of Herbert Cushing. He's from a farm in Massachusetts, and he explained that they had an outhouse. But not just an outhouse. No, they had a big doublewide outhouse for multiple simultaneous patrons, just for his family.
So you can see why someone would hate the guy. A hundred of us students in Andersonville had to share one old shabby outhouse, and here's this rich bastard thirty years later lording his fancy shiny two-seater over me, gloating in his superiority. Imagine me seething in rage, and understandable class resentment. Still, he got me healed up and back on my merry way, so I figured I couldn't stay too mad at him.
Just recently though, I had another small bout of being laid up in the hospital - though not nearly so bad as before. One reason for not as bad is that I went straight to IU to begin with. Coming in again, I had the esteemed professor Dr Richard Kohler on the case, whipping ass with a quickness on whatever kind of ugly bacteria had hold of me. This fine doctor seems to know his business just as good as Cushing.
Despite not actually being on my case here, ol' Cushing was keeping tabs on me. He's making sure his colleague Dr Kohler is up with all the hoops we were jumping through before. Of course, Dr Cushing came by my room to check up. He asked after my father, which pleased him very much. You might think that was a little extra display of personal concern.
Of course his real purpose was further rich-kid gloating. We ended up talking about that doublewide outhouse with the two seats. But no, he explained, that's not quite right. I had assumed that doublewide meant two seats. No, their outhouse actually had THREE seats - one for each kid. In their little Cushing good-times-noodle-salad world, each kid got their own precious seat, and they got to pass their comic books back and forth. Make sure you tell your father about that. Yeah, he's rubbing it in good.
He showed up again just as I was being discharged to re-emphasize that I should contact him for a follow-up office visit if needed - and of course to gloat some more. Having spent three days laid up in his hospital seething in rage, I had time to think about extracting some retribution. I told him that I was going to write a story called "I hate Herbert Cushing."
He broke into one of his Cheshire Cat grins and laughed at me, the bastard.
