Meet Beethoven

( non-koran post)

A new neighbor has taken up residence in the neighborhood, of my left kidney, a big old tumour by the name of Beethoven. Calling him a tumour is no insult, because that's exactly what he is in the arcane jargon of the oncologists. Calling him Beethoven is because to the cats who scanned me he looked exactly like a St. Bernard puppy. He is a healthy and robust one-year-old, and beginning to get into trouble pestering my lumbar vertebrae, which I find quite unmannerly.

It's gotten a bit troublesome to move around, and I've been convinced to introduce Beethoven to doctors. They have all been quite intolerant of my tumor-American buddy, and so far have done CAT scans, MRI, ultrasound, a biopsy (that drilled a hole right through the puppy's head--O Noes!), spent possibly a million dollars, and can tell with with all the backing of the world's most advanced medical science that ....(drumroll).... I have a big lump in my back.


---update, later---
Beethoven is highly insulted: the doctors called him a 'retroperitoneal sarcoma'. Can you imagine the nerve! They could have dispensed with the slanderous portrayals and simply said he was made of muscle tissue. He is a strapping softball-size, and is minding his own business, staying aloof from all the other organs, not even involving himself with those busybody lymph nodes. A well-behaved tumor, he is, but even so the surrounding muscles are irritated with him, and there is considerable tension within their ranks.

The doctors want to shoot him. Only with X-rays though, to motivate him to reduce, and later want to perhaps slice me open and take him out, possibly for dinner and a movie although they didn't say. Their latest evil scheme involves what they innocuously call a 'radiological simulation'. One can't help but be suspicious. Should I escape their clutches on that occasion, I'm to talk again with the head doctor, whose bedside manner implies he waterboards part time for the CIA, and decide what shall be done. Rumour has it that every day for a month they will bedevil Beethoven with their ray guns, after which he should show results from his weight-loss plan and I should glow nicely in the dark. Interesting times ahead.

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