1048 Sunset Boulevard

“I Am Bill’s Gall Bladder”

July 25, 2008 | Items of Interest

When I was a kid, back before Al Gore invented the Internet, before ATM machines, automatic transmissions, raised-letter tires, and continuous-roll toilet paper (forget it; you don’t want to know), “Papa Luis” had a perpetual subscription to “Reader’s Digest.”

It was ubiquitous in our household, even before the “1048 Sunset Boulevard” era (roughly co-terminous with the Upper Permian geologic epoch). There was always a pile of back-issues sitting on the toilet tank in the bath-room; I think the issue reporting on the George Washington Inaugural was permanently adhered to that of the “pink bathroom” for about 150 years or so.

Anyway, as a voracious reader I was enthralled with the magazine and its articles. I would read the many regular topical “jokes” columns that appeared monthly (such as the one regarding military life, called “Humor in the Athenian Phalanx Formation,” or that depicting daily life in general, “Life In These Loosely-Federated States of the Holy Roman Empire,” etc.), and I very much enjoyed the many “condensed books” installments (the serialization of “Plato’s Republic,” which had just come out in paperback in CXI A.D. was a particular favorite).

But by far my favorite semi-regular feature was that detailing the various organs and members of the human body, called “I Am Joes [FILL IN THE NAME OF THE BODY-PART DU JOUR ].” For example, you’d have “I Am Joe’s Heart,” about the primary muscle of the circulatory system; or “I Am Joe’s Pancreas,” which oddly enough dealt with the pancreas.

The stories were written in “first person” (or perhaps I should say “first organ”) style, so that the Heart is telling its own story – an amazing feat since no one knew that the human heart could write, much less hire a literary agent. For instance, an introductory sentence to “I Am Joe’s Lungs” reads:

“Without me, Joe could not take in oxygen to feed his red blood cells”.

Yeah, pretty riveting stuff. But it did feed a lot of factual information that later on served me well as “crib notes” for biology class, and I learned a lot of stuff I did not actually know, like the fact that “hormones” are produced by “ductless” organs (mostly residing, of course, in the the body of Joe at 15 or 16 years of age).

Oh, and who WAS Joe? Just a composite average red-blooded American male of indeterminate age (well, except for the part in “I Am Joe’s Circulatory System” that dealt with anemia).

As you might expect, given my teen-aged state at the time, and the natural curiosity about some of the more interesting parts of the body that I had kept in occasional contact with, I was very much interested to see how some of those were going to be treated. Alas, however, such articles never appeared at least in the issues that we had on the toilet tank (Mother might well have kept those out of sight, however; very unfair of her under the circumstances).

But there’s another interesting organ that I do not remember ever seeing treated in the season: “I Am Joe’s Gall Bladder.” I may well have missed it – over time, I began to skip some of the titles that promised little in the way of titillating…er, I mean to say EDUCATIONAL content.

So, herewith is my modest contribution in the spirit of that dearly-beloved Reader’s Digest series, which I have for some reason decided to call “I Am Bill’s Gall Bladder.”

I am Bill’s Gall Bladder. Not having much time or inclination toward basic research, I’m not really at all sure what I’m supposed to be doing, residing as I do in Bill’s increasingly-capacious abdominal cavity, near (or even attached to) the Liver. But I do know that I secrete a substance known throughout antiquity as “gall,” hence my rather clever name. “Gall,” or “bile,” is known over the many centuries of Western civilization as comprising two – “yellow” and “black” bile – of the four essential “humours” circulating through the human body, along with “blood” and “phlegm.” The term “bilious” arose from this belief that originated, it seems, with the ancient Greeks.

(There are rumors – or I guess I should spell it “rumours” to keep in the spirit of things – of a so-called “fifth humour”: fartus maximus, which was known to be particularly exhbited (or expressed) by males with a fondness for legumes and summer sausage, but it was eventually dropped from the lexicon of ancient medical art at the insistence of the approximate one-half of the human race known as the “female,” on the theory that “denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.” But I digress).

At some point in the life of the average Bill (or Nancy), I, the Gall Bladder, seek to gain greater attention and notoriety chiefly through the subtle act of making Bill feel like a 6′-8″ cop with a pointy riot-stick has made him the object of his attentions by poking the thing hard just under BIll’s ribs and halfway into his thoracic cavity, all without, amazingly enough, actually breaking the skin.

“Oof,” says Bill, and we’re off and running. Bill is often inclined to express his appreciation for the decades of my quiet service until that point, by visiting his primary care physician, negotiating the mounds of HMO referral paperwork (and a ten-day waiting period), and seeking to have me completely extracted from his abdomen, where I have served faithfully since a couple of months before his birth, and thrown into the nearest Biohazard container.

Yeah, thanks for nothin’.

Anyway, I apologize for the brief nature of the foregoing, but I haven’t had much of a chance to clean up the prose any, spending a great deal of my time the last couple of days since the ol’ gall bladder flare-up, popping Vicodin and moaning and groaning on the bed, much to the delight of my wife who is probably in favor of euthanasia as a possible solution to my ills, about now.

So if I appear particularly, well, “bilious,” at the family get-together next week, please don’t hold it against me.

It’s all the fault of my @#&% gall bladder which, after nearly fifty-one years of quiet reflection, has decided to thump on the ceiling of its apartment – repeatedly – to let me know how things are with it.

My doctor assures me that it’s not simply a question of age, as young people can have gall bladder problems as well. But all I can say is “if I could live without it, why the heck is it rocking the boat right now? Doesn’t it know that the Biohazard bucket is waiting?”

Can’t wait to see everybody.