Do petrol fumes cause breast cancer? Or, is it the prairie life?
Background: United States Healthcare is ruled by government Death Panels. Their official government designation is: Securers of Sustainable Care for Resource Responsible Wellness in the U.S, acronym SSSCRRW US. Citizens appropriately refer to the death panels as the “Screw US” panels. The National Death Panel is comprised of three officials: a federal government official (DOP-1 who is the Panel’s Chair and directs the interrogation of the patient), a member of a medical field (DOP-2), and an ordinary citizen (DOP-3, who has been elected to service by national lottery).
National Death Panel members are comfortably ensconced at a half-moon, antique marble table. A heavy metal door opens and a Special Panel Guard, carrying a Colt 45 revolver in an antique black leather holster reminiscent of Paladin, escorts the Person under Review, or PUR, to a metal folding chair at the focal point -) of the Death Panel. All the fictitiously complicated (but not far-fetched) details of administrative procedures and protocol are given under my February 12, 2010 blog, “Death Panel Make-Up.” (http://southofmoosejaw.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/death-panel-make-up/)
This secret blogger has managed to spirit away the workings of the pitiful case of the National Death Panel vs the Petrol Station Operator. The National Death Panel (DP) reviewed and recommended medical procedures for this very ill woman in urgent need of cancer treatment.
Here are the files of the case of the DEATH PANEL VS PETROL STATION OPERATOR.
Our brave female gas station operator and owner is 67 years young. The armed guard anxiously escorts the tall, lanky woman to a seat before the National Death Panel threesome; she has waived her right for advocacy. The armed guard taps his holster and nods her onto the metal folding chair at the focal point -) of the panel. Our courageous gas station lady sits on the very uncomfortable, rickety metal chair, gently adjusting the bulging lump below left of her sternum.
The guard, armed, requires the PUR to swear “To tell the truth” upon her chosen item; the petrol station operator swears upon her and her husband’s weather-beaten Holy Bible. The officer proclaims, “Here begins the official record for Case # 46-0321-2010-PetSO.” He exits, sealing the room.
The gas station lady’s allotted 11-minute appeal began when the heavy door opened upon the SSSCRRW US panel. As intended, the extreme backlog of medical appeals limits each case-under-review (CUR) to eleven minutes or less, from PUR swearing to the “Screw US” decision. The ominous wall timer relentlessly ticks away the PUR’s precious minutes.
Questioning of the PUR begins by the Chair of the “Screw US” or National Death Panel, Government Official DOP-1:
DOP-1: Good God, Woman! Your file says you still operate a petrol station out in the middle of nowhere! You’re out on the snow swept flat lands along Canada! How depressing! Have you no sense? What ever got into you?
PUR: God.
DOP-2 [Medical Member of DP]: Here we go again! Here’s another bleeding-heart, blind Christ-follower wanting expensive medical help for something that’s their own doing. Please. Spare us your imbecilic chatter and salty tears. State your case and leave us to decide your fate. That’s what we do.
PUR: I’m not the one cryin’ here, good doctor of the death panel. When I cry, it’s not about my own pain. It’s about the prairies of pain God sees all around us, especially here in the city, and we do nothin’ to make it better.
DOP-3 [Citizen DP Member]: Get on with your bloated appeal, gas lady. Answer the Government Man’s question: How in, in Wasilla Saskatoon, did you end up smack dab in the middle of that godless barren place?
DOP-2 [Smirks and leers]: Get it over with – tell us your story of misery and woe – don’t expect us to do much for you, however, times here are tough, too. Like you said, there’s a lot of people crying for help and we’re the ones designated to give it to ‘em!
PUR [Smiles with sad wisdom]: I’m sure you are! I’m sure you do.
DOP-1: Tell us how you ended up way out there – time’s wasting away.
PUR: Like me; bein’ eaten up inside. [She carefully adjusts the growth blob beside her left breast, sliding it into a more comfortable position].
DOP-1: Go on – answer the Chair’s question. How did you get out there into nowhere?
PUR: Got married at 15. Left high school; had to.
DOP-2: You got pregnant. [Smiles condescendingly]. I knew it! Such a righteous Christian!
PUR: No! God forbid! Have sex and be with child before marriage! Unheard of on the high plains! Good way to get disappeared. Had to leave school ’cause the school wouldn’t allow married people to attend. I guess the school figured that once you got married you had all the education you needed.
DOP-2 [Grunts in arrogant disbelief]: Humph! [Folds his arms across his chest and blinks shut his eyes].
PUR: John and I, John’s my husband, had this dream. We grew up in a small town along the highline and He, God, told us to get out to the four corners area of this hiway and that hiway and make a gas station. We didn’t have a nickel to our names. But we obeyed. We put up a tent out there to start with; was springtime. I remember how purple the flowers were that year. [Smiles]. We smiled and stopped the traffic and said “Hello! Jesus loves you!” and told them our dream, the dream God gave us, and asked if we couldn’t clean their windshields, check the air in their tires, check their water, and maybe give ‘em directions – we got lots of roadmaps; long-haul truckers collected them for us. We would hold their hands and say a prayer for them, too! We had an old blue Maxwell House coffee tin set out there on a fence post and sure enough, just like God showed us in a dream, people were kind enough to leave us a coin or two. When we had enough we bought ground coffee and flour and a little sugar and we made steamin’ hot coffee in a soup kettle and offered it, too. Most of the locals around didn’t have cash, so they traded with us: some traded their garden vegetables, sticks of pine firewood, a hen or two, and a neighbor gave us his runt pigs to raise – said he felt guilty ’bout knockin’ ‘em on the head or settin’ ‘em out for coyote bait. One bachelor to the north traded us home-brewed beer, but we swapped that for wooden matches, kerosene and cans of Arizona tangerines from the shop in town.
[Our lady petrol station operator pauses to readjust the huge lump on her chest before she continues]: When we scraped up a little more cash, we bought some gas 18 miles away in town and brought it out in five-gallon cans and started selling it, too. We used a newspaper for a funnel. John was always pretty handy with a fry pan and he started cookin’ up pancakes and eggs over the cottonwood branches; sometimes he grilled a prairie chicken and we would have a real food celebration! Later on, before the electricity came out, we traded a litter of kittens and a feeder pig for a gas stove with an oven and he made cakes and pies to sell and gave cookies free to the kids travelin’ north with their folks.
[In obvious pain, she again moves the lump below her breast]: After a few years, we hitched a ride to Moosejaw and won the bid on an abandoned pickup truck at the Police auction. Nursed it back home and truckers would stop and help us get it runnin’ – needed new rings and a transmission gear; missin’ teeth. Still runs! Got it parked out back. The town wanted to get rid of some old buildings and John offered to tear them down for the salvage lumber and slowly we built up our own station. Foot by foot we scratched a livin’ from the soil out at that prairie crossroads. Northern Motors, we called it; our home – we made our bed in the back part. Had a preacher from town come out and bless it when it was done – he tossed Holy water in every corner, up in the rafters, too. That was when we started havin’ our babies. They’re all grown up now and gone away. Don’t blame ‘em; not much out there in their eyes. God didn’t give them that dream like He did John and me. God gave them their own dream.
DOP-1: Yes, that’s all very interesting, I’m sure. [Government Member of the Death Panel taps his forefinger on the manila file folder]. Says here in your file you had a couple surgeries…
PUR: Yeh, one of the boys had trouble comin’ out right and the doc had some cuttin’ to do on me to get him out safe. He’s a big boy still! Six feet seven! All the grandkids are big, too.
DOP-2: Ugh! More obese candidates for diabetes, I’m sure.
DOP-3: Or for heart attacks and bad knees and crushed vertebrae. Big people are such a pain to our budget, especially with the cutbacks due to the expansive government pensions.
DOP-1: Lady, how did you get sick? Is there something specifically you recall or can attribute it to? Did you pick up some virus or disease on a vacation, say in South America or Africa?
PUR [Incredulous!]: Vacation! Who has time for a vacation? Maybe you fed-types do; we never had time. Too late now; we’re both too sick to go anywhere far. This trip is a real trial for us, you know. Nearly 2100 miles one way. Besides, God didn’t show us no picture of a vacation someplace other than watchin’ the sun settle down under the Rockies and show up jeweled in the prairie grass each day! The clouds are so beautiful on Sunday mornings as we gather for our sunrise service right out there on that prairie. The truckers blast their dual horns when the blessings are given and the prayers offered. We still do that; indoors now in a little chapel on the southwest corner of the hiways. Got to be so many truckers comin’ in the night before just for the travel blessings that we had to rent the southeast corner field for them to over-night in. Those truck guys and gals have such a lonely life out on the road. God has been so good to let us know them!
DOP-1: Back to my question, lady. So, you took no trips to Africa or Asia where you might have contracted your illness?
PUR: Nope. I expect it was just the hard work and all the wind and dust that comes along with God’s good times. Maybe some petrol fumes or hot anti-freeze radiator spray or gunky engine grease got into us. There was that one time a 12-volt battery blew up when we were checking its acid levels; several cells got sparked somehow. Just a freak accident, I suppose. John and I never have really figured out what God wanted us to learn from that; still a mystery to us.
DOP-2: What about alcohol? Statistical research has shown it’s a proven fact that obese people living in remote areas grossly abuse alcohol. I’m thinking you are a qualifier under that research. And that’s not to mention the increase in average temperatures (see Master Smudge’s calculations at http://southofmoosejaw.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/smudges-stats-001a/) all over the melting northern glaciers on our precious, fragile earth. How much liquor do you consume each day? Remember that you’ve sworn to tell the truth!
PUR: Nope; no liquor. Never. Not allowed on our property either. The truckers respect that rule, too. Only problem we ever had was with the tour buses of city people who got scared of all the stars out at night and the clear, wide-open sky. Drove ‘em nuts, I guess. Maggie and Millie took care of them, though.
DOP-3: Maggie and Millie?
PUR: Yep. Our wolf dogs. They get to howlin’ and scratchin’ at the bus door and the city folk order their tour driver to get on down the road! Was always amusin’ to us when that happened. Serves people right for not respectin’ the rights of others.
DOP-2: Alright! I’m tired of this self-righteous dribbly God crap! [Turns in his comfortable leather chair and asks the other death panel members]: Haven’t we heard enough? Let’s vote the health care verdict on this very obviously sick and deluded female of our species. God, who let her type be born? That’s one fetal mass we should have had aborted; can we detect Christians yet in the womb? We need to shovel additional funding into that research line.
DOP-3: I agree. Remember, Number 1, its fish-fry night at Fotzie’s and I’m tired of being late and not getting some of the prime catfish fillet. Let’s get this appeal finished and in the books.
DOP-1: Anything else you’d like to say, petrol lady? How big has your cancer grown? Show us?
PUR: You pervert! No! Go to deep blazes!
DOP-2: Look, petrol woman. We don’t need to see your cancer-swollen breast. Just give us a sense of its medical history, its development, its progress, if you will.
PUR [Calms herself; she checks the wall timer and realizes she has little time left for her final appeal for surgical removal of the deadly cancerous mass on her breast. She sighs and states]: Well, it started out like a ball bearing in my, well, my chest. Then two years ago it sprawled out into a radiator cap shape – saw its ugly shadow in an x-ray; looked like the radiator cap of a ‘48 Kaiser. On my birthday last year it changed and looked more like a rumpled-up grease rag. Now it’s the size of a Mack oil filter and it’s awful hard to catch a deep breath.
DOP-1 [Reaches under the marble table and pushes the call button for the guard]: Guard, take this woman out now; her time is up.
DOP-2 [In a mocking voice]: May the Prairie Gods of the Blackfeet bless you with purple-flower healing.
DOP-3: May Mother Gaia grant you health.
PUR [Smiles sadly at the obtuse, heathen members of the National Death Panel and admonishes]: Keep your gas tank full, boys. You wouldn’t want to run empty out there in the middle of nowhere. Jesus loves you – there’s nothing you can do to keep away His love.
[The guard, armed, follows the cancer-ridden woman out the door, closing it tightly].
DOP-1: She sure likes to talk; must be the extensive exposure to diesel fumes. Okay; back to reality. What’s our verdict on the Appeal of the Petrol Station Operator, Owner actually, and our Death Panel? Gentlemen, what do you have to say?
DOP-2: There’s surplus Vaseline in the government warehouse complex at Minot.
DOP-3: Yes, but most of that’s earmarked for the Vet Hospital in Haiti.
DOP-2: Say, Number 1? Did you remember the crayons for your kids’ homework last week?
DOP-1: Of course! Their Statistics teacher was so proud of all the colorful patterns in the margins of their homework; they got A-plus-plus grades!
DOP-1: It’s decided then. [He speaks into the official recording device for the National Death Panel]: For the official record, Case # 46-0213-2010-PetSO reviewed by the SSSCRRW US Panel hereby authorizes breast cancer treatment with isopropyl alcohol, Q-tips and Vaseline. The patient must pay the S&H costs from Quebec. Case closed.
DOP-2: I never saw a woman with such long, boney fingers! It’s freaky! Must be a mutation.
Once our lady’s gone from the four corners “South of Moose Jaw”, where will I find a blessing with my next tank of gas?
smj
Upcoming “SSSCRRW US” Cases include:
Death Panel vs Invalid.
Don’t miss a case at http://southofmoosejaw.wordpress.com/
Learn from each appeal, fellow Citizen! The DP may reach out for you next.
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