"Boy!"

My elevated anxiety concerning an upcoming prostate examination triggered memories of a – appropriately – seminal (sic) anecdote involving a paralleling arrangement. 

I have, as has been numerously conceded, a rich and fertile imagination.  This, like everything else in life, is both good and its opposite.  (Are you aware of any exceptions to that observation?) 

A rich and fertile imagination allowed me to enjoy a rewarding and remunerative career and today, fuels my ability to successfully – meaning reliably, if not always artistically – deliver these ramblings.  In the context of an upcoming prostate examination, however, my rich and fertile imagination takes me directly to surgery and Depends.

Ah, well.  We take the good with the incontinent.

On the night preceding my appointment – with a doctor I had never met who would inevitably require me to “drop ‘em” and bend over – my fearful apprehensions kept me torturously tossing and turning.

The following day’s encounter, compared with my darkest pre-fantasies, was comfortingly uneventful.  Though the investigation remains a work in progress, there are no immediate red flags.  I got “the finger”, but it emerged with an encouraging “Thumbs up!”  (To mix digital metaphors.)

Though hardly a mental health expert, my prediction concerning this positive outcome would be relief.  Instead, however, on the night following my appointment I slept more fitfully than I had on the night that preceded it. 

Reminding me of this story.

Which I found on Wikipedia, told with a Yiddish inflection, though its punchline is hardly ethnocentric.  It was performed by Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street.

Wikipedia amazes me.  “Great, that story’s not in there.  I’ll put it in!”  Is that really a job?  (Asks the man who writes blog posts for nothing?  Demonstrating that if you try hard enough, anyone can be judgmental?)

Post-Digression Summary:  I slept terribly on the night before my appointment and even worse on the night after it.  Recalling the following anecdote.  (Please excuse the tonality.  I am quoting it, as my maternal grandmother would say, “werbatim.”)

“Abe is traveling on a bus to Coney Island about to fall into a sweet nap when he is suddenly jolted awake by the sound of an old Yiddishe bubbeh (elderly Jewish lady) saying from the back of the bus:

‘Oy, am I thirsty!  Oy, am I thirsty!’

This is repeated over and over again every few minutes.  ‘Oy, am I thirsty!  Oy, am I thirsty!’  Finally, Abe gets up and brings the woman a bottle of water and goes back to his seat to relax.  The bus is quiet again and Abe’s just about to nod off when all of a sudden he hears from the back of the bus:

‘Oy, was I thirsty!  Oy, was I thirsty!’”

Complainers complain, is the message of this anecdote, about matters at hand and, if there is nothing current to complain about, retrospectively.

I may have dodged a bullet at my medical examination.

But boy – or oy – had I ever been thirsty!