A tale of doctors and dustmen

When I was about 10 years old Hugh Berney took my appendix out. A couple of years later he removed my tonsils and adenoids. Hugh Berney was our family doctor; only we didn’t call him “Hugh.” In deference to his standing in society we invariably referred to him as “Doctor” Berney. These were those halcyon days when doctors were treated with respect and to some degree, awe. After all if they were going to squirt chloroform in your face then cut you open you had to believe in them unconditionally.

Your status in life was quite justifiably based on your exam-tested intellect and although we have become more egalitarian over time, the same still holds today. Top of the class folk went on to be doctors, those who struggled with the formal education became butchers or dustmen.

It was the natural order of the world.

Come to think of it, why did we call the rubbish collectors dustmen? Though some dust will have accumulated in the garbage it hardly constituted their main cargo. At the time I was having my appendix out the community didn’t create nearly as much waste as we do today. Butchers supplied their meat in greaseproof paper, drink bottles were sold back for a penny each, then washed and reused and you took your old newspapers to the fish and chip shops or the greengrocers to use as wrapping material. The plastic’s industry was in its infancy; its forerunner, bakelite, was used sparingly, mainly on car dashboards.

The town had just two dustmen back then who stuck at their job for decades. The borough council had one rubbish truck - Jimmy Kane drove it and Ted Te Huki rode on the back and manually emptied the rubbish tins - and they were made of tin - which everyone had just one of. They managed to clean up the town working just a few hours each morning.

Now back to my body parts. Once these appendages were removed my sister unkindly teased me, saying that now I wasn’t “all there.” In those days this meant you were mentally impaired. Mentally impaired people were sent to Porirua which back then was just a village, with a few houses and a mental hospital. Subsequent revelations about these asylums imply that they were as nightmarish as we imagined.

Meanwhile many scientists now question Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection because of the quite remarkable amounts of information they are finding scattered along the DNA superhighway. And yet my sixty-odd years of relative normality without the appendix, tonsils and adenoids may prove that although I wasn’t “all there” these were unnecessary appendages that never got discarded in the evolutionary process. Perhaps we weren’t created after all.

There’s even a distinct possibility that I might be the missing link.

I don’t know what Hugh Berney did with my abandoned tonsils, adenoids and appendix; I suspect Jimmy Kane and Ted Te Huki took them to the dump which later had an upmarket name-change to “landfill.” When you think about it, it sounds much better to “dump” an appendix than drop it off at a landfill.

Some cultures are a bit precious about surgically removed body parts and I recall a furore some years ago when relatives discovered that their deceased loved ones may have had their hearts and other preserved remains stored in a research facility at an Auckland hospital. They wanted the removed organs returned so they could to be placed in the casket allowing the deceased to go on to the afterlife relatively intact.

Our religious heritage has surely taught us that the body is an earthly vessel discarded at death and our souls go on in their original form to a higher place where doctors and dustmen are treated as equals.

If this wasn’t so, consider the amputees, patients with hip replacements or those who have had cancerous colons, prostates, breasts or other diseased organs surgically removed. Are their bodies any less sacred because, in my sister’s parlance, they are not all there?

I think not.

You can’t have it both ways. Either an entire body is not a prerequisite for a fulfilling after-life or else we must abandon life-saving surgery to ensure purity at death.

At least this would put an end to those hospital waiting lists.

Dr Berney told my parents that he got to my appendix just before it burst and caused potentially fatal peritonitis. It is possible I suppose that within this organ lies a chemical that when released allows the brain to show compassion and understanding for other people’s strange behaviour. Without it I may have become heartless. It’s the best excuse I can come up with for being unable to find even a modicum of sympathy for the Internet-Mana party given Laila Harre’s blatant hypocrisy and fraudster Kim Dotcom’s overt desire to bring down the present government.

And yet I had a lot of sympathy for those dustmen. They weren’t highly paid and they weren’t highly regarded, but in those simpler days they were an integral part of the body of the town.

“That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.” - Aldous Huxley