After several decades of living on this planet, I believe that I may truly have found the very essence of life! Brace yourself, because this discovery is probably not going to be what you thought; however, to me, it feels like the proverbial brass ring. It makes me happy, almost giddy, and sometimes I fantasize about it for hours on end. When I am restricted access to it, I usually feel a little depressed, cranky and even a little weak in the knees.
My passion is dark chocolate. It is absolutely an acquired taste like single malt Scotch, caviar and cow tongue, none of which have become part of my daily longings by the way. As I approach my more mature years, it has become exceedingly clear to me that this vegetable (it does come from beans, you know) seems to have possessed me like some type of demon drug. Whenever a day goes by without my tongue wrapping itself around a dark chocolate Hershey kiss or two, I feel cheated and a little empty inside.
So why the hurrah? When did this chocolate bug bite me? It was after a 12-year abstinence. Seriously, for 12 years no chocolate crossed my lips or penetrated my taste buds. Not even one M&M. Then I read a series of articles touting the merits of dark chocolate consumption and the rest is history.
This brings me to the very essence of this story, and it is a perfect introduction to one of my all-time favorite doctor stories. Back in the late '80s, I was working as a vice president for a hospital that had a subsidiary nursing home across the street from it. Around lunchtime one of our internal medicine physicians came into my office with a rather sheepish look on his face. When I asked him how his day was going, he looked at me very seriously and said, "I really screwed up." Keeping in mind that those words from any doctor's mouth represented a sentiment that was not normally a good thing, I quickly pursued his source of anguish. He went on to explain that he had just returned from the nursing home where he was performing a history and physical examination on a new very elderly patient who had recently been admitted there.
He explained that, while taking her blood pressure, he had noticed a bowl of peanuts on her bed stand. His reflex motor skills immediately took over as he scooped a handful of nuts from the bowl into his mouth and continued the exam: eyes, ears, nose, reflexes, ankle pulses, et al. Before he knew it, he had consumed the entire bowl. Every single peanut was gone, all of them eaten by him.
It was after he finished chewing the last remnants of her snack bowl that he realized what he had done and began to apologize profusely to her. "I'm so sorry, Elsie," he said, "I wasn't thinking when I sucked down all of your peanuts." At that point in the story, he said that she looked up kindly at him, and said, "Oh, honey, don't worry about it, it's not a big deal." He, however, couldn't stop apologizing. "No," he insisted, "I will go across the street to the gift shop and buy you another bag of peanuts." "No, no, sweetie," she said, "That's really not necessary. Honestly, you don't have to go to all of that trouble." Our doctor was at once embarrassed and insistent that he had to make this wrong right — that he had to correct his outright thievery of her peanuts.
Finally, she looked up at him and said, "Let it go, young man. You don't have to buy me any more nuts. In fact, if you insist on buying me something, you can buy me a big bag of peanut M&Ms 'cause I just love to suck the chocolate off them."
(Nick Jacobs, Windber, international director for SunStone Consulting LLC, is the author of the blog Healinghospitals.com.)
I've found the essence of life
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