Water problems of my own

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published 12:00 p.m., March 3, 2009

General Electric the Washing Machine called me downstairs the other night. All in all, this isn’t that unusual for him. More often than not, it’s to complain about the other appliances shirking their duties. Obviously, tied to the wall with an electric wire and two water hoses, he’s pretty limited in his ability to review the ranks, so to speak.

However, this time, it was me he was concerned with.

“I notice you’ve been hanging around here all weekend,” he told me. He doesn’t miss much.

Uh huh. I haven’t been feeling too good.

“Water problems?” he asked me. He views everyone’s problems—the dryer, the water heater—even the oil furnace—as most likely a water problem.

Yeah, kind of. I asked him if he remembered when his water pump was partially restricted.

“Oh, yes,” he replied, “I remember that quite well, but you fixed me up pretty quickly.” It was rug fibers entwined in his impeller.

Do you remember when I checked your pump?

His console turned a little white. “Well, it wasn’t much fun.” Yeah, that pretty well sums up having your water pump inspected.

I had to have mine checked, I told him. Got a little water problem going.

“Did you have carpet fibers in your pump?” he asked me.

So I tried to explain to him that men don’t really have a pump; that most of their problems have to do with a thing called the prostate, which isn’t really a pump so much as it is an invention of the devil, the way it meanly sits astride the main outlet hose, waiting for a chance to raise hell with water flow.

“Do you mean the devil is in your prostate?” he asked me. He’s pretty bright, but human biology, to say nothing about human misery, is beyond him.

It’s just a saying that humans use when they’re miserable, I told him. I didn’t tell him what it feels like to have your family practitioner in there checking it out. I don’t think he’d want to know. I don’t even want to know, especially as I’ve reached an age where prostate ailments seems to have become unavoidable in conversation with other guys my age.

PSA tests have become the new conversation starter. They are, of course, an indicator of stuff in your blood that the prostate has put there because it is cancerous. In the good old days, men died before their prostates did. That’s no longer necessarily true. If you’re 65, there’s a 65 percent chance your prostate is going to get you.

It used to be that how much you could bench press was a conversation starter. Or what size engine your pickup truck had, or maybe, how big that deer was you just got.

Now, it’s one of two things, your PSA, or your triglycerides, which are cholesterol globules plugging up your hose systems. Nowadays, you see some guy your age, nonchalantly say: “Hey, how’s it going.” You mean it noninterrogatively, but he goes into a ten-minute presentation of his last PSA test, which makes you late for yours.

I tried to explain all this to General Electric by asking him why one of his metal feet was rusting, but for some reason, the other one wasn’t.

“Yeah,” he said, “why is that?”

Good question. No answer. But it happens.

I told him that humans were like that, too, that we had parts, some of which “rusted” kind of like his did, and there wasn’t a lot of knowledge about how to avoid it.

“Oh,” he said, kind of puzzled.

He should be puzzled. When it comes to cancer, we’re all puzzled. When it comes to the prostate, men are not only puzzled, we’re kind of like prehistoric man watching their first forest fire burn, wondering how all that started from a little camp fire that we were being warmed by.

“Can I have a PSA test?” General Electric asked me.

You can have mine, I told him. I sure didn’t want it. Where 0.2 to 0.4 is the norm, mine was in the teens. Along with telling him this, I added that we’re waiting for the infection to clear up to see exactly what is causing this. I’m reminded that, in the last columns about the good old days, in those days we wouldn’t have had the PSA test to alarm us. Alarm us it does. There’s not always a firm correlation between cancer and PSA numbers, which is something I keep reminding myself of.

General Electric asked: “My water flow got way better when you cleaned out my pump. Did yours?” Ah, a funner question. For some reason, I suddenly remembered peeing off a bridge when I was a little boy, how much fun that was.

I grinned at him and said that yes, it got way better.

“That’s good, then, right?” he asked me.

I was still grinning when I told him that he’d never know how good that felt.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.

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