Mitch Gets the Hiccups

Poor Mitch Clinton.

His trip with us to Port Alberni and Courtenay on Vancouver Island was neither enjoyable not profitable.

We had just had a rare few days off at home in Vancouver between road trips.  I killed time by doing semi-independent and totally useless door knocking in town.  Big cities like Vancouver were ruined for door to door encyclopedia salesmen long before I ever got into it.  City folk are hostile and suspicious, go figure.

The day before our upcoming Island Adventure we all met up at the office for our periodical meeting/pep talk/cult ceremony.  Uncharacteristically, Mitch stayed in the background, but I didn't give it much thought.  We went out for lunch together, and I noticed he was hiccuping.  And that he was miserable.

Turns out he had had the hiccups since we had gotten back from our last road trip a few days earlier.  If not for my childhood obsession with and constant reading of the 1981 Guinness Book of World Records, I wouldn't even have known that hiccups can last more than a couple of hours.  And here was poor Mitch whose suffering for the better part of a week had worn him down to a hollow eyed jittery shadow of his usually chipper and very very alive self.

"I went <hic> to see <hic> the doctor yester<hic>day.  He said tha<hic>t it's probably a lesion on my <hic> diaphragm. Can you <hic> believe it?  He said it should <hic> go away on its <hic> own, but if <hic> it lasts more than <hic> a couple more weeks, he'll con<hic>sider medication or surger<hic>y.  A couple <hic> more fu<hic>ing weeks?  I'll fu<hic>ing die!"

Ever the optimist, he went on the road with us assuming the affliction must go away any day, any moment.  For the next week or so, he was like our crew's pet ghoul.  He just sat on the bed in the motel room all day long, day after day, staring blankly at the TV and hiccuping.  He barely ate, slept, or talked.  We'd go out to knock on doors, and he was sitting on the bed and hiccuping.  We'd come back after a tough day in the trenches and there he was, sitting on the bed and hiccuping.

What I found most interesting was that the more ghost-like and pathetic he became, the more human he seemed to me.  Mitch had always seemed like such a pig, plus so confident and arrogant; it was an unexpected bit of perspective to see him so helpless.  The perspective remained even after the affliction was a memory.

At any rate, a couple weeks after they had started, the hiccups went away as suddenly and as mysteriously as they had begun.

The pig was back.