It was hard, medical school had pounded me - nearly four years of toiling in the deep (DEEP) south had almost broke me. The hours were long and sometimes never ending, disease and malnutrition always my dark shadow everywhere I went. But my calling was the healing arts - and this was my mission. I had also fallen in love with Betina-Jo - a beautiful (though mildly rotund) nurse on the 4th floor (pediatric ICU post care and feeding) of the nearby university hospital. Then the dam broke - patients started flooding in - the diagnosis was a mystery and the symptoms were legion - we were but a small dam to the tsunami of suffering. Even our brilliant attendings, even the unbelievably super intelligent Arthur C. Guyton (the father of medical physiology) and his acolytes could not figure this out and the mystery deepened daily and inevitably along with the hideous suffering. Confusion (eventually becoming delirium), painful and swollen joints, running pustulous sores (I know icch - but thus the life of a pure healer), swollen bleeding gums and patients becoming edentulous (okay, admittedly a lot of them already were but it seemed to get worse so we made them brush their teeth more)(also they had to use mouth wash made up by the dental school students), and weakening unto a horrible lingering death was the pattern of symptoms. We all cried and moaned and even gnashed our teeth. We wailed and gnashed our teeth some more but to no avail. We finally even prayed to the medical gods (Cushing, Abbott, Favalaro, Harvey and even Freud) but it did us no good - our sacred whispers only settled quietly to the damp sweaty ground of Mississippi where they just fungated in the sickening silence. Then, one sickening sad morning I was sitting in my on campus hovel (err dorm), sadly eating my fruitios with the cute little banana slices sadly adorning it, twirling my 571B (my mother in Gulfport had gotten it for me as a Christmas present that year)(THANK ALL THAT IS HOLY!) languidly on my little finger when the words came into my mind - THIS IS THE CURE FOR WHAT AILS THEM! I looked around in shock (I was single and Betina-Jo was asleep over at her place after a late night of holding the hands of the dying little malnourished children in the unit), wondering where the heck did that come from? And then I heard it again, "THIS IS THE CURE FOR WHAT AILS THEM!" "What?" I said out loud to no one in particular (except for the 7,251 cock roaches which I shared my apartment with when Betina was not there). Hesitantly I looked around. "THIS IS THE CURE FOR WHAT AILS THEM!" "Huh?" I looked around and screamed, "WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU WANT?" No one responded. I wrung my hands together and then in agony I looked down at them - I had a paper cut from the 571B (I was still holding) on my left pinky. "DAMN YOU! WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU WANT?" I screamed. Then it hit me -- like a two-by-four between the eyes! I hit the floor as if I'd had a grand mal. When I came to, 7 roaches were staring at me, with this WTH look on their little faces. Their antennae moved in the stillness. I shooed the roaches back into their corners and got up quickly and then staggered a little (light headed from the recent seizure and dehydration from the typical Jackson heat and humidity). I made it into the kitchen and poured another friendly little roach out of my drinking glass and threw down two quick (but tepid) glasses of tap water. I suddenly had a mission and little time to realize it and take it to its success. I grabbed the Hutzler 571B and my white coat (with handy pocket stethoscope and otoscope and ophthalmoscope and tongue blades and...you get it) and headed out the door. The 571B slid into my pocket like it belonged there, and maybe it just did. At the University hospital I barged brazenly into the kitchen to the utter befuddlement of the staff. "I FIGURED OUT OUR PLAGUE! I'VE GOT THE CURE!" They all looked at me in shock, some desultorily even (looking back all these years, I realized now why - it is so hard to surprise a hospital kitchen worker who can cook pigs feet and collard greens and serve them with a straight face every day, sometimes even mixing in buttered grits?). One rather corpulent worker (I believe she specialized in boiled okra prep) passed out, she was obviously stunned (or incredibly hypoglycemic -- maybe her diabetes was out of control - hard to tell at that exciting moment in my young medical life). I waved the staring and stunned workers aside and pushed 30 pounds of pickled hog's jowls off a food prep area and grabbed a bunch of bananas and let the 571B works it magic. Soon I had several hundred pounds of sliced bananas (the Hutzler truly is miraculous in so many ways), and yelled, "Serve the nanners to the chillens first!" And they did it! It was like a gate had opened and the monkeys overran the banana plantation and I was the chief chimpanzee! I felt on fire, slicing and dicing like a demons spawn, whether right or left bended bananas - it mattered not. There were lives to be saved, and, by GUMBO, I was there to save them! Soon we had served all the patients, then the staff, and finally the doctors and medical students (even the interns each got a slice). Covered in peels and banana muck I finally wearily slowly walked out into the cafeteria. They cheered. A loud roar went up as I walked out into the usually dreary eating area. Hundreds of white coats and white nurse's dresses and even tiny beaming faces from wheelchairs gave me loud huzzahs! I quietly held up the 571B over my head. It was the real hero. Not me. "Speech! SPEECH! SPEECH!" Hundreds voices yelled in unison. I brought the Hutzler down and slid it into my pocket - we were one again, never to be separated. I bowed my head. This moment was almost sacred. After a few long moments, I looked up, and said quietly (the crowd hushed immediately), "It was the Hutzler 571B, not me, that did this. This was just simply scurvy, SCURVY!" I shouted and the crowd quieted more."Run rampant like a pirate horde through our beautiful community and state and the 571B along with a little help from a friend," I smiled, "has turned back the tide this time, THIS TIME! I looked around. "We need to bow our heads and thank the Hutzler family for sharing! They've given us so much!" I was almost crying as the words choked out. The cafeteria was quiet now. And everyone did (bow their heads, not run rampant - it was too hot and humid). We said our thanks that day. And then one by one, we all quietly went back to our mundane existences - I onto a residency out west - my classmates elsewhere - but the 571B was always by my side. And to this day, in a quiet little glassed wall case, buried somewhere deep in the bowels of that university medical center, sits a little bronze memorial to the Hutzler 571B. And somewhere out here in the west, in an old house, weathered by the snow and fierce Utah winds and sun, sits that original Banana Slicer, still with the hardened goo on it from that fateful day it saved thousands of lives, along with the aging doctor who somehow, some way knew when and how to use it. Thank you Hutzler family, and the 571B, we all love you and will forever. Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer
