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t m c » p u l s e | m ay 2 0 1 7 27 mean when he gave him to a neighbor with a farm. We were so wrong. He was just watching out for us. So where was my bugger headed? He was proba- bly making a beeline for my temporal lobe. After all, that's where my memory and emotion are stacked and stored. And if I had to pick the thing that matters to me most, I'd pick my memories. That's what I hoard, although I am proud of how good I've gotten about throwing things away. I've learned to ditch ticket stubs from most concerts (except my first, ninth grade, Deep Purple, 1972, Cloverleaf Speedway, Ohio) and pitch birthday cards (barring those from Mom and Dad, my sister, brother, husband, close friends, and aunts from Turkey). But I have to be the one doing it. Matt can vouch for that. He still can't understand why I got mad when he threw away the red spiral notebook I kept from my fellowship, the one with all my study notes for the boards. "They're twenty years old," he said. "You passed the boards. You'll never take them again. Why would you save them?" "I just do," was all I could say. When this critter lays the foundation of his new home, he'll do it by eating up my memory bricks, one by one. I don't care if he devours Denise Bloxton with her big butt and Afro, wearing those red-and-blue- striped tube socks. She stole my patchwork suede purse in eighth grade. When I got it back, she had her name all curlicued on the side. He can chew through the part where I threw up in Andy Katz's car and on his shoes after drinking flaming shots of something orange-colored in college. He can take my fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade school pictures. In fact, I should request he take the lecture I gave at the American College of Gastroenterology in 2005—five thousand people, videotaped for a DVD, and I was immortalized with the worst haircut of my life. People asked me if I was doing okay, since it looked like I'd lost my hair to chemotherapy. Yup, take that one, but I don't want to lose the day I actually jumped and screamed with hap- piness when I got into medical school. That's the one that should have been taped. And don't bore through my birthday on Vancouver Island. I want to keep that first vacation with Matt. I don't want to forget how we found all the restaurants closed on Sunday night and had to celebrate with pretzels and 3.2% beer we found at a gas station. And please, please, make a detour around our hike to Inspiration Point and Hidden Falls. It's where we found spring flowers confettiing a moun- tainside that surrounded a lake so impossibly blue, it was like staring through a sapphire. Maybe the bugger could be open to suggestions. I could propose he look at property in my frontal lobe. It's mostly silent, probably a good place to raise a little microbial family. But come to think of it, I do a lot of work there. Executive function mostly: impulse con- trol, all my prioritizing and strategizing. With juggling my patients, managing my staff, running a center, and teaching residents, it's so much of what I do that my frontal lobe is probably twice the size of an average person's. I could give up 50% and not miss it. As for the impulsivity, well, I could use a little liberation. Doctoring took that out of me. Maybe I could give him Some say poop landing on your head is good luck, but I'm not given to superstition. My family's pretty pragmatic. We didn't throw salt over a shoulder or knock on wood. We may have had the blue charms against the evil eye, but everyone from Turkey has a nazar in the house. Mom said it wasn't about luck. She said life was about fate, and that fate was written on your forehead when you were born, we just couldn't read it. So that was it? My fate was checked by a bird blotch shaped like West Virginia? That night in bed: "What's wrong?" "I'm mad at you." "Why? I didn't do anything." "That's the point. You didn't do anything." "About what? Is this like when you wake up from some dream, and you're mad at me?" "No. I was awake, but you didn't help me." "You mean dinner?" "No, I mean at Ace." "That's what you're mad at? Because I didn't go to the bathroom with you?" "No, because I was dying of a brain abscess and you left me." Guffaws. "Don't laugh." "I didn't leave you, and you don't get brain abscesses from pigeon poop. If anyone's going to get a brain abscess, it's me. I'm the one who got bitten by the tsetse fly in Africa. Remember that? Next to the Mara River. There's no vaccine for that. I have to worry about trypanosomiasis for the rest of my life. And what did you say about it? 'No Matt, it's not a bite. It's a zit.' Boy, were you wrong." Then, the wrap of his arm. "So what do I need to do?" "Kiss it. I'll forgive you if you kiss my eye." And he is obedient. "And, I might have been a little bit wrong. If I'm not blind or paralyzed, I'll take care of you when you get sleeping sickness." Then he whispers in my ear, "Promise me something." "Anything. No feeding tube, no nursing home? Just name it." "Stop talking. You think too much. Now come here, my little s*&t head." Gulchin A. Ergun, M.D., is a gastroenterologist and the medical director of the Reflux Center & Digestive Disease Department at Houston Methodist Hospital. She is also clin- ical associate professor of medicine at Houston Methodist and Weill Cornell Medical College. This essay first appeared in Jet Fuel Review. Credit: Courtesy photo My nemesis was probably a pigeon. And given that he didn't bite me, it was probably his breakfast or leftovers from lunch that were about to infect me, but then again, what did I know about birds? All I knew came from Hitchcock, Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective … a garage apartment and live with a little personality change. I would like to tell people exactly what I think sometimes, maybe even say no sometimes. My buddy, the parasite tenant, could help. I may wonder about this for years, and even if I turn out okay, it could seriously ruin my marriage. If it weren't for Ace (hardware, not detective), I wouldn't have known how Matt would react if I got sick. Maybe this was his version of "better or worse" and I'd misjudged him? He does have lone-wolf tendencies. He's still perturbed I gave our number to his medical alumni association. "Now they'll know how to get hold of me," he'd snarled. He was a bit feral in the begin- ning, but I left food out, and little by little, I got to pet the creature, and eventually he stayed. But then, he'd probably say I got it all wrong. He'd offer he did the stalking and got exactly what he wanted. That wouldn't surprise me. We're opposites, but that's exactly what I like about him. And he makes me laugh. I'd miss that. So who will write the obit, and who'll pick out what's on the tombstone? Matt hates that kind of stuff. I'll have to write it myself. Gulchin A. Ergun, taken for granted , beloved wife and sister, gastroenterologist with a name no one can pronounce … respected member of the medical staff died an ignoble death … Wait, I'm wasting my precious time. Matt and I still haven't decided where we should be buried. I know I bought those plots in Cleveland, but they were a great bargain. My sister bought six in a bankruptcy case, and it's where my parents are buried. All the kids took a pair. Where else can you buy prime plots in the best part of the cemetery with all the old trees? I thought if I died first, Matt wouldn't visit anyway. Graveyards aren't his thing. We don't have kids, so landing where my siblings lived seemed like a good idea. Then someone might visit. But what if this parasite is a slow grower and Matt goes first? He doesn't want to be buried in Cleveland. He's from Cincinnati. There are no direct flights. Visiting him wouldn't be easy. It would involve a layover in St. Louis or Chicago. This is where cremation starts making sense. Why limit the visits to a graveyard? Sift the spouse into a jar and take him with you. I know TSA limits you to three ounces of fluid on a plane, but are there restrictions on ashes?