Day 212 Gall Bladder Zoo



July 9, 2015


(This is part of a 365 project during my 70th year where I write and illustrate a blog on each day’s gift.)


I neared the entrance to the medical building where I was not looking forward to a two-hour scanning procedure, when a chipmunk suddenly scampered across my path. A small thing but it made me smile and enter with a lighter heart. Little did I know that this chipmunk and his friends would help me cope on the hard table during a long procedure. 

The friendly technician got me settled prone with machinery looming close to my body. A monitor would show me how much time had passed and how much time was left. I could also see grainy monochrome images—my liver and gall bladder on the screen—ever changing during the scan. 

As I looked at my insides, I realized that I would have made a lousy surgeon with my tendency to “see” things not there—an undesirable distraction for a doctor but most welcome for me today as a patient.

I was mesmerized with the changing shapes and shadows. At the beginning, I saw a cartoon style dancer with a ball. At one point, the dancer lost a leg but continued. Later I saw a turtle swimming but my perspective was from below in the water with sun shining through. For a while, the turtle kept morphing into a miner with a headlamp and back again. Then, from a high perspective, I saw a woman holding a baby one minute and the next she was sewing at a sewing machine. Following that were animals: puppy heads with floppy ears, owls, furry minions, teddy bears and chipmunks. The next "picture"  I saw on the screen were portraits of senior men and women, some ¾ view and some profile, always looking to the left. Just as the final timer bell rang, I was looking up again at the underside of a beetle flying toward a street lamp.

I am glad that I see pigs in the clouds and chipmunks in my gall bladder. 

My gift today is imagination in the middle of stress.
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> Day 213: Power of Images

You can find links to my other posts on this project here:





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