The Schmutz Factor - Or Not

Since there is no news on the Acoustic Neuroma front, the appointments having been scheduled for next Tuesday, I thought I would share some thoughts on our meeting with Dr. McNasty at Weill Cornell last Friday. 

I think “schmutz” is a funny word.  Maybe it is funny because I am Jewish but it might even be funny if I were not.  So when, after a few minutes of being in the presence of Dr. McNasty, who I had discerned was definitely Jewish, and with whom I was unable to establish a human relationship, I decided to pull out the schmutz connection.  As an aside, the only time I remember actually getting a laugh when I was a child was when our old doctor used his ear scope to look into my sister’s left ear (she was a notoriously difficult patient) and I looked into her right ear and said, “I can see you Dr. Conway.”  I was only about 8-years-old and both the doctor and my mom laughed out loud.  I felt like I had scored a hit. 

So when Dr. McNasty took a cold stainless steel cone and inserted it into my right, impaired ear, it seems like an opportunity to turn this “inhospitable” visit around, “Do you think you could just take out some schmutz and make it all better?”  I asked.  “Save the surgery, I promise, I’ll pay you the same amount.”

“Everyone wants me to do that,” he said in the most humorless, unresponsive voice.  Really, I thought.  Really?  Everyone asks you to remove the schmutz and make it all better?  And still offers to pay you?  Is that possible?  Has everyone even heard of the word schmutz?  Doesn’t schmutz make you smile just a little bit because it sounds so funny and isn’t it is sort of a secret password between us, the chosen people?  Jewish?  Saying schmutz counts for nothing?

Indeed . . . nothing.  The meeting continued on its downhill slide to emotional extermination.  Did he not grow up in an extended family in which everyone scanned the newspaper for bad things people had done, hoping that none of the names were Jewish?  Did he not hear his grandparents talk about who was Jewish and who was not and who might be but had changed his name?  Does he not remember that it was bad if something happened to someone Jewish but dreadful if someone Jewish was the perpetrator?  Does schmutz have no cultural value these days?  Apparently not.

With love,

Karen