12 October—It’s a relief to know that Kamala Harris is in great health. But we’re still waiting for fat old junk-food addict Donald Trump to release the medical records he had promised to release after the kid who couldn’t shoot straight grazed the mendacious bully’s ear three months ago. Not that anything Trump’s campaign would release could be believed anyway.

It’s interesting that when Kamala was three years old she had a laparotomy with an incidental appendectomy for intussusception. The appendectomy would have been a common proactive measure in the circumstance since the surgeon was in the poor kid’s abdomen anyway. But the intussusception is pretty rare in children, rarer in adults. Medically, it’s when part of the bowel telescopes into an adjoining part. Its causes are generally unknown.

(Non-medically, intussusception is essentially absorption into a concept of whatever it may be itself.)

Intussusception is not only a painful ailment, but it’s painful to pronounce and even more painful to type. Especially over and over.

I know about intussusception because when I was living in England my friendly local GP diagnosed a gut pain I was telling him about as possible intussusception. It was over a couple of pints at the local. The pain wasn’t terribly agonizing, to be sure, just very . . . painful. But, you’re wondering, what the hell I was doing drinking ale with an upset stomach? Don’t wonder.

After I described the symptoms, essentially intermittent belly pain, Norman MB ChB FRCGP asked about my temperature and stool. Over beer. I told him I’d never checked either one. Over beer. So he asked if I knew what intussusception was.

I’d never heard of intussusception. So he described it. And that it was very rare in adults. And very serious. And would require emergency surgery at the Radcliffe. And that he had never actually seen a case in his two decades in practice but had read about it in med school. But an X-ray would confirm it. He wanted to drive me to the Radcliffe, but I demurred and deferred.

Mirabile dictu, after Norman MB ChB FRCGP’s tentative diagnosis over a couple of pints at the local and the prospect of being cut open by what my father MD CM FACGP FACS called butchers with scalpels (he was a board-certified surgeon, although he never practiced butchery of any sort) the gut pain began to subside. They weren’t doing laparascopic gut surgery in the sixties.

So the next morning I cheerfully phoned Norman MB ChB FRCGP to tell him he still hadn’t seen a case of intussusception . . .