I Can’t Stand The Colour Green
“Doctor, doctor I can’t stand the colour green! There is just too much green in the world for me. Everywhere I look I notice shades of green.”
The doctor looked up from his notes and peered intently into my eyes. He looked me over like I was a cut of meat in the refrigerated supermarket aisle.
“Green is a bad colour, Doc. It makes me feel like puking. Every time I see the colour green I experience a constriction in my throat, like I’m choking. I see green and I am immediately nauseous. I just don’t know what is wrong with me.”
My hands were shaking slightly as I told the Doc this. The surgery was a sterile place with charts on the wall and I was sitting on the edge of the treatment couch. I had never visited here before in all my years living and working just down the road. It was a dark day.
“If I never saw another green thing I would be a happy man. In fact, if I didn’t have to even think about anything green ever again it would make my life so much better. Even saying the word, forming those elongated vowels, is torturous. It rhymes with mean and fiend. Everything about it is a blight on the world.”
I slumped into silence, fidgeting like a schoolboy waiting to see the deputy head. The Doc prodded my neck and gestured if I had any pain around my glands. He was a taciturn kind of guy. Not one for a lot of idle conversation it seemed. Fortunately for me he was dressed in his white lab coat and with no green gear underneath. Perhaps, he appeared a little peaky around the gills. Pulling out his stethoscope he leaned in to place that cold metallic disc against my chest, whilst listening in to what my cardio system had to say.
“Any good news, Doc? How doth do the drums beat? Do they beat solidly for me?”
The Doc smiled weakly and went about his business, moving that sensitive instrument to various places about my torso. I suppose it was like a mechanical ear designed to hear stuff with a clarity beyond normal, like a dog maybe. What could my heartbeat tell us about the colour green and my reaction to it? Could it say something in Morse code that would explain the situation? Was there a syncopated story to be told about the verdant realm. An offbeat drama maybe, where Mister Green murdered my equilibrium and peace of mind on a summer’s day.
He wanted me to cough gently, now, as he roamed about my body with his listening bell. Tapping on my chest like a TV detective seeking out a secret panel in a serial killer’s den. I had watched enough episodes of The Good Doctor to know what to expect. The diagnostic tools and techniques employed by the medical profession had not changed all that much over the years – not at the GP level at any rate.
“I used to be in green faction at school, when I was a kid. If truth be known, it was my favourite colour growing up. I would have been in Slytherin in Harry Potter-speak. It’s strange how things can change. Maybe you can have too much of a good thing. Yes, spearmint milkshakes were my ‘go to drink’ in the milk bars of yesteryear. No, I didn’t like peas or silver beet but I was partial to green beans on my plate.”
The Doc didn’t ask me to pee into a cup and if he had I don’t think that my wee was green. Even though I had eaten asparagus last night and that really messes with your pee aromatically. Medieval doctors were big on urine analysis, always sniffing and checking its colour for characteristics to determine health status. This Doc was more of pulse and respiratory monitoring medico. He was going over his notes on my chart and scribbling away. I gazed out the window upon a bucolic suburban scene. However, it all seemed divorced from my own current crisis. To be or not to be, that kind of question.
The Doc abruptly finished his scribbling and looked me in the eye.
“What do you do for a living Mr Green?”
I panicked slightly; my heart rate went up a score suddenly. My eyes flickered everywhere but upon his cold stare. I gulped in stale air.
“I’m a golf pro. Down the road at Viridescent Links.”
