W. Bruce Cameron - A Consultation With My Sister

My younger sister looks to me to provide her with advice on how to do her job better — though she’s too shy to ask me questions, so I have to give her my opinion on an unsolicited basis. (She’s a doctor.)

“You’re ‘book smart’ in medicine. I’m ‘street smart,’” I explain to her.

“I’ve been practicing for 20 years!” she replies.

“Well, keep at it, practice makes perfect. I think you’re coming along fine,” I say charitably.

(Her response to this is, as they say in the medical profession, unprofessional.)

She’s irritated with me because I was able to prove to her that from a strictly medical perspective, I should eat pie.

“Pie contains fruit, which, as you know, increases the good and decreases the bad in a diet,” I inform her.

“You’re eating chocolate pie,” she says in response. See how distracted she gets? I mean, she’s my sister, so I’m not going to report her to the medical board or anything, but clearly we’re talking pie, here, not the type of pie.

“It’s critical you understand the role of glucose,” I advise her. “The brain needs glucose to survive. Glucose is a sugar. Pie is full of sugar. Thus, if you don’t eat pie, your brain will die.” (I know what you’re thinking: How come they don’t cover this stuff in med school?)

“But you’re not eating glucose, you’re eating fructose and sucrose!” she says testily.

“So?” I say wisely.

She doesn’t seem to have a response to this one — in other words, touche, Bruce.

“Didn’t you say you had gained weight recently?” she asks me shrewdly.

“OK, well, first of all, I told you that in professional confidence as my free doctor,” I chide, “not so that you’d bring it up again in an irrelevant context. And second, I never said I had gained weight because of pie. There’s no evidence to support that.”

“You’re eating chocolate pie and gaining weight! What more proof do you need?” she demands.

“There could be lots of factors,” I say patiently. “For example, it’s humid out. Humid air weighs more than dry air because of the humidity. So maybe I had a lungful of heavy air when I weighed myself. The whole topic needs a lot more study.”

In the name of further study, I help myself to another slice of chocolate pie — a small one, though, in case my brain is in danger of overheating. I mean, what if I come up with a Noble Prize-winning idea? I can’t do anything about it now, I’m having lunch.

“What you should do is put down your fork and go outside and ride your bike or even just take a walk,” she says. “Get some exercise.”

“Thus increasing my intake of heavy, humid air. You want me to be obese?”

“You’re driving me crazy!”

“Sounds like someone’s brain isn’t getting enough glucose this morning,” I admonish kindly. “Want a piece of pie?”

“No, thank you.”

“Besides, we did ride bikes last week, remember? And you admitted in your own words that as a result I would probably gain weight,” I remind her.

“Because you stopped at the doughnut shop and had a half a dozen doughnuts!”

“That is so not true,” I say loftily. “They were fritters.”

“Arrghhh!” she cries out. (This is called “losing medical objectivity” and calls all of her judgments into question, just in case you were thinking of taking her side on the pie issue. Also, in professional debating circles, it is considered to be poor form to shriek unintelligibly while pressing both hands to your head and making a pained expression. If this were the presidential debates, the news analysts would say she had just thrown the election.)

When you have a half slice of chocolate pie, it’s as if you owe yourself the other half — what’s known in medical circles as a “caloric deficit.” I correct this imbalance now.

“‘Put down my fork,’” I repeat lovingly. “‘Exercise.’ You’re so cute when you say stuff like that.”

She leaves the room, probably embarrassed at my display of affection. I’m confident, though, that she’ll eventually understand my scientifically medical argument — just as soon as her brain gets some glucose.

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