Soup for the soul can give some a bad feeling

Have you ever had the the occasion of eating leftovers long after a holiday feast had been enjoyed? When we were growing up, nothing ever seemed to go to waste, so if the leftovers could be made into an edible meal, my mother would find a way to make it happen. We had casseroles, turkey/chicken ala king, or ratatouille, but to us, they were only names to disguise those interminable foodstuffs. Finally, when we thought that we had experienced every food creation possible, Mom turned the remaining morsels into soup. Soup can be a welcome alternative, and it's nice when you are feeling ill, but sometimes soup simply lacks that medicinal element. In fact, it doesn't always go down quite as smoothly as you'd think.

Several years ago, my mother put together her "leftover" soup from the last of the holiday turkey. By the time she was ready to "boil it down", you can only imagine that there wasn't exactly a generous portion of meat left to be consumed. However, with the proper "doctoring", she managed to concoct a meal, and achieve the ultimate goal, finish off the turkey. Well, it all went off as planned until Dad happened to get one of those small turkey bones with a bite. Fortunately, it didn't compromise his breathing, but that's when the dinner came to an abrupt end. It true form, neither he nor my Mom panicked, and off to the hospital they went.

After the assessment in the ER, it became evident that the only way to remove the stuck turkey bone was to retrieve it under anesthesia in the operating room. Of course, since Dad was a local practicing physician, he knew all those involved with helping him out of this dilemma, so he trusted them, without reservation. However, for my mother, she finally broke down with fear and became nervous about the outcome. On the way up to the operating room, she said to my father, "Charles, I have a bad feeling about this." My father, on the other hand, remained his calm, collected self, and he reassured her that he'd be just fine. Thankfully, the entire staff took care of him as if he was one of their own, and in this case, he really was.

There was a scene in "The American President" where the President (Michael Douglas) was having soup at Sydney Ellen Wade's condo (Annette Benning) when he apparently encountered a smaller but similar fragment of inedible bone. He navigated his way through this minor glitch in the soup mixture quite smoothly. Of course, he was the President, "the most powerful man in the world", and it was a movie. For my Dad, it may have been slightly more dramatic, but he handled it with the same aplomb and confidence that he has handled so many other obstacles in his life. As for Mom, she "survived" this episode too; just like the innumerable ones that preceded it and the many that have followed. I guess that's how couples survive life's ups and downs together, and in this case, what didn't go down, had to come up!