Catadromy

Once upon a time, far, far away in a remote part of the forest known as Penn’s Woods, there lived a Princess.  This Princess was very special, in the way that Princesses generally are.  She was also just a tiny bit rebellious.

Oh, who are we kidding?  She was hell on wheels.

But that’s a story for another time and place.

Back to our fable…

Our Princess had been feeling badly for quite some time, ever since the Season Of The Big Snow And Ice had begun and couldn’t understand why.  She’d been treated by the finest doctors in all the land (these things are relative, you understand).  Even though she’d had pneumonia the Winter previously, her current doctor failed to recognize the signs of the recurrence and never conducted any of the proper sort of tests.  Even though our Princess kept telling him she felt like she was drowning every time she tried to breathe and even though our Princess was coughing up blood.

How messy!  How very un-Princesslike!

Things rapidly came to a head in the Spring.  Our Princess was traveling in the Royal Coach with the King, Queen, younger Princess and the Prince (of course, he became a doctor—what else would he be?) when she became alarmingly ill.  The severity of her illness and the escalation of her symptoms necessitated a hospital stay for treatment.  As her current case of pneumonia had gone undetected and untreated for five months, what was once a simple illness was now something much more serious.  Our Princess had pleurisy and abscesses on her lungs.

I swoon at the writing of these words.

When it came time for the Princess to present herself at the hospital for admittance, she was asked the question all new patients are asked—What is your religion?  The Princess thought long and hard about her answer.  If you recall, the Princess dwelt in a remote part of the forest and there was only one clergyman of her particular faith available for pastoral calls.  The Princess knew him well and was not especially enamored of him.  ‘Decline to state’ was not an option.

So the Princess said simply, ‘I am a Druid.’

The hospital admitting office, being in a remote part of the forest, had no idea what that meant.  Being clerks, they had to check off every entry on the form and asked the Princess what religious practice was this?  She replied, ‘We worship trees, we paint ourselves blue and we believe in human sacrifice’ at which point, she made the fiercest of fierce faces as if she had fangs with blood dripping from them.

The admitting office clerk wrote ‘None’ in the box under Religious Preference.

The Princess had a peaceful hospital stay, uninterrupted by pastoral visits from over solicitous clergy.

Yes, I’ve always been this way.