Doctor M is very definitely of the “new” school of surgeons – relatively young (late-forties perhaps) and easy to chat to. When I asked him if the second stage of the procedure to break up my kidney stone would take 15 minutes or so he smiled and said it would take a lot longer than that. “We have to make sure that the stone is broken into really small pieces that will easily pass down your ureter and that takes a while even with a laser. We have to retract the stent enough to expose the stone, insert the scope under active X-ray so we know exactly where we are and then blast the stone with the laser”.
When I was told a few weeks back that the kidney stone that was blocking my ureter could be removed by laser I was quite surprised. I’d assumed that it would be crushed and removed by a more basic endoscope but apparently we are more advanced than that in Zimbabwe. Perhaps it’s the dilapidated state of the nation that automatically primes one to expect that nearly all other aspects of life will be equally decrepit. Medicine has, to an extent, escaped this fate (if you have the means to afford it) though it is generally accepted that for advanced medical treatment it’s best to go to South Africa. Perhaps paradoxically it is often cheaper (it’s the competition thing).
The first stage of removal was to insert a JJ stent (so called for the shape of each end) past the stone which was partially blocking the ureter near my left kidney. This required day surgery and I had to report to the clinic in the Avenues area of Harare at seven a.m. I was checked in by pleasant and efficient staff, escorted up to a ward and then the waiting began.
At 10 o’clock my cellphone was taken away and I was told that I’d go to surgery “just now”. By noon I’d given up on the “just now” and dozed off. Around 3 o’clock I was loaded onto a gurney and moved off to the operating theatre where I was left outside. The paint was peeling off the passage walls opposite. The anaesthetist arrived and talked me through what she was going to be doing. She was young and chatty. She left, doctor M called past carrying a day pack and greeted me and then I was moved into the operating theatre and maneuvered onto the bed. The interior of the operating theatre was, to my untrained eye, modern though the overhead lights had different coloured elements that no-one could explain.
I was awake around 4.30 and the surgeon checked in on me at 5. Marianne picked me up at 7. A day spent waiting. Mostly.
Doctor M’s rooms are new, expansive and indicate a successful surgical practice. When I drove in this Friday past to have the consultation for the second phase of the kidney stone removal the car park was only half full. I was on time at 9.45 for the 10 o’clock appointment. I finally got to see him at 11.45 and yes, I fell asleep in the waiting room. When I left the car park and waiting room were full. Maybe I’d got off lightly.
I go back to the same clinic on Monday for the laser treatment. I won’t make the same mistake and will check up on the time I am expected though I suspect a fair bit of latitude will be built in to their answer. Unlike the last time I won’t be getting out the same day – apparently pain management will be required for at least one night. I guess that I will have to put up with it, hopefully I won’t have to wait too long for the analgesics!
Zimbabwe Absurdity 
Mick Jagger, a frog and AI
27 10 2025Memory’s a funny thing. I woke up one morning recently and told Marianne I’d just remembered the punch line of an old joke; “It’s a knick knack Patty Wack, give the frog a loan”. She smiled and said “But there’s more to it than that” and added “he’s old man is a Rolling Stone”. Of course I had to see if I could find the original on the internet and called up the faithful Google search engine which Google assures me heavily uses AI.
Just entering “Patty Wack” came up with one suggested search for the correct joke even correcting for my alternative spelling of “Wack”. Quite impressive, there aren’t too many patty wacks out there.
Not bad for a start but on reading the original joke I discovered that a knick knack is a critical part. So I thought I’d include it in the search. Just by itself and Google didn’t come up with any alternative searches that would have led me to the joke.
Searching on “knick knack patty” was surprisingly successful with an accurate search term as the third item. Not too many other suggestions though it seemed to suggest that I might have meant Paddy not Patty.
The most successful search term was “knick knack patty wack frog” which brought the joke up to the top of the list for suggested searches but I thought that I was giving rather a lot of information out to start with so decided to up the task difficulty a bit.
The punch line of the joke, you can look up the whole thing here, is: “It’s a knick knack Patty Whack give the frog a loan, his old man is a Rolling Stone” where the Rolling Stone is referencing Mick Jagger. I decided to see if the AI would associate Mick Jagger with a frog joke and entered “Mick Jagger frog loan joke”. Nope, not a single other search was suggested – clearly I was being very specific. Curiously “Mick Jagger frog” did suggest another more specific search as the first item. Can’t think why Angie got in there. Yes, I can remember the song! We all used to crowd into a prep room in the school hostel on Saturday night and watch Top of the Pops on a black and white television. Mick doing his best emotional bit in a big floppy hat. “Angie. A-aaaaaangie. Can’t say we never tried”.
Perhaps a case of less is more?
There are of course many variants of AI to be found all over the internet. Perhaps one of the best known is ChatGPT. I have used it a bit when stuck on my programming projects and it’s been useful in suggesting solutions. I did get to use it today on another project and was really impressed.
My business is in trouble. Two weeks ago I was within a few days of running my bank account dry. It was time to see where the problem was. It didn’t take a lot of doing. I am selling my seedlings for less than they cost me to produce. My bookkeeper commented that my salaries and wages were too high a proportion of my overall costs but there is little that I can do about it now – nobody is going to accept a wage cut. I wondered if I could put the business into administration (yes, I Googled what that entails) and be closed down. I didn’t see how I could sell a business that is not a going concern.
There are at least five other commercial nurseries in Harare that I know of. My foreman on occasion phones them to see what they are charging. The biggest is charging substantially less than I am and I have no idea how they do it. I also know what they are growing as we use the same seed supplier and I am friendly with one of the staff there. It’s mainly tomatoes and lots of them. This makes me think they are supplying the farmers who grow for a well-known fast food company. It was time to see if I could get in on the action.
Zimbabwe being what it is, it was not difficult to find out who the procurement officer of the above-mentioned fast food chain is. Marianne, being more adept at marketing than me (not difficult – there are disadvantages of a science degree), helped me put together the approach email. The reply was non-committal. A different approach was needed but at least we had not been rebuffed.
Given our lack of marketing skills we decided to ask Maria. She’s a formidable communicator and the driving force behind HIFA (Harare International Festival of the Arts) that ran for several years and was the arts and entertainment highlight of the year. She agreed to draft something.
While I was mulling over what Maria had put together Marianne was chatting to her sister in Cape Town who has a tour company for older women . Mandy suggested we get ChatGPT to draft something as she uses it quite a lot and was impressed. She did mention that it was a good idea to be polite when asking it for assistance! So I logged in and made my request. The response is too long to reproduce here but I was very impressed. It was just what I was looking for with all the right marketing language. So tomorrow I will send off another email to see if I can get access to the produce suppliers. Nothing ventured. There will be a few adjustments to the original text – “Warm regards” will be replaced with “Regards” which I consider a bit less familiar.
I can of course remember back in the 1980s when AI stood for artificial insemination. One of my housemates at university was doing an animal science degree and they had been harvesting semen from a bull. He wondered aloud if an orgasm for a bull was as much fun as it was for a human. Someone else chipped in that it was physiologically identical, the difference being that the bull could not remember what was so pleasant.
Looking up artificial insemination on the internet (yes Google AI) I saw that it is widely practiced for women who cannot get pregnant the natural way. While there doesn’t appear to be human AI on offer in Zimbabwe (but plenty of livestock options) there are a couple of sites advertising IVF (in vitro fertilization). Most of us older folk can remember that Louise Brown was the first example of this “test tube baby” process. As one fellow student commented all those years ago: “The worst thing about being a test-tube baby is you know for sure that your old man’s a wanker”. If you don’t know what that means try a Google AI search!
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Tags: AI, artificial-intelligence, ChatGPT, fiction, HIFA, IVF, Kermit the frog, knick knack, Mick Jagger, Patty Wack, Technology, The Adventurous Ewe, writing
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