Some of us pteredactyls have been around for a while and it’s starting to show.

Where once my entire reason for being was to leave pteredactyl eggs in the seaweed up and down Thompson Beach, the only eggs i leave now are soft and smell like rotten fish.  Is that the same as impotence?

Well the other day the vet tells me that i have a heart condition.  Plenty of fish will tell you that i don’t have a heart, but he reckons i have a condition called atrial fibrillation, which is not so much the heart itself but that uneven impulses sent from the brain have caused one of the four heart chambers to go out of sync, and the heart speeds and slows erratically, attempting to compensate.

The vet says this could be a result, (i love it when they say ‘could’), could be a result of a lifetime of drinking excessive amounts of cod liver oil.  Well, i refute that emphatically as i only drink cod liver oil socially, or on any week-day with a ‘y’ in it, whichever comes first.

He says i’ve gotta come in this week so they can kill me!  Hopefully only temporarily.  The treatment involves using those defibrillator paddles to the chest, the heart stops, and then starts again, importantly, with every impulse in sync.

Now apparently i don’t need to put my affairs in order, pteredactyls travel lightly anyway, and i don’t have much in the way of estate, (although i’d like to claim that swamp at the back of Baker’s Creek), but i do ponder about the after-life.

The vet says not to worry; worse case scenario they have other means of bringing me around.  All very assuring.

But what’s next in the way of health issues?  What can a bird my age, (i think i’m three quarters of a million), expect from the future?

Already my right shoulder feels like the wing might drop off any day.  My neck feels like something yanked at my pointy head, and my right leg is permanently damaged thanks to that smart-alek shark.

So do i sit around counting my leathery wrinkles and waiting for the next health crises?  No way!

I’m off chasing fish up and down the gulf, well the slower ones anyway.  Coopers breweries are bringing out a new line of cod liver oil which i heard is fabulous, and i’ll continue to look for that elusive other pteredactyl for one last shot at procreating the species.

Life is for living my friends.

Until next time,

Pteri.

*****   Shout-out to Brian Aldhouse.  You shoulda been a pteredactyl.