The Natural Connection

As strange as it may seem, I actually look forward to my daily trip to the Post Office. I’m always hopeful that buried in the pile of utility bills and offers for Life Insurance, that there will be a real letter with a real stamp from some exotic country, perhaps announcing that I have won a travel sweepstakes, or maybe a free backpack or instant camera. The Post Office represents pure opportunity, where all things are possible.

But I recently learned that you must be careful what you hope for in this world, in our new age of bio-terror. Last week I opened my PO Box like any other day to gather the magazines and invoices into my satchel, when I saw it. Wedged between my annual invitation to a medical seminar on Creativity and Madness and the Waycross City water bill was what looked to be a real letter.  

Festooned with stamps from the Republic of Togo, little white doves circled the continent of Africa, above the words “Peace in Afrique” written in French. “All right!” I thought, “My lucky day!” I was already packing my bags. 

Something about the letter just didn’t look right, however. Maybe it was the way that my name and address were printed in crooked block letters up in the upper left corner of the envelope where the return address should have been. Or maybe it was the bold message stamped across the face of the letter by the Post Office that read in black ink “WARNING: SUSPECT MATERIAL.” On closer inspection, one of the stamps had a corner edge curled up, and I tried to remember from my bio-terrorism training if Ebola virus can hide out under a stamp.  

Just in case you aren’t sure what to do if you get a letter like that, the Post Office has three 18x24 posters in the lobby appropriately titled “Suspicious Mail Alert”, which instruct you in detailed fashion to isolate the mail, don’t eat it, and notify postal authorities. I marveled that it takes Suspect Material only five days to travel from Togo to Waycross, while a postcard we recently mailed to a patient in Hortense took a week.  

I figured that the easiest way to notify the postal authorities would be to walk over to the counter and show the desk clerk that they had just delivered me a piece of mail that they had determined was suspicious. But it was Social Security check day and the line of senior citizens waiting on their checks was snaking out the front door. I had a transient vision of the Waycross Journal Herald headlines: “Local doctor Exposes Postal Pensioners to Suspicious Mail Virus.” I decided to do the next best thing and just bring it back to my office and open it in the office garage. 

On the way back to the office, I reflected on the fact that doctors are always faced with the problem of Suspect Material, often without warning. I recalled the day that a mid-aged blonde woman dressed in a pink suit appeared at the front desk carrying her black patent leather handbag, which contained a stool specimen. She had just had a test at the hospital, and was concerned about the color of her stool afterwards. So she decided to collect a portion in her handbag and bring it to the office for my inspection. The fact that she didn’t have a specimen collection container with her at the time didn’t seem to bother her. 

Pharmaceutical companies are famous for distributing Suspect Material. Recently I received a Viagra key chain in the mail. Just what a female physician wants to toss to the nice young man at the auto repair shop when he asks for the keys, you know. I finally gave it to one of my male patients upon his sworn promise that he never tell anyone where it came from. Right now there is a squeeze toy in the shape of a purple stomach perched on my desk, just waiting for the right home. 

Back at the office, I donned gloves and mask and went outside to open my Suspect Material. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the letter contained a nice, hand signed letter from one “Dr. Michael Iwen”, of the “Nigerian Petroleum Corporation”. “Dr. Iwen”, and his friends, scam hundreds of millions of dollars each year from Americans who have not learned the lesson that if something is to good to be true, it probably isn’t. 

Dr. Iwen kindly invited me to fax my bank account number to him in Nigeria so that he could transfer to me 41.5 million dollars that had come his way from “undeclared windfall sales of crude oil during the Gulf War”. This could only occur, of course, if I asked for him by the code word Prince. The fact the he planned to extract my last 50 cents without ever sending me dime was never mentioned. 

The closing line of Dr. Iwen’s letter states, “Do not mind the handwritten envelope, it is an intentional guise to remove suspicion”. Well, I guess he underestimated our US Postal Service. They were sure on to him, no doubt about it. I wonder if he could use a purple stomach squeeze toy.  

©2000-2003 Pauline M. Bellecci, MD