Man Infected By Bookworm Reads 212 Books In One Week

Old Town’s Marty Frost had never been much of a reader until his wife dragged him to a rundown bookstore near the Canadian border last week.  Ever since that trip, Marty has not been able to stop reading.

“He’s been pretty much devouring books since we visited that quaint shop,” his wife Evelyn told this Modern Philosopher with a dreamy look upon her face.  “He’s read every book in the house, and I’ve had to make multiple trips to the local libraries and book stores just to keep feeding his hunger.  It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!”

While his wife might be a big fan of the astonishing transformation, Marty’s body has not.  He has lost ten pounds, has barely slept, and has been complaining of intense headaches.  Because of this, Marty’s mother insisted that they take him to the Emergency Department at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

“He’s read the entire time we’ve been here,” Evelyn bragged as she pulled a handful of books out of her bag to show me what her husband had ingested.  “I’d given up so long ago on the idea of being married to an educated man, and now my husband reads more books in a week than a college professor does in a year.  This is a blessing.”

Turns out, the ED doctor did not agree with that assessment of the situation.  “The patient has been infected by a Bookworm,” Dr. Timothy Logan explained to me as he held up the frightening x-rays that showed the long, thin parasite wrapped around Marty’s brain.  “If we don’t remove it immediately, it will lay legs, take over the brain, and he might never again have the desire to watch TV, drink too many beers, or say something embarrassing in public.  All normal manly behavior might vanish.”

Evelyn Frost did not see the problem with that.  “My husband was a rude, boring, uneducated man, who farted more often in a day than he ever looked at a book.  Since this worm crawled up into his brain, he’s been polite, engages me in intelligent conversation, calls me pet names that he finds in the romance novels he loves, and he hasn’t once treated me like I’m the live in help.  I say we leave that thing inside him because I like the husband it’s given me!”

Hospital Administrators and Lawyers are miffed.  Marty will not sign the paperwork consenting to the surgery, and neither will his wife.  As a result, Marty’s mother has threatened to sue the hospital and her daughter-in-law.  While the male surgeons believe that the parasite needs to be removed immediately, the female surgeons counter that his life is in no immediate danger, and if anything, the Bookworm is making the patient’s quality of life better.

So where do we go from here?

“I’m going to take my husband home, sit him on the couch with his books, and then I’m going to take a long, relaxing bubble bath,” Evelyn gushed.  “After that, I’m going to give him a few cook books to read because the doctors think that will increase his appetite.  Then I’m going to run out and get some books on home repair in hopes that it will inspire my amazing husband to make some changes I’ve always wanted to our house.”

The hospital decided it had no choice but to discharge the patient.  Marty’s mother decided to stay behind and talk to a social worker about how it made her feel to know that her son was being taken away from her.

I decided to stop at a bookstore on the way home and grab a couple of books that have been on my wish list since Christmas.

What about you, Modern Philosophers?  Do you think there’s such a thing as too much reading?  If your significant other was infected by a Bookworm would you want it removed?