Renalgram for Shaik: Go back to jail

AS SCHABIR Shaik prepared to make a last-ditch effort in the Constitutional Court to stay out of jail for good, rather than back to that cushy hospital where he has spent most of his 15-year sentence so far, prisons minister Ngconde Balfour said in parliament that he was "going back where he belongs" -- prison.

Schabir Shaik

I read this in an article in the M&G Online today and to begin with was rather pleased, and a little surprised, to hear a cabinet minister tell it quite like it is about Shaik. Back where he belongs, indeed. No need to mince our words here, the guy's a malingering sissy. He did the crime, and a particularly sleazy crime it was, but now he doesn't want to do the time.

Then I got to the part in the article, where Mo, one of Shaik's ubiquitous brothers, deplored the heartless and despicably uncaring attitude of the government towards his desperately ailing criminal scumbag brother.

Mo Shaik

He almost had me feeling sorry for poor Schabir, when my eyes lit on a medical term Mo bandied about - renalgram - which, although I've never heard it before, sounds to me like some kind of invasive medical examination related to a kidney ailment.

The unfamiliarity of the word got me thinking: I wouldn't put it past Mo to be talking the biggest load of crap to have ever come out of the mouth of a Shaik sibling as he desperately drums up sympathy for his brother on the eve of a doubly desperate attempt by his brother to get out of jail.


Cat scan

So I googled renalgram, and near fell about laughing when it returned a paltry 133 results. To make sure, I googled a few other common and not-so-common medical tests and procedures - cat scan, autopsy, tracheotomy, brain scan, amputation, arthroscopy,
x-ray, amniocentesis, dialysis, appendectomy, you name it. The number of results ranged from 700,000-odd to 95-million.

133! Ha!

Mo, dude, unless your brother is suffering from a condition so rare that it needs a test or procedure so uncommon that it can muster up only 133 results on Google, in which case I'm very sorry, then you have just been bust talking the biggest load of crap to have ever come out of the mouth of a Shaik sibling desperately drumming up sympathy for his brother on the eve of an inevitably futile attempt to keep him out of jail.

And to make it even more comical, the top Google result for renalgram is not for a medical procedure at all!

It's the name of a newsletter for patients with kidney disease!

Not that that's funny, of course.