Death Comes for Young Bertram

Hypochondria Gratified at Last

Sooo ... my new doctor doesn't like the sound of my cough. I get the smoking lecture and a lab order for an x-ray. I go back to see the doctor and he says there's a shadow on the x-ray of my left lung; he's worried I might have a touch of pneumonia, wants me to take two antibiotics til the bottles are empty. I go to the pharmacy, where the pharmacist says, "Whatever your doctor thinks you have, he wants to get rid of it fast." So I go home, take the pills faithfully til they're all gone, 12 days, just as instructed.

Again as instructed, I wait two weeks after completing the antibiotic regimen and go back for another chest x-ray. That was Friday. Monday morning at 8:05 the doctor calls me and tells me there is still a "spot" on my x-rays. He says I have two options. 1) Get a CT Scan immediately to determine exactly what is throwing a shadow on my chest x-rays. 2) Wait a while--say, two months, get another x-ray and see if the spot has grown. The doc knows I have no health insurance and that I am unemployed; knows, in fact, that I am as broke as an orphan's heart. So he is not surprised when I respond, It looks like option 2.

Now, I am not a hypochondriac in the strictest sense of the word but I do have a rather suggestible nature in that area. And I am dead certain I have lung cancer. There's not a doubt in my mind. And I'm just about obsessing on this. All week I've been thinking about putting my affairs in order. Updating my will; drawing up an advance directive; pondering where I want my ashes spread. And like that.

My bride is still driving me to take immediate actions to structure a future I just don't foresee. But here I am, sending out resumes, applying for grad school. It's all pretty strange. After a lifetime of mordant humor, morbid musing and tempting fate with the certitude that I am immortal, well, gee ...

The good news of course is that I have made a lot of mistakes in my life—been wrong about just about everything except politics. So I'll probably be wrong about this too. Come late November I'll be happily embarrassed when it turns out I ain't dying anytime soon.