The Doctor's Office

I have only mentioned this to a few people and never in public, but I've been feeling poorly lately.
Fatigued at mid-day.
Out of breath for no reason- jog up several flights of stairs, carry heavy loads etc, no problem...get up in the middle of the night to pee? I'm winded.
No pattern to it. I have a not-so hidden fear of illness, and heart disease is near the top of my list of medical phobias. I am so afraid of it that I have only mentioned my recent poor health to a few people- knock wood.

I have likewise been keeping mostly mum on my insurance woes - but today I finally got my health insurance. I called my doc right away.

When I mentioned shortness of breath, he said he wanted me to come directly in. So I did.

There was a new receptionist on duty, a middle-aged woman with a very sad face...as she weaved her way through my new insurance info she muttered something about insurance carriers. There was a peculiar, intense edge to her mumbled words that caused me to do a double-take:

"Pardon?"

"I said you've had quite a few carriers in the last several years, Mr. C.," she said, her voice now heavy with weary compassion.

It was a statement, not a judgement , but my reaction was defensive.

"Well, I've had a lot of jobs...and the ones I keep usually change insurance carriers every year. To save money, they say."

"Honey, we see this all the time ...all day...it's terrible. Do your premiums ever go down when they "save money?"

Aha. This woman had some sort of issue with The System, not with me. I felt like I could talk to her, so I did.

"No, of course my premiums never go down. I can barely afford my share, in fact. I've felt like hell for a month and haven't been able to afford a visit until today. It's absolutely shameful how our country refuses to care for it's citizens."

"If you were in prison, you'd get free medical."

Prison? Huh? Where is this headed?

"Excuse me?"

" The bastard -pardon my French- who killed my son. He gets free medical care. For life. He had an appendectomy last month and I was praying that he would die. He didn't. He killed my boy. My boy was only 23."

"I...."

"Your new co-pay is $20. It was ten. They need the extra money so they can give free medicine to the man who killed my son. They plan on keeping that man alive forever. In prison."

As she said this it was clear that she considered the murderer's incarceration to be her own, that her life would always be stalled at that moment , the moment that she learned her son was dead. In her heart, as long as her child's killer had a future, she herself did not.


"I...I think I know...," I stammered, but I don't know, so I shut up and listened. This woman's anguish was compelling.
I am strong.
I am powerful.
I am helpless in the face of a mother's grief for her murdered child.

I have been told a little about this sort of justice and how it feels.
Told by someone who wasn't quite murdered and by someone who was.
But that's all I can know.
Because I wasn't there. It didn't happen to me.

It wasn't my son who was killed.

It wasn't my son who grew up wanting to be a soldier just like his Daddy, only to drop out of West Point because he was broken-hearted over what had happened to our military. It wasn't my child that returned home without any dreams left, and it wasn't my kid who lost his life just because he wanted to help his mom by taking out the trash.

It was her son who wanted to be a soldier and it was her son who was shot in the heart while dumping the garbage for his mom. He died in the alley a few seconds after his parents heard the shot.

He was murdered as part of a gang initiation. When apprehended, the killer explained that it was nothing personal, just that "somebody had to die that night and he was there"...as the woman told me this story, I could picture this inhuman creature as it calmly explained how sure, "it wasn't personal - we just murdered your son because it's better than being bored..." and I KNEW that this animal would never, not once, have even the slightest touch of remorse over what it had done.
In fact, the creature didn't seem to think it was treated fairly.
After all, someone had to die. It wasn't personal- why was everyone so upset?

That is how the animal thinks. It wasn't my son in her story , but I have met the animal.
I know others who have and not a single one of us is better for the meeting, but we have survived the encounters, with varying degrees of success.
Nietzche was wrong.
Not everything that fails to kill you makes you stronger.

I managed to choke out a few words about two friends of mine who fight this animal war every day but I couldn't get it out properly. I could tell from my voice that I was about to burst into tears and I wasn't sure I would be able to stop if I did.

"I'm sorry...I'm not used to talking about this. I didn't mean to bring all that up...", words that could have been spoken by either one of us, but in this case it was her to me.
And I'm not used to it. I'm used to writing about my feelings; I am not used to talking about them.
There is a huge difference.

" No," I said, " it's OK. Most people don't talk about this sort of thing. We hold it in until it kills us because that is easier than talking about it."

She reached through the sliding glass window and squeezed my hand.

"People should talk more often," she said and handed my paperwork back to me.

By the time the doctor saw me I had almost finished crying.




My doctor is an extraordinarily kind man and I've been seeing him for almost ten years. He has seen me through a (temporarily) crippling neurological illness; my first panic attacks and a nearly fatal addiction.

He has never seen me cry.

But he understood.

Now. What seems to be the matter?

I described my symptoms.

Hmmm...I haven't started smoking cigarettes have I?

No sir, just marijuana.

No alcohol?

Not a drop.

Mind if I look?

Go ahead, please.

(Note to alcoholics who think that they can fool their doctor: You can't. He can look down your throat and tell if you are a drunk. If he can't , you need a new doctor- not that drunks practice much preventive health care. It's almost always a sudden ER trip that gets them)

My doctor is very proud of my sobriety. He tells me that the chances of me doing what I have done are almost impossible, yet here I am.
I am not ashamed to admit that I needed to hear that.
That I do need to hear it from time to time.
That I will probably always need to hear it.

He used his ears and a stethoscope- still one of Medicine's finest tools- I took breaths until I nearly hyperventilated. Through the nose. Now the mouth. Nose. Mouth.
Dizzy.


Well. I was sent to have some precautionary X-rays, but the doctor seems to think that I have developed an allergy- my heart and lungs sound fine, but my sinuses are draining and seem obstructed.

He believes that I have developed an allergy or twelve and it is causing mild asthmatic attacks. This , I was told, is not nearly as bad as a heart attack.
Cool.

So I was given an inhaler.
I have to laugh.
It fits.

See, despite all the hype, I'm really just a nerd who likes Dungeons and Dragons, comic books and record collections.
I'm not even cool enough to wear horn-rimmed glasses- only cool geeks get those...but now I do have an inhaler!

I'll keep it in my Pocket-Protector, next to my Bic pens, my d20 and my Texas Instruments math machine.

Right above my heart, which seems to doing fine.

Man, I was really worried and was afraid I'd have a stroke any second or something...asthma?
The inhaler seems to work.

I am literally breathing easier!

Now, will my new sleeping pills be enough to counter the speedy feeling from the inhaler?