Go Out With A Bang.  Whimpering is for Pussies.

(This is Slim Pickens riding the bomb in Dr. Strangelove for you young folks.)

If you do not remember the Watergate hearings you likely clicked on this post by mistake or have a parent around my age.  Either way I hate you!  I remember being your age.  I was the loud one making everyone laugh with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other back then.

I now stand before you alcohol and nicotine free staring into the abyss that is middle aged, and I am here to tell you that I could really use a drink right about now.

Getting old is not for sissies.

And nothing has really happened yet.  It is just that the look in the eye of the medical professionals when you say, “I’m 50” indicates they are ready to run and pull a fire alarm and race to the exits on you.  It’s as if I have two pounds of plastic explosives around my chest, and I have just yelled “Jihad!”

This all started out innocuously enough about ten days ago.  I had my annual physical with a wonderful doctor I’ve known for over 35 years.  That in and of itself happens to be problematic.  I am his youngest patient by about 20 years.  His waiting area smells like a nursing home.  Furthermore, when he retires in a couple of years, I am going to wind up with some young, officious health Nazi scolding me for my ill spent youth as if my body isn’t kicking my ass enough over it as it is on the way to the eternal dirt nap.

But this doctor happens to be fantastic.  Very kind and caring.  He limits the number of annual physicals he does to three per day.  One each at the beginning, middle and end, so that he has enough time based on the start, lunch break, and running late, to give them all the time and attention they need.  He takes the folders home the night before to study them.  He cares.

He lacks a sense of humor, which has been a challenge for me over the years.  He took on my mother when her GP retired on her in her 50s.  He convinced her to go onto lithium and bought her several decent decades in the quality of life department.  My brother and sister’s children owe him a great deal of thanks for helping provide them with a loving grandmother.

But, there was a time when he was tapping my chest and scowling that stands out.  This process always gives me a case of the yips given my father had his first heart attack at 38 and died at 45.  Yes, I have outlived my father by 5 years already.  I am playing with house money as far as I am concerned.

As he was doing the tapping and scowling, I looked up at him and said, “What?”

He looked down at me, took the stethoscope out of his ears and said, “Nothing, why?”

“Well, you do recall that my father died of a heart attack at 45, don’t you?”

“Oh,” he said with surprise in his voice, “I had forgotten that.”  And, after a bit of a pregnant pause, he added, “Was he under a lot of stress?”

I, naturally, could not contain myself uttering in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “Well, he was married to my mother.”

No smile whatsoever.  Just a bit of an eyebrow scowl as he processed the information, ran through the ticker file of past patients, got my mother’s record up on his cranial microfiche and then, bingo, the light went on.  “Oh, right…. R I G H T.” he said upon this realization.  “Well, you should not have any problem then.”

And with that he put the stethoscope back in his ears and went back to thwacking my chest cavity.  I laughed then, and I still laugh now.  Knute just looked at me as if it was odd that I had laughed at his reply.

So Knute’s a great guy, but a little on the dry side.  I guess you want that in a GP.

And on the occasion of my first physical after my 50^th birthday, Knute was in overdrive.  I had another EKG lined up.  He asked about how many times I pee in the middle of the night and whether or not I was able to maintain an erection, which is a cheap shot for a guy thrust into prolonged bouts with celibacy as he extricates himself from a 25 year marriage.

He asked about chest pains, and I made the mistake of saying that, yes, I had had some.  These were not piercing heart attack pains by any stretch.  I remember having one of those when I was about 33 and rushing in to see him only to find that yes, one valve, had moved on the EKG from the great side of normal to the iffy side of normal.  I was talking about chest tooth ache kind of pains.  Sort of inexplicable.

Well, inexplicable if you are not over fucking 50, I guess.

So Knute ordered a chest X-ray in addition to my first appointment to ride the silver stick that is the colonoscopy procedure.  That first colonoscopy meeting, according to my doctor, is to get acquainted with the process, and then the second time they slip me the high hard one.  Seems I get drugged first.  I made some joke about it being when the doctor slips me the rufi before having his way with me, but Knute’s faced remained impassive.  It is my life’s goal to get this guy to break into a real belly laugh one of these days.

So about a week ago, I do a daily double.  I head into the lab for the blood work where a new technician has difficulty drawing blood.  On her third attempt rolling my veins, she scores.  Then I have to remind her to remove the rubber tube so the blood will flow into the damn glass vial.  Good thing I shot heroin in my youth, or I might still be there. (No, I didn’t. It’s a joke, but this thing is under my real name, so the disclaimer must be immediate.)

From there I got the Chest X-ray.

And that’s where this damn odyssey got really interesting.  Seems Knute called me back immediately and left a message on the answering machine in the home occupied by my wife where I used to live and now merely stop by to pick up my maintenance punch list and bills.

I call him back this Monday.  Seems there is infiltrate around a lung.  Have I had a cold recently?  Any coughing?

No I say.  This means I am asymptomatic for the infiltrate issue.

Then comes the El Kabong, the kick to the nuts.  There’s also a density.

“Density?” I ask, “Can you be a little more specific.  What, in English, is a density?”

Knute proceeds to tell me it could be one of three things.  The first one escapes me, the second was a tumor, and the third was a fatty deposit.

I laugh and say to him, “Well, I am going to pick door number three.  Let’s go with fatty deposits until further notice, ok?”

He does laugh, tells me that is a good idea, and says he will get a CT scan scheduled right away.

He was not kidding.  It was the next day, Tuesday.

So I try to stay focused on fatty deposits.  I try to whistle past the big cartoon time bomb that is the fact I smoked for over thirty years.  I keep pointing to the gene pool that has uncles in their 80s who huffed butts and slammed booze like the WWII era rat pack wannabees they were.

But that little fun fact about my smoking history is to me what a shiny object is to a kid with ADHD.  I cannot look away.  I keep cycling back to my Gordon Gekko, two-pack-a-day,  life in the fast lane days when I had three ashtrays in my office and could get myself so wound up that sometimes I had two of those mothers going at once.  Sure, I also could do that in bars, but it used to really surprise the shit out of me when I did it in my office when I had my head down on this or that project. 

So for 48 hours I have plenty of time to run through all sorts of shit that was not at all productive.  I have a friend who ignored what he thought was a pimple and is now dealing with stage three melanoma.  So I call him.  He is one of two people I let in on what is taking place.  For a brief time I actually will know what it is like to be him and what he has endured for the past eight months.

But I keep the information contained.  I figure there is no reason to let the panic extend out beyond my overactive imagination until such time as said panic seems warranted.  I intend to let melanoma-man be the judge of that for me.

But, in the middle of divorce and all this other shit, figuring out who gets what and who can provide you with the tactical support you might need if life really, really sucks can provide you with all sorts of added distractions.  Who needs to sign a lease on an apartment right now?  Can we get a few test results back, first?

But, I am proud to say that I did keep laughing.  In explaining this to the other person to whom I shared it, I laughed when they asked me how I was doing.  They like movies, as do I.  So I mentioned one of my all time favorites, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  I told her I felt like Butch and Sundance at the end of the movie, laughed, and said, “What’s another fucking gunman?”

So Tuesday afternoon was the CT Scan with Iodine.  Wednesday morning I had to be back in the GP’s office for the EKG reading from a gorgeous nurse who unfortunately has an engagement ring on her finger.  By showing up then for the EKG, I was also hoping to get the results of this CT scan at the same time.  

I had spent the night running through a number of different possible scenarios and none appealed to me.  I did not want to go there.  I did not want to enter the world of cancer remediation, thank you very much.

I mean, the only thing for certain about being on this earth happens to be that no one gets out alive.  But being dealt the cancer card is your ticket to the outside edge of the herd faster than you can say “Carrot Top” or “Sarah Palin.”  One minute you’re just a slightly paunchy, middle aged guy with a few personal issues, the next minute you’re the walking dead awaiting a radiation treatment plan.  I did not want to go there.

The nurse asked why I was there as she pulled the crossword puzzle out of my hands and began attaching the EKG wires to my body.  I explained it.  She winced.  She checked to see if the doctor had the results while I put my shirt back on.  I heard a hand on the door.  I was not sure if it would be the nurse or the doctor.

It was Knutie in all his glory.  Shirt, tie, tie tack, pleated geezer pants, socks and Birkenstock sandals to go along with his pencil thin moustache and reading glasses.  The guy would be a babe magnet on an over 60s cruise liner.

And he had a smile on his face.  The lungs were fine.

As I was mentally going WOO-HOO in my head, he began asking me about my 11^th vertebrae.  “Huh?” I thought, “Where the fuck is that if 2 and 3 are in the neck which I hurt playing rugby?”

Knute read my mind, touching me in the mid to lower back area to give me a hint as to where vertebrae 11 would be.

I could not recall any recent injuries to it, joking about there undoubtedly being many alcohol-related snafus over the years where this could have been an issue.  I distinctly recalled a booze-soaked attempt to barefoot waterski in my late teens that resulted in my head hitting the water followed by my feet flying over my head and hitting the water as well in a mid-air back flip that knocked the wind out of me while also generating an audible pop in my back.  

Knute claimed it had to have been in the past year or two. 

I was all out of prizes.  I had no clue.

So now I have to prepare for a bone scan to check out the 11^th vertebrae.  I have no worries about this thing.  My inner hypochondriac can stand down.  I do not have sufficient grist for that mill to keep churning.  Dissipating body abuse ought not show up in vertebrae number 11.  I never had back pain in sports.  

But who knows?  Maybe it’s Karma’s way of really kicking you in the nuts.  You know, put you at ease and then really let you have it?  General George S. Patton made it all the way through WWII before getting taken out in an automobile accident.  I am sure that was not how he expected to go out.  

What about Mama Cass?  Do you think as she was choking on that ham sandwich she was saying to herself, “You have got to be shitting me.  Not this.  Not now.”

Screw it.  After the chest X-ray and CT scan?  If there is a problem, I am not going to see it coming.  Life’s too short to worry about it being cut short.  

Henny Youngman’s Doctor had it right.  In that old joke, Henny says he went to his doctor and said, “Doc, it hurts when I do this.”

The doctor said, “Then don’t do it.”

Indeed.  Focus on what makes you happy and say to hell with the rest.  You'll get in the ground soon enough. 

And no one on their death bed said they wished they had spent more time at the office.

- 30 -

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