Normal and Healthy is Scary
I just got back from my 2nd Annual Medicare Wellness Visit. You can read about the first one:
Welcome To Your Welcome To Medicare Wellness Exam!
This one was just as uneventful and frightening.
I’d had lots of blood drawn a few days before. All tests came back normal. Some were more than the norm of normal, some less than the norm, the rest more or less the norm. But all were in the normal range. Normal.
My doctor, as most doctors do when you see them, thought he should point something out even though there was nothing to point out. He started talking about one test that was slightly high in the normal range. I tried to shut him up. “Hey, it’s safely snuggled in the normal range, not even on the cusp of the pre-whatever range. I’m almost sixty-seven years old. Gimme a break.”
He agreed, but still warned me that he didn’t want it to jump into the low pre-whatever range between now and The 3rd Annual Medicare Wellness Visit.
Oh, good. Worry me even though everything’s normal.
Then he had me climb onto the examination table so he could do his poking and squeezing and peering into orifices as I did my deep breathing and mouth opening and eyeball calisthenics. Everything normal.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m no perfect specimen. Like any middle-aged person I’m riddled with afflictions and head to toe annoyances. I’m quite creaky. That alimentary canal is usually full of sewage, often overflows or there’s stoppage, there’s excess adipose tissue flopping around everywhere, my brain has quirks. But nothing too serious.
I walked outa’ there feelin’ my oats, sure I’d be living forever.
Home and turning on the computer, the first news article I see is this:
Is living forever going to suck?
… At a certain point, parts of the body stop working properly, making it difficult to enjoy the time you’ve got. Medical conditions like Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and arthritis can make the final years of one’s life an exercise in suffering…
Wonderful. Now I’m hoping next year’s Wellness Visit will turn up something horrifying and incurable, so I won’t have to live long enough to suffer for years and years.
It’s great to know that I’m so healthy it’s making me sick.
Originally published at www.huffingtonpost.com on October 15, 2017.
