I'm sixty-nine years old today. No need to congratulate me as I really didn't have a lot to do with events back on this date in 1952 except just show up, literally. As I've aged, more like milk than wine, I've accumulated medical maladies and mysteries that employ a larger and greater number of specialists as the years go by.
In addition to a Primary Care Physician, I have a cardiologist, endocrinologist, nephrologist, oncologist, pulmonologist, rheumatologist, and urologist. Technically, we could get in a mini-van and use the HOV lane (instead of turning on the siren) to rush to the hospital.
Earlier this month I went for my semi-annual vascular scan, the book-end to my other semi-annual whole-body exploration, the carotid stenosis. They are not especially subtle reminders that there are just so many sunrises and so many Springs left on the odometer. (As if I didn't have a mirror that told the face in it every morning the very same thing).
We, meaning me and some very clever person with a wonderfully complex machine from Siemens and warm gel to smear on my legs and chest and elsewhere, listen to the sounds of my blood coursing through my arteries and veins and hope it continues to sound like the ocean crashing onto the shore. I peer over the specialist's shoulder to watch the monitor for waveforms and splotches of color, sometimes dark blue and other times bright yellow and vivid red, knowing no matter how keen I am to know what the colors mean, I'm too afraid to ever ask.
In all these sessions with all the watching and waiting, and the conferring that follows them is the awareness that there's no medication I can take to reverse the process of what's happening to me. (That's a joke, actually. After I had had a series of Transient Ischemic Attacks, I was so terrified the surgeon could have told me to drink my own bathwater and I'd have asked if I could use a straw. Fear of death is probably the most powerful reason to live there can ever be).
I remember one of my doctors (now retired) early on explaining that to me at our very first session and adding 'but there's always a hope someday of surgery.' In the ensuing years, I've seen enough surgery to last me a lifetime (it has, so far), so 'hope' is a word I use guardedly.
The facility I visited is brand-new and has floors of doctors (some of them mine) and other out-patient services. In the waiting room, properly distanced, was a young woman in what looked like hospital scrubs, holding a small child, a baby actually, of perhaps six months or so on her lap. He, not she, I learned was a customer for some other kind of imaging equipment.
He was extremely well-behaved as if I am an expert with my own babies getting ready to celebrate a 39th as well as a 34th birthday in the coming days, for one, and weeks, for the other. The child on her lap stared at the world, bounded by the waiting room walls and ceiling with an eagerness and intensity I no longer remember but truly admire.
It was a moment for rubber-necking, his, and reflection, mine. He, even if he lives to be one hundred, could never remember me, and I, should the same fate await me, shall never forget him. Another traveler on Spaceship Earth. -bill kenny
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