Confessions of a heavy breather:

I’m up early and I was out late. I haven’t really been doing the going out thing much at all, but last night I got in the mood to see the world a bit. I drove over to Mary’s and watched the end of Bullet followed by a Steve McQueen documentary. I didn’t know he died of lung cancer possibly caused by exposure to asbestos in the Marine Corps.

After the documentary we went up to Uncle Bill’s for a late night snack with a short detour to Fredrick’s Music Lounge so I could introduce Mary to one of her neighborhood groover pits. The twenty somethings were in fine form sporting the Sally [salvation army] fashion. One young lad had even jelled himself a blonde little Mohawk. It was after two when I got home and five hours later I am awake and doing homework.

Steve’s lung cancer…it’s all about the lungs. My lungs are like an unopened box of health crackerjacks and today at 2pm we get to find out what my prize is.

Obscure joke: to paraphrase Conrad’s description of the narrator of Heart of Darkness as the Buddha without his lotus blossom, I feel like Keats without his Fanny. That works on a lot of levels. Keats died of TB. He wrote love poems to Fanny. I am not in the habit of writing love poems to anyone, but I do feel like I could lose my ass.

I was a pretty sickly kid and it was often about my lungs. I have shitty lungs. I can’t run a mile because of them. During those grade school fitness tests I would sometimes cough blood. I have several memories of early morning trips to the hospital, booster shots, catching up after weeks out of school. I was the poster child for bronchitis complicated by asthma until they finally took my tonsils out. Even after that I usually got at least one good case of bronchitis per year until my mid twenties.

I became a reader in part because books would distract me from the constant coughing. If I could keep my focus I could control the fit. Also, for the couch-bound kid daytime TV in a no cable town sucked hind titty. It is not an exaggeration to say that I missed months of school over my health, but I was a college age reader by the fourth grade. (It's interesting to speculate on patterns. I wonder if my academic/life habit of procrastination follwed by rapid change/work started here.)

Then there were the shots. I remember in Milwaukee that we had this family friend Mrs. Ficken, who was a nurse. She would come over twice a week and give me my allergy shot. We kept the preloaded hypodermics in the refrigerator. One of my earliest memories is getting KFC with my shot, because as everyone knows fried chicken eases the pain of small puncture wounds. I must have been five.

After years of injections and blood draws I am now impervious to needless. I was often precociously droll with nurses, “I don’t need to look away. I get these all the time. Just go ahead and do it.”

Dentists love me. When I got my wisdom teeth taken out I remember the surgeon sneaking up on me with the wide bore needle, “You don’t need to hide it behind your back. Really. I’m fine with it.”

I’m used to turning off the pain switch. If you’ve never had the pleasure of the old school allergy test where the take skin samples from your back and arm I highly recommend it. I’ve had it done three times, to accommodate each new asshole allergist, and each version of the procedure seemed more medieval than the last. I would say that my last official whimper from physical pain was during that final test in Appleton Wisconsin. Neither of my bone breaks were comparable to that allergy test.

The shots persisted well into my teenage years until it was determined that I was allergic to the shots they were giving me. After the shots stopped my health improved quite rapidly. Then we moved into the dermatology drama. I remember trying to explain to my doctor, who was emotionally invested in a lack of connection between chocolate and acne, that I could time a breakout to within hours of eating certain foods. That didn’t fit into his medical paradigm. A diet prescription is far cheaper than Actutane, which came in at two dollars a pill back then. Between the allergists and the dermatologist I lost all faith and respect for modern medicine.

In my adult life I have enjoyed relatively good health. As I said, I’ve broken a few bones here and there out of the rambunctious stupidity of the early twenties and there is my ongoing flirtation with borderline hypertension, but I’m not often sick. At least I haven’t been. Can you tell I’m a little worried? I haven’t had great experiences with white coats, small rooms, and needles. Ah well, as I said to the nurse, “You don’t have to worry. I’m used to this, really I am.”