Before you go nuts, let me clarify that I’m referring to the old-and-sick. If you’re elderly with “underlying health conditions”, maybe your time is up. Maybe we weren’t meant to live lives extended by pharmaceuticals and pacemakers and stents. The planet can only bear so many people, remember?

I thinks it’s amazing to see normal healthy people hoarding toilet paper and going around wearing masks. If they would read the statistics, they would see how little their actual risk is. Being sick is awful, of course, but a virus that threatens the health of the elderly is not going to fuck you up if you’re outside this group. If you have a compromised immune system, you probably already practice safety measures in your everyday life.

Humans are so tenacious of life, it strikes me as poignant all the time. I have a friend in his 60s who goes around freaking out about an oil refinery a few miles away from his community. He’s afraid it will explode or be targeted by terrorists. I mean, those are real possibilities but what makes him worry about it so continuously? I’ve exclaimed to him more than once, “You really love life, don’t you!”

To constantly be aware of what catastrophes might befall you is to be absent from your immediate experience. How can you drive anywhere when the car coming toward you could smash into you at any moment? When you go to a movie, a fire might break out, or a guy in a batman outfit could burst in with an assault rifle. When you eat a chicken wing or a hotdog, you’re just minutes away from choking to death.

Real threats should be avoided, unless you’re a daredevil. I just read a sobering article in the New Yorker about mountain climbers and the grief their families must learn to process. They know it’s part of the territory but the climbers themselves are driven to test their mortality again and again. I’m not sure if they’re nuts or just wired differently. I wonder if they give a shit about the coronavirus.

There are so many ways I don’t want to die! I don’t want to be eaten by a polar bear. That’s at the top of my list. I don’t want to have my head chopped off or be set on fire. Oh wait, I don’t want to be trampled to death on a pilgrimage to Mecca or after a soccer game. I don’t want to die under a pile of metal shelves in CVS during an earthquake.

The right time to die is when I’m old and sick, in my own bed. That’s the best place for everyone to go, even though in the US, that privilege is only granted to around 17% of us. If the coronavirus wiped out ten per cent of the sick elderly people who become infected, that would leave more room for everyone else. Maybe millennials and Gen Z would be more open to the idea of procreating.

I discussed this with a Gen Xer last night and he was impresses by my “zen attitude.” I like that he didn’t accuse me of speaking from depression. I am depressed but obviously I’m not looking to die on purpose since there are plenty of opportunities for that.

I just see the value of thinning the herd.

What about you scaredy-cats? How much Purel have you got on hand? Or toilet paper?

Photo (c) courtesy of  Dr. LaRue

I went to get a pelvic ultrasound test for my latest round of hypochondria. The radiologist was a small Asian woman with a dour demeanor. “My name Tran,” she said resentfully.

We started a test with the thingy on my belly, which reminded me of the ultrasound tests you get when you’re pregnant. It was a nice feeling. I asked Tran, “Do you have kids?” and she said, “No kids. Not enough money for kid.”

Uh-oh. Now I felt sad. Here I am, a middle class white women who could afford two kids, and this poor immigrant is servicing me, so to speak, on a crappy income, unable to live the life she deserves, that everyone deserves.

“Yeah,” I said stupidly, “They are expensive!” “What are you doing tomorrow [Thanksgiving]? I asked next, hoping to cheer her up with conversation. “Sleep,” she answered tersely.

Oh god, okay. So I said, “Oh, I love to sleep too! It’s my favorite thing in the world!” She brightened up a little.

Next, I had to get undressed and she stuck the thingy up inside me. With my legs in stirrups, and the internal “discomfort”, I remembered the feeling of giving birth, the agony and the ecstasy, and it was shockingly visceral. I wanted to give birth with all my might!

But then it really started to get uncomfortable and I said OW. I asked her if she saw anything awful and she reminded me that she wasn’t allowed to say anything.

She stayed in the room while I got dressed and I asked her in a sympathetic tone when she could go home. It was around 4. She said 4:30. I said, “Oh good! It’s coming right up!” She told me I was the last patient of the day. Then she told me that it was the last day of her job.

Shit! Had she been fired? Or was she just moving on? I asked her what her plan was and she said she didn’t know. “But I am healthy, I have brain, I can do work!” she said plaintively. “I not going to kill myself!” she exclaimed, as though meaning the opposite.

Fuck! What was going on, I wondered, my brain whirling. “Of course, of course, you can get any job!” I told her. “You didn’t like working here?” I asked her. She looked down as she straightened things up. “They don’t like me. They not happy with me. Say I am mean to patients.”

Well, she was kind of mean, but that no longer mattered. I told her that she could start a new life, she was just 40 years old, not too old to have a family or do whatever she wanted. I told her about all the places I’d worked where no one appreciated me, about the time I called my boss a cunt and got fired, the fact that I could not work with people looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do. She listened intently. She asked a few questions.

Now she was smiling a little while we talked about our mutual dislike of cooking on holidays. I thanked her and said it was nice meeting her, and added, “Hopefully, I won’t die from a gigantic uterine tumor the size of a cantaloupe!”

She smiled and said, “You have nothing to worry about.”

One thing I’m good at is tricking the radiologists into telling me what they saw. You don’t get to be my age for nothing.

But somehow, I’ve ended up making a million doctor appointments, as though I’m a car getting everything checked before a long trip.

Sticking with the car analogy, I don’t even want to leave the garage but I guess I thought I should know what condition I’m in, just in case.

Today I went to the eye doctor, who revealed that I can have cataract surgery, even though I wasn’t aware I had cataracts! What are they, even? All I know is, the surgery would improve my vision so much that I wouldn’t need contact lenses.

That sounds wonderful! Except there must be a downside, like possible blindness?

Who cares! Life has become a game of dodge-ball, and I was never good at that. Cancer, blindness, fragile bones, you try to keep ducking but there they are.

Also, and this is way too much information, for the first time in years I went to a gynecologist, who loved what she saw and said my muscles were too toned! She pressed several different places and asked how each place felt. Some were “Don’t love it”, a couple were “Ow”, one was “Nothing” and others were pretty nice, although I am too classy to say “Keep going!”

Later this week I have an appointment to discuss my shitty bones, and then a regular annual physical.

I feel a weird mixture of dread and elation. Dread of finding out awful things and elation at knowing I don’t care about dying, if only it would hurry up.

If you were ever a smoker, I’ll bet you think if you had six months to live, you would smoke your head off. If you’re concerned about your weight, you probably think you’d go on a wild 6-month eating binge.

Me, I eat cookies all night long, I don’t exercise, I don’t care about my cholesterol, I don’t want anything more than a little dope to smoke and something good to watch on Netflix. I’m ready to die, like Leonard Cohen was before he recanted, but first I have to go to a million doctors.

But here’s the good news: Two different blood pressure tests today at two different offices revealed that it was 150 over 80, and also 114 over 51.

So that’s a relief.

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