Uncertainty

Originally Posted Sunday, November 23, 2014

Forty eight hours without solid food and a ton of antibiotics which have torn up my upper g.i. track so that the entire things feels rotten.  I am still bloated and in pain below. 

"Ewww.  TMI!" 

O.K.  I'm not telling you everything, trust me.  I am being very selective.  And in truth, I am worried. I am a worrier without doubt, but The Fear has me in its grips.  Two days of bed rest, I think, should have improved the way I feel, but rather I feel the same or worse.  Perhaps it is time to eat some food, I think, but I am not thinking clearly and cannot decide.  Is yogurt good for me?  I'll try yogurt, I think.  I feel very, very weak. 

All I could manage yesterday was to sit on the couch and watch t.v.  I decided to try a series I had heard was good but was never intrigued enough to watch, "Californication."  It is just the thing to binge watch right now.  I am glad I never watched it so that now I have something light to do.  People have told me I'd like it, that I'd identify with the main character.  Yesterday I watched the entire first season (half hour episodes) and just dipped into the second.  I guess that is on my agenda for today.  I thought I would be up and at 'em by now, but that isn't happening.  It will be another day of sick and silent existence alone upon the couch.  I'm just too out of it to read. 

I keep remembering bits and snatches of my hospital visit that do not inspire me with confidence.  The people were nice enough, but there is a lack of serious purpose in America today and an even more serious lack of standards in our educational institutions.  But I have always said fuck it, once you are in the hands of doctors, your life is never your own again.  The thing to do is to stay healthy or as close to it as possible.  The men of my father's generation avoided doctors like the plague.  "Do you know how many people doctors have killed?" they would say.  It was impossible to get them to go. 

Go back and look at the medical journals from the '50s and '60s if you want to be horrified.  Look to see how they treated heart attacks and cancer.  You will be just as horrified to look back in another fifty years.  Nope, the trick is to stay healthy or die. 

That is what I keep thinking as I sit alone on my couch just as I have always thought.  We are given a finite life that starts crazy and ends bad.  To think you will escape that is ludicrous.  To accept it is miserable. 

The fellow in the picture is a doctor.  Was.  He's gone now, like everyone else.  I'm sure people begged for him to come when they got the sickness.  He may have been the best of his time.