Salamander
Fire Walking

Perhaps this is some sort of mild PTSD, where I just can’t let go of that point in time where my life jumped the shark and became a medical situation comedy instead of an infomercial with all the seductiveness of leftover meatloaf. I’ve come to feel that the situation comedy should be canceled, but at this point I’ve been typecast and I’m not sure I’ll ever get another starring role. Let’s face it, I’m too old to play the stoic ingénue, (marginally) too young to grab a role in some British sitcom about geriatric merry-makers, too able-bodied to grab a role in some “Fault is in our Stars” tear-jerker and too Muggle to grab an O.W.L. in Defense Against the Black Arts. Everything that happened to me starting twenty years ago this afternoon has left me Ouroboros rather than Phoenix; more likely to depict the cycle of life as a hoop snake than as a poult rising from the ashes of yesterday’s turkey dinner.

To celebrate the 20th annual Survivor’s Day I took the entire day off of work for an annual appointment with my transplant team at Penn. I’ve become dull enough for them that even after last year’s series of mini-rejections I am assigned to the bottom rung of transplant practitioners, more concerned about my blood glucose readings and mammogram history than anything to do with the transplant. The Low Doc on the Totem Pole [which is a total misnomer; in Eskimo society, the most venerated totem is on the bottom of the pole, holding the others up] had all kinds of ideas about what needed to be inflicted on me this time around. She wanted to make sure that I’m following up with a hematologist, dermatologist/oncologist, endocrinologist, gynecologist and oh, by the way, we’re still waiting for you to get that dexa scan. I tire of adding yet more doctors to my inventory of practitioners. I tire of adding yet more tests to check for things I’m at low risk for (NOW they want me to see a hematologist about my Budd-Chiari syndrome when it was cured by a transplant thirteen years ago?) It would appear that it has become my duty in life to divert as much of my personal economy as possible into the coffers of medical specialists.

But today is Survivor’s Day. And I take with this the knowledge that just as I survived the diseases, I’ll survive the cures and those who push the nostrums. I celebrated with dinner out with the Professor last night; tonight he teaches, and I’ll celebrate on my own by reviewing the last third of my life and how it brought me here, against odds and reason. And I’ll remind myself that if my life has become a medical sitcom, then that’s OK, because the whole point is to get a laugh out of it all. If you can’t laugh at it, it ain’t worth living.