Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
My doctor is a good man. Patient. Thorough. The kind of physician who has been quietly documenting the slow unraveling of the human condition for more than twenty years and has recently started documenting mine specifically.
He has me in a different color on his calendar. Red, I assume. Or the kind of orange they paint on guardrails before a dangerous curve. His nurses rotate so no one absorbs the full cumulative weight alone. I believe there is a brief pre-visit meeting. Someone brings donuts. His assistant probably pages through my file the night before and goes home to hug her children.
I am, in other words, a gift to the practice of medicine.
This year’s visit opened, as these things do, with the wellness inventory; the standard emotional triage designed to establish whether I am a functional adult or a liability to myself and others.
“Any depression lately?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Good. And are you finding time for activities you genuinely enjoy?”
“I am.”
He clicked his pen and started to move on.
“Aren’t you going to ask what I enjoy?”
He paused. You could see the math happening behind his eyes. He has been doing this long enough to understand that asking me a follow-up question is like pulling the thread on a sweater that was already on fire. But he is a thorough man.
“What do you enjoy?” he said.
“Sitting in the corner of a dark room,” I said. “Weeping.”
He wrote something down. I assume it said patient is fine.
Testosterone, Application Zones, and the Scientific Method
We moved on to medications. Specifically, the testosterone supplement I’ve been applying to my shoulders, which is apparently the prescribed approach now, in lieu of, I don’t know, hard weight-lifting work and personal discipline.
“Has it had any noticeable effect on your energy levels?” he asked.
“Some,” I said.
“And on your sexual functioning?”
I considered this at length.
“Well,” I said. “Not when I rub it on my shoulders.”
I swear someone in the hallway did a rimshot.
He wrote something else. His notes have gotten more interesting over the years. I think of them as a serial publication. A man’s gradual transformation from physician to ethnographer.
My hearing issue came up next. I walked him through the situation: left ear in open revolt, words arriving scrambled, daily life now a low-stakes improv exercise.
“Do you think a hearing aid might help?” he asked.
“I fed the goldfish this morning,” I said.
He looked at me.
“That was a misheard sentence,” I clarified. “You said something. I heard that.”
“What did I actually say?”
“No idea. I usually piece it together from context. Sometimes the context isn’t there.”
“Has that caused any problems?”
“I thought Karie said there was a fire in the kitchen,” I said. “She said she needed to retire to the bedroom. There was a brief period of unnecessary alarm. I will buy another fire extinguisher.”
He clicked his pen several times. This is a thing he does. I’ve started counting.
Four clicks. That one was four clicks.
Everything I Have Tried for the Drinking (A Retrospective)
We arrived at the topic of alcohol, which my doctor has been circling for approximately two decades. He does it gently, tactfully, with the careful optimism of a man who still believes in the capacity for human improvement despite mounting evidence.
“Any progress on that front?” he asked.
“I’ve tried everything,” I said.
This is true.
Pills. There are pills designed to make alcohol taste terrible. They work. I was willing to push through. I defeated them. Science is silly.
Magnetic bracelets. These claimed to alter body chemistry through the power of magnets positioned around the wrist. The mechanism was not explained in clinical detail. The bracelet is now attached to the refrigerator, which I regard as a reasonable outcome. It is holding up a takeout menu for a Thai place that closed in 2021.
One AA meeting. The people were kind. The coffee was authentic. I had been culturally primed, however, to expect a room full of people who had stopped drinking and subsequently built a hydroelectric dam, or performed their own appendectomy, or at minimum become excellent at something. Everyone was just regular. Struggling. Real. It moved me more than I expected. I went home and made a drink to process the experience.
“And then there were the hypnosis recordings,” I said.
“How many sessions?”
“Fourteen. Called “Stop Drinking Without Willpower Sleep Hypnosis.” Audio. I play them at home, in the recliner.”
“And how did those go?”
“Well,” I said, “I fall asleep within four minutes. Every single time. I have no memory of any content past the opening breathing exercise. I wake up forty minutes later with a blanket on me that I did not put there, which means Karie walked past at some point and decided covering me was preferable to conversation.”
“So you don’t know if they worked.”
“I don’t know what’s in them,” I said. “That’s the more pressing issue. I was unconscious for fourteen sessions of content. For all I know, I have been programmed to assassinate a diplomat.”
He set down his pen.
“The recording just… plays,” I continued. “Into the room. Into my sleeping brain. Whatever that woman said to me over fourteen sessions, she said it to an unguarded subconscious with no security posture whatsoever. She could have put anything in there.”
“Has anything… manifested?”
“Not yet. But I don’t know the trigger word. I was asleep for the trigger word. It could be ‘cucumber.’ It could be ‘fiduciary.’ It could be ‘good morning.’ I have absolutely no framework for knowing.”
My doctor nodded once, very slowly, in the way of a man watching something approach him that he cannot stop.
“And given the hearing situation,” I said, “I don’t even need to hear the actual word. I need to hear something in its neighborhood. Karie said ‘pass the mustard’ last Sunday and I experienced a full-body startle response that knocked a lamp off the end table.”
“Any particular concerns about where you might be deployed?”
“I’ve been avoiding the UVA International Studies department as a precaution. Those people all think they’re diplomats, or adjacent to diplomats, which I believe counts under the program’s rules of engagement.” I leaned forward slightly. “I also won’t go to the Harris Teeter on Route 29 anymore. There’s a man who works the deli counter who looks like he could be a regional attaché. I’m not taking chances.”
“What do you do when you feel the response coming on?”
“I’ve developed a protocol,” I said. “If I hear something that might be the word, I immediately think about the magnetic bracelet on my fridge. I don’t know why this works. It just seems to disrupt the sequence.”
“Does it work?”
“The lamp is still broken,” I said. “So: mixed results.”
He picked his pen back up. He was smiling now. Not the professional-courtesy smile that starts appointments. The real one. The one that a man earns slowly, over years, by showing up consistently and delivering.
“I’m going to put in my notes,” he said, “that you appear to be in good spirits.”
“I do my best,” I said.
He booked me for next year.
Same time. Same color on the calendar. Same warning to the staff.
I will be there. Assuming the word isn’t spoken between now and then.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
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