The convenient thing about being a physician is that you know how bad it is right off the bat. You know your options, and the lack thereof. Of course, there is always hope. I never extinguish hope for it is always there. No matter what. But I do know the reality, the inevitability of what I have, and it will very likely not be easy.
I don’t know what I have, but if it’s like last time, they didn’t know either. In medicine “idiopathic” means we don’t know. I couldn’t find a similar case in the literature. The other ones mostly had causes, the most common cause being tuberculosis. “It’s from a virus,” they said in 2001. Back then, the answer was to cut out my entire pericardium, which is the sac that surrounds the heart. Don’t need a pericardium; but, the pericardium is the same layer as the pleura, which is the lining of the lung, and that is what gave me pause at the time.
Now that I think of it, I do feel that I perhaps felt the faintest whisperings of it over the past year or more, but they were brief, and I troubled myself to not think of them until that first disconcerting vibration of the sub in my chest, my first clue of the potential torture from progression from some weird disease that, as far as I know, affects only me. All my searches revealed asbestosis, mesothelioma, lymphoma, pneumonia, tuberculosis; none of which were the answer last time, and probably not this time either. This means that I have a very singular disease, a chronic fibrosing pleuritis that is turning my lungs to a wet, sticky, constricting leather, and that is not good. That is my fear, which may be unfounded, but my experience with disease is that once it starts, it progresses for why would it start in the first place if not to get worse.
Perhaps this makes me special somehow, carrying this unique burden that is so rare I cannot find another similar case in the medical literature, a benign but terminal process with an exquisitely unpleasant ending of painful frantic starving breaths for air until I can no longer. I wonder if I was chosen for this because I’ve been a good person or a bad one. Perhaps I’ve been a bad person, and this is my punishment for a life ill-lived, and I’ve already been consigned to hell, and this is only the start of it; or, perhaps I’ve been a good person, or maybe not a good person, rather, good enough; good enough for redemption, to suffer, to be a physical manifestation of His Grace. After all, like I said, this is quite a singular condition. It is very likely that there are more people in the world with the stigmata of Christ than have what I have, not that I’m Jesus, but maybe a little bit, like a little bit more than that part of Jesus that’s in all of us. I guess I’ll go with that until I know more.
As for now, I can breathe deep most of the time and there is no pain. I take my four aspirin four times a day for the anti-inflammatory effect, and one Prilosec a day since I think I was getting an ulcer, but even that’s better now. I look at the sky a lot. I love the cerulean blue, it’s one of my favorite colors, how it’s translucent and goes on forever, and I love the stars, always have. Everything is brighter now. I already feel a better person. It’s like God is making me a saint, and this is my burden, my horse-hair shirt reminding me of my date with eternity with every breath I take, and like Jesus in the garden, I pray to be delivered of this burden, but it occurs to me that this may be my purpose.