White Male, 45

I was to follow up with my doctor three days after turning up at the ER. That would have been New Year’s Eve. The new year came in on a Friday morning, so there was the weekend as well. And then there were another three weeks that somehow went by, and then this week, when the pain shifted to a higher register. I finally made it today.

The doctor’s hands did their work. My concern was the liver. “That’s on the other side,” he said; “The other side.” He says most things twice, so I got to feel stupid twice. He has Tourette’s (which the Microsoft Word spellchecker wants to change to Toilettes). To avoid whatever it is he would otherwise do involuntarily, he intermittently stares at something on the ceiling, and, to get back to the matter at hand, he repeats whatever he has just said.

Twice relieved, then, of fears for the liver, I moved onto pneumonia. But the doctor’s hands had located the spleen.

I got a referral for a CT scan. I stripped and lay flat, feet pointing towards the electromagnetic donut hole. When the IV was inserted, there was the taste of salt and then the taste of ball bearings, just as advised. The sensation around the groin that was supposed to quickly follow was a complete disappointment.

The doctor found hardened and hardening blood between the ribs and whatever else is in there which can conspire with ribs to capture and harden blood. I missed exactly what he said, twice. He’ll be talking to me soon.

In the meantime, I have disk and can’t resist a look. CT imaging - from a number of x-ray beams and detectors operating, as you move through the tunnel, on a spiral path - has been compared to looking into a loaf of bread by cutting it into thin slices. This is not a comforting thought.

I know what I’m looking at. I’m not saying I understand what I’m looking at. There’s a fearsome shadow covering the lower third of one lung, for example, but I can’t tell if it’s inside, in front of, or behind it, and that is just about the only body part I recognize (along with the spine, which I know from the Natural History Museum): the rest of it could be something viewed in night vision from the bottom of the ocean, or an image, before enhancement, sent back from the Hubble telescope.

But I know what I’m looking at, nevertheless. With the hand that has lifted glass after glass for decades, held the burning cigarettes for as long, and shoveled up a reckless diet, I click the mouse on frame after unlovely frame of the vulnerable, ephemeral viscera, cavities, and bones of a white male, forty-five. And he doesn’t look good. They never do, from the inside. But this one doesn’t look good at all.