I’m in a large white room and I’m chained to a toilet.
Well, perhaps not chained – but I can’t move. Something prevents me from moving, and I am naked. There are several people in the room – men and women in white coats. I feel like I am at the mercy of some vast and terrible medical bureaucracy that un-sick people choose to never think of until it is too late. Now it is too late for me.
Something is shoved, very uncomfortably, up my ass, and a machine whines and hums, recording all the bad news. I feel terribly weak now – just sitting on this toilet as these medical workers bustle about, making calls and arranging consultations.
What follows is hazy; I can’t remember it because perhaps I should have written all of this when I had just woken up at five in the morning. But I’m sure that my insides were invaded, recorded, all for my own good, because what is inside me is ten times worse than anything this proctological nightmare hospital can show me.
They are done now, and the next think I see is a woman’s face, a nurse, nurse practitioner, or doctor. She looks smiley, good-natured, and she has become rude and unfeeling because she’s given this news far too many times to bother being sensitive about it.
You’re going to have to think about who’s going to be in your kids’ lives, she tells me. Because you’re not going to be there. Look. Look at the black marks.
In front of me is readout that is not unlike the markers for DNA. It is plastered with little black dots – many have a label. Cancer. Malignant. Free Radicals. Somehow it is a roadmap for all the things in my lower intestinal track that will kill me.
What is inside me frightens me. Not this terrible, impersonal place that has me sitting naked on a toilet.
Welcome to the fearful dreams of the middle-aged, as we worry about death in all its most boring and painful incarnations. Me in a hospice bed, crapping my diaper as my wife prods my kids to come closer and ‘be more respectful.’
I hope I don’t have too many more dreams that this. And I should probably be smart and go to the doctor for a checkup one of these days.
