The Prognosis Isn't Good

This one I wrote last summer when I was pretty sure I was about to die. Clearly, I lived. At the time, however, I was making lists of my belongings and deciding who would inherit what, e.g. Dad gets the giant Pink Floyd poster, Mom gets the DVD collection, eldest child gets the Koontz books, youngest child my stuffed animal collection...you see my point. Luckily, I've lived long enough to finish my manuscript. Go me! I'm rather glad I lived. I love my DVDs.

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A click on brilliant blue words is followed by the last, and another collection of letters fills up my screen. Each sentence causes already scared eyes to go wider, and I’m certain Death has come to take me home. It doesn’t ride a pale horse or even pedal in on a pale trike. It creeps in slowly like paranoid cells of doom that slither betwixt binary code and absolutes.

So sayeth the website that lets me enter my symptoms into convenient little boxes.

Who needs doctors, right? I’m sure the guy who wrote this has a medical degree or they’d not be allowed to maintain a site full of medical information. The Internet is a highly regulated entity, after all, and there’s rules. I mean, Jojo the dog-faced boy has a site and he can’t have it unless he is dog-faced. The world has to make sense. There is order in the chaos, and it manifests itself via the electronic impulses that fuel my shiny-box-o-information-highway.

I’ve read the signs in the most literal sense, deciding the stars cannot predict my digestive habits nor my body’s ability to defend itself against cell destruction, and instead read actual words. These words tell me the light at the end of the tunnel is hanging on the wall of an x-ray room, and within its rays glow ominous areas of darkness that mock me with a hazy but discernable smiley face.

Except there’s more than two eyes and the smile looks more like a Charlie Brown stripe. Or sort of like a crushed bottle of mini- M&Ms, and all the candies are scattered around in my body instead of nice and safe in my stomach, floating in acid and Diet Dr Pepper.

Although, now that I look at it, it’s possible the darkness is shaped like the Virgin Islands, which is incredibly ironic on many levels when I think about its location. I’ll leave that open to interpretation.