Late Vic 2

From Sokoshinbutsu

**BAJILLION**

One thing about having enough money to do whatever you want is doctoring.

I’m not the kind of man who seeks medical attention for a cold, but the amount of partying I was doing was doing a number on me, on my mind and my health, and I thought I should go get looked at at least.

Existential crises arise from weird shits and odd pains and mysterious bruises.

A man of sound mind can write these things off as standard damage from being one of the things that goes bump in the night, drunk and having relieved oneself of all of one's cocaine.

I was truly enjoying the level of enhanced feral I had taken on, but in the first sober hours after a chemically complicated night of socializing, a man has his doubts.

Cuhdooshess

I went to the doctor for a battery of tests and I told the doctor I went to see everything. I’ve never had therapy but the experience of therapy at its best must be akin to telling a person who you have hired to assess the state of your health all the secrets you can’t tell your mom or your friends from work.

My habits had become unspeakable.

I had stayed up late the night before finishing some piled amount of cocaine and writing down a comprehensive list of my chemical intake over the eighteen months or three years or whatever since I stopped working and started running around in bars and telling lies to strangers. There were a wide variety of painkillers and pharmaceutical speed with notation as to whether I had eaten or sniffed them.

Some things had stars by them in that I had noted them to be exceptional while I was maniacally listing them- Modafinil sticks out in my mind as having a star by it.

Black and reds, reds, white cross, Adderall, cocaine, ephedrine, ritalin, crank, pink mist which I believe was oxycontin, darvacet, percocet, morphocodone stolen from a dead man, Tylenol 3 which I was told was codeine, mescaline pills, lsd, mushrooms and a wide variety of indistinguishable pills all of which were called Molly- none of which were at all the same thing over the course of my recent discombobulating run since returning from Tibet some many months or few years before. I’d lost track of time a little.

In slightly larger text next to the drugs list I’d written “drinking” in all caps. I neglected to mention marijuana at all, though it was ubiquitous.

It was winter, but spring was coming on.

What snow there was left in the shaded parts of the city was filthy and nearly indistinguishable from the cement it sat on, but for the melt water made.

Doctors, I think, might be encouraged to keep a certain remove from their patients. This doctor was about my age, probably mid thirties. He was amicable when I came in. I thought maybe he had a look of concern on his face but I didn’t know him well enough to know whether that was just something he did.

While I was actively trading, I went to him once a year if I was well to get looked over. My working life had been a little stressful and perhaps over focused. There were parts of my life that didn't get the attention they deserved and this young man and I had met once a year so he could tell me if I had anything concerning wrong with me. He hit my knee with a hammer. He stuck his finger up my ass and grabbed my balls and took my temperature and looked in my ears and took some blood.

There was never anything. One year he took a mole off my shoulder. I think his kid needed braces or something. I knew I was fine. I just let him do it. There isn’t even a scar.

This time he kind of looked at me like I was an asshole as I listed what I had been up to since I got back from Kathmandu. I think I mentioned the hooker.

Honestly, I felt great after I told him, but he seemed to be suffering.

He ordered a battery of tests and did everything he always did besides. He didn't talk much. He scheduled an MRI and a barium enima and he took a swab from inside my cheek to send off for a dna test for a gene linked to Parkinson's disease, which was a new test, but I said sure.

I felt like I was going to die, but it had become a sort of normal feeling from how I’d been living.

In the doctor's office with your pants around your ankles it becomes easier to accept that you are in fact going to die. I gave the guy every opportunity to find out how I was going to die and then tell me.

So he did.