We Are All Riding A Bucking Broncho In Mortality's Rodeo.

I am going to discover my best-before date on June 1st. I have an appointment with a Respirologist who needs to test my lungs and confirm the findings of numerous CT scans. They indicate fibrosis is not only present but spreading across the base of my lungs as if it were wet cement oozing from a construction worker's mixer onto earth being turned into pavement.

The disease is always progressive, which is a polite way of saying terminal. But there are new drugs now that can slow this fibrosis garrotte. Time for me is still for sale. But I wait nervously for what the physical and emotional cost will be to extend my duration on the right side of the ground.

I believe I am still asymptomatic because I walk at least nine kilometres every day without breathlessness. Genetic inheritance is a different matter and gives me reason to be concerned. Interstitial Lung Disease runs across my family tree as chins once did for the Hapsburgs.

At his end, my dad's lungs were enmeshed in fibrosis. But this disease either came to him very late in life or was the sleeping cat of illnesses that lay dormant for decades. Doctors found my dad's fibrosis during an examination for something else when he was 87. I only learned about it because I was asked to hand deliver his medical files to a hospital emergency department. When I questioned his GP about the fibrosis, his response was, "Don't tell him because there is nothing that can be done. So why bother worrying him about it?"

So I didn't, and I assumed the burden of fretting for my father. Internally, I was in a panic every time someone with a runny nose or a cough wanted to hug my dad after he gave one of his talks about life before public healthcare. I thought sooner or later people's love for him was going to kill him off.

Dad didn't die until he was 95, and that should give me comfort for my health predicament were it not that my brother clocked off at fifty from the sickness that is present in my lungs. Interstitial Lung Disease has as many swings as roundabouts for its sufferers. Yet in my familial experience, it always ends as it does for a fish out of water- longing for breath.

My appointment with the Respirologist is in a town not far from me but far enough that I have to find transportation to it. There is a bus that does a milk run between here and there early in the morning and then in the late afternoon. A trip that is no more than 50 km will take me upwards of an hour and a half. But I am not complaining because I am thankful there is that bus, or else I'd be forced to take a taxi that would charge me the amount I pay on groceries every month.

Being told I had rectal cancer in January 2020 was more convenient because I could walk to that appointment for my mortal destiny. Since it was winter, the air was cold on my trudge to the surgeon's office, so it cleared my head of negative thoughts. After the doctor gave me the "I am sorry you have cancer news," Peggy Lee's "Is that all there is," ear wormed its way into my head.

I'd been to this death rodeo before when I had a heart attack at 41 in 2005. It was bad enough that it required a medical evacuation by helicopter to a cardiac hospital. Although when I got there, the surgeon intent on stenting me discovered the clot had squeezed its way through my arteries narrowed by genetics and Camel cigarettes like a 10-year-old boy from long ago might sneak under a circus tent for a free look at the big top attractions.

Long story short, I survived, although it battered me both physically and emotionally for years. Who knew you'd get a form of depression from surviving a heart attack?

The heart attack changed me for the better, I believe. Before then, I was in the booze business, primarily in Russia. It was honest work in a dishonest environment. I had my fair share of run-ins with some of the most incompetent Russian mafioso types. Although, during one encounter at a train station, these buffoon mobsters tried to live up to their reputation for thuggery.

They were irked because I managed to extricate them from a contract where they were to be paid a commission for being mobsters, albeit incompetent ones who had fallen into banditry when the Soviet Union collapsed. So, feeling cheated, they confronted me while I was about to board a train that was taking me to Moscow from the Urals.

On that day, one even screamed at me while waving a pistol in his hand, emulating B movie theatrics, "You will never leave Russia alive." I did, and then I came back for years without a scratch on me.

But doing business or living my life never felt the same after my heart attack. I had been given too early the melancholic knowledge that I was finite. I am not profound, which is why I know my perception of life's fragility would have faded were it not for fate's repetitive tempus fugit reminders to me. My brother Pete died two years after the grim reaper tried to shake hands with me. My father almost died of a blood clot a year after Peter demanded the respirator keeping him alive in an ICU hospital ward be turned off.

After that, I spent 8 years caring for my father, who hop scotched his way from one illness to the next while we worked on his Last Stand Project. But he did die, despite battling death for years with the bravado of a street fighter going against a gang of hooligans with only the broken end of a beer bottle as a weapon.

I had that same gusto when the Big C came for me in 2020. Now, after three years of thumb wrestling with my mortality in a COVID world while living skint, I am kind of tired. Not defeated so much as spent of energy. I am the battery six months in a remote control still working-just not clicking as fast as before.

 I've existed too long as if I were out on a ledge of a building, trying not to lose my balance from the gusts of wind hitting me and slip to the hard asphalt below me. If it was a radio competition, I'd have won a new car for endurance by now.

So in a week, when I go to meet my destiny on a bus that traverses a milk run between here and there, I will go knowing the tune that awaits me. But with whatever I've got left in me, I'm still going to refuse to dance to it. I have other melodies that must play out for me first in my jukebox of existence.  

As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts because I really need your help this month. Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. This month is proving to be real scramble to get next months together. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John

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