Health: What Is It Good For?

[copied from dland]

I just got off the phone with an insurance company nurse, who called from Minnesota (to New Jersey) to quiz me on my condition so that I can qualify for long-term care insurance, which seemed like a good idea of something to get. So she asked all the questions one might expect, you know, the kind of test that if you get 100 on it, you're probably already dead. But I was listening to myself answer all her questions ("no, no, no, no, no") and it occurred to me that I seem to be in way better shape than I generally think I'm in.

Okay, I wasn't all that truthful about the weekly exercise routine. Maybe I told her what I PLAN to do, instead of what I really do, which is basically not a damn thing. What I described was what I did during a six-week period this past summer, when I joined a gym and actually went, until the ragweed bloomed and I was nauseous and congested for about a month. But I'll be going back to the gym any day now. Really, I will.

The trick was this: almost all of the nurse's questions involved that magical period of time known as "the last five years." And since the imminent breakdown of all my body systems that appeared last spring turned out to be all stress, and actually went away the very day after my mother died following an eight-year illness, I don't think that counts. It didn't fit into any of her questions, anyway.

She did ask if I'd had any brain disease (encephalitis, tumors, etc.) And I said "In the last five years?" "Yes," she said.

So I actually never had to tell her -- no lying, no deception, I really am a remarkably honest person, not counting the exercise thing -- that I had a brain tumor removed from right out of my head about 11 years ago, and that I'm missing a chunk of skull about three inches across as a result of that surgery, and I'm totally deaf on one side because they had to snip out a significant section of my hearing nerve, while they were at it. It was a tumor of the hearing nerve, so I just got to end up being half-deaf and with a hole in my head as a result, instead of being actually dead. So all in all, a good deal for me.

Can you believe it? This nurse on the phone thinks I am the very picture of excellent health. And me with a head hole as big as a racquetball. Huh.


ENTRY #7