The Saga

Wednesday.

"Nice to meet you" says Doctor Rafael Rodriguez offering me his hand across the desk.

I'm partial to alliterative names, my first real girlfriend was named Laurel Larson and my father went through life as Walt Walton. I like Dr. Rodriguez right off-the-bat for his warm smile and firm hand shake as well as his mellifluous moniker.

"What can I do for you?" he asks as we settle into chairs at his desk.

How do I put this?, I think. "Well" I say, "I have a sort of mystery illness that latched on to me last October and won't let go."

"Tell me about it," he says, so I describe my symptoms in detail and emphasize the one that bothers me most, my freakin' fatigue. "I have no energy, doctor, and I tire faster than a fat guy in an uphill marathon" Truth is, I'm taking more naps than Rip Van Winkle." We then chat about my previous lifestyle for ten or twelve minutes before we get back to business.

"What medications have you taken to treat your problem?" he asks and I list the antibiotics, inhalants and steroids I've popped over the last three plus months in the so far fruitless attempt to exorcise my be-sicked bod of its demon.

"Hmmm," he says, "are those your X-rays?" They are. I've brought them along even though I had been told by two other physicians that they don't show anything of interest other than that I had smoked for three or four hundred years. I hand them over. There are two, both chest X-rays, one taken in October the other a month or so later. As he takes them from their enormous envelopes and hangs them on his light screen, I tell him they've been dubbed normal.

He looks at the oldest first, then the other. He goes back and forth between them a few times and then says succinctly, "These are NOT normal." He waves me over to his side and points at a circle of light on my left lung appearing in the October X-ray. "This" he says, is pneumonia." He then replaces that X-ray with the November one and notes that the pneumonia is gone. Nice, I think. No problem there. He then points at another circle of light emanating from higher up on my lung and says, "This is what concerns me." He shows me that the spot exists on both x-rays. Although I like to be creative from time to time, my next question was the same one that everyone on the planet would ask, to wit, "What is that?"

"I don't know" he answers. "It's a mass of some kind...Let's sit down."

A MASS! A MASS! I DOAN NEED NO STEENKING MASS!, I'm thinking in large neon letters as we get back to our seats.

The doc says, "My first thought when you described your symptoms was that you might have Myasthenia Gravis. Do you know what that is?"

I do. Well a little bit anyway. It's a muscle disease of some sort. I nod my head. I'm still mostly thinking, A MASS!

He says, "And that may, in fact, be the problem, but I need more information. What I am going to recommend is that you get a Cat Scan so we can have a closer look at your chest and then we can decide how to proceed. We have to know what that mass is."
I note that he is avoiding all the scary words like tumor or cancer, but he does say something about "and whether the mass is benign or not."

Being the well-heeled fat cat that you all know I am, living as I do on the ginormous amount of money Social Security pays me each month, you can guess my next question.

"Not much" he answers.. "About three hundred dollars." (It turns out to be three-forty.)

I tell him I can handle that and we schedule the scan for Friday morning, nine A.M. as I need to be in David that day anyway for a skin check and stitch removal by my friend and yours the Abominable Doctor Panagas. I had had a skin cancer on my back incised by him on Monday.

My new pal in the medical profession, a profession I really don't want to have anything to do with but, hey, what else CAN you do, Doctor Rafael Rodriguez, then writes me a couple of scripts to clear up my lingering pneumonia/bronchitis symptoms, a cough and phlegm, and off I go. RTGFKAR is waiting for me in the cleverly named Waiting Room admiring the receptionist's butt, a thing I can't blame him for as it is truly an eye magnet. I follow it all the way to her desk where she sits and I pay her thirty-five dollars for the visit.

Thursday is uneventful and passes slower than usual as I ponder the word "mass" and what it might mean.

Friday morning I wake up with the answer. It must be the skin cancer I had removed from my back Monday. It was more or less in line with the spot on my X-rays. It would have been there growing gradually back in October and November when the rays were taken. I make a note to ask the doc if this might possibly be the answer to what the mass is.

And I would have asked him had he shown up that day. While waiting for my turn at the Scanner, Lovely Butt calls and says the doctor needs to reschedule for Monday, nine A.M. Alrighty then, I say, I'll wait until Monday.

"Where's your cat?" the Scan tech asks me as I peel off my shirt.

"What cat?" I ask in reply.

"This is a cat scan" he tells me. "I can't scan your cat if you didn't bring it."

Okay, that only happened in my mind.

In reality I climb up on the table and the tech and I have a quick conversation in Spanish about me not moving and when I should hold a deep breath and when I should breathe normally during the scan. The table moves me electronically under a huge plastic arch where I hear nothing but do see some spots of light blinking across the front of the scanner. In less than three minutes we are done.

Woowoo Charly is with me on this day and we next truck along to the La-bor-a-tory where it is colder than an Igloo and where I have a quart or two of blood removed from my arm for some other tests old Doc R.R. has ordered. After that, Woowoo and I head for breakfast. I had been warned not to eat before the scan.

After breakfast, still having hours to kill before my appointment with Panagas, we wander over to the Casino across the street from the Gran National Hotel. Armed with five rolls of nickles each, we assault the slots. Playing Deuces Wild Poker on one of them, I hit a Royal Flush (with three deuces) and win 125 nickles. I'm thinking my luck is still holding in the good to excellent range since I won a raffle drawing at La Reina Department Store before Christmas. The machine asks me if I want to go double or nothing, high card wins. I say you betcha. It goes first and draws a king. So much for good luck. My nine of hearts comes up woefully short.

Later, at Panagas' lair, he answers my question about whether my skin cancer could be the spot on my X-ray with a decisive, "No way, it's not possible." He also tells me that the biopsy on the chunk of my back he shoveled out Monday had not yet come in, so he was unable to clue me if it was one of the "bad" cancers or just another basal cell, my usual.

It's going to be a limbo weekend all around, I think. I'll have plenty of time to watch college hoops, NFL football and further contemplate that peculiar word "mass." Curiously, I'm not worried. I don't feel bad, I have no pain and I'm just a little tired. Despite my double down result, I still feel lucky.

The above was written Saturday morning.

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Monday 1:30 P.M.

Fat! Fat! Who woulda thunk it? Placing the scanned cat on his light board Dr. R.R. points at the suspicious mass and says, "This is just fatty tissue, a thing not uncommon in people your age." Behind me I hear a quiet but still audible "pheww." Woowoo Charly is standing there. As for me, well, I knew it was nothing all along. I do admit, though, to not spelling relief R-O-L-A-I-D-S but rather with a lower case a-l-r-i-g-h-t-y t-h-e-n!

That worry now gone I can return to fretting over the Broncos not having a franchise quarterback, Carmelo Anthony's latest ankle sprain and what-the-hell is wrong with me anyway. "Let's talk some more" is Doc R.R.'s suggestion.

He has no answers for the Broncos or Melo so we get back to me.

We rule out depression and any connection to my pulmonary problems. My symptoms with the latter are almost gone. We mostly rule out my on going, seemingly life-long stomach woes, but I do get a script for Nexium. I'm also handed a script for an immune system booster aimed at people with bronchial problems and a new inhaler. Pharmacies throughout Panama are considering parades. My fatigue, the one remaining symptom, seems to emanate from somewhere along my upper spinal column. This, I'm told, could mean a neurological problem, IE; nerves or muscles. I don't have Myastenia Gravis or even not so Gravis, but I might have something that mimics the symptoms of same. For this reason I am referred to yet another doctor for, whoopee, more tests. If I wasn't depressed before, the mounting cost of this fiasco, has me heading down that road. So there I am happy about not being terminal or, at least no more than the rest of us, but upset over the cost and lack of a medical conclusion. Let's just say I'm conflicted.

When we leave the office, WooWoo Charly cries a little. I don't know how I feel about this. I mean, I'm glad she cares that much, but I didn't want her to worry so. I feel bad that she did. I am, wouldn't you know it, conflicted de nuevo, (again). Chuck, though, is relieved and I'm happy about that.

We now return to a deja vu scenario. After locating my new doctor's office elsewhere in the building, we learn he is not there. Nor is his receptionist. We are told to return in an hour which we do to no avail. Neither person has made the scene. How familiar is that? We do, however, manage to score a telephone number. I will try to make a cita (appointment) later today. No need to wish me luck. I'm already up for another double down.

So there you have the latest chapter of this mind numbing saga. Sorry to bother you with it but, you know, I can't help myself. The Monkeymind carries on.