Summer of Seconds

A few months ago it started to become increasingly obvious to me that a chapter of my life was about to come to an end.

In a simultaneously miraculous and disheartening coincidence, within weeks of each other, and in one case on merely a few weeks notice, nearly every member of one of my friend groups were all moving out of town, and all for different reasons. Within the same time span, even more than a half dozen members of my peripheral social circle were shoving off as well (it was graduation season in a college town after all). The rate of farewell parties I was attending surely must have set some personal mark.

Meanwhile things seemed to be taking off at work. I had just begun managing my first project, and in an unrelated move had started receiving an occasional invitation to the CEO's favorite happy hour.

(Even my home life was marking a changing of the guard as I finally exhausted the last DVD in my Netflix queue and cancelled my account after nearly half a decade, significantly altering the dynamic of how my down time was spent.)

I began to see all of this coming into view on the horizon around early March. For reasons too convoluted to flesh out here I also started to recognize that this could mean a window was closing on an opportunity I'd been waffling about for the better part of a year. Tired of waiting on the sidelines, to even my great surprise I actually started taking some initiative, laying the groundwork, and building towards a chance to pull the trigger. The early efforts were extremely promising, but forces outside my control kept getting in the way and twinges of doubt (not self-doubt for once, which made these stumbling blocks all the more frustrating) continued to linger around the edges, preventing me from ever getting a chance to fully execute. Then March crept into April and April into May.

As the days and weeks slipped by though, I was holding these going away parties in my back pocket, planning on leveraging them to my benefit in pursuit of my goal. "One way or another, things are going to change," I thought. Yes they were.

Instead of a launching pad, the spiteful Fates largely turned these parties, one after the other, into a series of  painful slogs with the most ironic of twists. The symbolism was almost too much to bear; it seemed it was either going to be the end of everything, or the grand beginning of something new. And yet I endeavored to put on a good face for my friends, who were oblivious to my internal struggle.

Before I get too cryptic to comprehend though, let me back track to March again. One day early in the month I was in the break room at work talking to one of my newer co-workers. She had just had a doctor's appointment and was asking me about how our company's health insurance worked. I told her she probably knew better than me because I hadn't actually been to the doctor since coming to work here. She looked startled. "Never?!" she asked. "But you've been here for almost four years." A tad embarrassed, I smiled sheepishly and shook my head, resisting the urge to retort, "You say that like it's a bad thing." For a moment I did pause and wonder if maybe I should get a check-up sometime.

A week or two later, after having put the wheels in motion on my aforementioned plan, I was in my apartment late on a Saturday night psyching myself up to implement said plan the next day. As I washed my face in the bathroom, I turned to one side and noticed what looked like a bump on the rear right side of my neck. A flash of fear rippled through me, I was actually too afraid to touch it. My thoughts immediately sprang to one of my close friends and his old fight with lymphoma. "Not now," I thought, "Not now when I'm just about to start this whole new life." I couldn't afford to think about it now, it would only distract me from following through on my mission. It was probably nothing, I assured myself, and would go away on its own. If it was still there in a few weeks I could get it looked at then. I noticed it once more a couple days later and then actually forgot about it.

Six weeks later my parents were in town. We went out for dinner and I ate an excessive amount of food, then stated I didn't even feel that full. Generally known for my small appetite, my mom looked concerned, asked me if I was still losing weight and if I was eating enough (I made the mistake of telling her seven months earlier that I was several pounds lighter than the last time I remembered weighing myself years before). I actually laughed at that notion, the notion that I wasn't eating enough, because I love eating. I didn't tell her though that I actually had been trying to limit my calorie intake to around 2000 per day. It wasn't that I was trying to lose weight, rather following some foolish middle school borne impulse, as part of this new epoch I had also back in March begun an effort to try and get a six pack. I figured the best way to do this was to not eat too many calories and do a bunch of sit-ups every night.

Just a few days after my folks left town, and one week exactly before the last going away party (aka maybe my last chance), I noticed the bump again. It's only visible when I contort my neck at a very specific angle so it was pretty easy to miss. "Now I really should get that checked out," I decided, but once more I opted to delay an appointment until after the party next week, again so I could try and focus on my plan.

I didn't forget this time though, and began nervously poking, pressing, and rubbing my neck over the next few days. My heart occasionally skipping a beat when I thought I felt something. If it really was something it must not be that far advanced though, I kept telling myself, since I hadn't noticed any other repercussions. After about four or five days of this, and just two days before the party, both sides of my neck began to swell up. I hoped this was probably just a final repercussion of the bad cold I had just had. The next day the right side of my neck, the side where the bump was, started to feel really warm and began throbbing. By the day of the party the right side of my neck was throbbing constantly, as well as the right side of my throat and down into my collar bone. It was actually difficult to get to sleep.

It became ever more difficult to chalk this up to a cold as all my other symptoms receded further into the past and especially because, while I've had plenty of colds, I'd never felt anything like this before and I knew of nothing else that might have caused it.

While at work beforehand on the day of the party I became progressively more anxious, and a little mad. How could this be happening now? Today of all days? How could I prepare for and focus on executing my plan when I was so distracted by the pulsing? But the fear was becoming more prominent. Why did I wait? What if it was cancer and this was a sign it was growing or becoming malignant? It was just too much of a coincidence, to have this totally unique pain in the exact part of my body I was already concerned about. Either that or my body has a cruel sense of humor. How could I have been such an idiot?

At the party that night for multiple reasons totally unrelated to my neck, my plans had been brought to a grinding halt anyway. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. Again I couldn't help but dwell on the seemingly perfect timing of all of this. At the very going away party that distinctly marked the end of this page in life, the next page I wanted was being ripped away, and was apparently being replaced with a whole new much scarier stanza. It was while sitting at this party where I arrived at the realization I needed to make an appointment for the doctor asap, I shouldn't even ignore this for a few more days.

The thing was, part of me was almost more reluctant to go now than before. The physical ailments on top of the visual marker made it so much more scary, more real, but all I really wanted to do was play the ignorance is bliss game. I told myself it was time to get over that and face the music.

As if I needed any more reinforcement, that night one of my friend's was staying with me for the first time ever. It was the very same friend whose reticence about his father's ongoing cancer struggle had spurred me into deep reflection just a few months prior. As I described in that post, he had only spoken to me about that battle one time, in passing, nearly nine months before, and it was only through his girlfriend that I had learned the severity of the situation.

As we sat in my apartment that night after the party, chatting into the wee hours of the morning, he began complaining about a knot he felt in his back. He said it scared him because although he'd been to the doctor twice about it already, it just felt like "there's something there." The reason this especially concerned him, he said, was that last year his dad had been complaining about having trouble swallowing, an innocent enough symptom, but "it turned out he had cancer."

I should have asked him how his dad was doing, but I forgot, too distracted by the pounding under my collarbone that had just accelerated a little more. Within the last few hours I had noticed it was becoming a little bit difficult to swallow due to the swelling on the right side of my throat.

When I woke up the next day it felt better. It wasn't healed by any means, I could still visibly see some swelling and detect some tenderness, but the constant throbbing was largely absent. I even played soccer that night without any issues. The day after that though it was back, and getting worse throughout the day. Even moving my right arm or turning my head would cause dull pain to ripple through my throat, shoulder, even the back of my neck and down to my upper back. Merely grazing the right side of my throat would cause it to swell up so it was hard to swallow, and using a straw was a nightmare. I called the doctor that night and set up an urgent care visit for the following morning.

When the nurse weighed me in before seeing the doctor I was about 4-5 pounds lighter than the last time I'd weighed myself in October. I tried to hide my alarm. Like I said, I'd been trying to limit my calories a bit during the past couple months, but I wasn't getting much exercise and there were certainly a fair number of nights in there where I'd binged on food to excess.

As I went over the timeline of when the pain started with the nurse she glanced at my neck and said "wow, that's really swollen isn't it?!" Then she departed and I was left sitting alone in the doctor's office for nearly half an hour. At first I was surprisingly calm, but the longer it dragged on the more I got inside my own head, especially after the low weight reading. "Holy Crap," I thought, "I'm just treating this as if it's some routine Sunday, but in five minutes I might find out I have cancer. This day might change the rest of my life." So I started to try and steel myself for that worst of all possible news, and kept reminding myself as scared as I was to find out the truth, that I should tell him about the bump. 

When the doctor finally arrived (by chance it was my primary care physician, who just happened to be on call that day, though after seeing his name on my insurance paperwork for over 3 years this was the first time we'd ever met), I told him a quick synopsis of the pain and the cold I'd had. He said the swelling was probably just a remnant of the cold in my lymph nodes, but rattled off a list of a dozen other possibilities and signed me up for a blood test too. Just as he was about to dismiss me I told him I thought I'd seen a bump even before the pain started, and he came over and felt both sides of my neck and said it did feel "a bit lumpy" but nothing that overly concerned him; it was probably just all related to the cold. If the pain didn't go away in 10-14 days ("sooner if condition worsens") I should give him a call and then we could check for more serious things like lymphoma or "pre-cancerous" growths. But he stressed I shouldn't wait all summer to "get this figured out."

This all made me feel a lot better. At least for the next few days all I had to do was sit back and see what happened; passive was in my wheelhouse. And I especially liked that term, "pre-cancerous," it made me feel like even if it was indeed cancer related that we'd be able to catch and treat it in time.

Despite my neck, I then felt pretty inspired that day and began making arrangements that I'd been putting off until after I learned the extent of my condition. Refusing to take a hint from the universe, undeterred by the large obstacles hindering my plan, I even began to strategize for how to get things back on track in that arena.

The next day I felt good on the whole, although by afternoon the left side of my neck began to throb again for the first time in days. This concerned me as I thought it was only a matter of time that it became just as severe as the right and manifested itself as swelling on that side of my throat as well. At night though it subsided and I felt so good overall I even began belting out a few songs in my apartment, which was perhaps a bit hasty.

The day after that I again felt really good in the morning, but around midday nearly all the symptoms came back in their most severe form. By the end of the workday I even felt lightheaded, had little energy, and was almost reluctant to talk due to the pain in my throat. I went straight to the department store after work and bought a thermometer. My temp was 98 degrees.

The next few days continued like this, with the symptoms waxing and waning, often seemingly at random. It certainly didn't feel like things were really improving though, and that extra scary moment on Tuesday made me keep thinking back to the note my doctor had written to contact him in 10-14 days or "sooner if condition worsens." I turned that phrase over in my head many a time, so again keen to pounce on the issue should it prove to be serious, that Friday morning I scheduled the next available appointment with my doctor, which was in the middle of the next week. It would fall ten days exactly after my first appointment.

While part of me was irked that I'd have to wait so long before the next visit, another part of me was a bit glad that they hadn't been able to squeeze me in on Monday. For you see, that coming Monday was my birthday, my golden birthday no less, and in yet another coincidence, the birthday on which, had I needed to, I would have no longer been eligible for my parent's health insurance, during the first ever time I would have utilized it as an adult. The prospect of potentially being diagnosed with a terminal or life altering illness on that day of all days (and a federal holiday on top of it all) was almost too awful to conceive. As more and more of these signifiers marking a new era began to pile on top of one another the serendipity become ever harder to appreciate.

Over that long weekend preceding the appointment, which in another milepost marked the unofficial start of summer, I decided to try and enjoy myself as much as possible, in case it should prove to be the last weekend I had free of the certainty that I might be very ill (and, you know, because it was my birthday). I also decided I'd let myself consume as much as I wanted of whatever I wanted, not just to indulge every whim, but to try and gain some weight back as well.

Early Saturday afternoon the weather was gorgeous. I went for a walk, met some (of my remaining) friends at a new (to us) restaurant, watched a stellar soccer game, had some delicious food and a couple of good beers, got the slightest bit buzzed, flirted with a cute bartender, and just generally felt great. I barely even sensed any pain in my neck. Sitting at the bar with my friends towards the end of the game, I looked around and thought: "How could I be dying? I don't feel like I'm dying." I felt invincible. I felt like the whole world as ahead of me.

But later that night the throbbing returned and my euphoria wore off. I stayed up until at least 3 AM every night of the long weekend googling my symptoms and reading pages upon pages of possible diagnoses, convincing and unconvincing myself every ten minutes that I probably had a malignant tumor. I'd get to the point where I had essentially accepted that it was something really bad, and all I wanted was a fighting chance, anything but a death sentence. A few times I descended to the level where I was nearly ready to accept a terminal appraisal, so long as I could delay my demise for at least a year to get my affairs in order.

I kept thinking that while tragedies had occurred to people in my high school class, which I often use as a convenient sample size comparison for potential life courses, none of them had been quite like this, and I guess it was just a matter of time before it happened to someone. I kept having mostly baseless conflicting thoughts of, "Of course this is happening to me" and "In a year I'm going to laugh at all this."

I know it's a cliche, but it's truly enlightening, the things that run through one's head under such circumstances. While I was obviously somewhat scared for myself, the thoughts that tortured me the most were actually thinking about how heartbreaking my premature passing would be for some of my loved ones, in particular my mom, grandma, and my friend who had lymphoma. I couldn't bear to dwell on it.

Part of the reason I was less scared for my own sake was probably because I would never quite let myself stare directly down the barrel of mortality. I wouldn't let myself walk too far down that road yet, for I've done it before over extended periods and it's terrifying and incredible and overwhelming and everything in between. I've since somehow developed this sophisticated ability to talk about it as I am now, and remember how draining it was on me, without ever actually letting it sink in again. So even during this latest ordeal, I would continually bypass that core trauma (I'd cross that bridge if and when I had to) and instead speculate about all the indirect effects a debilitating ailment would have. Mostly, I tried to think about all of the positives that might result.

Foremost among these thoughts was an opportunity I've thought of at length before, and even articulated in the comments of one of my posts, that being the way lots of barriers of etiquette would dissolve in the face of such a frightening situation, enabling me to share my full appreciation for my friends and family with them. One particular prospective instance I cherished pondering was the chance to be more open with my mom.

I was also looking forward to the opposite side of the coin; hopeful I could be the recipient of some similar bursts of candor from my loved ones. Even just the potential expressions of sympathy and related chances to reconnect with old mates was quite appealing.

All of this though was of course merely the positive spin I was trying to equip myself with should the situation prove to be a grave one. Should I alternatively find out I was actually okay, I was determined to take full advantage of this second chance, this new lease on life. I would burst forth out of the gates like never before and laser in on all my goals, laughing at lack of focus, fatigue, or any other previously salient hurdles as I tossed them aside. Reinvigorated, I was chomping at the bit for another go.

I also became hypersensitive to any sort of reference to cancer or death. Dozens of comments, quotes, and events that I wouldn't normally have given a second thought all became foreboding omens when filtered through my new macabre lens. And it's probably not true, but it sure seemed like I was being exposed to a disproportionately high amount over this stretch.

I heard a clip of Michelle Obama saying that young adults need to have health insurance because they're "knuckleheads" and I couldn't help but think again how stupid I was not to go to the doctor earlier. I was trying to avoid all media that might even contain the slightest morbid references so I flipped to a rerun of How I Met Your Mother, and lo and behold it was a scene at the end of an episode where Marshall finds out his dad just died. I waited a few seconds until the next episode started (they weren't airing in order) and the show began with Ted joking about how now that he was in his 30's he couldn't do stupid things that people in their 20's do, like "waiting too long to go to the doctor." Oh come on! And that was just the tip of the TV viewing iceberg.

These ominous signs continued into my place of work. I went out with my co-workers one night in the midst of this to a "meat-raffle" and won a marinated sirloin. The next morning one of my colleagues was describing the past night's events to a couple people who hadn't been there. Despite the fact that the narrator had herself won two choice cuts, one of the people listening to the story, who I rarely talk to and don't know that well, just said to me as I walked by, "Well that's not too surprising. I feel like you're a really lucky person Dan."

This raised so many concurrent thoughts and emotions I didn't even know where to begin, so I just smiled and went, "heh." Even bereft of my new fatalistic context I would have found this remark quite notable. By what basis had she formed that judgement? I almost felt a little insulted. But with my present perspective it took on a whole new ironic meaning. "We'll see if you're still saying that in a week," I thought to myself, part of me wanting to spill the beans about my health scare to this most arbitrary of people, bursting with this secret I hadn't told a soul so far. It did also re-raise an enigma I'd been considering over the last few days though myself, the question of whether or not I'm lucky. It is a good question, because in some ways (almost all ones my co-worker would have nary a clue about) I do feel incredibly fortunate and blessed, but in others I feel almost tragi-comically cursed, and I felt like this present trouble might settle the score one way or the other.

In seemingly the strongest harbinger of all though, that same week I went to a client meeting with my immediate boss. Since my first week at the company I've noticed that my boss had a large scar on the side of his neck that I figured was probably from some sort of cancer related surgery. In my 3.5 years there I'd heard him make one or two very quick references to having cancer, nothing more. Due to the location of the scar I assumed that, like my friend in high school, he had probably had lymphoma, and so naturally he too had popped into my head when I first began noticing my symptoms, and I even briefly considered asking him about it for my own knowledge. At the beginning of this client meeting, he told the client the full story of his battle with cancer. It turned out it was melanoma, not lymphoma, and they had only opened up his neck to see if it had spread to his lymph nodes (it hadn't). I sat there in near disbelief, as my own neck painfully pulsated, wondering how it came to be that now of all times I was finally hearing his whole tale.

That very day I turned on my phone as I was leaving work. As I sat down in my car a delayed text message appeared out of the blue from my aforementioned high school friend. To paraphrase, it basically said he just wanted to let me know that he was "through" with letting his past battle with cancer and all his other immense hardships (and there were many) stifle his progress, and that there was nothing that could stop him from living life to the fullest now. I began to tear up.

Finally the date of my next doctor's appointment came. Just beforehand I had one and a half donuts at work, enjoying this free pass on calories I had granted myself while trying to gain back some weight. When the nurse performed the routine weigh in at the start of my visit I was grossly startled to see I was another 1.2 lbs lighter than when I'd been measured 10 days before. I was wearing nearly the exact same outfit as before, except even heavier shoes this time, and as I said, I had actually been trying to gain weight over the last week and a half, when I'd been getting very little exercise and eating to and beyond my heart's content.

While seemingly lessening in frequency by this point, the fact that the throbbing and swelling in my neck was still present led my doctor to recommend an appointment with an Ear-Nose-Throat (ENT) specialist. He also ordered another battery of blood tests, a chest x-ray, and an ultrasound for my neck. I meant to mention the weight loss to him, as my primary fear had now shifted to this - weight loss being one of the frequent symptoms of many of the scariest kinds of cancer I'd been reading about, but we covered so much other ground and he was in such a hurry (already way behind on his schedule) that I didn't get a chance.

During my chest x-ray a few minutes later I felt incredibly scrawny with my shirt off. It scared me, I could tell I wasn't my normal girth. The rest of the day I ate and ate and ate. After work I drove straight to the department store again and bought a digital scale. I determined a standard set of clothes I'd wear when weighing myself and logged my first official measurement. Then I ate some more, and some more.

It was the strangest thing: I couldn't get full. After gorging myself I'd feel full for perhaps five minutes, during which time I could feel my stomach and intestines cranking away like they were in overdrive. Then I'd feel as if I had an empty stomach again, if not outright hunger. More and more nervous now, I was weighing myself every half hour or so, and my weight kept dropping. By the time I went to bed the scale said I was two pounds less than when I'd arrived home from work 6 hours before, despite everything I'd eaten.

I woke up about two or three hours later in the middle of the night and placed my hand on my abdomen. I was terrified: it felt like my abdominal muscles had simply disintegrated. When merely a few weeks before they were at perhaps one of their strongest points ever following my eight weeks of nightly situps, they now felt like a flat formless mass, and whatever gut I'd had on top of that was clearly gone as well.

I went over to the scale, weighed myself again, and was told I'd lost another pound or so just since going to sleep a few hours prior. Breathing quickly now, I paced around my dark apartment, trying to decide what to do; although I'd had no abdominal pain and seemingly healthy bowel movements, I thought perhaps I had some sort of intestinal worm or virus. What else could cause such a rapid weight loss? After a little while I thought of my formerly cancer stricken friend again, and reaffirmed my drive that I needed to survive for him, I needed to, and so I wasn't going to take any chances by waiting around.

So, at around 3 AM I threw on a hoodie and drove straight to the 24 hour Walmart. A little wary of the readings on the digital scale I'd purchased at a different store earlier, I made a beeline for their scale aisle, took an analog one out of it's box, set it on the floor, and weighed myself. It registered roughly the same weight as the digital one back in my apartment. This confirmed, I got back in my car and drove to the E.R. Once actually inside the building, I hesitated in the hallway for a bit, unsure if I was overreacting, unsure if this truly warranted the resources of the emergency room in the middle of the night. But thinking of my friend again, along with this rapid weight loss and the fact that I'd never be able to get back to sleep without more information, I went inside.

My two great hopes now were that I had either an overactive thyroid or diabetes. That's the level I'd fallen to, because these were seemingly the only conditions I'd been able to find online with my symptoms that didn't spell a near certain and rapid demise.

For what seemed like the umpteenth time now I recapped my story, which was getting longer by the day, to first the check-in nurse, the attendant nurse, and finally the on-call doctor.

They took my vitals and they were perfect. The doctor too hypothesized it could be thyroid or diabetes related, and they tested my blood sugar right then and there. It came back normal. She said that whatever it was, she hoped it was easy to fix, but she couldn't do anymore for me right then. She continued, now I just needed to stay calm until my neck ultrasound the next day - which would surely reveal any thyroid abnormalities should they exist. Until then, I should just keep eating whatever I wanted.

I stuffed myself again that day and yet still couldn't seem to gain weight. I also ducked into the stairwell at work that morning to call in and set up my ENT appointment (which had to be done specially through another hospital in town). The earliest they could fit me in was in two weeks. The next day, Friday, I was scheduled to have my ultrasound. I couldn't bear the thought of going through the whole weekend waiting for the results though without hearing another opinion, especially now that it'd be 14 days before I saw the ENT, so I called in to my clinic again that night and set up an appointment with a doctor to immediately precede the ultrasound.

I was terrified of being weighed in at the beginning of my appointment, but when I stepped on the scale, I breathed a sigh of relief when I noticed I'd finally gained back a little over a pound. I breezed through my neck symptoms to the doctor and told him I was considerably more concerned about the weight loss now than the neck pain. He checked my breathing, then probed and prodded my abdomen all around, muttering "good" to himself over and over. When I told him it felt like my muscles had practically evaporated, he informed me they may have lost definition, but the muscles are the very last thing the body eats away at when it's malnourished, and there's no way I could have been playing sports within the past week if I'd reached that stage.

His informal conclusion was that I had likely brought this all on myself with stress, combined with losing water weight as the temperature outdoors skyrocketed the past few days. When I asked him how that was possible even when I'd been very deliberately trying to gain weight the past couple of weeks, he said my body is probably just hyper efficient - that it takes the nutrients it needs from food and burns off everything else. But of course I should keep monitoring the situation.

Again, I felt like a large weight had been lifted (only metaphorically this time) as I exited the office and walked downstairs for my ultrasound.

In better spirits now, the ultrasound was actually... sort of fun. The technician was super friendly, and the whole process basically involved lying back in a comfortable chair while they slathered a cool gel all over, then gently pressed a wand across my whole neck to collect imagery. Plus, as one of the few males I know who will likely get to experience one, there was of course the novelty factor.

I wouldn't get the results until their specialist had a chance to review the pictures, but I left feeling pretty optimistic about things.

Sure enough, over the weekend my weight began to stabilize, though I was certainly still doing my best to help it along. Late Saturday morning I decided to treat myself to a big lunch at my favorite restaurant, just across the street from my apartment, though I couldn't help but shake my head in awe again when I walked through the doors to see the place packed with participants in the annual "Race for the Cure" breast cancer fundraiser.

When Monday rolled around the diagnosis from my ultrasound came back. There was nothing out of the ordinary with my thyroid and nothing else looked amiss (my chest X-ray had previously come back clean as well). As a final step I attended a physical therapy session previously scheduled by my doctor for my neck, which had been improving as well if still not perfect, the next day. I showed the PT where I thought the lump was. He felt it and said he could say "with confidence" it was nothing to worry about. I even began to consider the possibility that I had instigated this entire episode myself by pressing and poking my neck when I thought I saw something that ultimately wasn't there, but I was more just relieved and didn't dwell on it too much; at this point what difference did it make?

And I thought that was that. The following weekend, as I promised myself, I began to try and take life by the horns and make sure that some good came from this ordeal; if nothing else I could be thankful to it for throwing all my priorities into stark relief. I even started writing this that weekend in hopes it would help me solidify those goals.

But as life loves to keep proving to me, there aren't many clean breaks. And just as I thought I was out of the woods a series of other mostly unrelated novel health scares and issues began cropping up every few weeks for the duration of the summer resulting in several more trips to the doctor. Intestinal infection, possible Celiac disease (ultimately believed false), more rapid weight fluctuations, severe eye strain coupled with bouts of mild vertigo, abdominal cramps, recurrences of neck pain, informally diagnosed Eustachian tube dysfunction, independent food poisoning (and all of the fun side effects that entails), removal of a suspicious mole.

Many of these would linger for multiple weeks before fading away unheralded. None of these diagnoses, barring a benign mole reading, were ever confirmed. A few are still recurring intermittently though with less acuity and frequency.

So what have I learned from all this? Aside from some very specific medical knowledge, the truth is I'm not sure; this is the way the blog post ends - not with a bang but a whimper. Maybe just that paranoia is a powerful thing with psychosomatic effects, maybe that it was all just bad timing or a rapid-fire payback for years of good health, maybe merely that I'm getting old. I've certainly learned that I need to pay more attention to my physiology. Though I guess another lesson is that no one can ever truly know that they're completely healthy; the small possibility does still exist that I have some significant ailment present in my body.

Perhaps that second round of lessons was necessary and will prove valuable someday. It is true that while I try to lead a decently healthy lifestyle that I had basically been taking my health for granted for a long time; I was probably one of Mrs. Obama's knuckleheads after all. But I'm still a little bit saddened that these assorted subsequent issues drained me of that incredible fire I had in my belly in the Spring. Even though things didn't work out according to my plan, I've never been able to motivate myself so strongly for such a sustained period of time. It took a lot of energy but I truly was beginning to alter my whole approach to life. The initial health scare in May put that on hold, but as I described I was still rearing for a chance at a comeback, and then this summer of sick more or less dampened the drive altogether.

Ah there it is: Even health issues shouldn't get in the way of my goals. I can't just put my whole life on ice every time I come down with a cold and wait for perfect health to return. It may never return.

These coming months may be the true test, as my health has seemingly returned to relative normalcy (if still plagued by occasional flare-ups of the above), and as my schedule becomes a little less hectic.

But hey, at least now I know how my health insurance works.