Day 17. A Pregnancy Journal

Day 17. What To Do When Someone Tells You You Have A Significant Heart Murmur.

Take the money out of the sock drawer and run! Leave this country of cowards and conservatives behind! Go forth naked in the shivering dawn, south across less spoilt borders. Go live out your last days on a daily allowance of fruit and fresh fish and potent herbs from the curanderos. Stifle your murmuring heart in the company of an indigenous bride and an adopted family and live out your days in rectitude and quiet contemplation. Go! Go like Gaugin, like Rimbaud, like Papillion. Go! Like Bowles, like Burroughs. Go, where civilization meddles less in the affairs of men!

This could be the third stroke of bad luck for me. Not that I expected to be in the best of health - and I still don't know - but at my age, barely 41, you don't expect to have heart trouble, especially when you feel fine. But Dr. Murray said a significant murmur. Level 2 on the referral paper he gave me. Now I need to see a specialist in cardiovascular disease. He said my cardiogram looked ok. BP was fine. Pulse strong in all my extremities. Of course you'll want to quit smoking he said. And maybe your having a few too many drinks per day so that cut that too.

That's it really. My whole life is catching up to me. It was a decent run to live almost exactly how I wanted to this point but you have to pay sooner or later because NO ONE gets away with living. And that's what I mean when I say it's over and maybe even overdue. So what now? Chapter 2? Or do I kill the narrator and start a whole new book?