Horror films with homicidal clowns and chainsaw-wielding serial killers define Halloween for most. But for me, with my health issues, little is more frightening than an abnormal medical test: This week, red blood cells showed up in my urine.
What exactly this means is any doctor’s educated guess. The urologist ordered ultrasounds of my kidneys and testicles, but since I have to wait a week for them, I’m obviously not dying. He also wants to shove a catheter up my urethra with a camera to check my bladder. Fuck that.
Best case scenario, red blood cells in my urine are just that. Maybe I worked out too hard Monday night before the test. Maybe my prostatitis from three years ago flared up.
Worst case scenario, I have kidney disease or cancer. I’m trying not to focus on this because I’ve had my blood tested so many times the last year, doctors would have likely seen something earlier.
Waiting, yet again
Nonetheless, waiting for test results, yet again, sucks. My heart pounds. My mind wanders. My own House episode continues.
I wonder what a couple tests mean for the rest of my life. Is my autoimmune condition destroying my kidneys? Are my medications to treat it affecting my kidney or bladder function? Is this just a fleeting result with little consequence after this week ends? Is my anxiety for naught?
Yet again, I wrestle with existence, with the purpose of life amid a universe that so often seems to bring only suffering. Sure, I’m not alone. I have coworkers with their own autoimmune conditions. I have Facebook buddies with diseases rarer than my own. I even have a good friend struggling with a much more daunting medical issue and awaiting his own prognosis this week. Clearly, the universe does not discriminate.
But are we, as humans, really meant only to survive? What of happiness? Can we really ever flourish when each day brings a new anxiety of its own, when life becomes a series of test results and visits to specialist after specialist, each one delivering another worry, another reason to fret?
Ancient wisdom for the diagnostic life
Western religions teach us not to worry. Christ tends to his flock. Yahweh watches his people. Allah blesses those who believe. Good triumphs over evil. God provides. But what comfort is heaven when you’re trapped in diagnostic purgatory, hoping you don’t end up in oncological hell?
The Stoics teach us to seize the day as it comes, to immerse ourselves in the moment.
“True happiness,” writes Seneca, “is to enjoy the present without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied, for he that is wants nothing.”
Such advice is all fine and well for the healthy, even for the unhappy or the unemployed. But those ancient words ring hollow when “he that is” cannot be.