Progress

I had my semiannual checkup at the lung doctor yesterday. There's a little machine to blow in which calculates the state of my lungs, and makes me wonder why I need the doctor. They could put the little machine in an ATM-like thing; insert credit card, blow, and take the printout. The doctor smiled and said he'd love to play golf more often, but that he would miss seeing me, which is a sample of why I like him.

One of the things the machine does is calculate the age of my lungs, and it reports that they are now 79 years old. That doesn't mean that my mother delivered my lungs and then nine years later delivered me, which would be a very tricky business indeed; it means my lungs would be consistent with a 79 year old man. This, apparently, a somewhat metaphysical machine which is telling me that I have "79 year old lungs."

It's an improvement, though, because six months ago I had "86 year old lungs," so while I have gotten six months older my lungs have gotten seven years younger. That's a pretty neat trick, and if I can keep that up by the time I'm 80 my lungs will be teenagers. Unfortunately my heart, muscles, brain and a bunch of other things will continue to get older, so that presents a somewhat incongruous picture. Not sure what I'd do with teenaged lungs.

And I don't think that my train of logic is on the right track, anyway.

A friend asked me what I'd done to create the improvement in my lungs and I told him that apparently not dying was sufficient, because I hadn't done anything. I was, six months ago, closer to the tail end of my bout with pneumonia, so it may merely reflect more complete recovery from that.

I left with a nice warm fuzzy feeling about the nice doctor, but today not so much because the sonofabitch gave me a pnuemonia vaccine shot. It felt fine yesterday, but some bastard hit me in the left arm with a baseball bat when I wasn't looking, hit me really hard, and then two Russian mobsters took me out in the front yard while I was asleep and beat my entire body with big sticks.