Author: Chris Dunn
I never liked school really. Didn’t understand what it was
for. Apart from math, none of the classes was trying to teach me anything. I
knew how to write complete sentences, I could look up the spelling of words in
a dictionary as long as I had a starting point, and everything else just seemed
to be about memorizing shit I didn’t care about. Who conquered what on what
date? What form does third declension take when used as an object? What
countries make up the internal structure of the continent of Africa? Yeah, that
stuff would matter, if I wanted to impress other people who had wasted their
lives learning the same stuff, but those people sounded boring.
Do enough to get by. Read the bold print and the first and
last paragraph. Ask your buddies what the big points were. These were my tools,
and they got me through high school without much difficulty. Apart from
scraping by with a 70.2 % average in US History junior year (which was .2 above
passing at good ol’ Roger Bacon), I faced little challenge and little worry.
Sure, I went in to high school ranked #2 on a scholarship, but I used my innate
abilities to determine how little work I needed to graduate safely in the
middle of the pack. Then on to college….
Wait a minute? I don’t have to go to class? No one’s going
to check? There’s no one around to make sure I put on pants and face the sun at
some point during the day? Well, this is bliss! This is what I’ve been working
so hard for - the good life. Up all night, sleeping in till noon, writing
papers at the last minute, seeing teachers two or three times a semester, as
long as I kept my average above a C, I was fine with getting by.
But not everyone was so understanding about my new-found
freedom. Every so often you’d find a teacher who had seen my kind before, “Miss
three classes in a semester, and you’ll get an incomplete. Four, and I will
drop you!” Please! Why did these in loco parents have to challenge me? Couldn’t
we just keep coasting? You get your money – well not from me since I was riding
my father-professor’s free coat tails - but still, in principle…. You get your
money, I get to avoid facing the real world for another few years, it’s
win-win! It made sense to me. I made to sophomore year before I met my a real
challenge.
We were well into the second semester, I slipped into Latin
202 assuming no one would notice I had been gone the entire previous week, or
even if they did, that – as before – the threats would prove as hollow now as
they had then. The professor let me sit through the entire class before calling
me out, and asking me to stay for a few minutes.
“Well, I’ve been sick, you see…”
He raised me. The dreaded doctor’s note was now a must, or I
was gone.
“Not a problem,” I said, and must have sounded convincing
because he let it – and me - go at that.
This was how it began. I could’ve just bailed, taken my
medicine, faced my parents and started over, but no, not me. I wasn’t going to
be beaten like that. That afternoon, I was down at the campus infirmary
flipping through a list of symptoms in my head. In the end I decided, with
Spring was coming on, I would just play up my seasonal allergies into something
worthy. Taking my sniffle and red eyes and adding a low grade fever and
headaches and I was golden. I had my
excuse note and nothing to worry about except the Latin exam I was woefully
unprepared for. Nothing, except a referral, that is.
The doctor was concerned about my response to the treatment for
the sinus infection I didn’t have, and recommended a cat scan of my sinuses.
Well, I was in too deep at this point to back out, so I got to spend my spring
break lying on my stomach with my head propped up on a post set beneath my chin
trying not to notice how close the loudly vibrating walls were to the sides of
my head. A vacuum sinus condition, this is what I had somehow managed to
convince the university doctor I had. And whatever the cost to the university
insurance program, they weren’t going to let it go unchecked. It took two scans
not to find it. One with contrast IV. I remember the intern administering the
first scan looked a lot like Scott Baio from Happy Days and thinking, “Surely,
there must be someone more qualified…” But despite the giant machines involved,
CAT scanning is little more complicated than old-school photo development.
It was when they scheduled the second scan that I started to
get nervous. Why would they need a second scan? I was making all this up. There
was nothing for them to find, right? But I had no one to ask these questions. I
was all alone marching silently to my doom, trusting that at some point someone
would realize the mistake, yank me out of line, and explain this was all just a
misunderstanding. They had to, right?
CAT scan machines are loud and the exams take a long time –
a long time with nothing but your thoughts to wonder, “Maybe I should just go
to class… Wouldn’t it be easier than all this?” But no, now I had to know.
The letter that came contained lots of confusing bits, not
all of them technical: Arnold-Chiari malformation, food-filled sac between the
hemispheres (we assumed this was a typo), “usually, mostly benign.” I had a
follow up with a neurologist. He had me walk on the side of my feet, asked
countless questions, and then flick my fingers against my thumbs like I was
doing a pair of hand puppets having an intense argument. Only, then did he
bottom line it all for me. Slight desensitization on my right side due to
cephalic pressure… Probably always been there since birth… Nothing much to
worry about… Shouldn’t cause you much difficulty… Come back in six months and
we’ll see if it’s growing…
This was over 25 years ago, and I’ve never been back.
Occasionally, the diagnosis will seem relevant – like with my recent discovery
of arthritis in my neck – and I’ll tell the doctors about it. The reaction is
always the same, confused indifference mixed with disbelief, as if I thought my
run in with a unicorn on the way to the exam might be relevant. As that ancient
neurologist predicted, “nothing much to worry about.”
And I didn’t get dropped from Latin. Aced the final.
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