Being in the medical field gives one perspective on various things, one in particular being the value of saving money, which is why I’ve started to scrimp this morning by stealing hard galletas from a patient’s rationed breakfast. Seeing the hospital ward patients, you know you’ll be old and have one or ten of these thousands of infirmities soon, and you know how bleeping expensive things would cost just to keep you alive. I’ve started saving, because in a few years I might need dialysis twice a week, or an angioplasty or valve replacement, and I might need muriatic-acid level antibiotics to kill the concomitant nosocomial infections. I might need hundreds of thousands of pesos for systemic chemotherapy, but before I might even get there I would need costly body scans and blood tests and aspiration biopsies and such just so I could establish that I have this cancer. And those biologicals and stuff, in the event that I develop some autoimmune motherfucker. Not to mention the PF’s and the hospital stay, which might prove quite expensive as I would demand that my hospital room have a theme, particularly, I would want it to look like…. The Bat-Cave!

And what about the complications of treatments themselves: I might have HAP on top of CAP (who invented this fun phrase anyway?), and my cancer might have cancer—all those years of drugs, smoking, booze, and whoring would eventually catch up. I’ve started saving, but just realized that with the amount of salary I get I would probably have just enough funds for, let’s say, an IJ catheter insertion. An IJ catheter insertion?! You mean you wouldn’t be able to sustain dialysis?, you snootily ask, then why start at all?! Good point, so I’ve just decided, right now, not to save—at all!!! Because really, save for what? For a few years worth of lease on life? And for what? And don’t spoil my ranting…I mean sound introspection… by arguing back with theologicals and inspirational stories and virtues and stuff—you’ll ruin my train of thought! What if I don’t want any diagnostics? What if I don’t want any treatment?!? For anything?!?! I’m formalizing it right now: I don’t want any of those! You can keep your expensive interventional procedure thingies, your antibiotics, your chemo, your anti-virals, I don’t want any of them!!! What’s that you’re saying? Why am I leaving the painkillers out? Oh yes, painkillers. I’ll probably save for painkillers. I love painkillers.

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