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The doctor smears small drops of cold cream onto my skin and rubs them carefully, like a child with finger paints. His uncoordinated strands of hair swing wildly as he nods and hums to himself. Nick and hum.
He runs an electronic magnifying glass over my spots, focusing his gaze carefully and precisely on my body so that every conceivable thought of catastrophe has time to be released from his grunting syllables. Four hundred futures pass the test and all are crap.
I forced my fingers not to google the symptoms. All googling leads to malignant melanoma.
That’s why I’m here to see if I have what I didn’t google. I don’t know. But I’ve reached the age where genetic factors that have long been at risk have now been overtaken by lifestyle factors, by the environment, by what I ate and drank and what I had on my body, by all those unprotected hours of childhood sunshine.
Can you do something today that isn’t carcinogenic? It feels like everything is connected to cellular changes
The bill is on its way, so to speak. I have friends the same age who suffer from cancer, diabetes, liver failure, obesity and heart failure. We who tip over into the second half of life, where the wear and tear is so clearly visible. I wish I had Taylor Swift’s PR skills to call this age an “era,” but it’s difficult to start the decline as an artistic project.
The doctor continues humming, moving from the shoulder area to the backboard, and in the pause between inhaling and exhaling I have time to think: Is it even possible to do this today? not is carcinogenic? It feels like that all involves cell changes.
It’s the plastic in the spatulas and the paint in the cans. Eating meat is dangerous, but so is lead in protein powder. Sugar, wine, tobacco, everything that makes life more bearable also seems to shorten it. According to new findings, the receipt strip in the supermarket and my gas stove contain carcinogenic substances. It’s just a matter of choosing between plague and cholera – or yes, cancer.
Because almost everything is dangerous In our chemical society, and this is solely my responsibility, it suddenly becomes a test of character, a moral decision: If I get cancer, it is my own fault – I must have eaten and drank wrong, lived carelessly and naively, and not googled carefully enough. A hundred years ago, people died of cancer without knowing why. Now we know a thousand possible reasons for this, and the mental over-responsibility makes my head dark.
I stand in the supermarket and turn over a packet of oatmeal, looking for the fine print that says life-threatening. I know raisins and oranges are poison bombs, but what do I know? not? Which hormone-disrupting steps are hidden in the production phase?
Life moves toward death at the rate of five thousand heartbeats per hour, but in this neighborhood at the medical center, the speed of death has doubled
One of the most unflattering aspects of humanity is to immediately blame the victim. This is the magic against terrible coincidence: if we can explain the tragedy through other people’s decisions, we don’t have to think that it could have been us. The disease becomes a test of the strictest Lutheran austerities.
This is not a new insight, but it is the first time I have encountered it as something other than theoretical thinking. I guess that’s the way age and wisdom are intertwined: as I get older, I don’t learn much new, while my unique insights turn out to be common knowledge long ago.
A friend tells me that he spent thousands of crowns on a health test, a kind of preventative blood test, and I immediately feel guilty for not doing the same. I only ate sweets.
Life moves towards death a rate of five thousand heartbeats per hour, but in this neighborhood the speed of death in the medical center has doubled. The doctor takes his time and is naturally slow. I think about my control fantasies. I don’t smoke and I always dodge the clouds of secondhand smoke like I’m playing with cancer, but does it matter if I also walk to and from work through the fumes of Essingeleden every day? So here we go.
Then comes the verdict. The doctor laughs: “It’s nothing dangerous, it’s just age spots.” No sooner has relief set in than it is swallowed up by an insult: “Sometimes we call it.” Old man moss.”
And this is how the era in which I live was named.
Read more writings by Kristofer Ahlström, for example: How bad can customer service get before it becomes completely illegal? and the songs you get into your brain have a secret message for you.
