Stress Test
by Bernard Greenwald

Off this am for a cardio nuclearstress testin Albany. Tests whether your cardiac arteries are closed due to inflammation. Takes 4 hours. First hour or so on your back while this giant machine passes back and forth over your chest, buzzing to itself. Then an Abu Ghraib session on a treadmill with wires pasted to your seminude body.I have gained some weight since the last test, so they will probably have to use BX cable instead of the lightweight wires sufficient for a less accomplished patient. They up the speed and angle gradually until you either confess, turn blue, orlight bulbsinserted into all yourbody orificeslight up. If just the ones in your nostrils light up, it’s a Jersey City. If the nose, urethra and nostrils light up its a Semi-Hoboken. When they all go off, or if any one of them bursts because of current overload, it’s a FullHohokus. An alarm triggering a closed circuit video in thewaiting roomgoes off andand you get a much covetedcommemorating tee shirt. I will be competing for my third consecutive Full Hohokus, a record for the Albany office. Maybe it will catapult me into the Nationals this summer, or even a professional career.

Afterwards, there’s a lunch break during which I can go out. Reminded why I am in Albany, I virtuously order a heart-friendly meal, while staring contemptuously at those around me hammering fries and cheeseburgers down their gullets like mortuary attendants sealing coffins. My spirits thus lightened, I return to the doctor’s office to have the second set of images made. In a few days they will call and tell me my meds are being upped by another quarter pound.

I started seeing Dr. DeSantis about 25 years ago for a benign arrhythmia. Partially to assuage my fear at having to see him every six months (symptoms long ago became more ominous), I always joke around with him, telling him he must have been 15 years old when I started, because he seems so young now. I want to stay on his good side because I credit him with keeping me alive all these years. While I’ve seen him only 30 or 40 minutes over the past 25 years, that adds up to 50 meetings. I have little knowledge of his personal and career lives, but I like him. He knows me, and he talks with me in a personal way. While generally I put on some weight between each visit, his chiding is gentle: “I expected you to lose 13 pounds between visits, not gain 13 pounds.” He keeps me informed of my condition, but doesn’t lecture me. If I ask him a medical question, he explains it by referring to the Frank Netter illustrations on the wall that look like New York City subway maps.

I also appreciate that, even though the nurse orders me to strip to the waistas she leaves the examining room in anticipation of his arrival, he, sensitive in his knowledge that the profoundly flabby do not like to disrobe in public,will manipulate his stethoscope under my tee shirt. He is a gentleman.

He asks how I am. I ask how he is. He says he has too many patients because with the constant development of new and more effective medications, the old patients don’t seem to die anymore. Subtle encouragement. He says to me: “You look fine.”

I say to him: “But even with the new meds and all the tests I could go home and have a heart attack and die tomorrow, right?”

“Tonight, even,” he says.