I just had another Death Scare.

My first Real, non-Boogeyman Death Scare occurred when I was eleven years old. All my young life I'd had trouble blowing my nose, and then in the fourth grade it kicked up a notch: airway varied from zero to 10%. My nose was usually mucousy and/or running. Coping strategies included the handerchief roll&stuff (effective for a minimum 5 minutes but not often much more), quickfinger & innercuffpantswipe (repeat as needed, which was a lot), and headtip (the angle was as finicky as balancing a quarter, but if I found that Sweet Spot, it worked the best).

One fine day on an unusually cool afternoon in early August, 1966, I decided to get more proactive, and see what was happening up there. Visible through the nostril, really close to the nostril's lip, was a graygreen wallish looking thing. "Aha," I surmised, "HERE is my problem: a Really Big Booger, whose Surface Tension needs to be broken." (I had just read about Surface Tension.) So I took a pin and applied gentle firm pressure. It went in but nothing broke--and when I pulled the pin out, it had BLOOD ON IT.

I knew about Tumors--a kid named David had one just under the skin of his shoulder. And I knew Tumors usually meant Cancer. So I knew that soon, probably quite soon, I was going to Die of Cancer.

I walked outside. People were out there, enjoying the weird coolishness, I think--and they were so nice to me! (In retrospect, since my appetite and energy both had fallen to near zero, these People hadn't seen me come out in quite a while, and they were nice, even a couple who generally picked on me, because they were worried.)

Well, in my head I was writing the final chapter of my autobiography, and this was a perfect setup for the upcoming touching death scene. I said nothing about my horrific discovery.

Lucky for me, kindly Dr. Ash, family physician, examining me because I was pushing 12 years old and only weighed 58 pounds, quickly ascertained that my problem was not Cancer, but Nasal Polyps. I was hustled into St. Joe's, and after the longest weekend in my life, a dragging miserable grind with brutish uncaring nurses and horrible embarrassment involving going to the bathroom in a hospital bed, I was wheeled out of the dungeon, much of my face obscured by surgical tape. A few sessions of really awful nose maintenance (first, pulling out the 3 feet of packing; then, later, Scab Removal to prevent excess scarring) and I had a wonderful Carlsbad Cavern of an airway, and quickly gained 15 pounds.

Just this week I've had another little glimpse of the Abyss. I felt an itchy weirdness on the high right thigh where I couldn't see it. The skin there, about fingertip size, was rough. There was an edge to it; and, impatient kid that I always will be, I grabbed it and pulled it off. It was about half an inch in diameter and papery-looking, with two dark spots in the middle, and I thought Uh oh . . . what could this be, here in the Skin Cancer Capital of the World?

A few days of sweating it out & I finally called my friend Dr. Susie. Would she please look at this thing. (A few hours earlier I'd talked to her husband, one of my oldest friends. He speculated, with odd cheerfulness, that it "could be Melanoma!")

Long story short: PROBABLY keratosis, MAYBE ringworm . . . almost certainly not cancerous. Eliminate wheat & white sugar from the diet. Look for it growing & getting white in the middle--that'd be Ringworm. Let's have another look in a couple of weeks. Let's have some more wine.

Now THAT'S My Kind of Doctor.

But naturally, the kaleidoscope shifts to dark colors when things like this happen, and AGAIN I have to stare Mister Death down, which I hate doing. I hate the whole idea, micro and macro. Do you know our Universe has only about a trillion years left to live? The Second Law of Thermodynamics so implies.

My defenses against confrontation with the Big D are pitiful indeed. I have concluded that the concept of the Afterlife is wishful thinking; luckily, I don't KNOW that, just strongly suspect. (Ah, the prayers that have been prayed over me by my Christian friends, when they learn what I don't accept as, to them, simple reality!!)

And the Universe--well, ignorance kicks in there too. They are only Pretty Sure. They don't Know.

My other defense is the result of a thought experiment. Is the Universe absurd or not? It would be, if all the thought, hope, aspiration, and nobleness of its history ultimately amounted to nothing. And MY, there are so many stars out there, and GOSH, there's room for an ancient civilization who turned all their efforts to the Preservation of Thought, and WOW, if the Universe is NOT absurd, maybe they'll have made a way for sentience to persist, or at very least, to recycle . . .

So I hope.