Be Calm. It Was Just a False Alarm

I'm not going to lie to you, but it's been kind of a tense few weeks for yours truly.  About three weeks ago, in preparation for a visit to my diabetic counselor, I was sent for blood work, to monitor various levels of my blood in my daily battle with Type II Diabetes.  Within a couple of hours, I received an urgent phone call from my doctor, in reference to the test results.  Normally, I don't concern myself too much with such trivialities, but when a physician, especially one as busy as mine, takes time out of her busy day to place a personal phone call, one has no choice but to sit up and take notice.  She informed me that my platelet count was abnormally low and that I should return for another blood test the following week.

In the olden days, before the internet, news such as this would cause the mind to race in a thousand directions, imagination taking over and running thousands more scenarios.  These days, with the advent of the worldwide web, a diagnosis is available at one's finger tips and I wasted no time typing "low platelets" into Google and was not very encouraged by the results.  Web MD listed a few culprits, including Leukemia and Colon Cancer, but I wasn't experiencing any of those symptoms, so I quickly discarded them.  However, I was intrigued by the list symptoms for Prostate Cancer. I'd been experiencing some oddities in the weeks prior and Googled those symptoms which brought up Prostate Cancer as a possible cause.  Now seeing the ugly name rear it's head, once more, I became a little more concerned.

By and by, I never let it get me down, believing "It is what it is".  In years past, I've always believed that if I ever faced off with cancer, that I could and would beat it, so these past few weeks were definitely a test of that belief.

The following week came and I returned to the clinic for a follow-up blood test, only this time, I never received a follow-up phone call from my doctor.  A week came and went, followed by a second and still no telephone call from my doctor.  "No news is good news." they always say, and so I continued on, like there was nothing to worry about.

I saw my doctor, today, for my usual monthly visit and we touched base on the "low platelet" issue.  She chalked it up to a mistake made by the lab, as it's not normal for one's platelet count to fluctuate such a drastic amount within a few days of testing.  We each breathed a sigh of relief, mine much heavier than hers, I'm sure.

I've had a lot of close calls, in recent years, close calls and near misses that I've had to face on my own.  I know I have a small circle of friends that, if I needed to, I could lean on someone's shoulder.  However, I'm not the sort to trouble others with my bullshit.  When I broke my back a couple of years ago, that was a tough ordeal to get through on my own.  I'm not going to lie, but I managed to get through it.  When I had pneumonia, before that and X-rays discovered what was described (to me) as a "black mass" on my lung, I'll admit that was a heavy burden to shoulder, too.  All-in-all, recent years have really been taking their toll on me, emotionally, but god damn it, I'm grappling each one, wrestling it to the ground and rising above it all.  I'm like the Batman, only without the cool threads or the kick ass car.  I'm an excellent survivor.

The King of Wishful Thinking

It is amazingly stupid, what passes for viable news, sometimes.  Two big stories emblazoned on the media right now, is the Lance Armstrong "juicing" confession that he made to Oprah Winfrey, in her desperate attempt for ratings on her dying O Network.  The other is Notre Dame football star, Manti Te'o allegedly being the victim of an elaborate hoax, in which he carried on a lengthy romantic relationship with a woman who not only died, but apparently never existed to begin with.

As for Lance Armstrong, I really don't see the big deal if he used steroids or not.  Cycling really isn't a sport, per se, so where's the harm?  Athletes and athletic companies continually test to find more aerodynamic and lightweight materials to give themselves a competitive edge, why is a chemical substitution frowned upon?  On drag strips all across this continent, you have people racing their cars with blowers, turbochargers, and Nitrous Oxide Systems (NOS) to give a winning edge, so injecting a substance into one's body should be an acceptable option, too. Besides that, the guy lost one of his testicles to cancer, for f*ck sake.

That might be something to debate in the media and the judicial system, but as for the latter, Manti Te'o having a fake girlfriend who died.  I don't understand why that is considered ground breaking news.  For the last couple of days, on CNN's sister station, Headline News (HLN), the story has been running nonstop.  My opinion is of the position, WHO CARES?  I don't even understand it all.  He (Te'o) apparently met this girl online and carried on a relationship which eventually turned into a boyfriend/girlfriend type relationship in early 2012.  This part is understandable, to a degree.  I think it's a helluva lot easier to fall for someone through text than it is in person.  That wouldn't work for yours truly, as I'm much more of an asshole in print than I am in person.

Manti's "girlfriend", Lennay Kekua, apparently had a bad car accident last summer, but survived.  Then she experienced further bad luck, by being diagnosed with Leukemia which hospitalized her and she eventually succumbed to the brutal disease.  (It sounds like this "chick" has shittier luck than me...)  Manti Te'o had grown so in love with Lennay, that her passing was quite overwhelming.  After that, I don't know what prompted the media to investigate deeper into the existence of Lennay Kekua, but it was quickly discovered that the girl that Manti Te'o was so madly in love with, never actually existed, and therefore the shit storm ensues.

Now it's speculated that Manti, himself, perpetrated the entire ordeal.  Humiliated, he denies all allegations.  But who really gives a f*ck whether he did or not?  Where's the harm in whether he imagined a relationship or not?  If in the process, he inspired some of his fans to donate money towards the research to cure cancer, where's the f*cking harm?  Whether the girlfriend in question, exists or not, cancer is still a motherf*cker of a disease.  I say lie to everyone 'til you're blue in the face, if it means bringing an end to this plague.

Scads of males everyday, go online, find "questionable" (and tasteless) pornographic videos, and for an average of 20 minutes, according to a recent study, pretend to be in a tawdry affair with a skeezy skank.  It happens.  Internet access makes it easy.  No one's proud of it, but it exists.  More so in Washington D.C., according to the research, but it does occur everywhere...

With much more important issues in the world.  Continuous poverty and unemployment; war in the middle east; whether or not North Korea is aiming any nuclear weapons towards North America; or most importantly right now, gun issues, like why is it so easy for the mentally unstable to acquire weapons, or why it's necessary and important for people to possess not one or two guns, but a complete f*cking arsenal of weapons, all because the constitution declares it.  (Talk about "artistic license".)

Even in the time that it's taken for me to tap out these few words, I've overheard some stupid stories covered on the television that I've left on in the other room.  I suppose when you run a 24-hour news channel, you need to air a lot of fluff to fill those empty spaces.

The comment I read in researching this story that I found the most absurd was "Even though Kekua never existed, Te'o's grandmother Annette Santiago did pass away on September 11, 2012."  As if someone would be cagey enough to fake the death of a family member.