Word Count: 385
I didn’t think I would change my mind and I didn’t, even after the diagnosis that gave me three months at the most. Now that I’m closer to the end of it all I want more. I ask the doctor about the new therapy that’s been in the news. He tells me it hasn’t been proven. But I’d be willing to try, I say. He smiles that same odd smile he used when I’d asked him about a transplant. That’s his answer. There’s really nothing he can do.
And he can’t. It’s out of his hands. Out of mine.
I made the living will years ago when younger and healthy but with a door that could always be opened, always be changed with my mind.
I’m forty-eight. As of six months ago I’d had no signs of health issues. Non-smoker, non-drinker, get sex as often as I can and no proof that it’s ever hurt me or led to this shortening of my life. Congenital heart failure, passed down from my father’s side but I never knew. Dad was killed in a car accident when he was still in his early forties.
Would I have signed papers had I known this? Probably. When you’re in what you feel is your prime nothing like your own death makes any sense. So a document, albeit legal, has no reality to you either. It’s just the right thing to do. So you don’t live for years like a carrot which is something, oddly enough, that you can relate to even as death, an unknown, you cannot.
No to the transplant, no to the promising new process, no to super fast food via a tube. No CPR, no to any last chances at all.
It’s hard to breathe now and they will give me oxygen and morphine to help hide the pain. I ask the nurses, beg the doctors, even tell the cleaning lady I want to live.
But the living will, that simple document that was supposed to help in case I couldn’t tell them what I wanted, overrides any choice I make now.
I’m sorry, says my doctor, but once it’s been filed with the state it’s in the database. There’s nothing else we can do. While I was busy living, extraordinary means has been redefined by law.
