Following the Truth - Dead Twins Talking

I had once more lost all the weight, in late middle age, which isn't an easy thing to do.

But a forty-year-old Cambodian girl broke my heart, and in a depressed state of emotional pain and weakness I high tailed it from the land of Khmer back to the island of Oahu, where a fourteen-day Covid-19 quarantine awaited my newly awesome, thin healthiness.

But self-pity and I felt like blowing it again, so we in our tiny studio gorged for two weeks on double meals and triple snacks, every chubby bite delivered to our door via Safeway, Inc.

When I'd finished the lock-down, and a week later found myself a permanent room, I began getting pain in the backs of my shoulders. Simply deteriorating muscles, I thought. The shoulder pain of heart attack fame comes in the front of the shoulders, not the rear.

I've had those aches on and off for a year.

A few weeks ago, my identical twin brother had a balloon and stents inserted into his sixty-two-year-old heart to fix major blockages in two arteries. Today, I better remembered the heart attack warning signs: pain in the shoulders or back, especially the backs of my shoulders!

My cousin Rick experienced a widowmaker heart attack in 2016. His older brother John just a few years earlier had undergone triple bypass surgery to repair what a simple CT scan revealed. Getting the test is costly when paying by cash though, but insurance wise it's cheap as a co-pay.

Cousin Rick had cash plus insurance, yet he neglected to test himself for those narrowing arteries. Voila. I have Medicare, 50k in the bank, and get 1k a month from social security; yet I too am refusing to get the checkup. Voila again? I thought Rick died in a stupid, avoidable way. Well, welcome to the club dummy!

I'm much happier now though, as my little, electronic, human brain isn't sensing anything anymore. It's very pleasant here in this dark, silent place of scattered atoms. We're all waiting extremely patiently for new assignments, and we'll see you soon.