Excitement While Dying

By Santiago Vilas PhD

In essence, this novel challenges the readers conceptual perception of the here and there. Upon unexpectedly being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and sentenced to die in three months, the protagonist makes a rare commitment. Instead of lamenting and crying for his bad fortune, he decides to search for credible answers to fundamental questions and anxieties when facing deathfrom the accuracy of the medical diagnosis to where he will go after death, to which documents to prepare for his family, and how to get spiritually ready to die. In his three months of waiting to die, he had a visit to a cemetery at midnight, an insight on domestic violence when he accidentally meets a woman, his modern interpretation of concepts such as euthanasia and pedophilia, and he defied the usual medical warning to patients in losing their desire for intimacy when diagnosed with terminal cancer. A reader, whether healthy or in a situation similar to the protagonists, may identify with one or two of the causes of his anguish, while another may embrace all of the above. A few samples are as follows:

Who is dying? The me I created and know or the me created by some supreme entity?
I cannot be prostrated. I cannot accept to be dead until after I have died.
Ubi sunt? Where are they, those who were before us?
Feeling loneliness becomes pleasant when shared with someone.
Assisted suicide is an insult to the patients personal integrity. Say last therapy.
I am dying; thus, dying is not my main concern but rather whether I am convinced of being ready to die.
Money is the number one cause of corruption, but I see that the United States honors it by printing the motto In God we trust on all dollar bills.
We die today in ways quite different from how we used to die some decades ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514450970

Santiago Vilas PhD

Santiago Vilas was a professional journalist in his native Spain. He came to the United States of America as a press correspondent and remained as a professor of languages and literatures. He taught at several universities and received his PhD degree from Louisiana State University. He was elected member of three honor societies: the academic Phi Kappa Phi and, in languages and literatures, Sigma Delta Pi and Phi Sigma Iota (of which he was later voted international president and executive director). He published six books in two languages, among them the now classic El Humor y la Literatura Española Contemporánea (Humor and Spanish Contemporary Literature), where he formulates the thesis of humor as a philosophy of living; the college textbook España: Cultura y Civilización; the college textbook adaptation of the masterpiece of the theater of the absurd Tres Sombreros de Copa by Miguel Mihura; and the medical study Prostate Cancer Is Curable.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Santiago Vilas, PhD.

Sunset in Boulder, CO. Photo by the author, Santiago Vilas.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016900776

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-5099-4

                Softcover        978-1-5144-5098-7

                eBook             978-1-5144-5097-0

All rights reserved under U.S. copyright laws and under the International Pan American Copyright Convention. No part of this book or its illustrations may be reproduced by any means without the written consent from the copyright holder.

This novel, from the title on the front cover to the last word on the back cover, is totally fictional.

Rev. date: 02/04/2016

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Back for more Tests

Chapter 2 The Sentence

Chapter 3 Budget for Dying

Chapter 4 Between Point A and Point B

Chapter 5 The City of the Dead

Chapter 6 No Love

Chapter 7 Flat Wrong!

Chapter 8 May Peace Be with You

Chapter 9 One-Way Flight

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to you, Reader.

It does not provide you with answers.

It does not provide you with questions.

You have to supply them.

As with all invitations, you may decline.

But if you accept, my best wishes

that you love yourself today more than yesterday.

Santiago Vilas, PhD

DISCLAIMER

All characters, names,

events, ideas

perceived in this novel

are pure fiction,

are true reality,

as judged by the Reader,

ultimately, the real Author.

Santiago Vilas, PhD

1

Back for more Tests

T he exit from the elevator to the seventh floor leads straight to the receptionists' open window. There are no corridors or doors to distinct offices as found in other floors of this hospital and medical clinic complex. The whole floor is occupied by the large clinic, where eight physicians navigate the traffic of hundreds of patients each day, five days a week.

While waiting behind five people in line to check in, I see that almost everything here remains the same as in my last visit and the same as in previous visits for years. Nothing changes in this medical environment, except patients, office personnel, and occasionally a decorating fixture.

In spite of inconvenience, time spent, and expense, a visit to the physician is a celebratory event. My mother and my sister felt, during their whole life, a strong apprehension in seeing their physicians. They feared being diagnosed with something bad. By contrast, I methodically schedule an appointment every six months, and I welcome as many tests and analyses as possible. It is pleasant and rewarding to be told, after an examination and tests, that I am in good health and that I have no physical or mental obstacles to expect in my future in spite of the natural progression of getting less young. It also merits celebration when an abnormality is diagnosed because, if on time, we may minimize effects or even destroy the cause and learn how to improve life quality.

When it is my turn to check in, one of the two receptionists calls my attention, first, because she is carrying big loads of thick, heavy folders from the enormous wall-to-wall filing shelves at the back of the office to somewhere under the front window---they are the clinical files of today's patients, who will move in/out of the examination rooms at an average rhythm of one patient every ten to fifteen minutes or close to four thousand patients/year per physician---and second, because she displays a fascinating hairdo, countless bright very thin, 30-inch-long black braids carefully crafted.

Good morning, she says.

I cannot restrain a question. Good morning. How much time did your beautiful hairdo cost you this morning?

Oh, not much, less than twenty minutes, she quickly answers, smiling.

Without looking away from the computer or stopping her fast typing, the other receptionist shouts when I am the only person standing by the window, Name?

Fernando Troya, I answer.

Birth?

August 15 . . .

Never mind. Got you, she abruptly interrupts. Dr. Brad?

Yes.

She bends her head toward the monitor and concentrates on reading something on the screen. Then suddenly and for the first time, she steers toward me and warns slowly, with an incredulous intonation, Your . . . doctor is . . . out. You will meet . . . his partner, Dr. Andrew, to discuss . . . your tests . . . and then . . . never mind.

I did not know that, I say.

Dr. Brad had to leave town yesterday. But a note here says that . . . he wanted you to know . . . today . . . the results of your tests, she added, expecting from me an expression of approval.

I gesture an approval, unable to find any other reaction. The same incident occurred some time ago when I needed to see him because of a tough respiratory infection. He had left town the day before. The circumstances are different today. I am not sick. I have not requested this appointment.

After my six-month routine check-up visit and tests of a month ago, the nurse telephoned me saying very kindly that my doctor would like to repeat a couple of exams. Routine verification, I assumed, because it had happened in the past; I even felt pleased to go through new tests.

She finally inserts several papers in a thick folder, drops it by a window behind her desk, and hands me the standard printed sheet/form full of tiny diagnose boxes and medical and billing codes to be filled in by the physician. It is a sheet that synthesizes the bureaucracy of modern medical practice.

Have a seat. Give this form to the nurse when she calls you, she instructs me.

Fifty-three of the sixty chairs in the large waiting room are occupied. Patients show an age of forty to eighty-plus. Half of them appear to be twenty-five to eighty-plus pounds richer than their BMI (body mass index) would suggest. Most of the patients hardly talk after the initial courtesy phrases to the receptionist at check-in. A new common link has developed in the last few years---spending their full waiting time petting the inseparable iPhone and tweeting frenetically, showing no symptoms of finger arthritis.

Ten-foot-high acoustic ceilings, eleven brown metal-framed windows overlooking just roofs, a cold water fountain, a fire extinguisher, a sprinkler system, and a clean seamless carpet. Bright sunlight illuminates the whole room. Hanging from the walls are two flat-screen TV sets turned on at such a low volume that it is impossible to understand one phrase of what is being broadcasted; and a large framed photo in full color of the eight smiling physicians with their names in six-inch golden metal letters. The plants in two big pots, which were very sick and dirty last time I was here, have been replaced with artificial silk ones, appearing now fresh, green, and dust-free.

It is fascinating to observe around. A medical clinic is a unique environment. The population within this small universe behaves differently from the population in other professional nonmedical offices. When here, we feel and talk (when we do so) in a peculiar, unsophisticated style called trilingual, conceptually rather than linguistically. Three groups coexist. One of them is formed by the patients, ill or anxious to verify they are not, and by employees, like receptionists and office checkout personnel, dressed in green uniforms. We attempt to communicate in a linguistic format historically labeled as telegraphic and in modern times as tweeting characterized by contractions, monosyllabic words, no punctuation, and all of those expressions ignoring what is now considered, even in schools, an anachronistic grammar structure. At the opposite side of the spectrum to form the second group are medical doctors, dressed in impeccably ironed white robes, who command a scientific/academic language of Greek and Latin resonances, full of abbreviations with plenty of initials and hardly understood by patients. The third are the nurses, dressed in blue uniforms, who are experts in communication and navigate between the other groups by injecting kindness and smiles into sweet phrases, like How are you feeling today? when they welcome patients who, as such, are presumed not feeling very well.

I wonder how many from the three groups reflect on the significance of what is going on every day in this environment. All of a sudden, in a fraction of a minute, somewhere in one of the small examination rooms a person's life will change forever and his/her family's life too. Nothing is to remain the same after one of the eight doctors informs a female that she has breast or ovarian cancer or that a man's prostate or lungs have been invaded by millions of hungry cancerous cells. Then after the initial news, it would be expected that those patients leave the room knowing almost everything about their condition, present and future. But it is rarely the case. Rather, they leave deeply anguished, disconcerted, with no idea of what exactly is going on or of what will happen tomorrow or of how to handle their lives thereafter. A high number of patients, affected by the bad news, hesitate to ask questions for fear of sounding overzealous or of learning too much about their diagnosed malignant health condition or simply because the doctor does not initiate or facilitate but rather avoids conversation on certain topics considered of personal nature. To further worsen the outcome, a number of doctors hide, behind that academically abstract language, their own insecurity or their fear of touching private issues when explaining a diagnosis. That is why some medical schools and professional organizations