I'm apparently Bruce Willis's cousin.

The lab tests confirm I will be a survivor of the end of the world. 

The Department of Veteran’s Affairs lab report has arrived. I opened their thin letter with a good deal of trepidation. When you are over fifty, and your grandfather died of a heart attack it is normal to expect the worst. The nurse at the veteran’s clinic was efficient; she drew and labeled four test tubes of blood in two minutes. She does this all the time. I am not a blood donor but I should be. I have Type O Positive, a universal donor blood type that is valuable as gold when it comes to transfusions. The blood tests were divided into forty-two categories, with neat columns showing the results, including the Normal Reference Range on the far right column. I was supposed to fast before the tests, but I forgot and ate a sesame butter sandwich. That probably explains the slightly elevated cholesterol. But they had no column that read “Traces of organic bread and sesame butter.” The bread, "Dave's Killer Bread," is chock full of sunflower and sesame seeds. You could live to be 200 if you ate Dave's 'Robust Raisin' bread every day. So I do. I'll be so old I'll have wrinkles on my wrinkles. On the back of the two sided report, after the results lists, was a short note from the doctor I’d seen. It read, “Your lab work looks great Mr. Mortenson, please call if you have any questions.” What questions would I have? Like, "Hey Doc, did you see how my stomach bulges on that one side? Do you suppose I have a toy embedded there from my childhood?" Or, "Couldn't you at least slice me open to take a look around?" The last VA doctor told me I should be in a display case.  I expected a terse note stapled to the lab report to the effect of: "P.S. It’s guys like you that will put the VA out of business! I have a mortgage, mister!”

My last big visit to the VA was for a colonoscopy. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in a hospital. I have only been in a hospital three times in my life. Once was to see my ex wife. The second time was to take my father to the urgent care wing. (He had injured his left arm while trying to fell one of my trees with his chain saw. The tree won.) I wrote a blog about my third experience, which was not unlike a Vonnegut novel. Or maybe it was a modern day rendition of Alice In Wonderland. I did, after all, see a floating head appear several times on a curtain, and both the floating head and I spoke nonsensical things.

A visit to a Veteran’s clinic or hospital is an effective remedy for the over fifty-years-old blues. The likelihood of catching a disease or virus while walking the labyrinth of Seattle’s VA hospital was high but I did it. But it is nice to know there are lots of skilled people in the VA’s hospitals. They get really good at treating wounds. Probably much better than the average staff. So if I ever get shot, I know where I’ll go for treatment. In Seattle’s VA hospital you’ll get a cardiovascular workout walking from one department to the next, even if you take the elevators, which I did. It seems bigger than the one in Atlanta, where I went to see about getting a job, not for treatment of anything. But I suppose I could claim PTSD from applying to jobs the last three years, or carpal tunnel from reworking cover letters and resumes to fit particular jobs.

Not that it makes much difference now that I am apparently the bionic man. I haven’t been really sick for twenty years, and I was only sick then because my ex put something in my cereal. Probably. How else does a person get E-Coli? I mean, extra E-Coli? Okay, maybe it was all the c***, er, I mean - the shenanigans - I was dealing with at the time. Bad marriages kill people all the time. But not me, so I must be Bruce Willis, as in the film, “Unbreakable.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_f1uCWKZQs  But I have broken one bone in my life, so maybe that isn't it either. Maybe I'm just too stubborn to get sick. A person has to have goals, and mine is to live to 101. I am already decrepit; imagine me in another fifty-years. I am depending on medical science to make some major breakthroughs by 2015, at the latest. I feel bad about the blog I wrote about December 21, 2012 being the end of life as we know it. There will probably be survivors, and I intend to be one of them. I am made to live in the Stone Age.

Type O Positive people can digest bicycles. It is a scientific fact. Or so I read somewhere. The reason is they have more robust stomach acid than average human beings. They are cave people. I know this because I also have my tonsils, appendix, and wisdom teeth. My arms are longer than most people’s arms. I am not saying I am a knuckle dragger, but if I had a sloping forehead I could be in a proto-human exhibit at a museum, aiming a spear at a wooly mammoth, while my cave woman cooked a leg of something on a fake fire, and my dirty little man-child, the one with the strange long hair smiled like a bad manikin in Macy’s, showing his big pointed canine teeth.

I am glad I am not sick. No cancer, yet. But you just wait. Yeah. I tried my best to convince the doctor, when he first met me at the clinic, that I was certain I was dying. I did my best Woody Allen impression. I acted neurotic. As neurotic as men with Danish ancestry can act, which is admittedly about as calm as any human being could look. But inside I was nervous. Yes. Finally, in desperation, I said I had a feeling my moles were misbehaving. I insisted on taking off my shirt to show the doctor. He reluctantly agreed to look. After thirty seconds he pronounced all my moles and freckles were not only benign but rather attractive and artistically arrayed. I told him to look again, and he did, but then he looked at his watch and said he had a golf date. So I gave him permission to leave. Because I had harassed him, he agreed that I should have a lab test to be sure I was Bruce Willis’s cousin. It turns out I am. Now if Bruce can just introduce me to M. Night Shyamalan. I have way too many screenplays sitting in boxes. They’re all Type O Positive scripts. ‘O’ stands for 'outstanding.'