Diary Entry No. 3 Day 9/10 (It’s 20 minutes into the 10th of February) Premonition:

Without getting into too much detail, I’m dead. Moments before a piece of wood from the chair I was sitting in broke through and between the ribs of my back and gravity’s pull on the weight of my body drove it about 2 inches into my heart I was reclining in my cabin with a silk relaxation pillow filled with fennel and flax seed gently draped over my eyes trying to unwind from a caffeine wired day of quarantine. It was to be a busy day filled with meetings, television crews and demonstrations for foreign dignitaries. It was in fact a day filled with coffee and confinement. 10 cups of coffee in a 10’x7’ room for close to 12 hours with nothing to do but nurture a vice gave me way too much time to think. I thought about how much I was smoking and shortly after lunch had convinced my self I had mouth cancer. I was sure lesions were beginning to spread inside my mouth at an uncontrollable rate. By the time this job was done and I could return home my lower jaw, tongue and palette would have to be removed. I have no insurance so the costs to save me would financially cripple my family. I would be deformed. My new grotesqueness would send me into a paralyzing depression made even more inescapable by the fact that I would receive little sympathy from anyone due to the fact that my addiction to cigarettes caused this. Were I not weak, none of this would have happened or would be happening. Yet I continued to smoke because there was nothing else to do except wait for something to happen and it was the only thing that would calm me down.

I walked all around the boat, bow to stern, floor by floor, in circles, pacing back and forth, waiting… not even sure for what but something, anything to distract my mind from the cancer spreading inside my mouth. As if my mind was and is as I write this determined to fulfill some prophecy it itself created in a one sided battle against whatever part of me doesn’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be sick. I’m tired of asking myself if I smell toast every time I have a headache, because I can’t just have a headache I have to be having a stroke. Every pang of pain around my waist is a kidney failing, every pain in my chest is a malignant tumor in my lung or the onset of cardiac arrest or Sickle Cell Anemia. And yes, I’m aware of the fact that my being white pretty much negates, in any realm, the possibility of me having Sickle Cell Anemia but just because it’s never happened before doesn’t mean it can’t. The high improbability only further convinces me of its probability. For example:

Back in high school when most of my peers were being rushed to the emergency room for broken bones incurred from athletic competition or from overdosing on drugs I was being rushed off to the urologist because my testicles were producing, besides an enormous amount of pain, enough Shakespearean Boner Oil to gag a trash bag. The operation itself took about as much time as it does to set a broken leg but the next day at school I didn’t have a cool cast to sign, just a scrotum the size of a grapefruit and even lower self-esteem because unlike Joe Football no one was lining up to sign my ball sack. Oh and when word got out that I had had a testicular operation (I know I talk a lot about my genitals but this I really did attempt to keep just between family and close friends) no one bothered to pry me for specifics. It was just easier to spread the rumor I had my testicles removed. As if I didn’t have a hard enough time as an awkward, pimply faced geek chatting up girls. I was now the awkward, pimply faced geek WITH NO BALLS chatting up girls. I mean, as if the cards weren’t already stacked against me.

I included the above for two reasons. One reason is to try and show that I’m not just a hypochondriac, though www.webmd.com has made it a whole lot easier to be one (I swear I have Lupus), but that I’m plagued with irrational concern over the statistical probabilities regarding my own health, or more accurately, the degeneration of my health. As far as my mind’s concerned I’m doomed no matter the probability, high or low. Because I smoke it’s completely rational in my mind to worry about cancer and statistically it puts me in a much higher risk group than non-smokers, add to that, the sore that formed in the back of my mouth today, and I might as well be filling out the organ donor cards right here and now because as for as my mind is concerned I am no longer at risk. I have cancer. I’m stuck on this boat for what could be 2 and a half months, smoking, with a sore in my mouth, and no oncologist around to give check me out and tell me it’s not. I know I’m a worrier and you may think I’m just letting my anxiety get the best of me in this confined, isolated environment. You are probably right, but it doesn’t stop my brain from undermining any confidence I have in my physical well being. In a way, that’s what I was trying to show with the anecdote about high school. The probability didn’t matter. The size of my graduating class was around 1200 students if I remember correctly. It was over a 1000. Let’s say half were male. Out of 500 males from every background I’m the only one who had a testicle operation. I’m .2% of the graduating male population. Anyone of the five hundred could have been hit by this, but it was me. So if my thinking is right, in a random sampling of 500 high school boys there’s a less than 1% chance one of them will have a testicle operation. So even when the probability is less than 1% I don’t feel safe henceforth proving that IF ANY WHITE PERSON’S GOING TO HAVE SICKLE CELL ANEMIA IT’S GOING TO BE ME.

And the second reason I put that anecdote in was because of the phrase, “Shakespearean Boner Oil,” which I made up and thought was funny. I thought it would make you laugh. I mean, just because I’m stuck on a boat, potentially with cancer, staring the grim reaper in the face, doesn’t mean you all have to mope.

Okay, back to the premonition. All day today I’ve been freaking out; too much coffee, nothing to do, a habit that can cause cancer, a sore in my mouth (which was probably caused by all the coffee I drank because I normally never drink coffee), and way too much time to think about my own demise. Around 11:00 PM I decide to do something about it. I pull out the relaxation pillow. Sit down in the desk chair in my cabin. Put on some relaxing music and force myself to think about something other than the cancer that is destroying my mouth. And what do I think about? The desk chair I’m sitting on breaking and me impaling my self on the rear left leg of the chair. Here I am worrying all day about slowly succumbing to the effects of cancer and lo and behold I have a vision of my own death and it comes not from disease but the most hackneyed stunt in The Three Stooges repertoire de slapstick.

In the premonition I go on to struggle, stake in back and soaked in blood, to my camera so I can film my last words because there’s no other way to say good bye to all the people I love before I die and go off on what I thought (if it were a scene in a movie) was a beautiful soliloquy about, oh this and that. (Trust me. It’s a splurge of senseless blather best kept for another time).

Okay, so I’m done. I feel better. In all sincerity I’ve been worried most of the day about this mouth cancer thing and I’ve still not entirely written it out of my mind but I feel a lot better. No one’s probably even reading this anymore but if you did I hope you got one thing out of it. And that one thing is this:

If you want to be happy, don’t think like me. What the hell’s wrong with me? Do other people think like this?

Oh and one other thing. This is what cabin fever reads like. Senseless blather. Yo Ho! Yo Ho! It’s a Pirate’s Life for Me!