June 16. Cough much worse. Kaff, kaff, kaff, damn! It’s not the cough of acute bronchitis, which I have experienced seven times. It’s a dry cough, which rules out pneumonia and cystic fibrosis. It’s not lung cancer, with its telltale wheeze, lobar atelectasis with mediastinal shift, diminished expansion, dullness of percussion, and loss of breath with pain and loss of weight. It could be Hand-Schüller-Christian disease. You will have a dry cough when you get that.

June 17. Dizzy. Head spinning, eyes whirling like pinwheels, smoke coming out of my ears. It feels like getting off the carnival Rock-O-Plane after a corn dog, a jumbo birch beer, and a haystack of pink cotton candy.

June 18. Woke up okay. Blood pressure 115/64. Pulse 57. Blood sugar 89. The fever is down, but the cough dogs me. What if it is lung cancer? Fuck. Had to lie on floor and breathe into a brown paper bag.

June 20. Eat a bowl of alfalfa to bolster my waning immune system. Man, I’ll never do that again. Decide to just fuck everything and ingest a large dose of ketamine. Paralyzed, I lie on the floor and watch my soul leave my body and fly to remote galaxies in outer space. Get real scared and try to reel my soul in. A bad scene ensues. I am chased by a fleet of spaceships from the planet Mongo. Captain Torch at the wheel of the lead rocket ship. (Man, he hasn’t aged well.) He shakes his fist at me, and I flip him the bird. Then I turn invisible, which is really draining. I bump into the Hubble Space Telescope and bruise my hip smashing the auxiliary lens into a thousand pieces.

June 22. I wake up with three ### floaters in my eye. When the nurse hands the phone to my ophthalmologist I overhear him saying, “What’s wrong with poor Thom today?” I say I think little elves are in my eye typing on the back of my retina with an old portable Smith Corona typewriter. “Like with a faded ribbon,” I tell him. When I explain this to him over the phone, this is what he says: “Look, Mr. Jones. You call me drunk at two in the morning. You call in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. How many times have I found you sitting on the curb in front of my office as I drive in to work? Before I put the car into park you’re banging on my window with some new bullshit symptom. I don’t want to be your doctor anymore. Don’t even come close to my office. I’m filing a restraining order against you, and I’m having my phone number changed.”

June 28. I just noticed how yellow my teeth are getting. I brush them with Comet for a gleaming white smile.

June 29. Gums hurt. Scurvy? I eat four lemons and get a sour stomach. I take a Tagamet, Nexium, and drink an entire $2.95 bottle of Pepto-Bismol.