I tried lying to my doctor. Blame the planets, I said. It didn't work

Sydney Morning Herald

06-06-2025

He says she stared at him as if he were Ernest Shackleton disembarking in England in 1917. I guess she'd never expected to meet someone who'd pulled off such a feat. Nobody could survive such a fire. Like meeting Alex Honnold, or Keith Richards… a myth, a ghost, a person seemingly impervious to the certainties.
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I've done the maths on his habit (50 years x 365 days x 60 cigs = 1,095,000). He appears to have gotten away with smoking a million cigarettes. I guess if the packs were stacked they'd be about the size of a school bus. But you'd buy the bus and the school itself for the $2 million the smokes cost.
He always has one lit, and in absent-minded moments two – one waggling in his lips as he talks and the other being used as a baton to enhance his arguments. And I notice that every time he draws a lungful, as the ciggie crackles and glows, his pupils dilate, and a moment's serenity washes over his sallow face. So, who am I to say he's got it wrong? If it kills him now, he's still played games of chance against God and won. Is that genes? Luck? Or the devil taking care of his own?
He's also known among those who like to hoist a goblet. And when he finally got in to see the doctor he told her: 'The kidneys and liver we're not discussing at all. They're off-limits, a no-go zone, my private affair.' That he felt protective of these organs rather than his lungs tells you how appreciative he is of the vintner's art.
You will have guessed by now that he is South Australian. From where else could such a committed debauchee hail? I don't know what medical statistics say about the bacchanalia that is South Australia, but the Croweaters I know drink like they're trying to forget breakfast and smoke like they're trying to fumigate themselves of hideous inner demons. They've built a religion around wine, replete with ritual and lore, explicitly so they can get skunked at lunch and call it culture. They don't seem to understand that health issues crackle and hover above the libertine like lightning above a butchers' picnic, and that at any moment their contempt for purer ways might be slapped down by God masquerading as a stroke or coronary.
I wish I had the courage of my friend. I wish I was able to tell my own doctor what organs were off-limits. Because recently, roaming across my torso as enthusiastically as Darwin across the Galapagos, she diagnosed a morbidity that, despite my diversions ('It must be Sarah's paramilitary cuisine … a hereditary defect … Mars and Jupiter's recent conjunction…') she kept subtly blaming on an addiction I'd stupidly admitted to. When I say, 'admitted to' I, of course, mean half-admitted to. We all tell our doctors we're drinking half as much as we are, and they immediately double the amount to get nearer the truth. The first lesson at medical school is that each patient is a propagandist for their own virtue, a rakehell in sheep's clothing. I could have admitted to only a quarter of my turpitude – but that would have been a breach of faith.
So now I'm taking a daily pill that tastes like a hospital. I have a reminder on my phone that goes off at 10 every morning and sounds like death running a whetstone along his scythe. This seems entirely shocking to me. Pills now? Me? Damn. And soon just another Achilles propped in a chair in a corner of a nursing home.