Phone Message from my PCP yesterday afternoon

Saying the chest X-ray done on me the day before gives no cause for immediate alarm, and I'm sure that, for her part, that's true.  Damn, I do like the woman--a (typically Hawaiian) Chinese/Caucasian who used the extra brains bequeathed her by her Chinese father to become a doctor, but whose Caucasion mother and Virgo birth-sign conspire to give her a sincere, rock-solid, honest character and utter lack of side or pretense,  which I, as a Virgo myself, find captivating, and, as a gay man/patient, utterly persuasive.  Plus, I think she likes me as much as I like her.   So I'd hate to lose her to a mere Ace Cardiologist, simply because she completely missed the boat in the diagnosis of my congestive heart failure (hereafter to be referred to as CHF).

But now then, as I read the material online about CHF, the reason it appears to be so invariably fatal and incurable seems, as I look at it, overwhelmingly due to the inability (or sheer unwillingness) of the (stick-in-the-mud, crotchety, old) people whom it afflicts, to alter their lives and habits in ways which would alleviate their condition, and even reverse it.  I am not such an one as who must persist in behaviors which are fatally injurious simply because I have got used to them: Remember that I quit smoking cigarets 29 years ago (after 30 years' addiction), cold-turkey and over-night.  I can do anything.