The modern condition perfectly illustrated

  The mole I had removed hid a pesky little malignant tumor within itself and Monday I’m going to the hospital to remove even more of the surrounding tissue, all the way to the muscle in an effort to be more safe than sorry. It will take months to heal properly, but they insist it is a necessary precaution. They’re gonna drug me and cut off that large piece of my skin.

  I dislike hospitals quite a bit, not just because they sum up modern medicine in a nutshell, but also because they are centers of disease and death. If I should write a horror story about ghosts I wouldn’t use a cemetery, but a hospital. It isn’t a place I would choose to die, if I could help it, that’s for sure. I would want to die with my boots on. That was a good choice in the old west, and it still is.

  I and a friend brainstormed about something we called health stations some years ago, decentralized, smaller units focusing on the individual human being, not trying to fix people on an assemble line. Hospitals most certainly evolve in the wrong, opposite direction today.

  Haukeland in Bergen is like most modern hospitals, more like a small city than a building, more like a mall or a labyrinth than a place of healing. Just the simple act of finding your way back out is hard as long as you’re still breathing.

  The cause for any cancer is pretty much established: It is environmental factors, various poisons and chemicals, particularly manmade chemicals we are subjected to since birth.

  Additionally malignant mole tumors may stem from us suffering from sunburns during childhood, and that is a sobering thought as well: that something you did or didn't do forty years ago, such innocent acts can lead to such results.

  I am told that the operation on Monday is pretty straightforward routine, and I believe that, even though there are no guarantees, of course, and I know that, too.

  Lastly, in the great morbid corner: The stipulations I have in my deal with the company printing and distributing my books say that their obligation to do that ends with my death (or not that long afterwards), since I will no longer be able to pay my annual fee for keeping the various books in the digital library they provide and since the starting date for each book is spread pretty much across the year the next payment is never that far off. And then the books may never be available anywhere again, except as obscure items at Norwegian university libraries.