Consumption
CJ Leon

So I got this letter from Toronto Health
to the effect that: your neighbour has TB
and you share a bathroom with him
so there's a chance that you do,
so you should get checked
even if showing no sympotoms,
and don't worry, people in Canada
don't die from tuberculosis anymore
because we give away the medications.

Having about the average motivation of a university student,
I kinda just ignored the letter for a couple months.
My flatmate had led me to understand
also that Korean medicine
was not as heathen
as the Canadians portrayed,
and that he will always test positive if injected with tuberculin
and that he had all the right drugs when he was a toddler
and they cured him then and he, on the other hand,
did have to pay for the doses we forced on him,
a lot, which maybe explained why for spite
he wasn't ever going to ingest them.
My motivation did not soar.
I was practically convinced.

Then I got sick. I got so sick
I lay in bed without the strength
to fetch myself food or water
and I developed this cough
where I hacked up blood
and rolling over made me dizzy
and I did a lot of staring at the walls
between naps and wheezes and sipping herbals.

And, you know, I started to think about that letter
that told me once that your neighbour has TB
and so maybe you do, so get checked,
even if you don't have symptoms,
which when I looked at again
read like a ticker-box list
of yeah, well, I guess
I got that one too.

I went to the clinic. Where I said:
I got this letter that says I may be consumptive
so I need to get checked and could you do that please?

Yes, that will be $20, said the nurse.
Oh, I said, and my stomach dropped.
I took account of all the money that I had,
which was all the money in my wallet at the time,
which was a measley ten bucks, and I was hoping to eat it.
I suppose you want that in Canadian funds? I said.

Uh, so, I got ten bucks.
Uh, what can I get for ten bucks?
The nurse shook her head: The needle is ten,
the check-up is ten, you need twenty.

I started to wheel around on my heel, pulling a grimace,
and holding that black-letter injunction in my shaking hand,
eyeballing it like the agonizingly raw and painful death sentence it was,
and I thought, if only for the concerned pale horror on the faces
of clinic bysitters, that I should give it a go. And I spun 360.

I don't need a new needle! Rinse one off!
And don't bother with the name brands.
Or why not just give me the needle
and I'll Google my results
on the Internet.

Now look here, I said pointing,
I got this letter from Toronto Health
that says my neighbour has tuberculosis
and we share a bathroom so there's a chance
that I have tuberculosis, so I need to get checked
even if I don't have the symptoms, which, actually, I do;
but, it says here that the medications are absolutely free;
and so, since I'm pretty sure that I've got tuberculosis,
and I can't afford to buy your stupid little test for it,
why don't we just skip the fucking test
and you give me the meds.

For some reason, unlike the frosty, needly
red-green, Christmas mucus in my lungs,
these suggestions didn't seem to float.

On my way home I started composing my obituary;
and I figured I better get to polishing my work,
for the best of headlines I could dream
with my cynical romance was:
Starving Artist Consumed:
Dead from TB, First in a Very Long While.
It was miles more desirable than: TB in TO: Beware!
And I'd be damned if I wasn't going to get it.

I didn't feel overly badly for myself, really.
I was soon to put my foot in the door
of the hall of all dead young writers
(where I'd give Keats a pat on the back,
especially were he still choking on his lung).

But all those twisted patients' faces
as I left the clinic untested and untreated!
Had they hoped we lived in a socialist democracy?
They seemed to watch me step out through the cracks.