What was a guy like me doing without life insurance? Forty-five, married, two kids, with home owners and car insurance, and health insurance for the first time in many years, but no life insurance. So I applied for a policy, which meant submitting to a blood test. My application was denied.
I remembered the last time I shot up. It was 20 years ago, with my friend P., in January 1983. We listened to the Cure and banged coke and dope in my apartment on West 71st Street in New York while a snowstorm blustered outside. It was a beautiful, beautiful day…unless that was some other occasion entirely. I was a self-destructive thrill seeker back then, gathering experiences for a book that would never be written, my self-regard bolstered by the fact that you could see Needle Park (Verdi Square, not the parvenu Bryant Park) from my window. I was a different person.
I told my wife and children about my diagnosis, then I left phone messages for everyone I’d ever shared a needle with. There were three people on that list: P., G., and D. I don’t live within 1,000 miles of them now, but we were all in the same close circle of blood. It was my duty to tell them if they didn’t already know.
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I sat down at the computer, typed “hepatitis C” into the search space on Yahoo, and clicked my way through the first 20 of 837,000 Web matches. Some of the info was heartening: sexual transmission is rare. In fact, the chances of transmission by any means other than a direct introduction of the virus into the bloodstream were practically nil. The odds of my having passed it to anyone outside the circle were minuscule. The sites also said that hepatitis C causes cirrhosis in about 20 percent of cases, liver cancer in about 5 percent. Hey, that’s not so high. Like Homer upon hearing Krusty’s pledge to spit in one of every 50 free Krusty Burgers, I liked those odds. They weren’t great, but better than I’d expected.
“Shut up,” he argued, and kicked me in the head. But I’d interrupted his dangerous monologue, and I lived to walk away.
“Thanks, man,” I said warmly, “I’m really glad you told me.”
I’d read that hepatitis C is the leading cause of the need for liver transplants. Livers are hardier than most organs, with great powers of regeneration, so they transplant almost as readily as car engines. And I realized that having a doctor who will put you on the transplant list is better than having one who won’t. But this talk about a transplant put me in a panic.
