via The New Yorker and Rebecca Dunlap

I’ve finally arrived. That’s right, it’s me, your bloodwork results, in your inbox three days after that chatty nurse couldn’t find your vein and left you with a tricolor bruise. I think it’s time you open me up, for inside, I have all the health-related answers you’re seeking.

First and foremost, you’ll have to log on with a password that you have long forgotten. I’ll wait as you do your two-step authentication. I promise I am worth the wait. This is serious business after all. This is life or death.

When you open me, you might be looking for a spot where someone, anyone, ideally the doctor, explains me to you. It gives me more pleasure than I care to admit that there will be none of that here. There is no one here to handhold you. You’re on your own, and I don’t owe you shit. You probably should have gone to med school like your parents secretly hoped for.

I will, however, throw you a bone and color-code myself for you. Anything in bright red will seem concerning to you, and perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. Who am I to say? And who are you to say? I will explicitly state that some of your blood levels fall under the “normal” values, and others above the “normal” values, and either that means you are dying or that you just need to eat some spinach. Oh, you want me to tell you which it is? Ha. That’s funny. Why would I do that? Why would I ever want to dumb myself down for you?

As you can see, I also threw in some confusing words, such as “unremarkable” or “abnormal,” to give you a little extra shock and fear. Fun, right? I want this to be a maze for you, a challenge. I want you to work for the answers about your own body. And quite frankly, I want you to live in fear.

What you can and will undoubtedly do is google the specific blood tests and what your results possibly mean, and please, go at it. It will leave you with more questions than answers. It will likely make you draw conclusions that feed your anxiety. Perhaps it will leave you with images of illnesses that will forever be burned into your memory. I could only hope that is the case.

You’re probably thinking, Screw you, my doctor would tell me if something was really wrong, or else they wouldn’t have sent these. But do you know that for sure? Did you also google that? Because there sure are a lot of numbers here and a lot of arrows up and down and big words that I know you will never be able to pronounce or even grasp, so you might want to rethink that thought process. But hey, what do I know?

Oh right. Everything. I know it all.

Well, now that you’ve pored over me and have convinced yourself you have six months left to live, my work here as an agent of chaos is over. And soon your time on earth will be too. Or it won’t. Again: I will never tell.