Yeah, a score I never signed up for. Doctors love the word fine. It’s clipped, dismissive, and vaguely authoritative—like a slammed gavel closing out a difficult case—fine. Full stop. Even as I’m sitting here, in a hospital by the way, sweat prickling at the back of my neck, feeling like something scraped from the bottom of a shoe. That’s where I’m at: David Marshall, age forty-five, being told for the third month in a row that I’m fine. Meanwhile, my body mutinies beneath my skin.

Here’s the scene: the clinic reeks of ammonia and despair. Dr. Dalby—whose only notable personality trait is a collection of aggressively patterned ties—stares at his clipboard like it accused him of something vile. I brace for the verdict. My muscles ache like they’ve been wrung out, my chest hums with a wheeze I’ve affectionately named Gerald, and just this morning, my legs threatened to buckle when I stood up too fast. But here we are again: bloodwork, scans, vitals—“perfect.”

“You’re perfectly healthy,” he says, removing his glasses like it’s some magician’s flourish. “Could be stress.”

Stress. It’s always stress. Modern medicine’s favorite catch-all. I could drag myself in here missing an arm, and someone would tell me to meditate.

“Stress makes me feel like this?” I ask, incredulous. My voice is tight, my fists curling in my lap. “Tired, breathless, sore? My lungs wheeze like they’re rehearsing for a solo in a jazz club.”

Dalby offers a nod so patronizing I half expect him to pat me on the head. “Movement helps with fatigue. Exercise more.”

I let out a brittle laugh. “I am moving. I climbed the stairs this morning in shifts like I was hauling bricks. I shuffle from room to room like a malfunctioning Roomba. I breathe real hard too, doc—feels like cardio just existing.”

His expression doesn’t crack. Doctors don’t laugh when they’ve run out of answers. Instead, they hand you a pamphlet on mindfulness or remind you to drink water, as though hydration is some cure-all miracle.

“Let’s keep monitoring things,” he says, offering vague reassurance like it’s a prescription.

I leave the clinic and shuffle toward my car, knees wobbling like a bad weld job, thighs burning like I just finished a sprint. The sunlight feels accusatory, like it’s mocking my limp. I slide into the driver’s seat, legs trembling from the effort, and grip the wheel until the shaking subsides. There’s no medal for this kind of endurance—just me, pretending I’m fine while my body keeps breaking down in ways no one can see.

Later that night, it happens again. I wake up gasping, chest gripped in a vice. My lungs seize, the air trapped somewhere between inhale and panic. I sit up so fast my ribs protest, hacking so hard it feels like my bones might crack. Gerald, my wheeze, sputters and whines like a kettle running out of steam. My fingers clutch the sheets, knuckles white. For a second, I think about the ER—imagining the fluorescent lights, the smell of antiseptic, the inevitable: “You’re fine. Just breathe.”

So I figured ‘why bother?’ and continued to sit in the dark instead, waiting. Counting heartbeats. Listening to the wheeze as it settles back into its corner like a sulking animal. Alive, I think. Technically.

The next morning, Dr. Dalby calls, chipper as ever. “Your test results look great! Heart, lungs—everything’s stable. Perfectly healthy.”

“Fantastic,” I mutter. “I’ll make sure to let my body know.”

I hang up and stare blankly at the wall, caught somewhere between relief and a quiet fury. I think about all the small betrayals: the popping knees, the drenched bedsheets, the way my legs tremble after ten minutes upright. I don’t need marathons or mountain climbing.

I just want to wake up and feel like a person again.

But maybe this is just the price of growing older. Forty-five feels like the point where you stop being unbreakable and start turning human—fragile in ways you never expected. So I keep eating salads, swallowing vitamins, and dragging myself from room to room like a relic trying to hold itself together. Gerald wheezes in my chest like clockwork, and I keep showing up at Dalby’s office, waiting for someone to call me something other than fine.

Until then, I’ll be here: a man held together by sheer force of will, living proof that you don’t need to die to feel like you’re falling apart.