59I understand that It Is dIffIcult to commIt to
reading a one-page column without knowing how long I’ll be
around to write it. If I’ve got a heart condition or cancer, you
might want to read a columnist you like a lot less, even if he
makes up facts and has no experience writing columns and
I had officially appointed a qualified backup columnist. The
person I’ve chosen as my vice columnist is Virginia Senator
Tim Kaine, who has amazing dad stories he hilariously pep-
pers with eighth-grade-level Spanish.
So I am releasing my medical records. This was a chal-
lenging decision, since I had no idea how to get my medi-
cal records or what medical records are. I read over Hillary
Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s medical records, and they
aren’t records at all. They’re letters from their physicians with
a bunch of boring numbers that made me glad I didn’t go to
medical school. I called my doctor, whose secretary invited
me to come look at my records, which she explained any pa-
tient has the right to do.
So I also scheduled a physical, since my readers deserve
up-to-the-decade information. After I finished my tests, I
went into my doctor’s office, where he told me that Trump’s
doctor’s report was ridiculous, since it claimed that his lab
results were “astonishingly excellent” and that he would be
“the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
“Doctors aren’t hyperbolists,” he told me. “We use litotes.”
I had never heard the wordlitotes, which means “words doc-
tors use to remind you they’re smarter than you are.” Despite
his reluctance, I told him I needed a bold declaration to reas-
sure my readers. “You’re the healthiest columnist I’ve seen
this morning,” he offered.Sitting acroSS from me at his desk, he held my folder in
a way that prevented me from seeing it. He explained that it
should never be released to the media. “It’s a sacred docu-
ment between you and me,” he said. Though it seemed to be a
sacred document between him and him.
I managed to get him to show me a few things from my
folder. I am 5 ft. 11 in. and weigh 170 lb., which he called
“perfect.” My cholesterol is “fine,” and my blood pressure is
96/60, which is low. This worried me until he told me it was
good to be low at this. On June 14, 2013, I had surgery for a
deviated septum, which is Los Angeles for “nose job,” which
sucks since I didn’t get a nose job. He showed me my post-
surgery X-rays. “Look at your sinuses. They look gorgeous,”
he said, sounding a little like a Trump doctor.
In 2010, I came in with a rash that turned out to bechiggers I had contracted while doing boot-camp
exercises in Fort Knox. If it’s not apparent, I would
like to imply that this is not the kind of gutsy report-
ing you’re likely to get from the healthier columnist
you’re considering. A blood test showed that I had
parvovirus as a child, which sounds much less seri-
ous when it is called any of its other names: slapped-
cheek syndrome, slapcheek, slap face or slapped face.
I spent 15 minutes looking at smiling babies with red
cheeks that looked exactly like they had told some
other baby she had a nice rack.
Before I got hair transplants on June 25, 2014, I
considered taking Propecia, leading my doctor to test
my testosterone, which was 268. Trump revealed that
his is 441.6—apparently the first time a presiden-
tial candidate had included that fact in his medical
records. My doctor said my low testosterone isn’t a
problem because my “sex-hormone-binding globulin”
is not only high but likely a made-up thing to keep me
from asking more questions.
It has never manifested, but blood work claims
that I have mouth herpes, though my doctor kept say-
ing there is only one kind of herpes, even though we
all know there is “mouth herpes” and “other herpes”
and I could not have contracted “other herpes.” He
was so insistent on this one-herpes argument, and it
went on so long, that I started to suspect that my doc-
tor has “other herpes.”though i want you to draw your own conclusions
from this data, that’s not how these doctors’-letters-
posing-as-medical-records work. Instead they sum
everything up cheerily. So: I am in excellent health,
unlikely to die before print media does. Sure, I’m a lit-
tle unmanly and a lot vain, but I am physically capable
of holding a desk job. You’re in safe, completely non-
arthritic hands. •The medical records you’ve
been waiting for are righthere in this column
By Joel SteinEssayThe Awesome Column
ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN GEE FOR TIME