Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict by Thomas T. Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

years. And he had to remind everyone who grumbled about the cost of his procedures that in their earliest incarnations the automobile, personal computer, and cellular telephone service had all been dismissed as “rich men’s toys.” Now they were the necessities of everyday life, available at vastly reduced cost.
    Formerly, the mantra among his cohort—the men and women in their sixties and seventies who were rapidly approaching what had once been thought the end of life—was “You’re only as old as you feel.” Now the truism was “You’re only as old as you want to be.” Or, for those who were heedless and neglected to take care of their bodies, “as you allow yourself to be.”
    But still, about every six months the morning would bring a new ache or infirmity as something else sputtered and offered warning signs of giving out. Chasing these maladies around his body was like chasing a mouse around the kitchen with a hammer. It was time consuming and demoralizing, and he wondered where it would all end.
    It was only after his fourth trip to the bathroom each night for two months, and urging his urine to flow even then, that he took up the problem with his current doctor, Virginia Mills.
    After a backdoor digital inspection that he did not at all appreciate and the return of blood work from the lab, she was ready with a diagnosis. “You have prostatic hyperplasia,” she said.
    “Is that what I think it is?” he asked, meaning “cancer.”
    “Probably not. The condition is usually benign. Your prostate gland is simply enlarged, and that obstructs the urethral canal, making it harder for you to urinate. I’m surprised you haven’t had this problem before.”
    “Yeah,” Praxis said, thinking that he’d been getting up in the night for years. But only recently had he been unable to void his bladder, not even a dribble, or not without pain. “What can we do about it?” he asked.
    “You can manage the condition,” Dr. Mills said. “Don’t drink water before bedtime, and avoid alcohol and caffeine entirely. Don’t take decongestants or—well, I can give you a list of medications to avoid.”
    “What about treatment?”
    “We can give you an alpha blocker, which relaxes the smooth muscle in there and lets the urine flow. Or you can take a hormone inhibitor, which treats the cause of the enlargement in the first place—but that can also damage your sex drive.”
    “And what else can you do?”
    “We can grow you a new gland, of course.”
    “Of course,” he said, thinking of his old pal the Tin Woodman, whose body was slowly taken over by replacement parts.
    “That’ll take a couple of weeks,” Mills said. “Maybe less, because we already have samples of your stem cells on ice and your genome programmed in the cooker.”
    “I suppose the replacement surgery will hurt?”
    “Oh, like a son of a bitch,” she agreed.
    * * *
    After her most recent late-evening call to Uncle Matteo, Callie Praxis sat up in bed for a couple of hours, cradling the now-disconnected phone handset, staring at the bedroom wall, and thinking bad thoughts. If she were still a smoker—a vice she gave up in her twenties when she was just out of college—she would have been halfway through a pack by now.
    The old man was actually out when she called, off on some early morning errand, and she had to talk with his son Carlo. She then made the mistake of trying to do her business through him. But really, she reasoned after her third imaginary cigarette, it wouldn’t have gone any better with Matteo himself.
    She had tried to be reasonable. “Given the amount of trouble your Ms. Kunstler has sown around here—” And when Carlo didn’t grasp the word sown, she had to interrupt herself and try again with spread and scattered. “—I think it’s best we cool our business relationship for a little while.”
    “She was working for you, Contessa,” he insisted, repeating his father’s line. “Certainly, if you did not