Donald Trump's stress test, and mine

Outside, it’s a delightfully crisp Spring morning.  The sun is out, the flowering trees are in bloom, carpeting the ground with pink and white petals fallen in winds overnight.  A breeze blows, making you glad you wore your down vest, even though the weather forecast says it’s going to warm up considerably later on.

Inside, the windowless room is airless, the chairs are uncomfortable, and the walls are painted in that industrial nowhere color between beige and ugh.  The overhead lights are harsh.  No one looks like they slept enough last night. 

It’s impossible to get comfortable as you sit and wait and contemplate what’s coming.  You’re sleepy.  The air in the room, cleansed and cooled by unseen machines and seeping through unseen vents, is stultifying.  There is dread; nothing that will happen to you this morning will be good.  You can feel your eyelids drooping and your eyes closing, but you can’t stop them.  Your breathing slows.  Trapped within your unbearable surroundings, you fall asleep sitting upright in the chair on which you don’t want to be sitting, in the airless room you are compelled to inhabit.

A description of Donald Trump in a Manhattan courtroom this morning?  No, yours truly in a cardiologist’s waiting room, marking time before a nuclear stress test.  Everything about the experience, right down to the age we share, 77, was as intolerable as Trump’s daily court appearances are reported to be.  You’re in a place you don’t want to be, undergoing a procedure you don’t want to experience, all the while feeling every bloody tick of the clock of the years your body has endured to get you here.

In my case, an intravenous needle and some EKG chest stickers and wires and a cardiac PET scanner are all the punishment I need to tolerate over a three-hour period, and then voila!  Welcome back to the sunny day and the budding trees and the sounds of mowers and trimmers working a nearby expanse of grass signaling that the rest of the day awaits with all its ordinary glories and pressures and delights!

I confess that when my chin hit the neck of my shirt, jolting me back to wakefulness, it did make me think of Defendant Trump down there in that Manhattan courtroom at the exact moment I was in the office of a Newton, New Jersey, cardiologist.  My years on this earth and the way I have lived them and a general sense that I should take care of my health with occasional cardiac check-ups sentenced me to my airless room, surrounded by attendants going about their professional duties.  Donald Trump, on the other hand, landed in his uncomfortable chair surrounded by attendants of a much different sort, going about the business of prosecuting him for the way he has lived his life, a circumstance which may lead to a sentencing more grave, and many would say, far more deserved than my own.

Age does funny things to you.  A recent survey I came across reported that attitudes of people about aging are changing.  The study found that as people get older, the age which they define as being “old” gets pushed further and further into the future.  “Seventy is the new sixty,” was one finding of the study.  The study also reported that “negative beliefs about getting older are linked to higher stress levels.”

Donald Trump is being described by court reporters who have seats inside the courtroom as looking lonely and older than he appears on television, as he sits there in his uncomfortable chair at the defense table.  I can testify that there is nothing you can do at 77 to feel like you’re 60, but not being on trial for committing several dozen felonies helps.  Hours later this afternoon, while Donald Trump was still listening to David Pecker on the stand describing a criminal conspiracy in which the two of them participated, I was home in an actual bed under an actual comforter taking an actual nap, having left my chin on my chest in my uncomfortable chair behind me.