Gone to Greed

Honoring my promise to the cardiologist is proving painful.

It's been almost exactly a month since I've exchanged chocolate in its many forms for Lean Cuisine - the poor man's Weight Watchers minus the meetings and weigh ins, I tell myself and besides you don't need an oven -
and I've added a sensible lunch as well, but it's the 30 minutes of walking each day that I suspect is going to put me in my grave.  I don't mind the heat so much but my poor old legs are protesting like aged, rusting hippies.  

I get home and tend the animals then immediately change clothes and head out while it's still light and before I can change my mind.  It takes about two blocks for my calves to begin to burn with that achy tiredness, two more before I have to stop for the first 60 second rest.  By the halfway mark, these old, unused muscles are screaming for mercy and I'm thinking that cardiologists should be taken out and hung.  I tell myself that it's just a matter of time before my legs remember their original purpose - in a few days I'm sure they'll remember how to accommodate me - but in the meantime, there's only a blitz attack of pain.  I arrive home staggering,
drenched in sweat and barely able to stay upright, reward myself with a quarter of a sugar cookie washed down with ice water and collapse.  I have hardly enough strength left to curse the medical profession.  As I shove a Lean Cuisine into the microwave, I remind myself that not all that many years ago I was walking 3 miles a day.
Surely, I think with a strong sense of desperation, I can learn to do it again.

Besides, a small voice in my head, the one I can usually do without, whispers, You promised.

It was extortion, the voice that usually gets me in trouble whispers back, Your heart is fine and you know it.

But you promised, the first one insists.

Oh, shut up, both of you, I say outloud.

I don't give promises lightly.  But I very often regret them.

A week or so later I stop by the local pharmacy to pick up a prescription for cholesterol medication.  The unsuspecting clerk hands me the little paper bag and an instruction sheet.

"$274.39" she says brightly.

My hand freezes in mid-credit card swipe.  Certain I had misheard her, I look down at the electronic card machine.  It confirms the amount.

"Holy Shit!" the woman behind me, a complete stranger, exclaims, "Dey be made of gold?"

"I don't know," I manage to say, "And I'm not gonna find out."  I mutter an apology to the cashier for wasting her time, replace my credit card in my wallet and walk out.  The following day, the cardiologist provides me with a month's worth of samples - as he will on a regular basis - and while I'm grateful for my problem being solved, I can't help but think that the pharmaceutical companies have as little conscience as the politicians or Wall Street.  The whole country has gone to greed.