Here's what I learned from a six-plus-hour comprehensive health exam.
By Bradford Pearson
There’s a line in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility — the latest in a series of increasingly bleak books I’ve been turning to in recent months — that has been ping-ponging in my brain lately: “Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.” I found myself thinking of this quote — and blithely denying its possible relevance to my own life — as I pulled into the Princeton Longevity Center, a preventive medicine hub in Princeton, New Jersey.
A little backstory: When Laura, our health and wellness editor, said she wanted someone to undergo a full-day comprehensive health exam for this feature, I mentioned offhandedly that I couldn’t quite remember the last time I’d had a real checkup. I knew I’d gone to the doctor in 2019 for a running injury, and I had a vasectomy later that year. But for as long as I could recall, when a form asked for my primary care physician, I simply wrote “none.”
My wife and I have two little kids, with little teeth and little bodies, and I dutifully schedule their checkups. I buy the medicines they need, and when they say something hurts, we ask a professional why that thing hurts. But I’d put the care of my own body on autopilot, hopeful that everything was working just fine.