Post-Modern Drunk: My Dark Secret Pharmacy
Back in January of 2004, a couple of months after I started my first full time job, I got really sick. It was a cold that just lasted and lasted. It was before I'd been made full-time, so if I missed work, I didn't get paid, so I just kept coming to work and coughing through it all.

This was 2004, so it was ten years before Obamacare made getting sick into a trip to a four-star resort, so it took me a long time to go to a doctor. When the cough persisted, and people started really noticing it eventually basically forced me to go to the doctor.

The doctor did those standard doctor things: he took my temperature, listened to my lungs, told me to cough a bunch, and then told me he had to give me the bad news.

"Mr. Stuart. I have to give you the bad news. You will never ever be president; you have pneumonia. In this trying time, as you adjust to the fact that, even once you turn 35, you are no longer be qualified to be president, I merely ask that you get this prescription filled, take the pills for ten days, get some bed rest, and you will completely recover, except for that gaping hole in your soul where the possibility of being elected President of the United States once resided before this terrible completely curable illness took it from you."

Reader, I wept in that office for hours. Then I filled my prescription, missed a couple of days of work, spent the weekend in bed drinking fluids, took my antibiotics for the required ten days, and recovered completely.

Except I can never be president. That is a career path that has been stripped from me by this common, treatable disease.

It was the worst news I ever received from a doctor.

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