Cultural subordinates

My upbringing has predisposed me to a hostile and suspicious attitude towards many authorities.   I'm calm enough when reassured that standards of civilization will be observed and that I'm not in Africa, again, but if I am under unusual pressure, my old Africa psychology immediately asserts itself again.

If my African self knows one lesson, it is how to catastrophize.  This catastrophizing tendency is perfectly natural and appropriate for many situations in Africa.   Don't go to hospital, because the hospitals are likely to be unsanitary and you are likely to die.  Don't get thrown in prison, because ditto.  Don't question authorities, but negotiate with them in a smooth and efficient manner and maybe you reverse the flow of reality that's taking you in a direction you don't want to go.

These days, I am extremely fit -- let's say, for my age.  I work out at least three times a week.   I eat well and I rarely work.  I play a lot.

All the same, I fear having the diseases of old age.  It's not so much that I believe I have them -- I feel and understand that the possibility of my having them is profoundly remote.   Nonetheless, I'm of the view that the doctors might succeed, in contradiction to my actual condition, in pinning what I don't have onto me.

This paranoia goes way back.  We used to have school nurses periodically examining us.   About every two years, the ordeal would begin.   We'd line up, during normal school hours, to be thoroughly checked out.  Our general physical appearance and eyesight would be examined.

Along with this, there would be difficult, perplexing questions.   The matron stopped the queue and looked at me, for I was the current specimen under examination:

"What's wrong with your legs?  Why are they covered in bruises?"

I had no answer to this question.  Were my legs covered in bruises?  I looked down to notice, as if for the first time, that there were a number of bruises in various shades of repair, on my shins.

"um..." I said.   "Um," was the expression you used in an authoritarian culture when you were buying time.  The equivalent expression, used by a few of the black servants of the time was, "It is not me.  I am not the one."

"Um..." I said.  "Are they?"

I didn't pause to consider that I'd been slamming my shins with the back of the pedals every time I stepped on my bike to travel to and from school.  That would have been too easy an explanation -- and, after all, I was bruising easily.  There could be no explanation for that, apart from the TRUE one, the MEDICAL one.

"Um..." I said, "Maybe it's because I went ice-skating?"

I didn't expect them to buy my "excuse", which was just as well, because the nurse would hardly be persuaded.

"You have a very rare disease," she announced, after writing something in her notebook.  "It's hemophilia."

She moved on to the next student in the queue.