. . . I've been engaged since the first of the month in a process that promises to rehabilitate the shambling wreck into which I have neglected my physical self, assembling in its place a sleek upgrade prepared to dance through the next fifty years. Maybe. Sounds unlikely, but I have two reasons to think something like this might actually happen.
First, I've seen inarguable evidence that the alternative to overhaul might be a pretty short shuffle to the Exit. Second, I have agreed to allow my restoration process to be televised on the Discovery Channel. On this show, my body will be the equivalent of the house in "This Old House" or the motorcycle in "Monster Chopper." If I fail, I will do so very publicly. Not cool.
Besides, I've hobbling around for five years with a lumbar agony that has excruciated a lot of the spunk out of my life. I've now fallen into the hands of folks who swear they can fix it.
. . .
Ordinarily, I would no more be able to afford months of Canyon Ranch care and supervision than mount my own private Mars mission, but I am the beneficiary of a providential intervention by Alexander Tsiaras, a huge-hearted Greek who is probably the world's leading artist in 3-D medical imagery. His company, Anatomical Travel, has recently embarked on a series of television productions aimed to deepen public understanding of how the body works (or doesn't) by giving detailed interior tours of the region.
Alex and I met last summer in Toronto where we were both speaking at a conference. We took to one another immediately. Alex, a former Olympic athlete, was concerned that my physical modus operandi was not long-term sustainable. To his empathic eyes, the wear already visible on my chassis was hard to behold. He and Liponis had been thinking about how to convey what Liponis had been discovering about health and aging to a wider audience when they hit on the idea of a TV special that would be a cross between a medical documentary, a reality show, and a remake of Incredible Voyage using an actual body. The body they selected was mine.
So, just before Christmas, Tsiaras called me with his wild challenge. He would use all the latest techniques in penetrative scanning and software image assembly to produce a Visible Barlow, first as a wreck and then as a restoration. Between the capture of these two images would be an intervening three or four months, during which, followed by a film crew, I would submit myself to a week per month at one Canyon Ranch location or another while while maintaining strict adherence to regimen of exercise, yoga, massage, meditation, and a diet so virtuous they'd be naming bitter vegetables after me before it was over.
Those who know me will also know that Orson Welles, were he still available, would have made about as likely a candidate for such a program. Over the surprisingly lengthy span of my life, I've drunk enough to float a tanker, smoked like Rumanian industrial zone, eaten like an average American, and eschewed most forms of regular exercise beyond dancing in bars. I've treated my body like one of the pickups I used to drive when I was ranching. High speeds, rough roads, no mercy.
But I saw what happened to Orson Welles and, besides, the multi-dimensional mirror Alexander proposed to create for me appealed hugely to my narcissism. I'm the kind of guy who's so self-absorbed that he'd actually like to visit his own pancreas and other scenic internal locations of himself. Finally, I enjoy being a good example. If such an incorrigible wastrel as me can be visibly retrieved from The Dark Path, others might be encouraged to think themselves redeemable.
So, despite considerable skepticism, I agreed to give it at least the start of a try. It already looks like it was a good thing I did...
On January 29, Alexander took me up to Inner Imaging, a Manhattan facility associated with Beth-Israel Hospital where they have an Electron Beam Tomographer, one of the most advanced medical scanning devices in the world. The EBT is kind of like a giant television in which the varying densities of one's targeted flesh act like the magnets that direct the beam in a conventional TV. In a matter of minutes, they were able to slice me into hundreds of detailed digital cross-sections. These images of the squishyware were then reassembled with software into the most Totally Nude version of me you can imagine.
The most striking features made visible by this radical disrobing were my coronary arteries, clutching my heart in a white lightning bolt of calcified plaque. It shouldn't have surprised me, but it was immediately obvious that I was a heart attack waiting to happen. This sort of thing will get a fellow's attention a lot more readily than some abstract analysis of his risk factors. Nervous as an ocelot on meth, I rushed outside and smoked a Marlboro Light 100 to the root.
Two days later, I stubbed out what may be my last cigarette, and, accompanied by my new guardian angel Alexander, boarded a train for Albany. We were met at the station by an alarmingly healthy guy about my age and driven through the snowy Berkshires to the Canyon Ranch compound in Lenox, Massachusetts.
It is an odd place. Built around one of the wretchedly excessive mansions that the Edwardian tycoons who built them called "cottages," Canyon Ranch in The Berkshires is a little like a cross between Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, the Betty Ford Clinic, and the Starship Enterprise. The equipment gleams with expensive modernity. The demographic curve bulges heavily around women of a certain age whose husbands - or ex-husbands - have been wildly successful. Things are pretty Caucasian, and very quiet indeed. I immediately felt like "what is wrong with this picture."
But the staff is engaging, sweet, and truly dedicated. After giving me an evening to mull things over in my richly-appointed chamber, they set about to analyze my everything. They drew about fifteen vials of blood. They scanned my bones. They measured everything from body fat ratio to hearing acuity. And, after a lovely nurse shaved a heart on my chest for better electro-cardial contact, they strapped a mask on my face and gave me a treadmill test that felt like a condensed version of the Bataan Death March. All of these indignities were suffered under the pitiless gaze of a video camera that recorded my every grimace.
