“If It Were Serious, Someone Would Have Given Me Something.”
In August I went for a preventive check-up. Nothing special, nothing hurt, I went because you’re supposed to. I left with a number I didn’t like.
Cholesterol high. I won’t write the specific value here, and I have a good reason for that — you’ll understand it in a moment. Nobody prescribed me anything, nobody called me back. I got a piece of paper with numbers on it, and silence around them.
Within two days, I had my defense ready
The number itself isn’t interesting. What’s interesting is what I did with it.
Within two days I had a list in my head. At work I walk fifteen thousand steps, over the course of a full day it comes out to more than twenty thousand. I do yoga every morning, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, no exceptions. From January through the end of April I keep a strict regimen every year — no alcohol, two months without meat, last meal at six in the evening. Yes, the rest of the year I’ll have a glass of wine, but not every day, and I never saw it as a problem.
Every point on that list is true. And yet I wasn’t compiling it to understand something. I was compiling it to feel at peace.
And at the end I added one more sentence, the best one of all: if it were serious, someone would have given me something for it.
This is exactly how half the men I know think. Maybe you too.
Two women, the same number, two opposite endings
My mother weighed fifty-two kilos. She was active her whole life, never ate heavy fatty food — and always had high cholesterol. She died of cancer. Of something that number had nothing to do with.
My grandmother was also active her whole life. But she ate the old way, cooked in lard, the way people cooked back then. She also always had high cholesterol. She lived to almost ninety.
When I wrote it out like this, one after another, it felt like proof. Two women, three generations, the same number and completely opposite endings — and you feel like declaring the whole thing meaningless.
It isn’t. And this is the one place in this piece where I want to be completely precise: two people are not evidence. High cholesterol is not a verdict or a prophecy, it’s a probability — and a probability can’t be confirmed or disproven by two people from one family. If it could, nobody would need medicine, family stories would be enough. My grandmother didn’t prove anything. She just had luck, genes, or both.
What our family story actually shows is far more modest: in our family, we all have it. Even the slim ones. Even the ones who stayed active. That number is clearly not a reward for good behavior or a punishment for sins in our case — and it took me fifty years to understand that.
Four months of honest work I never measured
As I was digging through all this, one more thing occurred to me — and it bothers me more than the result itself.
I do that four-month regimen every year. Four months without alcohol, two without meat, dinner at six. It’s real work, and I do it honestly.
And not once — not a single year — have I had my blood drawn before it and after it.
So today I’m holding one single number from August, with no history behind it. I don’t know if it’s my usual number, or an exception. I don’t know if that cholesterol regimen does anything for me, or nothing at all. Four months of discipline every year, and zero answer to the question of whether it’s good for anything.
Most people are in the same position. We get measured once every few years, get one snapshot, and read it as a verdict on our character. And yet it’s just a snapshot. One day, one morning, one blood draw.
So I told myself I’d add tai chi
Really. That was my first genuine reaction to that piece of paper. Not the question of what the number means. Not “I’ll ask at my next visit.” A decision that I’ll do yoga in the morning and add tai chi in the evening.
It’s not a bad decision. Extra movement never hurt anyone, and I genuinely enjoy doing it.
But when you line it all up — twenty thousand steps, yoga every day, four months of detox, a grandmother who cooked in lard and lived to ninety, and if it were serious someone would have given me something, and by the way I’ll add tai chi — it stops looking like a healthy lifestyle and starts looking like something else.
It looks like a person very industriously working around one short question.
I don’t want to turn this into a lesson, and I won’t tell you what to do with your own result. My picture isn’t your picture — I have my family history and my doctor, who’s known it for forty years, and you have yours and yours. Only someone who knows the whole rest of the story can really read that number.
I’m writing this because it surprised me how easy it was. In two days, without a single lie, using nothing but true sentences, I built myself a reason not to have to deal with anything. And if I hadn’t written it down on paper the way you’re reading it now, I wouldn’t even have noticed.
I don’t know what my number means. For now it only means that I know about it. And next year I’ll finally get it measured before January and after April — so that instead of speculation, I’ll have two numbers.
That’s everything I’ve learned from this check-up so far.
If this reflection has led you to wonder what cholesterol actually means and what can really be done about it, we’ve also written a factual article on the subject: Cholesterol After Fifty.
This is my personal view, not medical advice — what to do about your own number is best answered by your doctor, who knows your history, not a stranger’s text on the internet.
— Michal
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