The ICD-9-CM (International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification) is an interesting tomb. Within it's covers are listed every possibility of death, disease, illness, physical malady (accidental or otherwise), of physical decline, the loss of individual dignity, or personal psychological disaster, (a subject Company "X" is particularly suspicious of...) Simply skimming through its pages, or viewing it on a computer screen is enough to turn a normal, well adjusted person into a raving paranoid. The book is three inches thick, weighs four pounds, and is known well by Doctors, hospitals, insurance companies "X", the Government, lawyers, morticians, and anyone else paying or profiting from physical vicissitudes. It covers everything even remotely diagnostic to the human body, from lung cancer, to an infected hangnail.
It is a logically sequenced manual from hell, coded for communicative convenience to all concerned, and is very probably the Devil's second favorite book, from which he can choose a particular item of suffering and send it hurtling upwards to some unsuspecting human, vulnerable to subatomic irregularities, a broken leg, a virus, a pinched nerve, a dysfuctional bladder, endless types of infarctions, hemmorhoids, anal fistulas, blisters, unheard of and unpronouncable conditions, symptoms, and syndromes. Even cellular abnormalities, with the potential to flower into slow, agonizing death, (agonizing death has it's own code too.) are codified and listed in language as clean and sanitary as an operating theater. No tangible humanity exists here; its business, hard as nails, serving one goal, profit. Very few tears stain it's pages.
For a vast collection of information devoted entirely to the human condition, it is an ice cold version of EVERYONE'S FUTURE. It is the ultimate book of lists. In the "Medical Universe", it is simply the "WORD".
Of the hundreds of thousands of listings, Page's favorite, "Macular Puckering" (listed in Volume I of "Tabular Listings", under the clasification, "Diseases of the Nervous System and Sense Organs", P. 143.), never failed to bring a smile to her tired, over painted face.
A smile hardly shared by John Palmer, still "not yet again dead", completely unaware of his clerical bifurcation, sitting in his office of a major metropolitan bank, staring aimlessly out his window at the streets below, and wondering why he felt as if he was missing half of his soul.
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