The Test Results

The nurse had said three to five business days, which Andres Rojas interpreted, within about four minutes of leaving the clinic, as three to five days in which to imagine every possible way his life might end. He had fainted at a friend's wedding the week before, in the middle of a speech that was not even his, and his doctor, after asking a great many questions in a very calm voice, had sent him for blood tests "just to rule a few things out."

It was the phrase "rule a few things out" that kept him awake. What things? How many? By the end of the first night, he had read so many medical websites that he had diagnosed himself with four rare conditions, two of which mainly affected horses.

His sister Marta came over on the second evening with soup and a frankly unhelpful amount of common sense. She was a pharmacist, and she spoke the way pharmacists write labels: carefully, and with a warning on everything. "It's most likely nothing serious," she said, ladling soup into a bowl. "Fainting at weddings is extremely common. It could well be that you just hadn't eaten." "Most likely," Andres repeated. "Could well be. Why can't you just say it's nothing?" "Because I don't know it's nothing. Nobody does yet. But I'd be very surprised if it turned out to be anything worrying."

"Very surprised," he said. "So there's a chance." Marta sighed. "There's a chance of everything, Andres. There's a chance this soup is poisoned. The odds are just extremely low." He looked at the soup. She took the spoon from him and tasted it herself, which he found more reassuring than anything she had said.

The second day was worse. Toronto was gray and wet, and every time his phone buzzed, his heart did something it probably should not have done. It was the dentist confirming an appointment. It was his bank. It was a pizza company that seemed to know him far too well. He began composing, in his head, a dignified speech about how he had lived, on the whole, a reasonably good life. He got as far as his second year of university and decided the speech needed work.

On the third morning, Marta texted: "Any news? Remember, no news is generally good news. If it were urgent, they would almost certainly have called by now." He typed back: "Almost certainly?" She replied with a single emoji of a woman with her hand on her forehead, which he chose to interpret as sympathy.

The call came at twenty past four. Dr. Okafor sounded exactly as calm as before, which Andres had decided overnight was a professional trick to stop patients from panicking. "Well, the good news is that there's nothing to suggest anything serious," she said. "Your iron levels are on the low side, which would probably explain the fainting. I'd like you to take a supplement for a couple of months, and perhaps cut back on coffee. How many cups are you having a day?" Andres told her. There was a short pause. "Let's say fewer than that," she said.

He called Marta immediately. "Low iron," he said. "That's it. Iron." "I told you it was most likely nothing." "You told me it was most likely nothing, that it could well be nothing, and that you'd be surprised if it were something. You never once said it was nothing." "And I was right every time," said Marta, sounding very pleased with herself. "That's the beauty of hedging. You're never wrong."

That evening he bought a box of iron tablets, a bag of spinach and, after some reflection, a smaller coffee mug. When the next wedding invitation arrived a month later, he accepted at once and wrote on the card, in his neatest handwriting: "Will almost certainly attend. Will very probably not faint."