I Hadn’t Had a Checkup in Years — What Could Go Wrong?

The ultimate health exam / Illustration by James Boyle

There’s a line in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility — the latest in a series of increasingly bleak books I’ve been turning to in recent months — that has been ping-ponging in my brain lately: “Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.” I found myself thinking of this quote — and blithely denying its possible relevance to my own life — as I pulled into the Princeton Longevity Center, a preventive medicine hub in Princeton, New Jersey.

A little backstory: When Laura, our health and wellness editor, said she wanted someone to undergo a full-day comprehensive health exam for this feature, I mentioned offhandedly that I couldn’t quite remember the last time I’d had a real checkup. I knew I’d gone to the doctor in 2019 for a running injury, and I had a vasectomy later that year. But for as long as I could recall, when a form asked for my primary care physician, I simply wrote “none.”

My wife and I have two little kids, with little teeth and little bodies, and I dutifully schedule their checkups. I buy the medicines they need, and when they say something hurts, we ask a professional why that thing hurts. But I’d put the care of my own body on autopilot, hopeful that everything was working just fine.

Which is how I found myself standing shirtless with my chest being shaved by an exercise physiologist, 10 electrodes dangling from her hand. Soon I was running up an increasingly steep treadmill, and a printer next to me was popping out papers covered in jagged, progressively more worrisome-looking lines. (This endeavor, I was told, was intended to determine my aerobic fitness.) An IV port sat in my arm: Earlier, I’d been pumped full of a contrast dye and slid into a CT machine to map my heart and blood vessels. A few vials of blood had been removed, to check my triglycerides, cholesterols, and dozens of other things whose functions have whooshed out of my brain since 10th-grade biology. Meetings with nurses, nutritionists, and medical directors, and further exams of bone density, cardiac health, and muscle mass — it was more health care in one day than I’d experienced collectively in the previous decade.

I’m not afraid of doctors. My absence from the medical world was not out of fear, but rather a result of complacency. I’m healthy, I’d say. I work out! Still, as I waited for the litany of test results I couldn’t help but feel a low-grade worry growing in my gut, the specter of that awful randomness that Mandel had lodged into my brain.

But: I am fine. More than fine, actually. Coronary arteries? Zero plaque, something that 50 percent of my fellow 40-year-old men already have, according to David Fein, the center’s founder and medical director. The treadmill stress test? I placed in the 99th percentile, with the aerobic capacity of the average 20-year-old male. (I texted this to my wife, whose eyes I could feel rolling even before I sent the message.) Hearing, bone density, cancer risks — all good. Should I drink a little less alcohol? Of course; we all should. But then how am I supposed to celebrate this excellent news?

When I walked out of the appointment, the front desk handed me an inch-thick book with “Personal Wellness Plan for Bradford Pearson” stamped across the cover. It’s full of all my results, plus nutrition and fitness recommendations — I should add more muscle mass to help prevent falls in my later years, eat more protein, and (geez, again with this?) drink less alcohol — to help maintain my (as I’ve just learned) excellent health.

My own goals? Take care of myself the way I do my kids — like seeing a doctor more regularly, to start — and maybe add more uplifting books to my to-read pile.

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Published as “Brave New World” in the May 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.