Revatio had begun to feel less like medicine and more like a bad experiment conducted on your nervous system. The world took on a faint aquatic tint—everything dipped in blue, as if you were living at the bottom of a chlorinated pool. Your energy collapsed. Not ordinary fatigue, but the full-body resignation of a mild flu, the kind that makes even standing upright feel like a negotiation. Then came the mood—low, gray, airless. The drug put you into a state of full-blown depression. Eight hours later, the storm would pass, as if the drug had a built-in escape hatch. The problem was that the supposed benefit—the whole reason you swallowed the pill—barely showed up.
So you did what any rational man does when a drug both fails and punishes: you asked for a new one. You emailed your doctor, requesting a switch to Cialis, or more precisely, tadalafil. You added, perhaps unwisely but honestly, that in your pre-Kaiser years—when you played pharmacological roulette with online vendors—tadalafil had arrived in thin, slightly crumpled yellow envelopes from India, and despite the sketchy packaging, it had worked better and hurt less.
Your doctor didn’t respond. A nurse did. The message was bureaucratically crisp: medication changes require an in-person visit. Your doctor was booked for two months. You took the next available opening with a substitute, a Doctor S.
You showed up the following afternoon in cargo shorts and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, dressed less like a patient and more like a man running errands who accidentally wandered into healthcare. Doctor S walked in, clocked the shirt immediately, and lit up. He was a Zeppelin devotee. There was a brief, almost sacred detour into rock fandom before he pivoted to your symptoms.
You laid it out cleanly: the side effects were so punishing that if the choice was Revatio or nothing, you’d take nothing and call it a win.
He asked your age. When you told him you were months away from sixty-five, he raised an eyebrow and said you looked younger. You credited decades of lifting weights and a high-protein diet. This flipped the dynamic. Suddenly, you were the instructor and he was the eager student, asking how to get more protein, nodding, mentally taking notes.
Then, almost casually, he granted your request. Sildenafil out, tadalafil in. Done.
But the visit had a second act. He wasn’t going to let you off the hook so easily. You needed to provide blood work.
He ordered the full panel: PSA, lipids, liver function, hemoglobin—everything designed to turn your bloodstream into a spreadsheet. You nodded along, already running the numbers in your head. Most would be fine. LDL a little high—twenty extra pounds tends to leave fingerprints. You told yourself that at 210 pounds, your labs would gleam with moral superiority. Which made the timing feel absurd. Why test now, when a better version of you was theoretically just a few disciplined weeks away?
You didn’t argue. You agreed. Cheerfully. You would comply—eventually. On your schedule. The blood draw could wait until you were the man you preferred to measure.
The session was fifteen minutes in total. You thanked him, promised a return visit, and navigated your way out of Kaiser’s labyrinthine corridors, following EXIT signs like a man escaping a low-stakes maze.
Outside, the parking lot was packed and sunlit. You texted your wife: you could pick up your daughters; she didn’t need to leave work early. You added the medical update—the prescription switch, the unexpected protein seminar.
Her reply came fast: “OMG. Two guys talking about protein and Cialis. What a sausage fest.”
You laughed—loud, unfiltered, the kind that bends you at the waist. People nearby stiffened. Car doors shut. Windows slid up. You could feel the ambient suspicion gathering around you like static.
You texted back: “You made me laugh in the parking lot. People think I’m unwell. They’re scared of me.”
She answered: “They should be.”
And somehow, that felt exactly right.
Cinemorphosis 
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