Poem: The Many Bobs Interpretation

In 1985 a New York City doctor told me
that I had a disease,
lung cancer,
which has a 99% mortality rate
over a ten-year time period.

I didn't die. Either (1) powerful antibiotics cured it, or (2) a friend's New Age healing cured it, or (3) it was just a False Positive -- (the white splat on the x-ray fil just LOOKED like pulmonary carcinoma). Now permit me a geeky digression into popular science. One solution to certain perplexing problems in quantum physics is to suppose the existence of parallel universes. Whenever an apparently random quantum event with two different possible outcomes is observed -- physicists say a probability function collapses -- reality virtually splits into two different universes, each identical to the other except, of course, for that single outcome. Now understand, parallel universes are not a fact, not even a verifiable theory, just a mental trick useful for physicists because it eliminates certain paradoxes. Anyway, that's how I choose to think of that life-and-death medical milestone, twenty years later. And suppose there was e-mail service from one parallel universe to another. I wonder what Parallel Bob Dead would say to Parallel Bob Living?