"I was born with this. It's a hereditary genetic condition. This is something you can go your whole life without really knowing that something's wrong. I had high blood pressure, and that was the first sign"
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The line does a lot of quiet PR work while pretending it isnt PR at all. Cojocaru frames illness as inheritance rather than failure: not a moral lapse, not a lifestyle tabloid narrative, not the punishment arc people love to slap onto public figures. "I was born with this" is both explanation and shield, a preemptive strike against the cultural reflex to blame patients for their diagnoses, especially when the symptom on the surface, high blood pressure, gets treated like a character flaw.
What makes it land is the gradual reveal. He starts with certainty, "hereditary genetic condition", then pivots to uncertainty: you can live "your whole life" without knowing. That tension captures how modern health anxiety actually works: we are surrounded by data and screening culture, yet the body can still keep secrets. The phrase "something's wrong" is deliberately vague, almost childlike, a reminder that even experts in taste and spectacle become ordinary patients the moment medicine enters the room.
Cojocaru is also speaking as a critic, someone trained to diagnose and appraise others. Here he flips the gaze back on himself, admitting that the first sign was banal, not cinematic. High blood pressure is the kind of warning that hides in routine checkups, which makes the subtext a nudge toward vigilance without turning into a lecture. Its a story about the unreliability of appearances, delivered by a man whose job has often been to read appearances for a living.
What makes it land is the gradual reveal. He starts with certainty, "hereditary genetic condition", then pivots to uncertainty: you can live "your whole life" without knowing. That tension captures how modern health anxiety actually works: we are surrounded by data and screening culture, yet the body can still keep secrets. The phrase "something's wrong" is deliberately vague, almost childlike, a reminder that even experts in taste and spectacle become ordinary patients the moment medicine enters the room.
Cojocaru is also speaking as a critic, someone trained to diagnose and appraise others. Here he flips the gaze back on himself, admitting that the first sign was banal, not cinematic. High blood pressure is the kind of warning that hides in routine checkups, which makes the subtext a nudge toward vigilance without turning into a lecture. Its a story about the unreliability of appearances, delivered by a man whose job has often been to read appearances for a living.
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| Topic | Health |
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