They Can Test My Pee But They'll Never Tame It

           

            Early Thursday afternoon I kept my appointment with my doctor. When the nurse called me in, she asked me to confirm that the doctor had wanted me to come in for a follow-up on my lab tests. I told her I assume that I’d won some sort of prize for being the lab’s millionth blood test and that I’d probably get free shopping at Honest Ed’s starting in January of 2017.

            I had to wait quite a while for Dr Shechtman to finally come in. He asked how I was and I said, “I assume you are about to tell me that.” It was of course something to do with my lab tests a few weeks before. I asked if it was my cholesterol like it had been about ten years before, but he said, “No, your cholesterol is pretty good … and your blood pressure is excellent!” He said that it’s something of minor concern that we should monitor. He said that my kidney function is of minor concern. I think he said my GFR levels are slightly below normal and my creatinine clearance levels are within the normal range but they have jumped enough for us to want to take another look at them. He said it could be a lab glitch or it could be that I was just dehydrated on the day of the last lab test. He said he wouldn’t be surprised at all if the next test shows no problem. He told me that if I don’t hear from him within two weeks there’s no problem.

            I went to the lab and while the technician was taking my blood, she told me I’d have to give a urine sample too. I said, “Okay, I have to go anyway.” She said, “That’s good!” I went to the washroom and started peeing until I realized that I was urinating in the toilet. I stopped and emptied the rest of my bladder into the cup, but I’d only filled one quarter. I was embarrassed because I’d already talked about having to pee and for some reason I was worried that when the technician saw a quarter of a cup after my saying that I had to go that she would think there was something wrong. I stood there and tried to call up a few more drips from the depths, but after two tries I only managed a couple of little splashes each time. On top of that, while I was trying so hard to pee, I spilled some of what I already had in the cup. I didn’t know how much piss was really necessary for a sample. It could be that even less was needed than what I gave. One thing I noticed was that my urine was almost clear this time around compared to the full cup of almost orange pee that I left with the lab a month before.

            When I left Bloor Medical, I was unlocking my bike when a very large and muscular young woman with blonde dreadlocks, came riding hard and fast on a bicycle, heading south on Bathurst. Her arms and legs were bursting with tattoos. As she passed I found her strangely alluring.

            I headed north on Bathurst, but from Davenport to St Clair the traffic was either jammed or crawling. I quite often had to get off my bike to get around and ahead of cars that were stuck too close to the curb. In fits of walking and riding, I probably walked half the way up to St Clair. Once I turned east the way was open and smooth and a great relief like suddenly peeing after not being able to. Around Avenue Rd though there was more construction ahead and so I once again had to get off and walk from time to time.

            I stopped to take some photos of a nice art deco apartment building about halfway between Avenue Rd and Yonge Street.

            I rode up to Millwood and then across to Mt Pleasant and south again. On Yonge, south of Bloor, I took a few photos of interesting old storefronts. I also stopped south of College to take some photos of the beautiful art deco designs on the outside of the College Park building.

            That night I watched another complicated episode of Bonanza. The middle of the second season has some pretty good stories. This one involved Little Joe hanging around the telegraph office when his friend, the operator was out getting something to show him. A telegram came in from the main branch of a bank in San Francisco, saying they were going to close the Virginia City branch. Joe pocketed the message because he thought there was something fishy, considering that so many miners had money in that bank. He went to the bank and found out that most of the money was in bonds and so the miners would lose it all if the bank closed because there wasn’t enough cash to cover the $100,000 in bonds. It turned out that this was all a plot on the part of the owner of the bank to foreclose on a rich silver mine in the Comstock. The owner was shown as a very old and very mean man in a wheelchair who said at the beginning of the episode, “Our civilization was founded on negotiation! Force them to negotiate!”

            Joe decided that the only way he could save the money that belonged to all the miners was to rob the Virginia City branch of all the bonds, then take them to larger branch two days away where they would be able to cash the bonds. Then he would bring the cash back and give it to the miners. He got Hoss involved in this scheme as an accomplice. They cut down a telegraph pole on the way to prevent the town from being warned that they were coming.

            Meanwhile, the two managers of the Virginia City branch decided to rob their own bank and they also robbed Joe and Hoss after they’d cashed the bonds. Joe and Hoss though eventually get the money back.

            One interesting thing about this episode was that the music was not the usual old west style orchestrations that one usually hears on Bonanza, but it was closer to rock and roll sometimes and other times like Dragnet. Maybe that can be explained by the fact that the episode was directed by Robert Altman.