Annual Checkup

           

            Since I had an appointment for my annual check-up first thing in the morning on August 19th, I made sure I got up early so as to fit in an hour and fifteen minutes of song practice before I had to leave. The night before that I had eaten dinner an hour earlier than usual so that I would have been fasting for at least twelve hours before leaving blood and urine samples at the lab.

            Along Bloor Street there was the odour of garbage though there was no garbage on the curbs. The truck must have picked it up just before I came along, leaving the essence of the ghost of garbage trailing behind it.

            Around Dovercourt a man was sitting in his rollator and dozing in front of a yet to open bar.

            I was fifteen minutes early for my appointment and the first patient to arrive in the clinic.

            The nurse called me into Dr Shechtman’s office right on time, though the doctor himself had not yet arrived. She took my blood pressure, and as usual, it was fine. She weighed me and I’m a quarter of a kilo lighter than last year at 90.75. That puts my body mass index at 25.1, which makes me still slightly overweight, despite all the bike riding and sweating I’ve done all summer.

            Dr Shechtman was about twenty minutes late.

            He checked my prostate and that was still okay. He told me that I wouldn’t have to go for another colonoscopy until 2019, so that was good news. The abdominal ultrasound that I’d had last year showed no problem with my kidneys, even though some of my numbers had been off based on the blood and urine tests. He told me that if the numbers were off this time he’d send me to a kidney specialist. He remembered me telling him that my brother had been on dialysis, and he wondered if I knew what had caused his kidney problems. He was both an alcoholic and a heavy smoker, but the doctor said neither of those would cause kidney issues. I told him that Allison had been a long haul trucker. Shechtman said that could have caused it because those guys sometimes hold their bladder for long periods of time.

            The clinic lab was closed, perhaps permanently. There was a sign telling patients to go down the street to 800 Bathurst, so that’s what I did. The little waiting room was full of mostly old people. I sat down beside an elderly man, and across from me were his wife and his daughter. They were conversing in what sounded like Hebrew, but when their name was called, it was Ibrihimi, so I assume they were white Muslims, maybe from Albania, Chechnya, Macedonia or Turkey.

            I waited 40 minutes before my name was called. The technician took three vials of some kind of dark, red liquid out of my left arm, then she handed me a container and told me, “You need to go pee-pee.” I had to take a key with a meter long handle to the men’s washroom outside and down the hall. After a few stops and starts I managed to fill the container, but when I brought the it back to put it in the basket, I realized that I’d left the key hanging in the toilet stall. I told the technician, but she didn’t seem overly concerned. I’ll bet it happens all the time.

            I had been fasting for 13 hours, but I happened to have a few Fiber 1 lemon bars from the food bank in my back pack, so I ate one of those to keep me going before getting on my bike.

            I went to Woodsworth College to get a letter to indicate for the Noah Meltz program that I was off the waiting list for Canadian Fiction. The people at the registrar’s office didn’t know what I was talking about, since they’d never had to write such a letter before. It turned out that I’d misunderstood what the letter from the Noah Meltz program had been asking for. They just wanted a signed letter from me. I spoke to the awards officer at Woodsworth. She was very nice, though she talked like a daycare worker. She checked her computer and found that for some reason I was still on the waiting list for Canadian Fiction, even though I’d taken myself off the night before. I tried again on one of the Woodsworth computers, but got an error message. Yvonne found that I’d removed myself in the wrong sequence and guided me through to deleting the course. Then she gave me a piece of paper on which to write a quick letter to take to Admissions and Awards.

            There was a short line at Admissions and Awards, but the two students in front of the person in front of me took forever. The young woman in front of me was short and my first impression was that she was a boy of about 12.

            I hopefully got my grant application un-glitched and rolling again.

            It was just a little before noon when I’d gotten all of my business finished. It was bright and sunny out, but if it had been cloudy I would have taken a bike ride. I really didn’t want to do it in the blistering midday sun. I told myself that I might do it later at my regular ride time of 17:30 or so, but I think I knew I wouldn’t. Once I was home I decided that I’d already sacrificed my morning and since I had already ridden my bike for about an hour, I wasn’t going to ride later for another two hours.

            I went to sleep for a while, then got up and did some writing.

            That night after dinner I felt sleepy again, so I went to bed a couple of hours earlier than usual.