Cold

Terrific. I have my first cold of the season.

Colds are in a way worse than influenza (to my mind) because I can't justify staying home from work just because I'm annoyed. Flu takes me down hard and I don't feel badly at all staying home bundled up in my Snuggie sipping home remedies and watching what I like to call “unemployed TV” (which back in the day featured “ChiPS” and “Love Boat” interlaced with truck-driving school commercials but now has expanded to include cooking shows, DIY shows, QVC, and a few dozen true-crime channels with a scattering of “You Have Mesothelioma! Lawyer up!” ads; life used to be so simple). With a cold I just feel like crap but also feel ridiculous whimpering about it. So I go to work and give everyone with whom I work something ELSE for which they can be annoyed with me.

Health, namely my own, has been on my mind lately due mostly to the fact that my insurance through my place of work has changed. This means that I have to go soon to meet with a new physician, and really, I would rather not. I'm okay going to a doctor when I have a specific malady to address (that is a lie, but I would rather go to a doctor than hear the missus ASK me to go to a doctor fifty-two times a day, because who has that kind of stamina?), but a meet-and-greet just to give a stranger the opportunity to point out flaws in my lifestyle is offensive and it makes me want to not co-operate. Several years ago a doctor with whom I hadn't been in the room two minutes actually reached out his scrawny underweight finger and POKED me.

See, I have this thing I call my sphere. It's a personal bubble of influence. It's MINE. It has an event horizon, detectable via the furrow-ness of my brow. The more furrowed, the worse for everyone involved. It doesn't promise violence, but it does mean feelings are liable to be singed. I can't help it, it was there at birth, I think. I actually don't even like to have people stand too close to me but it's forgivable if it's inadvertent, but if you POKE me, or touch my shoulders, suddenly I don't care if you might suddenly burst into flame. Blame it on personal issues, problems with trust, misanthropy, what have you, but it is what it is. Anyway, the poking doctor, that was the first and last consultation he and I shared, and whenever I made appointments at that clinic afterward I would state loudly “I have an appointment with any doctor here EXCEPT DR. POKEY.” I would state this while leaning over the counter, my voice directed down the hallway behind the (cringing) receptionist. I never saw that physician again, or at least not his whole face. I think I saw half of it once, one eye tracking my progress past his door and down the hall, but when I turned to look the door had closed. I don't care. Muhfuh POKED me.

Another reason I'm not thrilled to see a doctor this time around is that I have to schedule THAT appointment soon. Yeah, THAT one. The “let's all trot up the down escalator” one. The “let us all climb up the water-slide, shall we?” appointment. In the age of diagnostic beds and iPads a la Star Trek, why must we still revert to this barbarism? It MUST be unpleasant for everyone in the room and not just the patient/victim, right? I know that the reason the consulting-room probes with the glove take place so fast is because the doctor doesn't trust him-or herself not to throw up, so actually feeding a hose through someone and then taking PICTURES must be some kind of special Hell for all involved, surely. Dr. McCoy never had to do that shit, so medical profession, get with the program! So, no, I don't look forward to this procedure at all, family history be damned.

It just occurred to me that I may have written about making an appointment before. Like, two years ago. Yeah, I put it off.

Cold or no cold, I'm taking a walk today after the household chores. Nothing beats a relatively dry autumn day in Portland. I would take a ride on the bike, but I've learned that biking, for me anyway, just invites more respiratory grief. I wish it wasn't so. I only got to ride one day this week for one reason or another. Speaking of which, I got a reminder this last week that locking your bike wherever you are is a very good thing. Some miscreant actually walked INTO the warehouse at work and stole a work-mate's bike during business hours. So no more parking my bicycle in sight of the docks, and I secure it with the two locks I'll always be carrying from now on.

That's it and that's all. L8s.