I’m healthy. Relatively speaking. Relative to, say, someone lying horizontal in a cemetery.
For the past couple of years, my insurance company wanted to check up on me – even though I have a general practitioner, a cardiologist, an ophthalmologist (or is it optometrist?), a dentist, a colonoscopist (you know what I mean), a podiatrist, an orthopedic surgeon, a dermatologist and a wife whom I rely on to diagnose everything from COVID-19 to mosquito bites.
Apparently, that’s not enough medical input. I’ve gotten calls to request a medical practitioner of some sort – physician’s assistant? Nurse? Pharmacy technician? – be allowed to ask me questions pertaining to my health. I’ve put them off – until now.
When I got another call last week, I answered their 1,482 questions, and on the day they promised to Facetime, I gathered my medical records and list of 59 prescription drugs (only a slight exaggeration). At the stroke of noon, a slightly overweight woman began by asking how my health was.
“Great,” I answered, suggesting this call wasn’t necessary, but she didn’t take the hint. Instead, she asked me to list my meds.
After citing the first three or four, I said, “Dutasteride.”
“Do you know what you are taking that for?”
“My Dutaster?” I thought about saying but wasn’t sure anatomically where that was.
“For your prostate.”
“Oh, right.” I remembered my doctor telling me it helped keep my prostate in check.
Once through checking my meds, she started on vaccinations: shingles, flu, COVID-19, tetanus, gluttony (I made up that last one).
“Your last tetanus shot was in 2009?” she confirmed. “You should have one every 10 years.”
I don’t like getting shots; when I was a toddler, injections arrived in the butt area, the needles longer, thicker and duller than a Big Gulp straw.
“Operations?”
I started listing them: two Mohs nose surgeries, two hip replacements, two cataract removals and a torn meniscus in a pear tree.
“You need a bone density scan,” she said.
That sounded like it might involve needles. “What’s that?”
“They take an image of your bone.”
I told her if it didn’t involve needles, I’d tell my general practitioner about it.
“Have you fallen in the last six months?”
“Just for my wife,” I wish I had thought to say.
“You have no trouble eating?”
“That’s a gross understatement.”
She cracked up. “How much do you weigh?”
I thought that was an awfully personal question, but I told her.
“How tall?”
I told her, but I didn’t like where this was going.
“Your BMI,” she said as if she knew beforehand what I was going to say, “indicates you are obese. You need to exercise more. Walk 15 minutes one way with your wife. Walk 15 minutes back. You will talk all the time and the time will fly by.”
That cracked me up.
“You need to run away from red meat,” she said. “Run away from salt. Run away from pre-processed food. Run away from pork.”
“Pork?”
“Fatty. Run away from bacon. Run away from fried foods. Run toward fish. Run toward chicken.”
She counseled me like a cross country coach for a while longer, then, before saying goodbye, warned me again, “get more exercise.”
“And don’t fall,” I reminded her to remind me.
“And don’t fall,” she giggled.
My takeaway from the call: laugh more, even when talking about needles, surgeries and a BMI that requires taking walks with your honey. Especially that last one.
• Rick Holinger’s writing has appeared in more than 100 literary journals. He holds a Ph.D. in creative writing from UIC. His poetry book “North of Crivitz” and essay collection “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences” are available at local bookstores, Amazon or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.