Anyway, last Thursday morning, I dropped the Beloved off to catch her train and then went home again to wait for a nurse to arrive... and, three-quarters of an hour later, she duly did knock upon our door and was allowed to enter, with suitable apologies being mumbled for the chaos within.
This was, of course, the assessment medical for my recent Life Insurance application which required me to have an "independent assessment" by a "qualified health professional" because, as all insurance companies seem to know, your own doctor is simply not to be trusted.
The allocated nurse was required to come to my home, check my height, weight, and blood pressure, and take specimens of blood, urine and perform a cholesterol test, and that was a process that would take "about fifteen minutes" if the telephone call making the arrangements was to be believed.
The most difficult part was that last one, the cholesterol test, because it required me to be "nil by mouth" for eight hours beforehand. Now, that ought to have been straightforward enough, given that, for an eight o'clock appointment, for most of the hours leading up to it I'd have been asleep anyway (or as close as I ever get to sleep, that is...) but I do tend to run on autopilot when I get up in the morning during those wee small hours - these daily word outpourings are probably some testament to that - and so I had to stick a great big "Post-It" Note (other self-adhesive notelets are available) to the kettle bearing the legend "NO!" just to remind me to only take my tablets with water when I got up and not to brew up my usual reviving cuppa...
This was, of course, a direct steal from the movie "Apollo 13" where Kevin Bacon's character, Jack Swigert, does much the same thing with the "LEM Release" switch to stop himself from accidentally hitting it and accidentally killing them all, a part of the story which the real Jack Swigert admits to having done in reality, although the consequences of me accidentally boiling a kettle would have been far less dire.
Mind you, if it had meant a second visit, I might not have been all that popular.
Anyway, when she arrived, the nurse was pleasant enough, and chatty enough, and I probably burbled out way too much information than was good for me, but still... My height has been measured and I'm still as tall as I thought I was, and my weight was recorded and found to be less heavy than I thought I was, given that we don't actually have any scales in the place because they were getting far too depressing.
My blood was taken and my urine sampled, dipped and, happily not tasted, despite he little cup basically screaming "Drink Me!" at me, and off she jolly well went, looking not at all judgingly at the cluttered state of our home and, happily, not resembling the kind of “X-Certificate” caricature of a nurse doing house calls which I had feared she might, and which might have made the neighbour's curtains twitch.
Mind you, I'm not exactly sure how "good for me" being "Nil By Mouth" had been to be perfectly frank with you because, not to put too fine a point on it, my stomach was in an absolute state afterwards. The could be because of the general air of anxiety any of these kinds of thing always instill in me, or it could just be because a "water and pills" breakfast means that the medication doesn't get absorbed by the usual bowl of "Fruit'n'Fibre" and so the unpleasant side-effects might be more prevalent than they ought to be.
Whichever it was, I found myself really craving coffee and pie afterwards, although I resisted for a while, because I really wouldn't want to worry my insurers now, would I?
Mind you, if it had meant a second visit, I might not have been all that popular.
Anyway, when she arrived, the nurse was pleasant enough, and chatty enough, and I probably burbled out way too much information than was good for me, but still... My height has been measured and I'm still as tall as I thought I was, and my weight was recorded and found to be less heavy than I thought I was, given that we don't actually have any scales in the place because they were getting far too depressing.
My blood was taken and my urine sampled, dipped and, happily not tasted, despite he little cup basically screaming "Drink Me!" at me, and off she jolly well went, looking not at all judgingly at the cluttered state of our home and, happily, not resembling the kind of “X-Certificate” caricature of a nurse doing house calls which I had feared she might, and which might have made the neighbour's curtains twitch.
Mind you, I'm not exactly sure how "good for me" being "Nil By Mouth" had been to be perfectly frank with you because, not to put too fine a point on it, my stomach was in an absolute state afterwards. The could be because of the general air of anxiety any of these kinds of thing always instill in me, or it could just be because a "water and pills" breakfast means that the medication doesn't get absorbed by the usual bowl of "Fruit'n'Fibre" and so the unpleasant side-effects might be more prevalent than they ought to be.
Whichever it was, I found myself really craving coffee and pie afterwards, although I resisted for a while, because I really wouldn't want to worry my insurers now, would I?
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