One of the things I wasn’t prepared for when I reached middle age was the number of appointments I’d have.
My default is no appointments. I don’t like having to set up little reminders on my phone’s reminder app. I thought “app” stood for application, but I’m now starting to think it’s short for “appointment.”
As someone possibly living with chronically undiagnosed ADHD, I am often “late,” a concept I’d never have to acknowledge were it not for clocks and appointments.
Furthermore, appointments interfere with work, skateboarding and my other hobbies, including hiking and scrolling for dopamine. Who is going to feed my hungry algorithms if I can’t be on my phone because of some appointment?
Just this month, I have multiple physical therapy appointments scheduled for knee bursitis. I have my annual dermatology appointment (history of skin cancer), at least one dentist appointment, probably more to come because they always find something. I even have two Les Schwab seasonal tire-change appointments because you can’t just drop your car off anymore.
And now, out of the blue, it seems I have a cardiology appointment.
It was from an early October appointment that my future cardiology appointment began. I’d gone in to see my primary doc about my swollen knee. After a full summer of long hikes and sometimes nightly skateboarding, the bursa sacs — now there’s a gross name — around my right knee began puffing up like they were filled with gel, much like the compression sleeve I’ve begun wearing over it.
At the end of that appointment, the doctor listened to my heart and took my pulse. That was followed by an appointment this Monday morning with a nurse, just a routine check of my blood pressure and comparison with my home blood pressure cuff and theirs to be sure the former is giving me accurate results.
Of course, they only worry about this sort of thing when you have had high blood pressure. I swear, this has been the year my mental age has really had to catch up with my chronological one. (Note to my body: The next big leap forward in aging is supposed to come at 60, not 57. Slow your fat rolls.)
I don’t want to bore you with details. Under any kind of stress, I tend to get things out of order when I don’t take notes or use a recorder. As a journalist, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed by that, but then who believed that Truman Capote had a nearly photographic memory? Not I.
So, in no particular order: My blood pressure device kept crapping out with error messages. I also mentioned to the nurse that sometimes when I took it, it would tell me my heartbeat was irregular. You see where I’m going with this. The doctor’s office blood pressure machine also kept saying I was moving around.
Perhaps a bit stumped as she alternated between the two blood pressure cuffs and multiple error messages, the nurse joked something along the lines of, “I don’t know, David, maybe you’re just weird.”
I’m about 90% sure she was joking, although “weird” is a pretty solid diagnosis for a middle-aged body. That’s why we have so many appointments ramping up.
“I feel pretty weird,” I said, hoping she would not take me seriously and refer me to a Weirdness Clinic.
Ten, 15 years ago, I donated my weird blood regularly. My phlebotomist would sometimes need a manager override because I had a slow pulse of around 40 and 50.
To quote Bob Dylan, things have changed. On Monday, after consulting with my doctor, the nurse gave me an EKG test. An hour later, I had a message from my doctor saying it indicated a kind of premature beat following every normal beat of my polyrhythmic heart.
“This is nothing urgent that needs to be done, however, we should explore further with an echocardiogram,” wrote my doctor, which, translated, means “cardiologist appointment.”
I sound like I’m complaining, because I am. I’m also steeling myself for more appointments. It’s been that kind of year, which started on Dec. 31 — emergency for insurance reasons, that is. I mention it here because two weeks into January, I was chowing on some toffee-infused Ben & Jerry’s flavor ice cream when I crunched on something that was not an ingredient but rather my broken-off crown.
My wife had been mentioning I had bad breath for a few days, but ha ha, it was just my dying tooth.
Now I have a partly missing molar and zero pain because of the root canal. I’m tempted to leave it as is, but I have too many appointments to look into a second opinion. So I’ll go along with my current dentist office, where they’re going to insist on excavating and inserting an implant or a bridge when I, human jack-o’-lantern, go in for my six-month check-up on Halloween.
While I’ve been rehearsing excuses in my head, I know I’ll just passively agree to fix it. I’ll probably opt for a bridge, partly because it requires fewer appointments than an implant.
Someone do me a favor and remind me to delete my reminder app.
