I’ve been told that I have a 12.7% chance of having a stroke or heart attack within the next ten years. This wasn’t, as you might think, shouted at me by an embittered ex-wife or someone I cut off in the traffic. This came from my doctor.
That’s the risk you take when you visit a general practitioner and he sends you for blood tests, as he will, regardless. You can be there for a broken toe and within two minutes he will have you pinned to the floor poking and prodding and listening to your organs. When he lets you up, he’ll prescribe something to ease the pain and humiliation he’s just caused you and tell you to go for blood tests.
I was only there because, while saving a drowning child from a shark infested lagoon, something went in my lower back. Okay, fine. I was bending over the sink. It might have been the toilet. It felt like I had been shot with a speargun.
My doctor shares a building with other doctors and I never have to wait very long to see him. I’ve barely started flirting with the diseased and dying when my name is called. I have considered that I might be his only patient.
Being familiar with his style, I often start undressing in the waiting room. This seems to upset some people but that’s not my problem. We are all there because something is wrong with us. To avoid creating the impression that I have mental health issues, I feign a limp or a cough. Sometimes I lure a child while the mother is busy on Facebook and get him to sit next to me so that people think I’m there with a sick boy. It helps when he starts crying, and he almost always does. Facebook – making human trafficking easier for everyone.
Before the doctor has even closed his door I am completely naked and waiting in position. Once the gloves are off and our breathing is back under control, we sit on opposite sides of the desk and exchange gifts. No, of course we don’t. We exchange pleasantries. How is the baby? Doctors always have babies. If not their own, then someone else’s. And if they don’t like the baby they have, they can always swap it for another. It’s one of the perks of being a doctor.
He scribbles something on his pad, tears it off and slides it across the desk. I look at it, shake my head and slide it back. I tell him the pharmacists in the area aren’t familiar with Esperanto and make him do it again.
He does what I ask but only on condition that I go for blood tests. I don’t like the idea. I never do well in tests. I got nine percent for history in matric. He asks what I’d like to have done. Liposuction on my face and a willy like a racehorse, I say. He puts me down for cholesterol, blood sugar, prostate and liver function. I was under the impression we’d just done prostate. He smiles and wags a finger at me. I feel ill but decide against mentioning it.
I take the form, stand up and put my hand out. Doctors have a pathological aversion to shaking hands with patients but it’s important that we force them to do it. A lot of them need socialising and this is one way we can help.
Of course I can’t just nip next door to PathCare and allow a stranger to open a vein in my arm. That would be too easy. I have to go home and fast. Nil per mouth. I once went to a gay bar and wore a wristband that said nil per bum. It got a big laugh. I don’t know. It was very noisy. They might not have been laughing.
The fasting starts at 10pm, which is annoying because that’s when my need for feeding and watering begins to peak. Not being able to shovel stuff into myself after 10pm is like loadshedding for the body.
Weak from hunger and thirst, I wake at crack of dawn with some kind of wild animal licking what little remains of my face. I wasn’t happy about forfeiting my traditional weekday breakfast of two bloody Marys and a starter portion of magic mushrooms on toast, but a fast is a fast and the faster I got to the vampires the faster I could end the fast.
PathCare doesn’t do bookings. First come, first served. Being a gentleman, I stood aside to allow three women through the door ahead of me. Won’t make that mistake again. When my turn came, a woman with the bedside manner of Genghis Khan told me to roll up my sleeve and make a fist. I rolled up both sleeves and made as if I was going to rabbit-punch her in the kidneys followed by a roundhouse to the head. I bet she gets that all the time. When she strapped a tourniquet around my arm I wanted to say something witty about heroin but nothing suitable came to mind.
“You’re going to feel a little prick,” she said.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I said. Right away I saw in her eyes that she had misinterpreted the remark. At best I had a thing for genitally challenged men. At worst I was a paedophile. I wanted to explain that I was talking about myself. Should I show her? Given the circumstances, my willy had almost certainly shrunk to the size of an Etruscan shrew.
Three days later the doctor called. He said my results had come back. This was followed by a long silence. I thought he might be trying not to laugh. After checking that I was still on the line, he rattled off a bunch of numbers that made no sense, then dropped the bombshell about the stroke/heart attack odds. I barely heard a word after that.
Picking up my palpitations over the phone, he reassured me that as far as odds go for a man my age, 12.7% wasn’t bad at all. And, what’s more, if I did something about my blood pressure and cholesterol, this could come down to 8%. I don’t care. This is still too high.
If you’re going to give me odds, give me the good ones. I want to hear about my odds of being struck by lightning while riding an elephant. What are my chances of drowning while having sex? How likely is it that I will get back with one of my ex-wives?
When it comes to Very Bad Things, I want to be told there is a 0% likelihood of any of them happening. Now all I’ll do for next decade is wake up every morning and wonder if this is the day the 12.7% comes knocking. This is why I hate maths. Numbers are dictators. Words are democrats. There is wiggle-room with words that you don’t get with numbers.
Thanks anyway, doc. A man who has sworn an oath to do nothing but good has gone and told me something that will make me worry so much that I’ll have cancer by Thursday and be dead by the weekend.