30-year checkup

You’ve gotta take your car in for an oil and filter change every 3,000 or so miles. I guess the same applies to people, so I went to the doc yesterday for my 30-year checkup.

The doctor we’ve been going to see is actually a physician’s assistant. She’s taken really good care of us in the past, but I wasn’t quite sure how the whole physical thing would work. It was, indeed, a lot like the Jeep must feel when getting an oil change. I was measured (still 6′2″) and weighed (unfortunately 211.5) and had to provide a little, um, urine sample.

The kind nurse dropped me off at the bathroom with specific instructions on how to create my sample. I followed them to the letter and put the sample jar in a little built-in wall box that looked strangely like the thing you put your bank deposits in. You know, the thing that automatically transports the doohickey to the teller. I felt sorry for whoever has to be on the end of that deposit window!

The rest of the checkup was a little like my physical in junior high sports (the turn-your-head-and-cough part), plus some other general testing and poking and measuring. I went ahead and had my prostate examined, and that whole experience wasn’t quite the nightmare I heard it was. I got my tetanus booster shot, and my arm still hurts like the dickens.

It was really all good news, but I do need to change my habit of Chick-Fil-A for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My blood pressure is on the high side of normal, so I am officially off fast food and am eating homemade creations. Today my diet included a bowl of bran cereal, a delicious turkey-and-melted cheese pita sandwich with applesauce, a 100-calorie pack of popcorn, and some barbecue pork and mashed cauliflower. I drank a lot of water and less Coke Zero.

I get to purchase a blood pressure machine thingy, and I’ll go back in a month to see how I’m doing. Hopefully by then I’ll be lean, mean and full of habits that I will maintain through at least my 90-year oil change.