let's get physical
Nate gets a physical. Before and After.
BEFORE
Tomorrow (Monday) morning I’ll be going in to my new doctor and getting a physical. I’m not sure what his name is because he’s new and we’re not yet on a name basis. What happened to my old doctor? I’ll field that question. I didn’t have one. In fact I’ve never had €œA€ doctor. I’ve never called ‘my’ doctor. In 11th grade I broke my leg in three places and was seen by a doctor (who subsequently discovered I had double pneumonia and thought it best I stick around for a few days). My leg’s and lungs have healed since. In 1997 I had a physical in Nebraska and got a bunch of shots to fly to West Africa. And then in the last 3 years I’ve gone in to random, but very helpful, doctors on two separate occasions for throat problems. The first doctor gave me nasenex (which my wife called natonex) and when that night I saw a commercial for the stuff and after the weird voice at the end went through all the side effects I threw it in the trash. The second doctor tried to give me a strep test and I kept gagging and accidentally slapped her hand away from my mouth on her third attempt. I apologized.
That’s my medical history.
Why the physical now? Oh I don’t know, my wifes been asking me to do it for 8 years, I’m out of shape, I turned 30, my wife made the appointment for me… all good reasons I guess.
Last Wednesday when Jodi told me about the appointment my first reaction was, €œI gotta get fit quick!€ My second reaction, €œBut wait! That’s impossible!€ My third reaction was to sit down and eat some cookies while I came up with a better plan. And a better plan I did come up with: Get in worse shape. It sounds stupid but think about it. If you’re going into a physical and you know you’re out of shape than you can safely assume there’ll be another physical to see what kind of improvements you’ve made. Starting to see the genius? The worse I look at this physical the more room for improvements there are for the next physical. Brilliant. Have I stuck to my plan? Heck yeah. On Wednesday I had bacon and eggs and bacon and bacon for lunch. Wednesday night Micah and I played a fun show with Rachel Kurtz and ended up at Wendy’s where we were pleased to discover the Baconator. The name says it all. On Thursday I put some left over bacon on my sandwich. On Friday something healthy may have slipped in, but that night Jason and I went to Taco Bell on the way to a retreat we were leading music at and on the way home we discovered McDonald’s was selling Eggnog shakes so we bought some. They asked if we wanted fries with them and it seemed like a wonderful idea. It was. More crap food on Saturday, another Eggnog shake, today there was frozen pizza and hot dogs… And at 8:59pm I ate one last piece of leftover pizza. And now I’m not supposed to eat anything till 9:30am tomorrow. Which is probably good ’cause I feel pretty sick. In this case it’s safe to refer to it as the sweet sick of success.
AFTER
Totally uneventful. I’m not obese. I don’t have high blood pressure. They did blood tests so maybe when the results I’ll at least have high cholesterol. All that bacon for nothing? I don’t think so.