My blood pressure is “optimal.” So too my cholesterol. My heart goes at an average of 56 beats per minute. My lungs are working at normal capacity. The brown patch between my shoulder blades isn’t skin cancer. The skin between my toes is splitting because of the hydrogen peroxide I use for soaking my feet, not because of Athlete’s Foot. I have no evident signs of Alzheimer’s Disease, nor of brain damage caused by inhaling the dust from lead paint. My left hip doesn’t need replacing. Ditto my left knee. My external haemorrhoid has been dormant for ten years, and may have gone away. The pain in my neck isn’t curvature of the spine, but probably the effect of typing 5,000 words a day at the kitchen table. I am continually tired because I work about twenty hours a day.
I’m just back from taking another half hour of my doctor’s life, and am not for the moment afflicted by any of my usual morbid fancies. He suggests I should switch off all my electronic gadgets for a month, and tell my publishers and clients to pester someone else for the duration. Also, he urges me to cut down on the coffee. To rub it in, he reminded me of the suspected testicular cancer I took him at the end of 2013, and the renal failure I diagnosed off the Internet in 2012.
Perhaps I do need a break. Then again, I shall eventually die of something, and I’m not getting any younger….
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Related posts:
COVID-19: The Post-Mortem
The Back-story behind Anti-Car Policies in the UK, Part Three: The COMEAP Report of 2009
The Back-story behind Anti-Car Policies in the UK, Part Four: The story from 2009 to 2022
The Back-story behind Anti-Car Policies in the UK, Part Six: Summary and Diagnosis
Powered by YARPP.
“Also, he urges me to cut down on the coffee.”
So in other words, he’s a quack. You should definitely get a second opinion. And perhaps a third. Or just keep going until someone tells you you have 90 days to live.
I think I will stick with Dr Schultz. So far, every time he’s told me I’m not dying, I haven’t.
Coffee is good. You see, it contains caffeine, but in fact actually not as much as tea, which contains more theobromine also, and which is almost better for you than caffeine. Nobody was quite sure what theobromine does at the last time I checked which was in October 1967 actually (it really was! I was in “Upper Science Sixth-A, and was merely interested since it looked er interesting) but that’s probably a good thing because then internet-“bloggers about natural health and remedies for everything under the sun” can’t then write crap about it.
Caffeine helps people like writers to write things for long hours at a time. Mr Blake would do well to note this fact. That’s why computernerds with bad hairdos and wearing glasses are always pictured carrying coffee about in public in little cardboard conoid inverted-frustrum-shapes with plastic tops. Celebrities then go about trying to emulate them, but always fail.
The nerds get it right every time; the celebs merely look as if they’re paid by Starbucks or Costa or whatever, to do it. It’s the ripped jeans that are the dead giveaway, and the iPhone in the other hand..
Tea also contains tea-ine, because it is from the tea-tree. This is a bit of what makes it taste like tea, although it also contains positive natural non-chemicals, which are naturally natural…. Tea-ine increases cell voltage. It also increases oxygen and carbon dioxide, and fights acid rain. So it’s green. (Actually, it _is_ green. I isolated some once while Sir was looking at the blackboard. But he got me though, because he smelled it from the front of the classroom. “Who’s that boy, extracting tea-ine with diethyl ether, in desk 8, at the back of the class? Davis….? Ah. Yes. I know it. Come here, and do bring my separating funnel with you…”)
The only tea I like is Earl Grey.
I wish I was in such good shape. You will clearly live to be hundred years old – by which time the nano bots will correct all aging and return you to youth.
Choose a day in the year, any day. Notice that on that day you seem not to die. Then do the same the next day. And so on. Then after a year, you’ll notice that when you don’t die on any particular day, you seem also to notice that you haven’t died at all that year.
That’s a bonus. Then you do it for the next year, and so on. I do it and I’m nearly 101.
If you detect signs of cancer and alzheimers and so on, you just tell it to eff off. So long as it thinks you’re looking, it will. The downside is that you have to keep awake, or “set a watch”. Taking bicarbonate of soda or pills is not the answer, for the buggers know the passwords for those, they’ve been hacked centuries ago.
The trick is to keep awake and keep working 20 hours a day. If you’re not working, then write another novel. If you’re not doing that or working, then read some nuclear physics textbooks aloud, the proper ones with equations and graphs in them, in bed next to your wife. She’ll keep you awake then for sure.
Forget about sex. It’s too much trouble in the modern western world, hedged about as it is with all sorts of fluid-based, manual and disgusting things the man has to do “to arouse the woman”. If she needed “arousing”, then it’s quite clear she didn’t want you in the first place. Be thankful that you have been released from the tyranny of a terrible and dreadful master.
Perhaps the Monks had it right.
I forgot to ask about deep vein thrombosis.
My dear old friend,
Just check each morning that you haven’t died in the night. It’s a good check, it’s quick to do, it only takes a couple of seconds, and always works, and doesn’t rely on doctorquacks. And, furthermore, _It Does Not Cost The NHS Any Money_ .
I do it all the time.
In fact My Dear Wife does it for me, for nothing also, several times in the night; this is because she says I snore. When she thinks I do, she _/boots me/_ (literally.)
And she exclaims something unintelligible at that moment, but it might not be printable. I then wake up and find I have not died. This is very bad, and depressing, since I needed to be simply asleep, and the death-test was done at the wrong time of night. It is really a great misery to me, for then just as I go off to sleep again, I am booted awake (again).
I trust you don’t have that problem. Clearly not, or you would have raised it with your doctorteam…?
56 beats per min is effing slow. Are you sure you are all right?
If your heart rate is not 66 precisely, then you are not a properly standardized modern British male diversified person, and the NHS will find an excuse to not treat you. Better do something to get it up to the required level.
It does go slower when I’m not fretting about my health. I am told, however, there is nothing wrong.
In regard to Mr. Davis’ suggestion at 3:41 on the 27th, about checking each day for a year to verify that one has not died on this day, I would like to point out that when one gets to a large enough number of days, one has a sample of sufficient size to run a decent statistical analysis.
In the cases of Mr. Davis and Dr. Gabb, I would suggest that statistically the chance that either will die on any one of the seven days, Sun., Mon., …, Sat., is zero.
Because I have it on good authority that quotient of 0 divided by any real number (0 is, arguably, a mere “place-holder” and therefore not a number at all, properly speaking — or so I have heard some argue) is still 0.
Now in my case, the outlook is less encouraging, as I already have several deaths in my history. The latest occurred just yesterday, at the drugstore, where I was informed that my drug insurance had been terminated and that my month’s medications would cost me north of $ 1000. This resulted in six strokes and a heart attack, as it meant that I would have to deal with my husband’s employer, one of the big national labs here, and they no longer answer phone calls or e-mails.
Fortunately the Fates let me off the hook, and updated cards appeared on my desk when I got home. But I’m quite sure I died there, in the middle of Walgreen’s, briefly. There is thus a positive statistical probability that I will shut down on some Wednesday.