Category Archives: my health

Still alive, still alive…

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Woke up with just a sore throat and improved from there. Was at work a bus or two later than usual, but otherwise normal day. Took a one hour walk in the evening. (Did not do that yesterday.) Pulse was a bit higher than usual, a sign that the immune system is probably working on something, but the difference was not very big. Then again my pulse has been unusually slow lately. Even for me, I mean. So it was more like in the old days now, I guess. Like this spring before I took up the habit of walking an hour a day. Well, most days.

I have been thinking more about psychology and religion. But when I try to write, the topic grows and becomes unwieldy and I stop a ways through. I guess that is OK. A shop should not have all its goods in the window, and a man should not tell everything he knows. So this for today, then.

Viruses and ghosts

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In the movie The Rebirth of Buddha, hospitals are plagued by the ghosts of people who died there and refused to accept their fate.

Today, after eating a small piece of chocolate, my throat began to get irritated. I had to constantly cough and swallow just to keep breathing, or so it felt. I tried to wash it away with water and then eat something, but it just didn’t go away. I started to get really worried. At this point, other symptoms had already joined in: I was getting weak, my heart was beating fast, I was shaking and my face was flushed, my eyes were dry, I was queasy and my bowels were upset, I even developed a headache. It was like my body was breaking down all over, all of a sudden. I started to think: No! I don’t want to die! And then I remembered something.

The place I was when the symptoms began used to be a hospital, many years ago.

In the movie The Rebirth of Buddha, there is a memorable scene at the hospital, where Sayako (the main character, well, except for the Buddha) can see the ghosts of patients who walk around, bothering doctors and nurses and fellow patients in their attempt to get painkillers and other forms of comfort. They all don’t want to die, and being materialists in life could not accept the fact that they were dead. So even now they are haunting the hospital, thinking that they are patients there and it’s all about them.

Could it be? That some long dead patient had returned to its hospital and found some kind of resonance with me? Stray spirits are attracted to people who resonate at the same wavelength, so to speak: People with the same habits, viewpoints, attitudes, feelings and interests. Well, that’s what Happy Science says. That doesn’t sound very happy, but the happiness is that you can save yourself and sometimes even the stray spirits by reflecting on yourself and seek to live a life of selfless love. When the stray spirits notice this, they will either flee from the growing Light in you, or begin to reflect on themselves as well and be saved.

Christianity generally seems to assume that possessive spirits are all demons, not ghosts. This corresponds to the notion that the dead are sleeping, unaware of what goes on under the sun, as the Bible says. Of course, just because they are sleeping does not mean their dreams may not resonate with ours… if only in the form of a morphic field. Be that as it may, the New Testament certainly implies that not only mental illnesses but sometimes also physical may be created or made worse by the influence of spirits.

This may sound like pure superstition unless you consider that the mental equivalent to these stray spirits are complexes, or mind parasites: Essentially tiny split-off parts of the same stuff that personalities are made of. In some cases, people literally have multiple personalities, usually one more dominant than the rest but not always. In “healthy” people the other personalities never grow to more than a rudimentary level, but they can still mess up things pretty badly. This “complex” theory is a pretty respectable branch of psychology, first championed by C.G. Jung.

Consider the placebo effect, in which supposedly ineffective pills or injections cause substantial health benefits. And equally nocebo, where harmless treatments cause illness and in some cases death when people believe in them. A wrong diagnosis can sometimes become self-fulfilling, and the patient dies before the error is found and corrected. Likewise, someone may recover from a serious illness due to misdiagnosis, although this may be less common.

Even though I did not think about it at the time, I was aware that I was in an old hospital building. Judging from the symptoms, it seems likely that I have contracted the illness my coworker had last week (he has now returned). He is still not able to speak normally due to his vocal cords being  affected, and had various other symptoms including fever. So it could simply be that I have the same virus.

But in either case, body and soul are tightly integrated. In this life, they cannot be separated. In the next life, they probably can. But I am in no hurry to find out. Still, if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take: It certainly beats it wandering around bothering the living!

Actually, I should probably not bother the living even while I live. But at least reading my journal is voluntary!

***

(Incidentally, my throat is still irritated, but the other symptoms are gone for now.)

Opposite of starvation

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Which of these represent the opposite of starvation? Sim-Magnus or the imaginary sim-Tuva? The answer may surprise you.

I first wanted to call this entry “anti-starvation”, but that sounds like a humanitarian organization.

I have a few times mentioned my own brush with starvation in 2005. It was certainly not in the developing country manner, but rather a medical situation that led me to steadily lose weight until my body started to adapt to the lack of food in several ways. The most obvious was perhaps the way it influenced my mind, with a kind of chronic hunger, which continued even after eating. There were other changes as well, and one of them may ironically have resulted in its opposite, which is the topic of today.

The opposite of starvation is probably the complex state of health often called “metabolic syndrome”. Actually the professional usage of this phrase may be a bit more precise. But as I am now in a state of pre-diabetes, a still mostly harmless form of the syndrome, I cannot help but notice the parallels.

When starving, my brain stem was hungry even when my stomach was full. I wanted to just keep eating, even though reason convinced me that I would just get sick. Now, it is the other way around: My stomach is bullying me to eat by the unpleasant gnawing feeling, but my brain stem would rather that I didn’t. I feel fed even when I wake up in the morning.  And rightly so.

***

Yesterday a couple hours after lunch I took a fairly long walk that burned 800 calories.  OK, I would probably have burned 100 of them even if I stayed at home, but anyway. I didn’t eat anything when I came home, because I had a doctor appointment next day and was told to fast the night before. So I went to bed, and woke up the next morning feeling completely restored. I could have taken another walk till my legs grew stiff, and probably another and another if I rested a while in between. I was not hungry at all, until my stomach began gnawing.  And my brain stem was right, while my stomach was wrong: My fasting blood sugar was 6.1 mmol. Not sure what that is in American measures, but the recommended upper limit is 6 mmol, and in some publications 5.8. So despite being physically active, I am still pre-diabetic. In fact, it seems that my body has decided 6.1 is the new standard (it was the same last time too), which it returns to after exercise.

This is in theory good news.  Not having to eat is money saved, right? Unfortunately the stomach disagrees. I am still experimenting to find ways to keep it from pestering me. I guess the best I can do is to just keep stopping before I am full, and hope that it will gradually learn to expect smaller and smaller portions.

Feeling over-fed by a small meal is certainly less unplesant than feeling hungry after a big one, so I can see why people just keep forging ahead until they get diabetes, hypertension and atherosclerosis. After all, we are programmed by our instincts to avoid starvation if possible. The safeguards on the opposite side are not nearly as formidable. But they are there, if you pay attention. And if you have tried both, you may recognize the opposite of starvation simply by listening to your own body, even before you hear it from your doctor.

***

I mentioned that the near-starvation may have somehow triggered its opposite. The body is known to do unusual things when facing unusual situations. And this is unusual indeed: Before the illness began at Easter 2005, I used to weigh close to 95 kg. (One kg is roughly 2 pounds, but not exactly.) This seemed to be a practical upper limit, as I stayed close to it for a decade or more perhaps. Occasionally I would dip down to 93, but usually I was in the 94-95 interval.

Now the limit seems to be at 88. That is good, right? No, actually, it is not that simple. When I was 95, the fat was distributed differently. I had a larger paunch (gut bulge), true, but I also had permanent fat deposits on my backside and thighs. Not enough to compete with your average housewife, of course, but plenty for a man and pretty obvious when looking back at some of the pictures from around the turn of the century. This kind of fat is harmless, possibly even healthy. It is only released in case of starvation.

And of course that was what happened, even if it went no further than that. No matchstick arms and protruding ribs and all that. But my body fat was gone. And when it returned, it did not return to where it had been. Now it is almost completely concentrated around my kidneys and thereabout. This type of fat, which is more common in men than in women, can be released very quickly to the bloodstream. It does not even take hunger, just stress.  Get angry or afraid, and delicious fat pours into the blood, ready to fuel your battle.

I consider this a poor exchange for my built-in sitting pillow. But this is the kind of thing that could happen if you are successful with your dieting. Luckily, most people give up after losing about 5% of their body mass in fat, so the effect on their body is quite limited. I will probably be one of them if I decide to lose weight at all. The doctor recommends it, although he is satisfied as long as I don’t gain weight, and stay physically active.  The irony is that I am not visibly “fat” at all. I don’t have the other symptoms of metabolic syndrome either, but if I had not convinced my body that it was starving, I might have been fatter and still healthier.

 

Doctor yet again

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Nothing dramatic, just the foot. Didn’t get time to look at it last visit.

My new shoes did indeed help, in the sense that the pain in my foot is not getting worse and worse for each passing day. It is not getting better either, beyond a certain level. It seems to have stabilized there. I can go to work and back without intense pain, but no more long walks. I also invested in a pair of sandals, but that does not seem to help either.

So, despite my experience that seeing a doctor VERY rarely has any effect except on my wallet, I took some time off from work to see my regular doctor today again. After all, I did NOT do this when my arm felt this way, but soldiered on for a couple years. And now that arm is permanently damaged. I can write naturally, since I automatically take pauses when I am on my own. But at work I cannot do much typing before the pain returns. Perhaps 10 minutes at a time. Now the foot is in a similar situation, and I don’t want that to become permanent if I can avoid it.

I got an appointment at 13:45, but an hour later the waiting room was empty and there was still no sign of the doctor. It was still half an hour until I had to go for the bus, though.

One minute before I would have gone for the bus, the doctor showed up. There is no way he could know about my bus routes, so this was an obvious case of Divine Intervention. Seems God has found me worthy of a couple small tests lately. Seeing this, I decided to clean my soul of this impatience so it could shine brilliantly with the bright white light of divine love. Well, that is my aspiration. I suspect it is still more like a dim glow to the random observer, if it can even be seen at all. But at least I got the opportunity to see myself.

As for the doctor visit itself, it was fruitless as usual. He wants me to take an x-ray on Monday “just in case”. Apart from that, he wanted to give me painkillers with an anti-inflammatory side effect. Unfortunately, they also have the side effect of weakening the stomach lining, which is already one of my few weak spots. 16500 Americans die each year from stomach perforation caused by over-use of painkillers (or simply because they did not know, or neglected to inform their doctor, that they had a tendency toward ulcer before they started taking this stuff.)

When I had the problems with my arm some years ago, there existed a second type of non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs, of which I got one called Vioxx. It did not affect the stomach at all, but was withdrawn from the market while I was still using it, thanks to the FDA. A few people got heart infarcts after using large doses of it for a long time, longer than the clinical trial that had originally found it safe. Because of this, FDA banished the whole class of drugs completely from the market, and the drug companies withdrew it from the rest of the world as well. And so the undertakers can look forward to their 16500 new cases each year, and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief that the government is looking out for us as usual.

I am starting to think prayer and fasting may be a better alternative. Fasting in particular, since fat is scientifically proven to be a pro-inflammation agent, both in the blood and on cuts and scrapes. But before we go into wholesale fasting, let’s see how far we come with rolled oats and an exercise bike.

 

Tame oats

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Rolled (pressed) oats are a wonderful addition to my fruit yogurt. They add texture and makes it feel like I have actually eaten a meal. The food stays longer in my stomach, and the oats contain fiber and slow carbs that are not broken down until the great intestine, if at all.

Ironically, the fact that oats are not as much “pure energy” as wheat, rice and maize is probably a reason why it has remained marginal, grown mostly in areas where wheat yields are low or the growing season a tad on the short side. Oats contain more fat than wheat and rice (but less than maize), but due to the structure of the fibers, the fat is not quickly absorbed into the bloodstream.

This natural functional food also reduces “bad cholesterol” (actually low-density lipoproteins, which are – as the name implies – proteins rather than the cholesterol itself, but LDL supposedly has a tendency to drop cholesterol at the artery walls). Finally, it regulates blood sugar. Which makes me think, considering that my ancestors have lived in oats- and grazing land for probably a few thousand years, that my parents’ diabetes may have been more than anything a case of oats deficiency. Now that we could buy fine wheat flour, the oats faded into the background. Nobody considered that our ancestors had been under intense selection pressure to adapt to that particular grain.

I am not planning to make the same mistake. Milk products and oats with a little fruit is smack in the middle of my ancestral diet. Let’s see how the body reacts to THAT.

Pre-diabetes and shoes

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The glucose solution, in a manner of speaking.

The glucose tolerance test today delivered a mildly unpleasant surprise. The starting value was 6.1, which is already too high. (Ought to be 6.0 or lower.) Two hours after the glucose meal, the value was still 9.3, which is smack in the middle of IGT, Impaired Glucose Tolerance, also called Glucose Intolerance (sounds like a worse case, but actually used interchangeably), also called pre-diabetes because something like 10% of IGT cases progress to diabetes each year.

Now, I have repeatedly told my doctor about my two diabetic parents, so he was probably less surprised than I. Back in 2005 I tested my blood sugar several times and it was below any warning lines. So anyway, I blame my shoes!

See, if I had replaced my jogging shoes two weeks ago, I would probably not have gotten a sinew sheath inflammation (or that’s what it feels like … my family has a predisposition to get those, it seems) and so I would still have been walking (with some jogging when needed to keep the heart rate up) for an hour each day. And so my liver would probably have some room to swoop up extra glucose for topping up its glycogen reserves. That would probably have been enough to lower the blood sugar to 7.8 mmol/l, or at least very nearly so. So, blame it all on the shoes. ^_^

That said, this is not exactly bad news. I don’t have high blood pressure, I have barely elevated values of fat in the blood stream (triglycerides and cholesterol), my pulse is slow, and I don’t have sleep problems by human standards. Health personnel used to envy me, perhaps not so much now with this new development.

But seriously, having more sugar in the blood? That just means I can eat less sugar and still be as active as before. I have to look for new types of food that contain less sugar AND still very little fat (since fat makes me ill) and don’t taste like coarse grass or worse.  Uhm, I am sure I will find something. I did find low-fat foods in 2005, after all, it just took me a couple months or so to change my habits and then the rest of the year for my digestion to rebuild for the change. For a beginning, I have bought a small bag of pressed oats, the old Norse and Scottish breakfast cereal. OK, not sure exactly how old, but I am pretty sure oats breakfast predates Kelloggs.  Mixing this with my fruit yogurt makes it last longer till I grow hungry again. It has lot of healthy fiber and slow carbs.

I am pretty upbeat about this, although I am sure my doctor will (figuratively) beat me up over it. I mean, having more fuel than necessary does not seem like a problem. “There is a way with the sausage that is too long” as the Norwegian proverb loosely says. Meaning you can just cut off some of it. I can do that with the food as well now that I know it is too much.

***

Oh, and the shoes. I have been thinking about buying new ones, off and on, for weeks at least. But I never found an opportunity to get away from work for long enough. (The shop that sells them in the city takes plenty of time with each customer and nearly always has customers. People seem to accept that a specialty shop requires waiting for half an hour or two.) So I did not take that time until I was already in so much pain that the alternative might have been to stay home from work for that.

This fits disturbingly with something I read by Ryuho Okawa yesterday, that there are people who love illness. They just steer straight ahead, ignoring the warning signs, until they get sick. Then they want sympathy, or feel that that they can’t be blamed. Well, I don’t expect sympathy for this. I made a mistake waiting this long, and I plan to make less mistakes in the future, if any. Or at least not the same mistakes as this time…

***

Speaking of making the same mistakes over and over, there is a small house in the countryside for rent a few miles from here, still in the Mandal area. For 3/4 the price I pay here, but 30-40 minutes walk to the bus, judging from the map. Which would been a GOOD thing, except I just have shown myself incapable of ensuring that I can even walk…

Foot

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My right foot was almost completely healed this morning. Unfortunately, on my return home from work it hurt worse than ever. The top of my right foot and front of the calf (leg, not animal) hurt very much like my wrist used to do when I was typing a lot at work some years ago. I assure you however, I have not been typing with my toes. Instead, I suspect my shoes. Unfortunately it is the last pair so I will have to take some time off from work to buy new ones. I think that is better than not being able to go to work at all!

Tomorrow is the lab appointment. For that, I have to stay in the clinic for at least 2 hours. (Glucose tolerance test.)  If the doctor has time, I will mention the foot again, this time with feeling. ^_^

Not going to look for a spiritual explanation of my foot problem before I have tried new shoes. The voice in my heart seems to concur with this. It certainly does not protest.

Harmless doctor visit

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Next stop: The glucose syrup diet! Kind of.

Let us talk about my doctor visit! It is always interesting to hear old people talk about their health, is it not? ^_^

Today was the appointment for my second doctor visit this year. (The trip in between was only to the lab.) Today’s appointment was originally for checking my prostate gland, but as I have already mentioned, in the meantime I found another explanation for that particular problem. I explained this to my doctor right away. He did not seem particularly disappointed, strangely enough, despite not getting the opportunity to study my rear end.

It seems the doctor had already concluded from my questionnaire that it was probably not a prostate problem. He seems to have thought of diabetes, as well he should since I have repeatedly told him that both of my parents developed this condition. However, the glucose content in my blood sample was within normal range, albeit higher than perfect. This is really the same as when I talked with him two years ago or so. He seems to be waiting for me to develop glucose intolerance, but that is unlikely to happen if my foot recovers within a reasonable time so I can keep walking everywhere. As long as you keep moving about, it is very hard to develop metabolic syndrome, even if you are bit overweight. And I’m barely even that, although what little fat I have seems to have gathered around my guts as I have grown older.

That said, I seem to live on the threshold of that condition, like my parents. If something happens to make me stop using my body actively for a while, it may well break out. Light send that doesn’t happen anytime soon.

My amount of bad cholesterol is also higher than ideal, despite my low-fat diet. Then again, the ideal may be a bit extreme. The doctor fished out a book illustrating the levels of heart disease risk at various combinations of age, smoking or not, blood pressure and cholesterol. Evidently to his surprise, when we looked at it, I fell squarely within the dark green area, the negligible chance of heart infarct. (Of course, fate may still intervene, but so may meteors from outer space.) So he slightly sheepishly added: “But if you would start smoking, you would be at risk!” Yeah, I’ll consider that if I ever feel suicidal and want bad breath thrown in.

So as to not waste a perfectly good patient by sending me home happy, he decided to attack the diabetes angle instead. I got another lab appointment, this time for Tuesday. I am supposed to not eat anything after 9PM on Monday, then at 8:30 in the morning to show up at the lab and drink a hefty beaker of concentrated glucose solution. Then I am to wait quietly for two hours and they will measure my blood sugar again. His theory is that it will go down more slowly than it should, thus betraying my glucose intolerance which will manifest within a year.

Of course, this is pretty close to my standard workday breakfast, which consists of two cups of chocolate pudding with vanilla sauce, and (until recently) two glasses of Pepsi with 10% cane sugar. I have recently replaced the Pepsi with chocolate milk though. Lifestyle change for healthy living!  I haven’t told my doctor. The blood sample was also analyzed for long-term blood sugar, where sugar molecules bind to hemoglobin. Evidently that was within acceptable range too, despite the sugar pudding with sugar sauce and sugar liquid. So I am pretty optimistic about that test.

And of course, the opportunity to tell the poor nurses: “Foolish mortals! You have provided me with a source of unimaginable energy! Yes… I can feel its power coursing through my veins!”

Seriously though – one cup of glucose after 12 hours of fasting? It is likely to leave me begging for another serving. I usually eat sugars and starches from morning till night. What else should I eat when I can’t eat fat? Broccoli? Perhaps one day – with modern technology, I may be able to work from the bathroom…

No more long walks

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That small gray stripe in the far background is a glimpse of a sand road I would sometimes walk. Picture taken during my last long walk in that area.

It may be a coincidence. Actually, according to the scientific worldview, everything is coincidence. You worldview may vary… Actually, I hope so, for your sanity. Although I suppose you can go too far in the other direction as well. (I am thinking of you, New Age people!)

I have been taking a walk of approximately one hour almost every day for the last few weeks. But when I came home from work on Monday, my right foot was hurting. I walked for half an hour that evening anyway, but I’m not sure that was a good idea. Since then, my foot has been hurting so badly that I can’t seriously consider taking long walks anymore. Even walking from the bus station to my workplace hurts now.

Yes, Monday was the day my landlord told me he had sold the house. That was after I came home from work, and my foot had already hurt for several hours.

If this turns out to be a long lasting problem, I will have to find some other way to exercise. But in that case it would be pretty amusing if the house was sold at the exact same time that I could no longer use the feature I most loved about it.

Anyway, I hope I get the chance to talk to the doctor tomorrow about this. My appointment is about something entirely different, so maybe the best I can hope for is to get a new appointment, and even that may not be before the summer vacation. And in any case, it is quite possible – even likely – that my foot will heal naturally over time. After all, my body has had a tendency to do just that for the last 52 years… Although it won’t continue that way forever, of course, and perhaps I needed a reminder of  impermanence in the midst of all my happiness, which I was so eager to display to the whole world.

 

Oops – sleeping may be it

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The human body is full of mysteries. Especially down there. But today was a slightly different form of pleasant surprise from what the picture might imply to the younger reader.

So on Thursday I had my blood drawn to test for the proteins that signal a probable prostate cancer. The reason was the sudden onset of one particular symptom of enlarged prostate.

For unrelated reasons, I went to bed at 2AM and slept til 9:30 AM today. The thing is, I did not have to get up to urinate, and when I finally got up, there was almost no liquid. That’s when I realized: This is when I used to sleep for the last 15+ years!

Well, perhaps not exactly, but around 2 to 9. When I lived closer to the city, I could do this and still squeeze in a 90% job before the 5PM bus home. Or very nearly so. When I moved further away, the next bus in to the city would not be get me to the office until nearly 11, so I would have to get up early and take the previous bus now and then.  Three such “long” (8 hours) days over the course of two weeks would be enough.  (Norwegians are very productive – we work short hours and have long vacations and still get everything done. ^_^)

The thing is, I did not actually work 8 hour days as often as that, with the predictable result that I slowly built up a large mound of “time debt”, “undertime” or whatever you will call it. Sometime this winter I started paying it down.

With the help of LifeFlow delta brainwave entrainment, I can go to sleep three hours earlier than before, get up early  and still not be particularly sleepy during the day. In fact, if I wake up a couple times in the night, this makes me LESS sleepy in the morning, because even a minute awake is enough to start delta “music” again.  (I don’t keep it playing all night so as to not mess with the brain’s natural 90-minute sleep cycle too much, and to not develop immunity. A couple times a night seems fine though.)

Now the whole 90% job grew out of the fact that I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, a minority condition where the body’s clock is nor reset by external stimuli in the normal way. There are divergent opinions on whether it can be cured, or even whether it should be cured. Arguably it needs to be cured to approximately the same degree that black skin needs to be cured: The only serious problems from this inheritable condition are those imposed by society.

In fact, if the minority with DSPS were allowed to live the way they were created, we would have less problems with rush hours and billions of dollars would not be lost to people sitting in cars and raging when they could have been at work.  But let us just let that slide for now. Humans are stupid, as we all know from direct observation of those around us. Especially in traffic, I suppose.

Anyway, my brain is happy with brainwave entrainment. But evidently my kidneys have no respect for it. They probably continue to work hard for the first three hours of the night, every night. (And then more slowly in the morning, as before.) Which means that the sudden onset of the nightly bathroom run did probably not come from any changes down there, but from the changes in my bedtime when I first started to try to work in my undertime, and later switched to working full time.

This, dear reader, is why I almost never go to the doctor. Because when I do, the local clinic usually concludes that I am healthier than those who work there, and the only things I achieve is to  a) embarrass myself, and b) add to my hypochondria score card.  There have only been a couple times in my adult life that a doctor visit has actually helped in any way. OK, perhaps four times.

Oh well. I understand in America, the land of extreme health expenses, it is customary for the better off to take these blood tests even if they have no symptoms.  (And even if the sum of the biopsies and the treatments are approximately as lethal as the cancer, statistically speaking.)

Now, the big question is whether the kidneys will eventually decide to join the sleep rhythm of the brain, or whether I shall have this divergence for the rest of my working life. I have a feeling that if I live to my planned retirement at 75, I won’t have any long nights of continuous sleep even after that. But who knows.

***

Well, I suppose I no longer need to eat tomato and take long walks. Well, unless I want to decrease my “overall mortality” – the risk of dying from any random reason – by 40% by investing half an hour a day. As far as risk management goes, that seems a pretty good investment to me. On the other hand we could be fatalists and say that the day when you are fated to die, you die. That is certainly true. But that day seems to come a lot earlier for most fat and flabby people, in our part of the world at least.  (It’s a bit different in hunger-stricken areas, of course.  May you and I never need to save up fat for times like that.)

Besides, I have started to kind of like both the spaghetti sauce and the long walks. I walked for an hour today again, in rain that was so light it was almost fog. Then went home and ate pasta with tomato sauce. I rather enjoyed them both, truth to tell. Although my “things to write” memory runs full before even half an hour of walking…

Now to decide whether to call off that doctor appointment. I presumably won’t benefit from it in any way; but on the other hand, if I cancel it, the doctor will never know if he later runs into a case like this again.