My family avoids going to the doctor. I’d like to say that it’s because we avoid getting sick, but those days come for us just like they do for everyone else. However, whether those days are Mondays, Wednesdays, or Saturdays has little bearing on what we do: we go ahead with what was on our schedule and eat our apples and keep the doctor away.
The school nurse has been pestering me to go get a checkup since the beginning of the school year in April. I snaked by without getting one in 2008, and I parried her numerous inquiries and attacks as best I could until she finally broke through.
She knows I like to sit at my desk doing non-school work and take off for the golf range on Wednesdays (when I have no classes to teach), and while I’m sure many other teachers and staff members know about it, nobody has ever said anything about it to me. She threatened to make it a topic of conversation and I want to keep my Wednesdays free, so I went to the hospital and took a physical last week.
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I’ve only had one physical in the States that I can remember, and it happened when I was 16 and set to go to work in the shop for my pop. I had to run in place, fill up a cup, and turn my head and cough a couple of times. No big deal.
It was pretty much the same thing at the Japanese hospital, but I got a shock when they went to measure my waist.
Nurse: OK, 34-and-a-half inches, you’re a little fat, aren’tcha?
Me: (in English) Excuse me?!?
Nurse: You’re over 33. You’re fat.
They’ve got this thing here, metabolic syndrome*, and according to them if you’re a guy and your waist is greater than 33 inches, you have it. Height and bone structure have absolutely nothing to do with it, it’s simply Male + 34.5 inches = “Metabo”.
*Apparently we have it, too. I had never heard of it before everyone started saying it about the fat guy in KCTC.
I asked about females out of curiosity, and they get 35 inches before they’re called metabos. Brilliant. The five-foot phenoms running around town have to be bigger around than I am to be considered fat.
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The hearing test came around, and I tried the old but chuckle-worthy deaf joke:
Nurse: OK, time for your hearing test.
Me: Eh?
Nurse: (dumbed-down Japanese) Time go to check your ears, you know, how well you can hear?
Me: (hand to ear) What?
Nurse: Follow me. We’re going to the hearing test room.
Me: What, not even a titter?
Nurse: What are you talking about?
Me: It’s a joke! You say, ‘it’s time to take a hearing test’ and I say, ‘eh?’ and show you that my hearing sucks.
Nurse: (stone face) . . .
Me: Oh, come on! You just called me fat! I’m just trying to get a rise out of you.
Nurse: (not havin’ it) . . .
Not all of my jokes fell flat that day. In between the various tests and interrogation sessions, I had to wait in the lobby with a bunch of other patients, most of whom were also there for physicals.
A middle-aged non-metabo lady was telling me about raising her oldest daughter at the same time that her sister was raising her oldest son. The babies were born three months apart and both mothers worked soon after giving birth (Japan now allows up to one year of maternity leave, but the labor law hadn’t yet kicked in at the time the women had their kids).
They cooperated and leaned on the grandmother, and it all sounded like a nice story until she told me that they used to freeze their breast milk and exchange babies for suckling sometimes. I probably just don’t get it yet, but I found that baby swap strange, and at the very least it was too much information for me.
However, I was downtrodden about the deaf joke and spied an opportunity to put a good one up on the board. I recalled a friend of mine once saying that he wanted a Mother’s Milk energy bar when, of course, he was referring to a Tiger’s Milk energy bar. You can bet that my buddies and I will never let him forget that.
I’d never had the occasion to put the two together in Japanese, but there it was at the end of the breast milk story. I tried it out and got the laugh I was looking for. Strangely enough, they’re closer in pronunciation in Japanese than they are in English.
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Some of the questions the doctors asked me were interesting. They asked how fast I eat, and I couldn’t give them an answer. I wolf down my food when there’s nobody around, but I’m usually the last one done at the dinner table or in a restaurant because I don’t stop talking.
They asked if I walk faster or slower than other people my age and I got a stern look when I laughed at the question. They seemed puzzled when I answered that I never go to sleep within two hours after eating, but have snacks and ice cream almost every night before bed. I told them that I thought I still had a few years left before I had to start feeling guilty about my ice cream habit. Not even a snicker. They were a tough crowd.
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When all was said and done, the hospital staff turned me loose with a clean bill of health pending the blood tests. I’m hale and healthy, if a little metabo.
I wonder what they’ll say about my cholesterol if they think a 34-inch waist is fat. I get a full blood analysis on a postcard in the mail after every time I give blood, and it always shows that I have very low cholesterol.
Of course, they’re testing my blood before I go back to the recovery room and load it up with cookies, crackers, and juice that I’m sure I’m consuming faster than people my age.