Autumn again in Olde Nagoyaland, and I find myself kind of shaking my head and wondering where the fuck the time is going? This summer filtered away faster than any that I can remember. After our all-too-short jaunt to Ishigaki Island in early July, it was largely uneventful...which isn't necessarily a bad thing - save for the fact that I actually really love the long days, heat, humidity, scorching sun, and endless clamour of cicadas. I think I had enough cold, damp, dark and dank weather growing up in Vancouver to last me several lifetimes. I actually saw the first round of Christmas advertising, pushing Tokyo Disneyland 'Christmas Fantasy Dream' packages on Japanese TV a couple of nights ago. Last year they were already 'decking the halls' in the local department store the last week of September. They started flogging Halloween the third week of August this year. What gives? When I first arrived on these shores 28 years ago, All Hallow's Eve wasn't even a shadow of a concept...now it's like an aggressive rash.
For me, Fall means 'Ningen (human) Dock' time. This is something of a ritual over here...and I'm in to do mine every September or October. Loosely translated, 'Ningen Dock' means 'human dry-dock'. Basically, it's a comprehensive medical examination, in which participants are sampled, weighed, measured, squeezed, poked, prodded, scanned, x-rayed, and tested in the same way that a passenger jet or ocean-going ship periodically gets a thorough going over, to ensure that everything is in good working order. Not an entirely bad idea...but I was brought up by people who thought that doctors were only to be visited when you were bleeding out or with one foot in the grave...lest you be labelled a 'hypochondriac'.
The whole Ningen Dock affair can take a couple of hours. You make a reservation (we set mine up a couple of months in advance - these 'service centers' essentially run from 8:30-12:00 pm, and are always fully booked), show at the designated time to check in, and after some sundry form signing, are given a name labeled paper cup and pointed toward the changing room. There, you choose a locker labeled with the Japanese characters for 'large', 'medium' or 'small', and change into the provided neatly folded, and hopefully appropriately sized Japanese-style cotton jammies and slippers - then it's off to the adjacent bathroom facilities to piss into your personalized paper cup, and leave it on a steel tray with a score of others, awaiting pick up and lab delivery. Of course, your piss isn't all they want. They require samples of your dung, as well...so your homework assignment the day before your appearance is to (as neatly as possible) sample two bowel movements - preferably from your first dumps the day before and then day of examination. They provide these funky little plastic bottles that you need to label after you do your business, with handy little stir sticks under the cap for poop dipping. My wife brings these home in an envelope a couple of days before the fun. This is my least favourite hoop to jump through, as probing through steaming floaters for samples with a stubby stir sick isn't the way I ideally like to start my mornings. As-per the jammies...'yes', it's OK to wear underwear - as it's off to be weighed and measured next; the last thing you want is a big blotchy pee stain on your pajama bottoms staring the attendant nurse in the face due to that elusive 'last drip' making it's late debut. Then it's the automatic blood-pressure pump....followed by the vision check viewer (the standard thing you'd get in an optometrist's office, but done with a simple peer-in visor contraption and finger clicker). Then it's the blood work...and since I've cleared fifty, they suck twice as much out to test for everything AND my prostate business. Then the chest x-ray. After that, it's the barium drinking and stomach x-ray station...which I choose to skip every year, as the 'inside word' on that whole routine is that it actually does more harm than good. A colleague of my wife's says that if you're really interested in checking out the landscape in your stomach, you should just go for an endoscopic examination. Not the most comfortable thing, but safer than drinking barium, and accurate without question. Barring the barium swilling and such, it's on to the electrocardiogram, then the soundproof booth, headphones and clicker to listen for the 'pings' to check your hearing. Then it's over to take deep breaths and do that sustained blowing business to measure your lung capacity and check for problems like asthma or emphysema. After that, it's behind the black curtains for the corneal eye check, where your eye balls are photographed. Then it's a trot over to have some freshly graduated intern doctor wearing a stethoscope ask you to lift your shirt, and breath in...and out, then try to act officious while looking over your file stats. The kid dressed up in the doctor's costume this year was a particularly rude little areshole....questioning/challeging us as to WHY we hadn't opted for the barium drinking/stomach x-ray station as if we had offended him personally - actually raising his voice at my wife (who insists on accompanying me to these examinations as a precautionary measure, lest I attack someone), who, he was seemingly unaware, was likely working in this very hospital before he was even a glimmer in his father's eye. He stood down and backed off when she gave him 'that look', and informed him that she was a senior nurse, and well acquainted with procedure. Pissed off, we then moved the pajama party upstairs to the CAT scan echo-testing area...my next least favourite procedure. This consists of laying down in every position imaginable while a medical tech rolls a scanner over the front, back and sides of your torso, taking a series of photos of the goings on therein. This year it took a particularly long time to get through, and I had my suspicions that said tech didn't actually know what she was doing. After that, it's basically a done deal. You hand in your papers at the front counter, change, and pick up your token for a free drink from the vending machine (tea, water coffee or juice)...and that's it. It takes about a week for the results to come back in the mail, and it's pretty much like getting a report card....everything being graded from A (perfect) to D (fail). Of course, my lovely wife, being a veteran woman about said facilities always gets my results from the computer records early, as neither of us has any patience.
A fringe benefit for my wife, as a career nurse, is that she and I can both get our annual 'Ningen Dock' examinations done free of charge...which is a good thing, as these can run upwards of $500 a pop, depending on extras and so-forth.
Still...not really my favourite thing to do on a warm autumn morning. Like most people, I'm not really fond of visiting doctors, or being poked and prodded like common livestock, but my part-time gig at the kindergarten has always required that I present documentation of a minimal annual check...and since my wife is a nurse, I basically have no choice but to go along with the whole procedure. Looking at the situation in the U.S., and the massive number of people for whom even basic health care is far out of reach, I consider myself to be fortunate. Crossing the half-century line, I'm now in the territory, age-wise, that physical issues can become problematic if not identified and addressed in a timely manner. While in recent years I have turned the page on decades of a rather hazardous lifestyle, I am all too aware that it could all come back and bite me in the arse at any time. Watching old friends and acquaintances around my age sputter out early is also a sobering thing. So...I run. Run like a jack ass five mornings a week. Watch what I fire down my gullet. Curtail the booze guzzling. Quit the cigarettes and the rest of it. Go to bed early. Get up early. Clarity. It's a fucking good thing. Of course, my social life isn't what it was...but what is at 50?
So, that's it for the weighing, measuring, poking, prodding, scanning, squeezing and sampling for another year. No doubt, the intervening year will pass even more quickly, and barring any natural disaster or catastrophic war, I'll be foraging through my turds with a stir stick, and back in those test center jammies having my blood sucked out before I know it. Oh - and the results came in a few days ago. I guess the running and lifestyle adjustments are paying off. In my case, the key with all of that is to avoid short-term goal setting. The only way that it would ever work for me was to commit to a long-term lifestyle change. Permanent. Embrace a totally different direction. Fuck the naysayers. Oh...and (postscript) It seems that in addition to losing a whole raft of fake friends, I've also dropped about 42 kg (around 92 lbs) over the last 4 years. At the rate I was going, things were definitely not boding well for the future. I look back on it as my extended John Belushi/'Fat Elvis' period. Good times. For what it's worth, I feel much better...though I suspect I'll need to invest in some new threads...my wardrobe seems to be hanging a bit loose and baggy these days, A bit too 90's.
That's it for this early autumnal edition of the rant and rave here in Olde Nagoyaland. Until next time, remember...."No matter where you go...there you are".
