Tribulations on a Minor Key

There, the ordeal over. And ordeal it was. Our imaginations do dreadful things to us. You feel ill, there seems no reason for it, and you decide to tough it out. Weeks later with no relief in sight, you finally decide to see your family doctor. Your family doctor of four decades. Placing you both in roughly a like age category. You've been retired for over a decade, past time for him to retire too and he plans to, come next summer.

Your family doctor scolds you that he so seldom sees you. But there are seldom reasons related to ill health for you to make appointments. When you do, however, it is because you're stumped, don't know what next to do.

He cannot make an instant diagnosis, reasons elude him as they did you. Although he ventures the opinion that a really tough-to-shake intestinal bacterium has been making the rounds, making people miserable. Despite which, as though to make up for lost opportunities, he scribbles a number of prescriptions for you. Prescribing, that is, a number of tests; blood tests, fecal occult tests, scans of one kind and another - and ogawd, a colonoscopy.

But before all of that, to ameliorate your symptoms, a drug protocol. One type of prescribed pill to be taken once a day, the second four times a day. Nicely enough, your symptoms abate. Although of course there are always some kinds of complications, aren't there, and the pharmaceuticals cause drowsiness and frequent urination. Frequent urination as in every hour on the hour, day and night.

What a predicament - exacerbating your already-enlarged prostate.

The day of the colonoscopy appointment draws near. How ominous is this: it's for Friday the 13th, but you're not superstitious, are you? Are You? You've had to fast a few days, no solid foods, only liquids, so apple juice, tea and chicken soup save the day; several days, in fact. Along with several purgative applications. So, along with the frequent urination is added frequent evacuations. Day.and.night.

At the appointed hour of the appointed day, you fill out a medical questionnaire at the endoscopy clinic in a downtown office tower. "No" to all questions; you have no medical conditions, you do not take any medication, although you do take a daily vitamin D capsule. Your wife tells you that your colon will turn out to be the clearest, cleanest the doctor will ever have seen in his career. And, as things turn out, she was absolutely right.

No obstructions, no polyps, no growths of any kind. That slightly low haemoglobin count that had disturbed your GP is explained away by this doctor as common enough for older people; the slightly elevated iron, nothing of concern. The diverticulitis (sans symptoms) he discovers is to be shrugged off as yet another physical symptom of the ageing process. You are 72 years of age, after all.

The literature recommends a good brisk walk to aid in eliminating all that air that was pumped into your system prior to the insertion of the light-bundled camera. That fits very nicely into your agenda, and that rigorous, vigorous, healthful, sunnily beautiful walk is replete with a musical accompaniment.