Adventures in medicine

This morning, I was holed up in the local hospital getting some routine tests done. I’m getting old, I get aches and pains, so every once in a while I have to go in and get inspected detected injected and selected, just because. If anything unusual is going on in my body, I go in to find out if it’s anything to worry about. The latest unusual thing is that for the last several years I often get arthritic flare-ups in my ankles and knees, but this year, to my surprise, my joint pains are gone. Just completely ache-free. I go for walks and my limbs are moving smoothly with hardly a glitch. This is not right, I am not at all used to this. Maybe my legs have died and are twitching zombie-like with no feeling?

I gave the doctor a small bucket of my blood and they measured all kinds of stuff, and to further my surprise, I am 100% grade-A normal, every indicator smack in the middle of the range. I have no excuses anymore. I am weirdly healthy.

We checked Vitamin D (because Minnesota) and Vitamin B12 (because Vegetarian) and again, boringly average and perfectly normal. My blood pressure is 120/70, like it’s supposed to be.

Oh, one enlightening exception: my %monocytes and %eosinophils were both absurdly high, but the doctor deflated my excitement by telling me that right now, that’s also entirely normal — those cell types are indicators of viral infections, and we’re still seeing symptoms of a recent pandemic. I guess if you’ve been exposed to some mystery virus in the last 4 years, you’re likely to have the proportions of those immune cells elevated.

Just to be sure, I also got my COVID and flu vaccines.

I am not accustomed to this degree of normality. I am not used to this at all. It might mean I’m about to die mysteriously.