Assessment

The road to perdition---when you're waiting to be "cleared" for surgery, at least in my view, you tend to be in too close contact with your body, trying to assess whether all parts are in passable condition.
   Several years ago, I sat in a doctor's waiting room where another patient and the woman accompanying her were also waiting, for a considerable time I might add.  The woman was elderly (meaning older than I), and she sat looking down toward the floor;   "I don't like the look of my legs,"  she said.  Her companion, glancing at the legs in question, asked her why, they didn't look swollen to her. The patient replied they just didn't look right.  Now I, sitting across from them, was more or less forced to take a look too, though I  didn't really feel like it.    The legs, in proportion to the woman herself, were scrawny, whitish with  kind of mottled bluish areas on the skin.  As I was processing this unwanted bit of information, the woman spoke again.  "And I wonder if the doctor will say anything about my arms," she went on. "I don't like the looks of them either."  I didn't look this time, though she was wearing a cardigan sweater, of course, but even not being her doctor, I could diagnose what was wrong with the looks of her arms and legs:  they were old. 
    When I wake up these mornings in May, I try to keep everything in perspective.   But I am scheduled for at least 2 clearances in the coming week, so of course I need to be aware.  This morning I woke up with a kind of toothache.  Not in the area of the late Tooth #3, but in the problematic Old #12, which was the reason for my dental referrals in the first place, and for which #3 was sacrificed, perhaps unnecessarily so.    Or maybe it's a sinus infection after all: I hear they're going around.  I take aspirin and hope for the best.  I go outside, and feel a sharp twinge in my right side.  A kidney stone that missed detection?  A gallstone?  Maybe just a spasm of some kind.  I drink some Gatorade, and it subsides. 
    There is danger in being overly involved with our mortal coils.  We shouldn't have to be aware; remember the days when we never thought of how our bodies functioned unless we  were having  a science test that day.
I sit outside, in the sun, trying to increase my drastically low Vitamin D level.  I expose my limbs to the sun, and I really don't like the looks of either my arms or my legs....