You know how your old car develops little maintenance problems and you have to get them fixed before it will run properly again?

First, you have a rear right turn light out, so I, being totally car illiterate, have to take it to the service garage.
You get it fixed, only to hear squeaks coming from somewhere under the hood (or bonnet). Back to the fixer of everything cars. It needs a new belt, he says. OK, what’s that? It’s the belt, he replies, that you don’t want to get your fingers anywhere near when you are filling up the windshield washer.
He fixes that, but the very next day you hear more squeaks, but not from the belt. (Oh, I am now an expert with auto terms and I can say belt, sort of knowing what it is.) So back to Mr Fixer. Oh, he says, that sounds like rotors. Hey, my car is not a helicopter: it doesn’t have any rotors. No, he says, a rotor is the thing in the wheel that the brake pads grab to slow you down.

So you get new rotors: they never come one at a time, always in pairs. At least that’s what Mr. Fixer says. After paying him a minor fortune, you drive off feeling happy.
A week later, I see water under the front of the car. I open the hood and, now I am an expert, even I can see there is a hose (yes, I know that term – I have several in the garden that spout water in various places leading to a little spurt at the end instead of a good jet) and I see water dripping from the hose that leads to the radiator (I know that term, too, for in olden days, My Beloved and I had an apartment in Winnipeg equipped with something that looked like the thing under the hood, which I broke by leaving the window open at night, only to have the minus thirty degree air come in and bust it, thereby flooding the apartment below). So, Mr. Fix-it fixed that.

All of that cost some dollars, but more to my point, they were all minor maintenance issues, which many an old car has.
And that is how I am feeling these days.

Back in November (2017), the fainting, going unconscious, episodes about which I had written and many of you knew about as long ago as five years were getting closer together. Short story: my pulse would drop to 30 beats per minute and leave those funny little billions of cells in my head with very little blood, so they shut me down and these episodes became a daily event. That’s when the cardiac specialist inserted a pacemaker in me. Great! Now I do not pass out. Well, not because of low pulse rate. So, I checked off No. 1 maintenance.

Second maintenance was a cataract operation to my left eye, which left me able to see half of you, as the other eye had not had an operation – until two weeks ago. Now I see you properly and you all look beautiful – or handsome, if you are a male.

Third maintenance issue: last fall, I arranged with a plastic surgeon, who also, fortunately, specialises in removal of basil cell cancers and the like, to have the one on the tip of my nose cut off. Some say, a smaller nose would have been better seven decades ago. So, that takes place March 21st.

Fourth maintenance issue started yesterday with a CAT scan of my abdomen. Over the past couple of months, I had been having teeny-weeny pains sometimes in my left lower abdomen and I could feel the odd lump, which, when I massaged it, would move along and disappear. At least, until it appeared later as, to put it politely, gas or poop. Now, I may not be a car expert, but I am a pretty good quack, so I figured it could be a hernia. So, also, after poking me around quite a bit, agreed my real doctor, the lovely Dr. Eve (name changed to hide the innocent), but I’d better get a CAT scan. As I have a pacemaker, I cannot have an MRI or I will disintegrate in flames.

However, before I was able to get it, another issue arose, which required a CAT scan also.  I chose to get it at an out-of-town hospital, as I knew it would take longer to get it in the main hospital in town. And yesterday, My Beloved and I had a lovely drive in the country with +8C and sunny skies to get my two-for-one CAT scan. I can’t tell you the results yet, but I’m sure my Dr. Eve will let me know next week.

On our return drive, we picked up our mail at the boxes, or as Canada Post tenderly calls them, a nest of boxes. In one of the envelopes was a demand for me to appear at a down-town hospital, where a urologist will give me a cystoscopy. Now, my quack knowledge did not encompass that technical medical word, but it didn’t sound or look like anything frightening. I mean, after all, cyto comes from Greek meaning a cell and I have zillions of them, so why would he need to copy one of my cells? But, if that’s what he wants, then he can copy as many as he wants.

But, curiosity, as they say, killed the cat. I looked up cystoscopy and it didn’t mean copying any of my cells. It meant this doctor, who from his name is obviously an Irish immigrant right out of the University of Limerick, is a newly born surgeon looking to further his experience and to take a camera right up my – yes, very private part – and have a good look around at several of my organs. When I have had my colonoscopies I have rather enjoyed watching on the TV in the op room the camera creep up my other private part looking for nasties, but I’m not sure I will be able to have the satisfaction of that in this next invasion of my innards, as they probably don’t have a TV set up in the same way. Or, maybe they do.

Well, remember the car and its maintenance? That’s how I feel I am these days, just getting maintained. But, when all has been fixed, just like the car, I will be as fit as I feel now, only knowing that there is nothing further that can go wrong — trust me, I’m a pretty good quack!