If you are a middle aged man, you need to get your blood work done, prostate test, BMI and, oh yes, the invasive colon procedure
First Person:
By Al Carlos Hernandez
My wife’s import sports car has a computer that tells her when to take it in for routine servicing. The computer reads out messages like, “You have X number of miles until servicing is required.” Then a little wrench icon pops up when you start the car and it won’t go away until you spend at least seven hundred bucks.
It gets weird when the computer figures out your driving habits and tells you exactly when you need servicing. Once we missed the servicing date and the computer switched up and caught an attitude with us. It started displaying messages like, “You are X numbers of days past your servicing date.” I’ve heard that some cars actually call the dealership and schedule their own appointments. If that was happening with her car I would make it pay the insurance bill and bring home Chinese.
Growing up ethnic we can assuage our guilt. We deny and deflect. We don’t blame the car; we blame the car’s programmers for being obsessive. Then again maybe Latinos are culturally and emotionally unprepared to own strong willed euro-cute cars.
Consistent with this kind of Latinesque thinking, maybe the car started nagging us. Maybe the car was insecure in the knowledge that we unceremoniously got rid of its older brother vehicle, a morbidly obese American luxury SUV, and replaced it with a fuel efficient and stealthy blacked-out muscle car on twenty-something inch rims.
Anecdotally, I too have recently been nagged into going for routine middle age servicing at the HMO. They checked my vitals, fluids, and quite possibly my oil. The in-office results were positive, but I was told I needed to fast all night so I could do blood work the next day. I didn’t eat or drink all night while praying for the Middle East.
Still haunted by computer nag-o-mania, my HMO emailed me the results. Everything sounded as normal as it could be without actually talking to me. Then in the mail came a hard copy with the bad news. Tests showed that I’m pre-diabetic.
Pre-diabetes is a condition whereby your body is not turning food into energy quickly enough. This condition can lead to heart problems, stroke, and the ongoing inability to make the huge car payments on your wife’s red import coupe.
The numbers didn’t indicate full-on diabetes and, with some lifestyle changes, the whole unpleasant episode would go away – if a new lifestyle could be maintained. Therein lies the rub.
We knew what my problem was. It was my love of sweets and I consumed a lot of cookies, pan dulce, ice cream, whatever. So I did what any normal American male would do in this situation: I blamed my wife for buying goodies. She, wise beyond her years, was shrewd enough to deflect the blame to her client Mary Mom, an older woman who is an expert in finding the best cookies on the planet. Every week Mary would give us a shopping bag full of the latest and greatest cookies and it was my job to not hurt her feelings by eating them… all.
After studying Web MD like a jail house lawyer for hours, I emailed the doctor explaining why she was wrong about my diagnosis. She was gracious in reminding me to read the pamphlet on the condition, inferring that I shouldn’t get my boxers in a bunch. And since she had seen my boxers, she no doubt knew what she was talking about.
Before she passed, my mother wrote in her journal that the one thing she knew about me was that I was at my happiest when I had a cause to fight. She was right. That very day I stopped eating sugar. The family was no help. The next day after church everybody showed up to the house with pink boxes of donuts. Even with my sister-in-law and her industrial cache of Jelly Bellys I would be unmoved, continuing to ingest my rabbit food trail mix.
It’s been a while since the diagnosis and I’ve lost fourteen pounds, walk a mile every day, drink diet sodas, munch sugarless cookies, and have come to the stark realization that routine checkups can truly save you from a breakdown somewhere down the road. You don’t need a computer to tell you that. Computers are programmed by emotionless, pragmatic, fact-based common sense. In other words, non-ethnic people more than likely.
If you are a middle aged man, or hope to become a middle aged man, you need to get your blood work done, prostate test, BMI and, oh yes, the invasive colon procedure. I’d signed up for that and the experience will, no doubt, be a story that I will have write to standing up.
“The only true wisdom is to know that you know nothing.”
-Socrates.
Al Carlos Hernandez writes for LatinoLA.com