JANUARY 4, WEDNESDAY

REMINDER (PART 2)

But I was up and ready at 7:30, drove to the Family Health Center, was warmly received by an assistant who knew and liked Kathe. We had an animated discussion about all the things I was going to do on the trip. I was tested for Covid and flu but I was suspicious that I might have urinary problems since all of my group of six old men that I meet with on Friday mornings have various urinary problems caused by an expanding prostate. My doctor explained to me at one point that the prostate enlarges slowly as you get older. I am not even sure what the prostate does and Wikipedia doesn’t help much. Why it enlarges to finally can turn cancerous I don’t know. But because of some evolutionary mistake in plumbing design the urethra running from the bladder to peeing runs right through the middle of the prostate and not around it. And so as the prostate increases in size the urinary track gets squeezed and finally cut off. The problem is probably, in my inexact understanding, caused by living too long. Back on the Savannah males were probly lucky to get to fifty and a major evolutionary function was to produce as many children as possible. But after 50 we males just go to seed and our prostates run amok just as women’s breasts, when they no longer can feed children, often decay. We are both, men and women, prone to cancer, of prostate or breast, men almost certainly if we live long enough.

Whether I understand what is going on or am making it up, I wanted the assistant to check me for more than flu and Covid before I headed out on my trip, so she added a urine sample.

They must do the checks very quickly because in ten minutes or so Dr. Coin had read the notes the assistant made. I was cleared of any virus, but had blood in my urine.

And suddenly, out of the blue, through her insistence, my three month trip was cancelled or at least delayed. The problem was my bladder and my prostate. The wild shaking for two nights was my body fighting off an infection. She would give me an antibiotic and, if I was lucky, this would end the infection, temporarily, if I wasn’t lucky and had one of three symptoms, I should go immediately to the emergency room.

I was lucky. After two pills, the next night, I didn’t shiver and shake and by Friday I was close to normal again. I was first enormously relieved that this had happened five days before the trip and not in two weeks in Virampur, Gujurat. I would have likely wrecked a good part of our trip and spoiled the trip for Susie and Todd.

But now I suddenly feel a little bereft with six weeks of emptiness ahead of me before I can possibly meet them in Helsinki and do the last five weeks of the trip together. Todd’s passport finally arrived today, Friday, and Susie’s and my passports and visas are back. I am all packed up and still receiving Amazon orders for things I plan to take. But I am not going anywhere. After preparing for a month I have nothing to do except look out the window and eat chicken noodle soup.

But as I return to normal I take this as a sign that at 85, anything can go wrong at any time. This probably will be a minor irritating delay and I’ll probably be patched up all right, unless something goes wrong in the process. I do lose a lot of money for the Finnair flight from Paris to Delhi. But that is just the price of being old with the chance that something will stop me at any point. And I would have lost a lot more money in a Parisian emergency room next week. It is also comforting being at home where everything is familiar.

Nothing special happened this week to me that doesn’t happen to everyone at some point in their 80’s, one malady after another strikes without warning and whether we survive or not is mostly chance until the big one comes. This is not the big one. This is hardly worth writing about except to help me sort things out. But it is what happened this week and all I have to write about.