Today I went for a health screening in a medical clinic on the third floor of the Ocean Financial Centre. This consisted of sitting for a long time in the Las Vegas Waiting Room, and then going to the much more prosaically named Room 3 to get my blood samples taken or to Treadmill Room 2 for an ECG. In between these excursions I sat and tried not to faint (blood tests require you to skip breakfast, which is probably the worst thing I can imagine) and watch TV.
To begin with, they were playing the Olympic Closing Ceremony, and I enjoyed watching some people dressed as broccoli dancing, and after that the programming changed to Peppa Pig. The episode was one I hadn’t seen – The Fire Engine – and I was just getting into it (Daddy Pig was having a barbecue with his friends while Mummy Pig was on fire fighting duty) when a member of staff came in and changed it to a shopping channel. Surrounded by serious men in suits I was too shy to protest and ask for it to be changed back, something I’ll always regret.
After an hour or two I went to the Miami room and changed into my running gear, then did the treadmill test, with an octopus of cables attached to my chest. I only got my heart rate up to 153, but without breakfast this felt like close to death. By then I had drunk a cup of Milo and had a finger sized egg sandwich, but that’s never enough for a growing boy. Afterwards, I slunk off to work, where I was fairly incapable until I’d drunk coffee and eaten terrible snacks by the fistful.
This evening, Destroyer wouldn’t sleep. La Serpiente, on the other hand, was so tired she was asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, which meant we could profitably spend the evening watching a MotoGP race. It was another one where it rained and my favourite riders chose the wrong tyres, and I was on the verge of fast forwarding to the end, when it turned at lap 3 into a nail-biting intense race and stayed that way to the end, probably the best race I’ve seen this season. I hope after all that adrenalin I’ll be able to sleep.
One response to “Medical screening and Peppa Pig”
You get to eat so much food when you’re a man and not 5’2″. In the plus side being small means you can squeeze in 10k run before breakfast without keeling over. (I have to emphasise don’t often do this. Only when away on holiday. )