I love San Francisco. And as someone with terrible balance, I’m glad this time we didn’t park outside in the lot where the earth is many stories’ worth straight down from the nose of the car.
I’m in a longterm study of lupus patient outcomes, and it’s been two years (note on that link: I got sent the most beautiful picture of that newborn baby and his mom later.)Â Time for me to come back for the in-person part of the study. Actually, they wanted me in July… When I told them what my surgery was going to be, Sandi, my interviewer this time, pushed the appointment way back to November over my protests that surely I’d be up to coming in sooner than that!
Wise woman.
Michelle drove. A wise woman, too.
And by the way, Haight-Ashbury just down the hill still looks exactly like you’d expect it to, psychedelically colorful storefronts and all. Peace, man.
So I have now been pushed, prodded, bled, challenged, tested, and assured that there are no points taken off for the artwork in not drawing my lines straight in their tests. (“Oh, I LOVED doing this in first grade!”) I now know I can spot and connect ABC’s in order faster than 123’s. Is anyone surprised?
Get strapped into a machine and swing your leg in resistance as hard as you can: set the timer, GO!
Take the words blue, green, and red, printed in varying colors, and say the colors the words are printed in, not the words themselves, line after line: set the timer, GO!
Repeat as many of this string of unrelated words as you can think of: set the timer, GO! (Note to self–if you repeat each word after she does as she presents the list, you remember fewer, not more of them: there is much to be said, in this and in all things, for simply quietly listening.)
Note that I had a mental image of a termite with its shorts hanging low, pliers stuck in one pocket, chomping on a tangerine, a nice warm summer watermelon on the picnic table in front of it and its drill at the ready to slice the thing up, trying to remember that list that just blew off in the breeze.
Then I had to explain why I was cracking up.
Actually, we did a lot of cracking up. Sandi is a delight.
Overall bone mass, good, but 10% loss in that hip since two years ago. Yowsers! Bring on the extra hot cocoa in milk, it’s a bit chilly near the Golden Gate.
But the people are as warm as they come.