The Path of the Bookseller

No one was at the front desk when I came into the gym on Sunday. I stood there for a long moment, membership card and picture ID in hand. Finally, one of the red-shirted trainers emerged from their back room and waved me over.

I showed him my card and ID. “I think someone has to scan these for me to come in,” I said.

He looked at them, then pointed one finger at the card. “Bang!” he said. “Have a good workout.”

That I’m going to a gym at all might surprise folks who have known me for a while. I’ve been notorius for avoiding and ignoring all things physical and medical for years. Until last month, I hadn’t been in any type of gym, other than for a concert, in the thirty one years since high school — and even then, I had finagled my way into a sort of Remedial Gym due to a very mildly bad back, where a group of us hung out, not having to get into gym clothes or anything, and stood around or did non-strenuous stuff that I no longer remember.

Things changed, after a chance-triggered chain of events, a couple of months ago (around the time of my previous blog post). On a Thursday night, I was cooking dinner for my household and guests as usual when I badly cut a finger. Since my housemates were downstairs praying at the time (for those just tuning in, I live in a community above and vaguely related to an Episcopal priory), I told one of our guests who was a few rooms away that dinner might be delayed, and, feeling woozy, sat in the common room, my finger wrapped in a paper towel.

When my housemates came in a few minutes later, they and the guest took one look at me and told me that I was going to the hospital. We quickly trundled over to the local emergency room and, after I went through an initial triage, sat and waited for a long time in the lobby. (They may have had a worse time of it than I did: while I was a bit out of it, and spent much of the evening in the relatively quiet emergency area itself, they were subjected to hours of Fox TV sitcoms blaring at them from an unreachable TV.)

The doctor took my vital signs and decided that I needed stitches. Looking at the numbers, he asked if I’d ever had trouble with my blood pressure. “Not that I know of,” I said. “But I do tend to be nervous in hospitals.”

They stitched me up and said that I should see my doctor in a week (or was it two weeks?) to get the stitches removed. I’d delayed for years getting a doctor, so they said that I should come back there.

When I returned (alone, this time; the local bus system takes me straight there from home), they took my vital signs again. The nurse did a double-take when she looked at the readout. “Your blood pressure is reading 200/145. Lie down over there. We’re hooking you up.”

I walked over to a bed, lay down, and was connected to the machine that goes ping. A few different people looked at it and shook their heads. Finally, a doctor came in. “Your blood pressure is dangerously high. You have to see your doctor about this.” When I told him that I didn’t have a doctor, he frowned even more, handed me a piece of paper, and pointed to a phone number on it. “Call them,” he said. “They will refer you to a good doctor. Get an appointment as soon as you can.”

A nurse brought me a pill, dropped it, and brought me another pill, along with a prescription for a few days’ worth more. I pulled all my stuff and papers together and went home.

I procrastinated for a few days in calling the referral number, but eventually did. I was referred to a doctor within the same network as the hospital.

The doctor is good: friendly, clear, and direct. He asked me all sorts of questions, especially about my family history. (When he asked me if I was sexually active, I just sort of sighed. “I’m not saying that you should or shouldn’t be,” he said. “But if someone were to have no interest at all, that might point to hormonal problems.” He didn’t diagnose me with any.)

When he asked me if I got any exercise, I told him that my job had me walking around for much of the workday. “That’s not enough,” he said. “You need to get your heart rate elevated for twenty minutes three times a week.” (Or he said something roughly like that. All quotes are from my notably questionable memory). “See about joining a gym. And I’d like to see you lose about fifty pounds.”

He gave me a prescription for more of the medication and for another similar drug, and more paperwork. He told me to go to the lab in that building for a blood test, and that I should fast on the morning of the test. He also scheduled me for a follow-up appointment, and gave me a referral to a gastroenterologist, with whom I got the first available appointment, several weeks later.

I ended up getting the tests done on the same day as the follow-up appointment. He said that he’d contact me about the results, and gave me a more thorough checkup, involving the usual poking, prodding, deep breathing, and strategic coughing. He didn’t see anything too unusual. But when he got the test results back, he said that he was concerned about one of the tests, and gave me a referral to a urologist.

This has led to a chain of further appointments, examinations, procedures, and prescriptions, all of which fall under the rubric of “things all men should have checked before they are fifty.” These included a colonoscopy (which, if I hadn’t been sedated, would have felt like the greatest of indignities, second only, perhaps, to those inflicted by airport security). At this point, I feel like I have ingested more odd fluids and had to have more other measured than ever before.And I’ve dropped my pants for an unprecedented number of men in small offices.

Fortunately, we have good medical insurance coverage through work, and having the chain of referrals made things easy. The offices and labs have good communication, so results of procedures from each one go to the appropriate others. I’m prone to dropping the ball on such things, so it’s good to not have to think about coordinating them as much as I otherwise might.

I still procrastinated on joining a gym, telling myself that I was waiting for my next paycheck or something like it. A few weeks ago, though, my housemate spotted a good sign-up bargain at a new branch of the gym he uses, and came home to tell me about it. I took a quick look at my bank account, decided that I could go for it, and headed back to the gym with him to sign up.

We went to the gym together a few days later, and he showed me his routine and how to use some of the equipment. I’ve been trying to go on alternating days ever since. There’s a gym half a block from the BART station on the way to work, so I try to leave for work an hour early on those days and hit the gym on the way.

I’ve been following what I remember of my housemate’s routine each time: twenty minutes on a stationary bike, followed by four of the machines (using low weights to start with, though I’ve increased each by one notch apiece as I’ve gotten used to them).

I’ve had to get over several personal issues in going to the gym. Most of them turned out to involve the locker room, rather than the gym itself: for reasons that I can no longer recall, but mostly involving self-consciousness about my body and my weight, I think, I’d been leery of undressing, showering, and dressing in a room with other people, especially people in much better shape than I am. Similarly, in the gym itself, I’d been self-conscious about the beginner’s level settings and small weights that I’d been using, when I knew that others (including many who clearly have made the gym practice the center of their lives) would be far above me.

To my surprise, I’ve found that the gym actually functions much like a community workspace or library: many people are together in a space, working on individual aspects of similar goals. Trainers are there, like librarians, to help with questions and to show how to use the tools more effectively.

And most importantly, it isn’t entirely occupied by people with perfect bodies (though those that are do serve as an inspiration). Everyone is at a different point in his or her practice, using the tools at appropriate levels. No one is looking down at the beginners for being out of shape or not working at the level of the others. Everyone just carries on, with an atmosphere of (mostly silent) camraderie and support.

I have found the workouts to be surprisingly like meditation sessions. On the bike, I have tried to read or to intentionally listen to music or podcasts, but find that I tend to slow down or even stop when my attention drifts from the physical exertion. So I keep my hands on the heartbeat readers and concentrate on the numbers that I’m seeing on the display. (At this point, having the bike at the default settings for a twenty minute ride, I’m keeping at about 85 RPM, or 15.7 MPH, with a heartbeat of about 120 bpm, and burning about 100 calories.)

One thing that threw me at first was that I had been using particular machines, with their own ways of pulling on the weights, each time, but never seemed to remember correctly which machine was where. I realized the problem when I saw someone changing the interfaces on one of them: the machines are actually identical, with handholds that swap among them.

I’ve been trying to keep a sterner eye on my eating habits than I had before (even figuring in the healthy weekly dinner and resulting lunches that I have been making). I realized that I’d been slipping into habits of empty calories: when eating dinners at one place, I’d been getting sugar-laden Italian sodas; when at another, I’d been getting Thai iced teas full of sugar and condensed milk. And I’d been getting ice cream and muffins far too often. I’d also been eating the bread and butter set out with meals. But seeing the numbers on the bike have given me a jolt: realizing that with all that effort over twenty minutes, I’m only burning about 100 calories, I’m much less willing to consume pointless calories that negate it.

And one of my friends (Material Girl, for readers of earlier incarnations of this blog), who has inspired me by losing a lot of weight herself by a similar sensible regimen over recent years, pointed out a couple of things that make sense in eating. One point is not to go on a grumpy and dangerous level of starvation, but rather to budget calories sensibly: if I know I’m eating something that is unusually caloric, I try to balance it out by backing off on the calories (while not skimping on nutrients) over the rest of the day.

The other was the idea of eating small sweets rather than large ones. As she points out, when I eat a large order of something for the flavor, the first few bites satisfy the yen for that taste, and the rest is just eating it to be eating it. If I take the time and intention to experience the flavor and texture of the first bites fully, I can do without the rest of what would be an overly large amount. This worked when I was at an amazing chocolate and coffee shop in Sebastopol a few days ago: when I got a chocolate macaroon with an espresso, I was at first disappointed at the small size of the macaroon. But when I put my full attention into experiencing eating it, I found it to be enough.

My cooking and eating at home hasn’t changed much. I intentionally don’t keep junk food around. When I snack, it’s usually a piece of fruit. And I’ve been cooking the usual dinners. One entrée that I’ve been enjoying, and which I stumbled upon while experimenting, is Molé Mackerel: I first sear fresh mackerel in a grill pan, then put it in the oven covered by a diluted paste of molé sauce, then serve it with fresh pineapple chunks or slices. Yum.

I haven’t been keeping an eye on the scale. Knowing, from previous attempts to lose weight, how unpredictable the process can be, I don’t want to get discouraged if I don’t see the weight changing as quickly as I’d like. (I know that sometime the body takes some time to reorganize itself to accommodate new activity and eating habits, and this can lead to jerky patterns of weight loss.)

But today, for the first time, someone in the breakroom at work told me that she could see that I’d lost weight, and others chimed in with agreement. Material Girl even told me that my jeans were looking a bit baggy, and that she could see the difference in my arms.

I’m psyched, and eager to turn the workouts and eating patterns into default habits. With results and encouragement like this, things are looking promising.

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Unrelatedly: thanks to all who are visiting from the links on Crooks and Liars and elsewhere. And thanks to Steven Hart for getting the link-ball rolling.

I’ve been relatively quiet over here, but having been posting pretty close to weekly at my fiction project, The Book of Voices. It’s a set of monologues from the point of view of Biblical characters, chosen by chance operations. It’s been surprising me, and may surprise you. Hop over and take a look!