{"id":5083,"date":"2010-11-04T22:40:14","date_gmt":"2010-11-05T02:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=5083"},"modified":"2010-11-04T22:40:14","modified_gmt":"2010-11-05T02:40:14","slug":"make-a-left-at-the-piano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=5083","title":{"rendered":"Make a left at the piano"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/81595350@N00\/5130083663\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4126\/5130083663_9bbe2454bf.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A rainy day here, the bulk of it spent at the doctor&#8217;s office &#8212; or at least that&#8217;s how it seemed at the time. I had a 10:30 appointment with the urologist, but for whatever reason, I ended up waiting almost two hours before I was seen. Most of that was spent in the magazine-free exam room, me just twiddling my thumbs and occasionally sending out a bored tweet with my cell phone. <\/p>\n<p>A nurse practitioner, and then the doctor, finally came in a little after noon. And the short version is, I&#8217;m pretty much okay. I had an exam, and now I have a couple of prescriptions to hopefully take care of my symptoms, which aren&#8217;t indicative of anything too serious. (They&#8217;ve been more worrisome and discomfiting than painful, and they haven&#8217;t gotten progressively worse since late September.) I go back for another appointment in a month, hopefully with all of this resolved. And hopefully never needing to go back to a urologist until I&#8217;m at least as old as most of the other patients I saw there today. (Sixty- or seventy-year-old men, I suspect, are urology&#8217;s bread and butter.)<\/p>\n<p>The place, incidentally, was huge, affiliated with a local hospital. How huge? A woman came in, asking for directions to another office, and the woman behind the front desk told her to go back out and make a left at the piano, and then&#8230; Seriously, if a medical practice has a <i>piano<\/i> in the lobby, that&#8217;s pretty huge.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, the appointment went well and helped to alleviate some of my concerns. (I kept flashing back to this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qItVguhA1hA\">Mike Birbiglia bit<\/a> where he notes that it&#8217;s never good news when they say they&#8217;ve found something in your bladder. &#8220;We&#8217;ve found something it your bladder&#8230;and it&#8217;s season tickets to the Yankees!&#8221;) I go back in mid-December, so we&#8217;ll see what happens.<\/p>\n<p>I have an 8:30 appointment then, so maybe I can even get out of there before noon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A rainy day here, the bulk of it spent at the doctor&#8217;s office &#8212; or at least that&#8217;s how it seemed at the time. I had a 10:30 appointment with the urologist, but for whatever reason, I ended up waiting almost two hours before I was seen. Most of that was spent in the magazine-free &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=5083\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[5,28],"class_list":["post-5083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-health","tag-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}