The Tomorrow Project

The Tomorrow Project - Supported by Alberta Health Services-Alberta Cancer Board, the Alberta Cancer Foundation and the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer
Janary 21, 2010

“Any good plans for the day?” That is what the medical researcher said to me this morning at 8 am when I went to participate in a ten year old on-going study on cancer.

“Best thing I know about my day is that I am here for your project,” I replied.

They tested body mass index (BMI) by just having me step barefoot on a special scale. Apparently electronic waves go up and down your body, at different rates through muscles and fat. I must be special. I measured 30.7%, right in the middle of the healthy range for my age. How sweet is that.

My blood pressure was 131/70 – which I flaunted at the guys who live here, for Ed just had his blood pressure taken and it was much higher. “How do you stay so calm,” he asked.

“Having 8 children around for 25 years makes it easy to stay calm now. My standards are so low, given that the bottom line every day is to just answer the question ‘is everyone still alive at the end of the day’”. They laugh and think I am joking.

The new measure for the waist seems to be the perfect indicator for abdominal fat – how can it happen to me again! Everything perfect ... or at least in the right range.

I don’t know why they are measuring the stiffness index of the bone in the left heel, but I was happy to give the Achilles Express machine a chance. I watched the woman take blood. Six vials. The first one was to let them take a complete blood count of the research participants. The next five vials are going on ice so that they can look at them later as bookmarkers when they get more data from the participants. I asked the woman for a drink of water when she was through. Just a few ounces for that was a lot of blood to lose without getting some kind of liquid replacement for it.

I had filled out a long 20 page survey that another researcher was looking at while I was getting all of this testing done. One of the questions was how much moderate exercise (housework for example) do you do a day. I put down 8 hours and the woman wanted to know if that was per week or per day.

“Per day,” I told her. “I would have to be near dead to only do 8 hours a week.”

“Oh, I do sit down,” I went on. “I eat and do paper work for some of the other hours of the day and I am sitting down then.

She laughed and said, “I surmised that from your survey. Here, let me validate your parking ticket and warn you that you only have 10 minutes from when I validate it to make it out of the parking lot.”

Guess they don’t want anyone hanging around drinking coffee and relaxing before they head out for home. And speaking of drinking coffee, one of the questions was, How much caffeine have you had in the last 74 hours? I had to confess to one coke in that time – even if that is out of the ordinary for me. Wish I could have appeared perfect to her, but that coke I couldn't resist got in my way.

By 9 am that part of my day was done – and I have gone on to enjoy myself in other ways – true to form, massive cleaning in the house; then my internet going down and the roomers coming to help me get back onto the gateway. The guys who went to Cuba brought back 25 cigars and the Iranian was checking with me as to whether I can smoke, since he had just come inside the house with a half smoked cigar in his hand. I said no smoking –not even cigars for Mormons. The smoking must have been on my mind for one of the related questions the researcher asked me was ... do you chew betel nuts. I told her no, and I asked her if she knew the song from South Pacific that has the word betel nuts in it. She said no, so I sang a few lines from “Bloody Mary is the girl I love” for her. Just enough that I could get in the line “She was always chewin' betel nuts”. When I got home I googled betel nuts, so I would have a little more information for the next time I am asked if I chew betel nuts. I wanted to ask the woman back ... watever for? Why would I chew them?

And now I know.

I turned to David and said, “No drinking alcohol for Mormons either”. He laughed.

The Brazilian guy who drinks coffee added, “No simple South American pleasures like coffee for Mormons, either.”

“Bad for Mormons all of the way around,” I agreed. Still fighting to maintain something interesting about my faith I ended with, “Most of the simple pleasures of life denied us. Only one thing left. Multiple wives and that has to be in the eternities ... not here. Sucks to be Mormon all the way around.”

They laughed and offer me a puff on the cigar, but I have just participated in The Tomorrow Project about good health and turn them down.


Arta