You know that feeling of exhilaration and pure, unbridled joy when you have an annual health check coming up?

Yeah, me neither.

This year was no different.  Three days before the check up I went on my “yikes, what will the doctor think!” diet. Somehow that didn’t quite work. I was five pounds heavier than last year – despite choosing feather-light clothes and omitting a ponytail (just in case bunched up hair in a rubber band caused the scales to tip further). Yes, my mind works in convoluted and unreasonable ways when it comes to weight loss. My current regimen is smoothies and green juice balanced with fistfuls of dark  chocolate and salted caramel gelato (myTrader Joe‘s staples that absolutely must get on your grocery list.)

But coming back to the appointment,  there’s the part where you have to stop eating the night before.  Fasting for a full 12 hours is distinctly un-American, if you ask me! What do I do when I watch TV at night? Just WATCH? What a waste of multitasking potential. Could life possibly become more pointless?

And don’t get me started on the crackly paper that you have to lie down on. Such a secure shield against germs and contaminants – if you have the girth of a ruler that is.  If you’re a normal person with, shall we say, some spillage, the crackly paper is abundantly insufficient. Really, why be pretentious with all this hygiene vygiene? Just lay a strip of toilet paper down instead. At least that might be two-ply.

So anyways, last week I had to contend with all of this.

And him.

A male nurse. I know I shouldn’t discriminate based on gender and typecast people and all of that jazz. I’m pretty sure he was a nice guy.

But, in my defense, he looked like he belonged on a ship. Like an eye-patch wearing, “aarrggh”-yelling  kind of ship. To make matters worse, he confessed to not having eaten breakfast either. So the pirate role was complete with a lot of gurgling and bellowing emanating from Captain Scrub’s insides.

He asked me if I’d been to West Africa recently.

No, I said, for the second time in 20 minutes. I wasn’t so sure about him, though. He, perchance, followed a yellowed map in search of buried treasure in West Africa.

After the doctor’s visit and the requisite indignities it afforded, I was turned over to the Phlebotomist. She asked me – if you’re counting, for the third time – if I’d happened to make a trip to West Africa recently.

But I forgave her simply because she increased my vocab by one word. Phlebotomist. So CSI sounding. Enough to distract me from blood draws, pirate nurses and unnecessary repetition.