Off the Mark by Mark Parisi for March 04, 2025

If you like that joke, there armor where that came from.

You can leave your hat on.

that’s gonna be trouble when you go to XRAY

“suit yourself”

Just how much DID a suit of armor weigh?

“Heavy.” Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull? (Dr. Brown in Back to the Future)

I had a friend who always wore very large earings and she would always take them off when she was weighed at the doctor’s office!

Eh but why no removes it?

If only.

he weighs more at knight

And I worry about the extra weight of my shoes.

Steel yourself for the results.

Which reminds me.

Knights are going forward soon.

That’s how I feel. Jeans and tee shirts have gotten heavier and heavier over the years.

Methinks thou art 20 pund overweight.

this is the forthknight she’s weighed in the past two weeks

One of the main reasons I hate going to the doctor’s office started in grade school when we would have those health physicals. The class would line up at the gym door in alphabetical order and the first thing we would come to were the scales. A parent volunteer would stand there and take our height and weight and yell it across the gym to the volunteer recording the results at the other end. I was always 2nd in line behind “skinny” Jenny A. I was 2nd tallest in the class [95% percentile]. Jenny came up to my chin. And I was “sturdily built.” So everyone heard Jenny’s stats and then mine. We were both reminded for days and weeks.

Going to the doctor’s office is a flashback to those days: Walk through the door. Take off shoes. Stand and be measured. Nurse humming as she writes down your height. Then on to the scale, nurse still humming, moving the bars back and forth. They don’t shout the figures - they don’t even bother to tell you what they are writing down. So it’s not broadcast for the world but it is kept from you - as if what is written down can’t possibly mean anything to you. You are just an animal, with no vested interest in the results. It’s your body and it’s important for you to know what is changing and how. You shouldn’t have to ask for the information — same with blood pressure, etc.

I always ask because I like to know facts and a doctor’s “it’s fine,” isn’t very satisfactory. And I have discovered that not all ‘medical’ scales are the same. I have my “annual Medicare checkups” in a row - general practitioner, followed by blood tests, followed by a specialist or two a week later- and discovered that there was a 12-pound difference between the scales. I have also discovered that sometimes the height/weight written down isn’t the same as what I saw — nurses, like anyone else, can accidentally reverse numbers and a 223 becomes a 232, leading to a weighty lecture from the doctor if not corrected.

Well, take off your shoes first.

“OK, that completes your exam. Turns out you’re worth more as scrap metal.”