I got my blood taken this morning for my upcoming physical that comes up in a week or so from now.

Amisha, the blood technican, did the dirty work. I got a little nervous. Not about the needles. They don’t bother me. And she was good. She found a vein after a few taps on the forearm.

My concern was slightly irrational and I probably shouldn't have brought it up with this blood technician because she's not a doctor, but I did anyway.

I wanted to learn something about my mom, who died of a brain aneurysm from a blood clot when she was actually younger than I am right now. And I have been kind of irrationally checking myself lately to see if I have any blood clots. As if I’d know.

I've looked on the Web for this, but I ended up at a lot of forums with non-doctors offering up there anecdotes about what they said their blood clots felt like.

So I asked Amisha,

“What does a blood clot feel like?”

“What do you mean, 'what does a blood clot feel like?' You mean you? Do you think you feel like you have a blood clot somewhere?”

“No. It’s just that I know someone who died from a blood clot and they never complained about anything, so I’m just checking to see if you've come across it. If you know anything about it from the people you work on every day.”

“Let me finish this.”

I wanted to keep talking about what blood clots feel like but she wanted to get down to business. Here come the blood. It’s amazing how many vials they go through. One after another. After another. After another.

Then she started packing things up and handed me the container for urine.

"You'll fill it up, bring it back and put it here in the basket."

“Okay," I said as she fixed me up with a bandaid. "I'll just bug you one more time on this, on if you know what a blood clot feels like.”

“Well, I’m not a doctor. But people do ask me this now and then. From what I’ve learned from the doctors around here, if you had one, you’d feel it in your leg. You’d have swelling, your skin would get red and you’d get leg cramps at night. That’s all I know. I should probably get going.”

Me too, as it turned out. Into the container.

Not sure I learned all that much

Now I've learned at least something about what a blood clot feels like. It's a leg thing apparently. If that's the case I know I don’t have to worry right now, at least.

So if it's a leg thing, why did my mom die of a head thing? Ah, the vagaries of life and death. Not everything is hereditary. And just because she died young from a brain aneurism doesn't mean I will.

Most likely I'll die of a massive cornonary because I'm morbidly obese. But

I asked Amisha to take this shot before we got started. The chair had one of those slide-up fold-over mini-tables. I’m so fat that the fold-over part wouldn’t fold past my own fat folds, and I wanted to capture that. Another one of those embarassing things that make you dread going out in public when you're mammoth.

If I can't fit into a chair...

Do you ever look a photo of yourself in the full glory of your gargantuanness and think to yourself, ‘Man, am I going to fit in a coffin if I bite the biscuit before I get thin?’