Free potatoes, and free health checks

A free potato

On Wednesday a friend who after five years of living elsewhere recently moved back to Sapporo called me and said that she wanted to eat Indian food and would pay for my food if I tagged along. I said I could pay for her food instead, since she probably makes less than half the money I do and she actually uses money (I have no free time so I have no time to use my money).

Nan bread filled with cheese

We ended up at her favorite Indian place, which is quite nice. She ended up paying. At this place, they had some special thing going on, so you could get one boiled potato for free if you wanted one. Since it was free, we accepted and got a potato each. It was a nice potato.

Chicken

The next day in the early morning I had my yearly health check administered by the university. These are usually interesting, though not so much interesting in the ways of the health check results. Last year, before even saying "hello", the doctor told me: "You are fat, but probably not dangerously so"...

Lamb, eggs, and green peas

This year, I was told: "Oh, you are even fatter than last year!" But since they only check this by visual inspection (with my clothes on) and by measuring body weight, I figure it may also be the case that I just added many kilos of muscle mass! Right... that seems very likely.

Two years ago, the only warnings and complaints they had all came from the blood analysis they did. Last year, they did not take any blood, so I could not see if I had improved on those points or if I was even worse off than before. Apart from the "you are fat" complaints, there was nothing they pointed out in the results. This year too, they did not take any blood. Our secretary, who goes to the same health checkup next week, is scheduled to have blood analyses, though....

This year, I have noticed that my eyesight is getting worse. People's faces are blurry at distances where I think I could still see their faces quite clearly a few years ago. Also, last year I had the whole "sudden deafness" thing, and not all of my hearing on the left ear came back. So I was interested in the hearing test and the eyesight test.

The hearing test is usually not that thorough, but this year it was much less thorough than the years before. This year they gave me a set of earphones and said:
"Do you hear a sound?"
"Yes"
"Left ear or right ear?"
"Left"
"And now?"
"Right ear"
"OK then, you are finished here."

The eye test was interesting in a different way. I have somewhat bad eyesight on my left eye and quite bad sight on my right eye. Last year they told me I had 1.5 on my left eye and 0.5 on the right, though I think the right one may be a bit optimistic. This year I was interested to see how bad the good eye had gotten, and the bad one also seems to have turned even worse. After the test, the woman said that the left eye was still 1.5, while the right eye had now improved to 0.9... Which I find hard to believe, seeing as how I see much less now than I did last year.

All in all, the health check-up is quite fun, but perhaps not that useful as a health check-up.