CAKED UP TO A FARE-THEE-WELL

The only exercise the thinking man gets is wandering around with his pipe because his apartment mate (a Cantonese American woman currently reading mystery novels in her bedroom) is a non-smoker, throwing stones at idols and tourists, and flame-throwering frat boys and rightwing trolls. Well, everything beyond the walk with a bowl of flue-cured leaf is, unfortunately, rare. Consequently after a few decades his veins and arteries might not be sufficiently well-functioning in his lower extremeties, and he might need angiograms of mentioned lower extremities to see how bad it is.

Which is what today is all about. In horrible weather such as we're presently having (roughly seventy degrees and scant breeze), the legs feel like right bitches. So I'm not looking forward to hiking over to the wastelands to my cardiologists office for this later. I shall bellyache.

My apartment mate called in sick today, went on the internet to see if constant pain was exhausting (turns out that it is), and went back to bed. Her pain is computer keypad and mouse related -- though I think that there is also a psychological element there because her job is rather awful and she works with younger people who are seemingly idiots -- whereas mine is the lower extremities. I am used to awful circumstances and near-idiots.

Piece of cake.

A doctor or medical student will look at the illustration above and go "I know what that is!", after which they might think of high-sugar content desserts and pastries, and retire to the hospital cafetaria for a cup of coffee and a smoke.

Naturally, instead of thinking about a cross-section of a vein or artery as examined under a microscope, I am thinking about strawberry shortcake, as one would, because the human body is a thing of beauty.

Endothelium (a single squamous cell layer) as the innermost part, surrounded by an elastic layer, enclosed entirely by the tunica media (sort of permeable and muscle-like) and ultimately the tunica externa.

Biscuit dough, fresh strawberries, whipped cream.
Great with chilled coffee on a hot day.


Sadly, one can no longer smoke in the cafetaria, because the vegan wheatgerm freaks have taken over (it's a miracle that they still have anything with gluten), but in the good old days when I would have kicked the bucket because heart attacks were inevitable, surgeons had favourite pipe shapes because having a puff while writing up reports for the file after surgery was a given. It all depended on how it hung in the mouth, and how the surgeon in question clenched his or her smoking equipment. We live in sad times.



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