A Renovator’s Delight

After yesterday’s visit to the doctor, I have decided that I don’t need treatment. I need a restoration team.

Not one person with a stethoscope and a prescription pad. I need several tradespeople, scaffolding and one of those television programs where everyone walks around shaking their heads and saying, “This is much worse than we expected.”

I have been dieting. Not merely thinking about dieting while eating toast, either. I have actually been making an effort. I'm fasting for 17 hours a day, sometimes more. I have also started going to a strength class once a week, where I lift things, stretch things and discover muscles I had previously assumed were decorative.

Surely my body should be grateful.

It should be responding with renewed energy, improved strength and perhaps a slightly more streamlined silhouette. Instead, it continues to feel blah.

Not dramatically ill. Not interestingly unwell. Just blah—the physical equivalent of a grey cardigan.

This seems deeply unfair. If I am going to deny myself food I actually enjoy and voluntarily attend a class where someone tells me to do another ten repetitions, I expect results. I don’t necessarily need to emerge looking thirty years younger, but I would like to get out of a chair without making the sound of an elderly wardrobe being dragged across a floor.

Instead, I have liver scans to arrange, B12 injections to endure, Vitamin D to swallow and enough green mucus to supply a small special-effects department.

Apparently, my body is one of those old houses that looked perfectly charming from the street but once purchased, reveals rising damp, faulty plumbing and wiring installed by somebody’s uncle in 1974.

Every time the doctor investigates one thing, another problem appears behind it.

“While we’re here, we’ve noticed the foundations are shifting.”

Wonderful.

I am trying, though. I’m dieting. I’m strengthening. I’m taking the vitamins. I’m turning up to appointments. I am doing all the sensible things people tell you to do when you reach the age where your body starts issuing maintenance notices.

Perhaps the benefits are quietly happening somewhere I can’t see them. Maybe beneath the general blahness, my muscles are improving, my health is recovering and my body is slowly remembering how to behave.

Or perhaps I’m simply holding the whole structure together long enough for the next inspection.

Either way, I no longer want a makeover.

I want a full renovation, a generous budget and somebody else to manage the project.