Healthy


I went to a “free” health fair thing this weekend. If they really wanted it to be free they wouldn’t have insisted I pay $5 to park. I went to another Health Fair several months ago that didn’t require me to pay for parking or stand in lines, but I wanted to hit this one so I wouldn’t have to claim that Wal-Mart was my primary care physician. I’m a lot happier with the idea that Kroger and my NBC affiliate have that job.

Wal-Mart happily took my blood and tested my sugar levels and fooled around with my triglycerides,but they didn’t give me free mini boxes of raisons or helpful magnets of emergency numbers and I didn’t score any free energy bars. It’s important to get free things. The Wal-Mart thing didn’t place any restrictions on who they do screenings on, if you were alive, they would screen you. The Glaxo/Kroger/NBC sponsored one I went to this weekend just looked at me and decided that I didn’t need my glucose tested and suggested I should not even ask about getting my triglycerides done. I didn’t have a sign around my neck saying “Hi! I’m diabetic” or “Hi! I have heart disease!” and since they could look at me and see I didn’t have small pox and I wasn’t throwing up on their shoes, I was too healthy to need most of their freebie health screenings. They did take my blood pressure, twice and weighed me and they did let me do a lung capacity test which proved that it is harder then I thought to make yourself turn blue and pass out.

While I was standing in the line to breathe into the tube a woman came along and started to give the guy standing in front of me a questionnaire. I was totally into trying to fill out all four pages of pertinent medical information that Glaxo wanted me to fill out “Do you have asthma? Answer No, Glaxo – Go Away before they would let me blow into the tube. So all I caught of his Q&A was the question “would he ask his primary care physician for a specific drug by name, if his doctor told him he had a condition that the name drug would treat”, the guy said he probably would not or would, it would depend. This made the woman sad. I think she wanted him to say he would ask his doctor for a med by name so that the huge amount of money Glaxo spends on advertising would not be totally wasted. She finished the interview by giving him a crisp new $2 bill. He carried on like she gave him a crisp new Faberge Egg. If she had asked me, which she did not, I would have said I ask for the generic equivalent whenever possible. But she didn’t because women are more likely to go to their doctors and ask questions and are allegedly more in touch with their health then men are, and probably do ask for drugs by name because in Glaxos corporate mind, we're pathetic attention seeking healthcare whores and whatever.

Because one of the major sponsors of the weekend’s health fest was Glaxo, we got free Glaxo drugs. They weren’t fun free drugs though, I mean, who gets excited about free fiber pills? but now if I have any pressing heart burn issues or I need some Beano and if gawd forbid I run out of calcium - I can take care of it, If they really wanted to buy me with free drugs they would have handed out free anti-anxiety meds, that would have made the many lines I stood in and the lines I could not stand in because they had all ready closed, less stressful. What if I needed to know if I had brain tumor and that tumor was like, days from killing me? and their little eye exam thing could have found it but didn’t get the chance because they wanted to close down and go home early, I know Glaxo makes something that could cheer me up.

All the various worker bees in the space seemed to like the men better. The place was full of women but I didn’t see any if the women getting accosted and asked for their opinions on pharmaceuticals, its not like they work for us anyway but you would think Big Pharma would at least ask which of the drugs engineered for male chemistry we like the best to not work as advertised on our chemistry. It would have been nice; instead they gave us lid openers and free energy bars. I felt the love.