Happy Belly Appreciation Day! (+18 Belly Images) (Patreon)

... is what I would be saying if there were, in fact, a Belly Appreciation Day on the calendar. But there isn't. The closest is "Tummy Appreciation Day" but that makes me think of housewives ironically showing off their washboard abs on Twitter.

On Friday I had a doctor's appointment - it's just a finger stick checkup to make sure levels of things are where they should be. It's from this place operating on the 9th floor of one of the towers of a nearby hospital. I'd been putting it off for as long as I could because due to the pandemic the hospital has closed the entrances to the tower and requires everyone to go through a nurse checkpoint at the main entrance.

Given the sizes of the buildings I had a feeling it would be quite a walk to get to the tower, and I was right - after getting through the nurse gauntlet where they checked my temperature and gave me some hand sanitizer, I had to cross a vast lobby and a dozen cashier kiosks. I barely made it to the back of the lobby where the large connecting corridor between the buildings was - and despair! It was very long, and there were no benches or anything to sit on along the way. 

I couldn't even see the elevator lobby of the tower at the other end - as I understand it, the corridor ends and then you go down another hallway and then walk more to get to the center of the tower where the elevators are. Then, it's up to the ninth floor... and back down again. And back.

If I had done this six weeks ago I might have been able to do it (I'm not convinced, it was hard enough getting to the 9th floor when the closest entrance was open), but since I moved and the lockdown orders I haven't seen my trainer and haven't done hardly aerobic exercising on my own. As such, what little conditioning I had gained over the past half year seems to have evaporated.

Panting and sweating, I sat down on the last bench before the hallway, crushing a polite paper sign that read "In the interests of social distancing, please do not sit on this bench." The mask I was wearing was causing my glasses to fog up and it certainly wasn't making it any easier to breathe. I thought about trying to make it down the hallway and just couldn't bring myself to do it. I was simply too fat and out of shape!

I stayed on the bench and tried to defog my glasses without touching my face. People were walking by and gave me curious looks (some weren't wearing masks!)  Finally I called and left a message for the doctor's office that I wasn't going to be able to make the appointment because of the new triathlon required to reach the 9th floor.

Once I had recovered enough to leave, I slowly lumbered across the huge lobby and back out to my ride. I got a call from the doctor's office later and they said they'd try to make other arrangements to get the finger stick.

Pandemic-ing while hugely fat and out of shape!