Stress Test

This morning at 4.30 Badger and I emerged from our beds blinking, bleary eyed and wondering why the hell our light had been turned on. We'd been woken in the middle of the night because my female staff had to catch an early train to Brisbane to attend a seminar. Something to do with the health field she works in. I expect it concerned how to mow the grass and keep the field free of weeds. In any case, my male staff shoved our breakfast under our sleepy noses. I told him I'd only just had dinner, but he took no notice, so I hoed in to my breakfast anyway.

Australian trains are interesting because the majority of passengers would have been patients in mental institutions twenty years ago before they closed the institutions down and turfed the patients out on to the streets to eke out livings as taxi drivers and travel agents. Of course the more socially inept and dangerous patients were not simply freed. They were housed together in a large house on a hill by a pretty lake in Canberra called Parliament House. These people don't travel on trains. If they have to go anywhere they are loaded onto planes where they are confined to special compartment at the pointy end and force fed French champagne and fois gras. At least in this way the general travelling public are spared their crazed rantings.

The last time my female staff travelled by train she was handed a page from a "Watchtower" magazine by a nutcase. (See my earlier blog that dealt with this episode.)
http://pemery.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/seven-deadly-sins.html
It is now law in Australia that each train must have at least one nutcase on board. Sometimes it's the driver, but more often than not it's a member of the public who is designated to keep the other passengers entertained with either loud religious ravings or simple threats of violence to innocent people, sometimes both.

Yesterday I took my male staff for his stress test. That was lots of fun. I don't know why he needed a stress test though. What's he got to be stressed about? The surgery had a huge empty waiting room so I could run around the floor depositing little piles of bush chocolate everywhere with no fear of getting myself trodden on.
After a while we were summoned to enter a little room containing what looked like an executioners electric chair. My male staff was told to sit, and I sat on his lap, waiting for the power to be turned on and my lovely fur turned to charcoal. However, all that happened was a Mike Tyson lookalike nurse came and stuck a large needle in my male staff's arm and told him she was injecting him with a radioactive isotope. When my male staff regained consciousness with the help of enthusiastic face slapping by the Mike Tyson lookalike and some slightly less enthusiastic groin biting by yours truly, we were ushered into another room containing a vicious looking exercise bike. My male staff had his chest shaved - Yeeuch! Makes me shudder. He was then wired up with several electrodes which were stuck to his now smooth chest and made to pedal the exercise bike like mad for fifteen minutes.

The doctor said he had to do this so that his now radioactive blood would pump through his heart and show up any defects, but actually I think that there had been a power cut and my male staff's frantic pedalling was the clinic's back up generator. The fact that the lights dimmed slightly every time my male staff slowed down a bit increased my suspicions. Anyway, once the power had been restored they took my male staff off to another room and shoved him into a big machine that hummed and beeped and circled his freshly shaved body. This took a further fifteen minutes, so I took the opportunity to wander about chewing cables and peeing on the floor where the Mike Tyson lookalike might slip on it when she came back to haul my male staff out of the machine. Sadly she stayed on her feet. Just as well really I suppose because if she'd slipped and landed on me I would have looked like one of those horrid tiger trophy rugs with the head still attached.

On Monday I have to go back to the clinic with my male staff to get the results. I like all this medical stuff. It's very educational. I'm learning all sorts of medical terms and their meaning. here's a few that I've picked up.

Heartbeat - A British TV show starring Nick Berry.
Bowel - The letter A, E, I, O and U.
Vein - What most doctors are.
Fecal - A sugary substance with which desserts are made. ie. - Sticky Fecal Pudding.
Dilate - To live longer than your average life expectancy.
Liver - A patient who survives surgery.
Angina - Don't be so disgusting.
Stable - Dead.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
The medical term for my feet is Badger's feet.