Some you go through everyday in your life without knowing.
Then comes the day you get the results.
By William Wetherall
"You've got a couple of blockages that bear watching." Or "It's shot up to 23."
Someone with a Japanese dream opened the Nepal/Indian restaurant called Kumari in the shell of a cast-off gas station a ten-minute walk from Toride station in Ibaraki prefecture. That's not as far from Tokyo as it sounds, but it's a long ways from India and Nepal.
The place is open only for lunch and dinner. Sorry, no breakfasts, which is too bad, because it was a quarter to eight in the morning and drizzling when I walked by the place on my way to a local hospital. It's a 30-minute walk, but to wait for the next bus would have made me late for the blood draw. Besides, my heart needs the exercise.
There's parking for six vehicles, a variety of dishes, a drink-all-you want deal, it's okay to bring kids, and a variety of credit cards are accepted. The meat, boiled in spices, is soft enough to cut with a fork, you can have your curry as hot as you like, and the Nepalese and Japanese staff are cheerful.
In all these respects it is a fairly ordinary restaurant, with different lunch and evening menus. Size wise too it's par for the course.
The Toride operation -- there's a twin in Asagaya in Suginami ward in Tokyo, which is on the other side of the world from Toride -- seats 26. So if your party has 27, someone will have to stand. The person who is standing can sit when someone goes to the toilet. And the person who goes to the toilet can stand until the next person has to pee.
But no will stand for long if everyone's chugging mugs of authentic Himalayan Gorkha Beer. The standing time will be even shorter if the party consists mostly of people with prostatic hyperplasia like me.
That's "enlarged prostate" in English. I was on my way to the hospital for a semiannual PSA test to determine if the proliferation of cells that are causing my prostate to swell is benign or malignant. That's "prostate-specific antigen" in doctorspeak.
Three years ago, my PSA shot up to 23 from around 2. Doctors were puzzled. I was shocked -- until two weeks later it was down to 10. And six months later it was 7. In another half year it was around 5, and for the next two years it hovered between 4 and 7. What would it be today?
Two hours later I was in the doctor's office. Fine, thanks, and you? Had anything changed in my general condition? He pursued that line of questioning for a few minutes. Any new medications? Now that you mention it, two months ago my heart doctor put me on XYZ instead of ABC. The urologist made note, but nothing else, of this fact.
"Well," he said, "your PSA has dropped again. It's now between 2 and 3. And there's nothing to suggest that it might be a false low."
We talked about the implications and he said I could go a year without another test. That was fine with me.
I took the bus back, as by then the sun was out and high, and the temperature and humidity were soaring. I gazed at the Kumari as the bus lumbered by it in the late-morning traffic.
I have it on the authority of several web sources that a kumari is a prepubescent girl who embodies the spirit of a certain goddess. Such girls are worshiped in a number of South Asian countries, but particularly in Nepal, by royalty and commoners alike.
Apparently the word means "virgin" in Sanskrit, Nepali, and a few other languages in the region. The goddess vacates the girl's body at the onset of menstruation. My anthropological muse tells me such celebrations of a girl's divine possession are communal rites of passage. Who am I to disagree?
I was circumcised a couple of days after my birth. It was something done, then, to practically all boys born in practically all American hospitals. I probably tripped over the C word in Bible school, but was well into my teens before I knew what it meant.
Someday I may have to submit to a prostate biopsy. It's been a few years since I read Bruno Bettelheim's "Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male". Perhaps it's time to give it another look.
16 August 2009
