I just got back from my immigration physical, and my hand hurts. The doctor, a sweet old guy, had a hard time finding a vein in my arm so he had to draw blood from my hand. And he wasn’t entirely steady, and now I have a great big lump on the back of my right hand which means that it huuuuurrrrts to hold a pen.
The bit I was dreading, of course, was being weighed. I knew I couldn’t avoid it, given the nature of the appointment (when I’m being treated, I refuse to be weighed on the grounds that, unless you’re putting me under general anasthesia and you need to know, you don’t need to know. And neither do I).
I know I’m fat. Everyone can see that. I know what size of clothing I have to wear, and how much my ass spills over the subway seat. What I don’t need is to quantify the amount in pounds. I don’t want to get obsessive if my clothes fit fine. I don’t want to provide my internal judge and jury any evidence to punish me with. I don’t want to know how much ground I’ve lost in the last several years, after having had a triple-digit weight loss beginning in college.
So I closed my eyes and/or looked away while the doctor was weighing me, and was grateful that he didn’t announce the amount in pounds (although he didn’t zero out the scale, so I had to look at it while sitting on the table so I had an idea anyhow). The kilos he converted it to don’t mean anything to me conceptually; I have no sense of how much that is.
I was also grateful he didn’t judge, didn’t lecture. Perhaps it was just because he wasn’t treating me so it was no skin off his nose what I weighed. But it depresses me no end that I can consider that a small mercy.