Does your stomach hurt? Do feel like you want to hurl? Does your head ache? Does the thought of food drive you into a single minded, Pavlovian response?

Suddenly my phone rings. No, that’s not exactly true. My phone started to vibrate in my pocket. Exercising good mobile phone etiquette, I stepped outside to see who was so important they felt it necessary to interrupt the death watch. It was Cheryl. She wanted to know when I would be home, when she should cook dinner, and what I would like to eat.

Now all those questions about hunger are starting to make sense, eh?

I’m sitting here starving and my wife calls to torture me. Knowing that I’ve got thirty minutes to sit here, I’m forced against my will to think about food. This is what I’m thinking as she asks me these questions. What can I say, hunger makes me a little irrational. Like any rational adult, she interprets my lack of verbal response as indecision and starts to run through the menu. “Would you like turkey, meat-loaf, macaroni with red sauce, or chicken?” In my current state she could have offered me reheated macaroni and I would have gladly accepted. I haven’t quite finished my thought, but my thirty minutes are up. It’s time to go eat!

Thirty minutes is a long time to wait in a doctor’s office lobby. The only thing that makes it tolerable is I know when it will end. It will be exactly a half an hour. When my time is up I get to walk up to the window, assure the nurse that my air passages have not closed up, and leave. A half an hour in the lobby waiting for the nurse to call you back to the exam room, not knowing when you will be called, is much worse.

Like I need to tell you that. My overdeveloped ability to state the obvious has kicked in again. I’m getting a tremendous sense of deja vu. Have I written this before? Have I written this before?