strange days have found us indeed, as we move from station to station, doctor to doctor, it takes me a while to find the one i want, i never use them unless i need a sick certificate and that's very rare. 
but the last few months i have been plagued by ill health, and my main man in the erina medical centre is not doing it for me. he's not really in tune with me at all. in fact he's outta whack with me utterly and completely. i gave him a few years and then recently move to the guy i take my clients to see, there's two of them and they are both very good. they both laugh a lot and keep things humorous between us, i can talk to them about anything, art, travelling to weird places, books and my work, they get what i do but they are old school doctors and come at everything with humour. anyway they fix me up with some x rays and ultra scans eventually discovering i have two torn ligaments but they do not address an underlaying issue i have. intuition has told me there's something else wrong, it's deeper, at the veins. i'm committed to my doctors but i know they just are not understanding me. 
that same week i notice a strange brown blemish upon my arm. being bombarded by awful cancer advertisements i freak and go to the sun doctors where i meet a very nice fijian / indian man who takes a biopsy. we make small talk and then he asks me about my legs.
he inspects them and tells me immediately what's going on and the implications, suggests i get a second opinion. i ask him if he knows a good doctor. he suggests a guy.
i'm in the surgery  it's filled with ice addicts and some derelicts from the local area. ice is big here on the central coast, it's nasty and i generally avoid it and it's users but here in the waiting room it's pouring out onto the floor. that energy is just not cool despite it's name. 
i'm in there for a long time, waiting, waiting waiting. i go through and meet a nurse whom asks me some weird questions, she's really nice, talkative. she's the frontline, a cool easy way, bright and someone i respect immediately.
she sends me through to see the doctor who informs me there's a councillor upstairs, a social worker and some other practitioner whom i can't recall. 
i smile to myself for some reason.
then the dr listens to me, i am just relaying the information the sun doctor gave me about my veins, i don't know what it all means and the doctor immediately conducts his own inspection and within seconds is making these referrals for tests.
the very next day i'm getting jabbed for blood, x rays shot full off iodine and shot through the doughnut machine. 
breathe the nurses say, breathe out. i take it all seriously, i'm outta my depth, how did i get in a doughnut machine, again!
however i'm kinda liking the idea of laying down and having a snooze. 
my eyes close. my body relaxes momentarily  as the nurses race into the room, pull the needles out from me and unbind my toes. (put there to keep my feet together for the scan)
'it's broken, the machine just broke.'
i open my eyes thinking off homer simpson and dougnuts and see the two girls fussing around. they say they have to do the whole test again.
i'm kinda chilled out, even as they jab me again and fill my body with iodine. the scan operates successfully this time. 
later they say i was a really good patient and i surmise they must get a lot of people freaking out but to be perfectly honest i'm very comfortable with doughnut machine. every few years i go for a ride in one.
it was a strange day, almost like going to the circus, except the rides are all designed by aliens who are probing for something that makes us humans human, only with me the doughnut machine met another alien and froze.