Success in scheduling, and in running further

Knowing the right person can mean securing a reservation at a popular restaurant, or getting good seats at a sporting event or finding a job, but for me at this time of my life it often means reaching the person who can get me a doctor's appointment.

This is especially important when I am trying to make multiple appointments on one day or on back-to-back days. And it is where I am especially grateful for friends like the office manager and scheduler extraordinaire at Brigham Dermatology, who gets me seen at short notice when something suspicious pops up on my skin.

 One day when I had time between appointments, I went to my favorite store in Newton Highlands and bought her a smooth stone with the word "calm" cut into it, telling her I hoped it would help her with patients like me.

A week from Monday, when I have an 11 a.m. checkup at Dana-Farber, she got me an appointment at 8 a.m. so Dr. Lin can look at what seems to me like a new squamous cell cancer on my hand.

Not wanting to leave Boston with only two appointments, I called the person who I know at the Kraft Blood Donor Center to set up an appointment for a therapeutic phlebotomy. That is the procedure in which a bag of blood is removed to continue chipping away at that high ferritin.

I will be tired but pleased that I have fit the pieces of that little jigsaw puzzle together.

On another topic, I am having good results with running a little further, a smidgen at a time. I had a talk with myself, which goes like this, "If you go a little further and then stop sooner just because you are a little tired, you are not increasing your distance at all." Being really tired is a sign to stop, but being a little tired simply means your body is dropping down a gear.

I thought I was going just about three miles or a little further, but I checked it on google maps and saw that my roundtrip has actually been almost four miles. If I just keep going up the hill to McCray's Farm, that will make it five.

Of course the danger is that if I do that, I might have to stop for an ice cream cone.