Doctor's orders

I was lounging near the freezers in Lidl (a French one) when the phone rang.  “Hello, Dennis, this is Doctor *******, are you away on holiday?”  This is not quite the opening I was expecting, because I had fiendishly noted that the incoming call was from the surgery. “Oh,” I said, “yes, you mean you heard a foreign ring tone.”  “Where are you,” he said, “somewhere nice?”  I am not sure where lounging by the freezers in a small-town French Lidl comes on the nice-scale, but I was wondering how long we were going to spend on the courtesies, before we got to the X-ray results. “France,” I said, “south-west.”  “I bet the weather is better than it is here,” he said.  I looked out the supermarket window, picturing X-rays that were good and X-rays that were bad and X-rays that were somewhere in between.  “We have your X-rays back,” he said. “Oh,” I said, trying for a tone of mild interest.  “Moderate osteoarthritis in both hips.”  Boy, you know how to hit a fella right in the eye. All those niceties about the weather didn’t last very long, did they?   Then the moderate word began to sink in. “Moderate” I wondered, is that good or is it bad?  It’s clearly not bad enough to be called severe, but how un-severe is it?  I decided that moderate should mean quite good.  “The good news is,” he said (clearly the moderate bit wasn’t good news after all), “the good news is that there is some good space in the capsule.”  Capsule? Space? What the hell is happening?  Is he sending me off to the moon for treatment in an almost full spaceship? “Oh,” I said again, trying to sound as non-committal as possible.  Now, at this point, most people would have asked for the medical meaning of “some good space in the capsule”, but I was still reeling from the word “moderate” that now seemed not to be not as moderate as I thought it was and the bizarre prospect of donning a spacesuit to go get some treatment. (I look up “moderate” later, when I get home, and it turns out that it means “moderate”, stage 3 on a 4 stage scale which, to me, is on the badder side of moderation). “We don’t treat these things the way we used to treat them,” he went on.  “Oh”, I said. (notice a pattern emerging here?).  Afraid to ask how we used to treat “osteoarthritis of both hips, moderate”, I narrowly avoided saying “Oh,” again and mumbled, “That’s good then, is it?”  “So, it’s not bone on bone (aha! the meaning of good space in the capsule begins to dawn).  “Just take over-the-counter pain relief,” he said, mentioning a maximum number of tablets a day that had my liver quivering in fear.  “And keep moving, keep up the ten thousand steps a day.”  Silly man, I think I might have hit that target once since I got my fitness device last Christmas.  “Enjoy your holiday,” he said.  “And you have a good day, thank you for calling.”  And that was it.  I have been waiting weeks for that call and that was it; moderate news delivered over the phone, near the freezers in Lidl.  I looked at the ice cream in the freezer.  Hmmm, I thought, eschewing moderation, and selected the pack marked XXL.