We had left much too early. My husband is always a stickler for that; being on time or preferably, early for an appointment. So we were up far earlier than usual, began our early morning routine earlier than usual, left the house to compete with Monday-morning traffic, only to discover the rush hour wasn't a crowded rush of vehicles monopolizing the highways, after all. We'd forgotten Spring Break.

The roads were relatively bare, the weather conditions were good, and we moved swiftly along to our destination. By the time we arrived, we were three-quarters of an hour too early.

When he finally moved briskly into the examination room, the cardiologist looked wan and worn. In part understandable; he, like the rest of us has lost an hour out of his normal day, since two nights before the clock had officially skipped forward an hour. If he looks like this at 9:30 a.m., I wondered, what'll he be like by afternoon? I remarked to him that he looked frazzled. He smiled warmly, said he was trying to make up for lost time, all the while knowing it would be impossible. He was already significantly behind schedule. Some days, he said, sighing, were just like that. And this was one of those days.

The woman who had giggled loudly, nervously and released a torrent of confusing words at me as I had earlier settled into the waiting room, taking off my coat, pulling my book out of my bag, I soon surmised, was the source of his problem. Such meetings and subsequent examinations, he explained, took a lot out of him. It was difficult to extract from most patients, using an interpreter, what their symptoms were, what they were experiencing, when and how.

With this woman - who had mastered a degree of English, but not the skills to put the words together meaningfully, and simply relapsed to giggles and shrugs and pointing to objects, competing with worried frowns and (to her) obvious problems relating to her health condition - her inchoate expressions even related through the medium of the interpreter made little sense.

I felt badly for him. But he is the consummate professional, and soon - immediately - fixed his attention on my file, recalling precisely the symptoms he had originally dealt with on my admission almost three years earlier to the Heart Institute. Questioning me closely whether any of those symptoms had reappeared. Satisfying himself that it was a chain of consequences that had erupted with the daily use of baby aspirin.

But, with that leaky valve, intent on discovering whether there had been any change there. The electrocardiogram taken this morning satisfied some of his queries, but not all, and he said he wanted me to take another in two weeks' time, and then he would meet with me again.