Category Archives: Health Issues

Updates

22 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Family, Health Issues

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  1. #2 Son went to the chiropractor, had his back diagnosed. No herniated disc, just a strain of the muscles.
  2. My Doctor visit. My b.p. is 130/80. My weight is 188 lbs, a 29 lb loss since mid-October, when last I saw him. I don’t know what the A1C value is yet. I am close to “normal” on the Body Mass Index, 26.9 where 25 is deemed not overweight. All in all, it was a successful visit.
  3. Birthday. We went to dinner. I had a good time and the food was good, not spectacular.
  4. Cold weather. It is cold. Tomorrow it will warm up to 36°, 8° warmer than today. By Thursday the temperature will be back to the 50’s.
  5. Swimming: I swam 12,500 meters in 5 days. That is 7.7 miles. I am satisfied with that total distance.

Predicaments

19 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in Family, Gender Identity, Health Issues

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How do I begin? And where? Number Two Son, age 30, (Yes he is an adult) called me and asked what it feels like to have a slipped disc. I explain as best I can and he shares that he hurt his back.

Somehow or other, he wants to diagnose and treat this problem on his own. All kind of crazy, but he says one thing, “They drug test if I file a Wokers’ Comp claim.” Suddenly, all the flanking maneuveres begin to make sense. He doesn’t want to test positive for marijuana, the use of which is illegal in Virginia.

But I get to work assisting him, and do way too much to help with his problem. He is seeing a chiropractor I know and have used on Monday at 5:00 PM. With luck the problem will be correcting itself over the weekend.

I don’t suspect my son is a heavy pot smoker, but he is now organizing his life around his habit. NOT. GOOD.

I get stressed because he has Asperger’s Syndrome. Even if he wasn’t using 4-20, he tends to argue, over-think, analyze, and question even the simplest of predicaments. Here two things are key. 1) He has hurt his back. 2) A medical professional needs to assess the injury. Concealing drug use complicates a simple task.

Here’s hoping for the best possible outcome. He sees the chiro. The chiro does his magic. He feels better. He realizes that he is planning his life around his marijuana habit. And stops using. We shall see.

Colds And Humours

19 Wednesday Dec 2018

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Why are colds called colds? Did you ever wonder about that? Back in the Good Old Days, i.e. The Middle Ages, sickness was considered an imbalance of bodily humours. There were four such humours, phlegm, blood (sangue), black bile(choler) and yellow bile. The medieval physicians also looked at whether one was hot or cold.

So I feel like my humours are out of balance. Maybe that is my problem.

What about your humours?

Not As Strange.

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Health Issues, sleep

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I had a chaotic dream, the kind that put familiar friends in strange places. I’m in this dream, participating in the action and observing from a neutral point at the same time.

I had thought I was sick with a cold or something. I do have a touch of bronchitis but that isn’t unusual for me.

What I realize is that I am just plain exhausted. I have been more active than I was 60 days ago and my eating habits have changed.

Worry, upset, anxiety are tiring. There is so much I need to detach from. I need to bring my loved ones closer. I wonder, in 1945 and 1946, when families celebrated Christmas together for the first time after World War II, if they cared that much, if at all, about presents. I suspect not.

In short I realize I need to just sleep. It comes fairly easily.

Strange Dream. Strange Day

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

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As is my habit, I woke up early, fixed breakfast,felt tired again, and went back to sleep. I then had a dream, where I walked into a college lecture hall and proceeded to lecture the students. When the authorities finally figured out I had no business lecturing anybody about anything, they turned the microphone off and said The Dean would want to see me. At this point, I woke up, relieved it was only a dream and I would not have to see The Dean after all,

I have been kind of manic all day. I feel angry, tired, or weepy at times, without crying. When I fantasized a Mister Rogers episode where he spays a cat, I figured I had felt crazy long enough.

So I am drinking hot Earl Grey tea and watching Popeye cartoons. Hopefully I will fall asleep early.

Snow

10 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Health Issues, Popular Song

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I keep thinking about Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye in White Christmas. Of course, that wa

s Hollywood and not really snow at all. There’s no Rosemary Clooney or Vera Ellen either. Maybe they should have stayed in Florida and sung Sisters one more time.

Shoveling snow is not one of the recommended activities after one has had a spinal fusion. So, like Blanche DuBois, I must “depend upon the kindness of strangers.”

The snow is still in the beautiful phase. Two young women built a snow family by the train depot in Ashland.

Truth is, I want to get back to the pool. I had created a pretty good “normal” for myself, being mindful of what I ate, swimming, feeling generally purposeful and useful. So life once again has intervened upon, uh, life. If I embark upon a comfort food extravaganza, I will be consuming way too many calories. I must therefore act as if, nothing unusual has happened. Of course, in the Northern latitudes, nothing unusual has happened. It snows in Winter.

Good Health. Good Feelings.

01 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Exercise/ Fitness, Health Issues

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I am sleeping much more soundly than I was sleeping even a month ago. I would attribute that to a consistent exercise routine that I reestablished in recent weeks.

My wheat consumption has also plummeted when I discovered that my “restless” stomach went away when I gave up carbs. That is how I discovered that I am gluten sensitive. Go figure.

Still the idea of putting my head on the pillow, falling asleep, and waking up eight hours later, has some nostalgic appeal, just as staying up all night making love does.

I have been incredibly lucky to enjoy the good health that I have. Even the arthritis pain and pain near my fusion site are more an inconvenience than a real barrier to getting along.

Getting older is an exercise in blessing counting and priority setting. Every day I ask my self, “Just how badly do  I want that donut, candy bar, croissant?” It gets easier. I consider the great blessings of making new friends in both real life and in the cyberworld and acknowledge that good health makes that much more likely.

Good health and anger seem to be incompatible too. Anger, for me, is a function of feeling threatened. I need the rage of anger to help me “fight back”. When I feel healthy, I feel more in harmony with the world, less threatened, hence less angry.

Consider how much political thinking implies that one identity group or another feels “threatened”. LGBT rights groups and NRA members both, in recent times, have expressed the notion that they are threatened. Simply “feeling” threatened does not mean that one is threatened in reality.

If you feel “angry” by the news, consider who would like to see you angry, then ask “Why?”. Regaining control of anger is about regaining your emotional serenity.

Finding Purpose (Again)

17 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by in alcoholism, Depression, Health Issues

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I grew up around drama. I grew up around people struggling with weight and weight related health issues. In 1968, Thanksgiving weekend, my mother’s brother, died of a stroke. He was only 45 and dangerously obese. He received a Purple Heart in WW Two and I suspect he was haunted by The War to the day he died. It just occurred to me that this is the 50th anniversary of his passing.

That was a very real bit of weight drama. My mother’s weight drama was ongoing. She would get serious about losing weight, then start jonesing for sweets. Eventually she developed heart disease and diabetes. She too had a stroke, but lived on another eighteen months afterwards before she died.

Her weight drama and her depression went hand in hand. There were tragedies galore in her family, her father’s alcoholism, her sister’s out of wedlock pregnancy, her father’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage. For a crazy woman, she did the best she could. Pure Christian Love prevailed over most of this.

But I came out warped, broken. I had a few missing pieces to my puzzle of mental health. The disease that is alcoholism affected me and I found recovery in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12 Steps.

The other bit of drama is my rather casual attitude toward diet and exercise. I would lose weight, gain it back over the past 12 years, I would commit to a regular program of swimming, then my sense of hopelessness would take me out of the pool.

This all combined to give a general lack of purpose to my life. Until. This time when I found out I was diabetic, I embraced healthy habits with a passion.

Today, after learning we have to replace a vehicle, I was all worked up. I was about to blow off swimming today, but did not. And I had a good workout, the longest in almost ten weeks, 1750 meters.

It takes effort for me to live life as free of drama as possible. My mother’s craziness, her outbursts of anger live permanently in my memory. Thank God she never physically abused us. And she loved us, took care of us, and wanted us to grow up to be decent human beings. But the repercussions from her brokenness linger in me to this day.

So every carbohydrate I don’t eat is in honor of you Mom. Every lap I swim is for you. I want to be the healthy person, you could never quite be.

I choose to be a positive example,

More Food. No Sex

13 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Health Issues

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I had my Weight Watchers weigh in today. I lost 5.4 lbs this week. 8.8 lbs in the past two weeks. Diabetes has put the Fear of God in me. Everything I blew off or paid lip service to around food has hit home as The Truth, the emes. (Nothing gets the point across better than Yiddish). So I’m eating as righteously as I can. Two words: fruits, vegetables,

I’m feeling way better. I do not want to be one of those anti-sugar, meshuganu types, but then again, there are worse types of people to be.

Walking Back From The Abyss

06 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Exercise/ Fitness, Health Issues, Uncategorized

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I keep a record of my weight and exercise in a nice pocket calendar that the Disabled American Veterans sent me. One of the business gurus I used to follow when I was in business wrote, “That which is recorded gets done.” I can’t remember his name. Jim Something.

I stopped doing. I stopped recording. My diary is chock full of empty spaces. My weight crept up. I developed Adult Onset Diabetes. Now, all of a sudden, I am as serious as, well, Adult Onset Diabetes, about my diet, exercise, and health, in general. It doesn’t take much to tip the balance toward the negative. The good news is that one can reset the balance by little incremental, regular efforts to return to H-E-A-L-T-H-Y and stay there.

It’s back to Weight Watchers for me. Tomorrow is my one week weigh-in. When I check my weight at the Y, I’ve lost weight since last Tuesday. My swimming is back to swimming. My shoulder feels better. Truth be told, I think the pain was from inactivity.

I didn’t plan on being a Healthy Person or an Unhealthy Person, for that matter. Stuff just sort of happened. No purpose or intention yields an unsatisfactory result. I’ve had a dysfunctional attitude around food since I was a child. That is a long story. But the synopsis of the dysfunction is that I returned to eating whenever and whatever I wanted because it changed the way I felt about my self. Food was, and is, my gateway drug.

Back in my thirties, I participated in the transformational programs developed by Werner Erhard, The est Training, (later transformed into The Forum), and The Six Day Course, to name two. I found Werner’s work valuable, useful, and memorable. One of the things Werner emphasized is that people are OK, exactly the way they are. Translated for my life, at age 67, being OK exactly the way I am means I don’t have to eat my way into feeling different. Or drink my way. Doing healthy things and living a healthy life means doing things we humans naturally gravitate towards doing. Notice how we have to tell small children to sit still. Movement is their default state.

Getting healthy again is an un-learning. We learn that it’s OK to let go of the stuff around our health that doesn’t work.

So here I go again. Thanks Werner.