Archive for the 'Health' Category

Dark forces are arrayed against me to prevent me from travel

Published at May 21, 2011 in Health, Misbegotten health care and Travel. 2 Comments

In the past year and a half, I have had to cancel/postpone/reschedule three trips that were purely for pleasure:

1. I was scheduled to go to Barcelona in March 2010, but my uncle passed away;

2. I was scheduled to go to Amsterdam in May 2010, but the volcano happened; and

3. I was scheduled to be in New York right now, but my body betrayed me.

Work, family and jobhunting-related trips?  I can take those, fine.  It’s the pleasure trips that elude me.

More on the body betrayal: I didn’t actually bork my liver by getting dehydrated.  Instead, it turns out I have a stone lodged in my common bile duct, and the dehydration pushed it from being happily asymptomatic to being symptomatic.  And once these things become symptomatic, they can back everything up and you’re looking at jaundice, liver shutdown, and life-threatening infections.  Fortunately, my doctor caught me before I left, or I might have been at the ER in Bellevue.

I’m scheduled for a procedure to have the thing removed on Monday.  It’s a pretty non-invasive procedure, in which a scope is inserted via a tube down your throat to peek up your bile duct where it empties into the esophagus.  If they can grab it there, they will; or they’ll cut a small hole in your small intestine and let it drop out there.  There’s a small chance it won’t work and they’ll have to open me up, but chances are good it won’t be an issue.  The biggest complication is pancreatitis, which is extremely painful and sucks very much.  In fact, that’s what Sugarplum had when she stopped eating and her liver went toxic.

I’ve already had my gallbladder out, 24 years ago, due to stones (I got to keep them after the surgery; they were HUGE).  I’m one of the lucky 10% whose bodies just love making stones even after removal of the gallbladder, and when there’s nowhere like the gallbladder for them to collect, they hang around in the bile duct once they get too big to pass through.  So I’ll have to be careful of this in the future (though maybe it’ll be another 24 years before I have to worry about it again, and by then I’ll (hopefully, if it’s still around) be on Medicare).

In the meantime, I’m waiting for my procedure and watching for signs of becoming bright yellow and having shaking chills. Woohoo!

And once again, I’m very glad that this is all coming to a head when I actually have health insurance.  I don’t know what I would have done had I still been uninsured; probably take antacids and hope for the best.  Then turn yellow and die, probably.

It gets worse

Published at May 15, 2011 in Health and Vanity. 2 Comments

So, the dehydration? Has fucked up my liver.

I was doing okay until Thursday, when I woke up at 4 am in agony.  I felt nauseous and was doubled over in pain; though I got to the brink of vomiting, nothing came out.  I had to take Junebug to the vet that morning, and had several meetings lined up, so I had to go into work.  But I felt completely poleaxed.  It wasn’t just that I was in pain and nauseous; I wasn’t really functioning mentally.  But I got through the morning by clutching a bottle of sports drink (fortunately, I’d just bought some hydration/electrolyte tablets at the running store, and they helped immensely) and left early to go to my doctor.

Which I have, now.  A doctor.  Because I have insurance.

Anyway, my doctor was actually on vacation, so I got his cranky partner, who seemed skeptical that I had identified my internal organs correctly (he asked me to show him where my kidneys were when I said my kidneys hurt, and didn’t seem to take my self-diagnosis of liver pain seriously until he palpated me and discovered that one edge of my liver was unusually firm.  He sent me off to the lab to get some blood drawn and advised me to keep hydrating and make sure I ate.  The next day, he called me with the results: my kidneys, urine, salts and potassium were all fine, but my liver enzymes were elevated.  I should come in to the lab again for a liver panel, and the ultrasound people would be calling me for an appointment, after which I should go see my doctor again.

My brother, who’s a fire-rescue EMT, sees a lot of dehydration on his crews, especially during wildfire season.  He tells me this is pretty typical, given the beating my system just took with the dehydration, and will pass.  I just need to rest, keep taking in fluids, and eat whether I want to or not.

And in the meantime, I can’t exercise.  Which means no half-marathon next Saturday.  I’m still picking up my t-shirt.

Well, that was a great way to spend a Sunday

Published at May 8, 2011 in Health and Sports. 1 Comment

I had my last long training run before the half marathon, 11 miles, on Saturday.  It went really well, though my mouth was terribly dry the whole time (probably due to taking a Claritin) and my legs started cramping at the end.

On Sunday, I woke up feeling fine.  I had some yogurt and raspberries with coffee for breakfast.  About an hour later, I started feeling crampy.  I thought maybe the yogurt had gone off, or I was cramping because my period was coming.  I went to bed, but things only got worse.  My kidneys started feeling sore.

Protip: if your kidneys start hurting, DRINK SOME DAMN WATER.  I didn’t, for quite some time, because unlike on Saturday, my mouth wasn’t dry.  I even thought it was appendicitis.

I got to the point where I thought it would be a good idea to get some medical attention, so I called my insurance company to see where I could go.  They gave me two urgent care centers, both of which were closed.  An ER visit would run me $100 for a copay and probably take all damn day.

I finally got some water, and that helped the cramping, so I drank more.  And I went out and got some Pedialyte.

So I guess I’d gotten way more dehydrated yesterday than I’d realized; I’d consumed two 20-oz. bottles of water and a 20-oz. Gatorade during the 2 hours and 23 minutes I ran, so I thought I was adequately  hydrated.  I probably didn’t realize how much water I was losing because in this climate, I don’t really sweat (or more likely, I still sweat buckets, but it just evaporates instead of hanging around soaking my clothes and running in my eyes).  Also, this hadn’t happened on any of my other runs.

I’m now mainlining water and Pedialyte, and I’m peeing again, so that’s good.  I will pay much closer attention to my hydration on race day AND the day after race day.  That was hellish.

All the world is in tune on a spring afternoon when we’re poisoning pigeons in the park!

Published at February 10, 2011 in Cali, Health and Sports. 1 Comment

Seriously, it’s spring here already.  Daffodils and everything, and it’s not even Valentine’s Day yet.

I am all discombobulated.

My training is going well (it certainly doesn’t hurt that I can run outside), though I have a small ache in my left foot near the base of the big toe.  I’m hoping it’s not the beginnings of a stress fracture.  Frankly, though, I can easily give up running if there are going to be stress fractures from doing it.  I can lift instead, since my shoulder is well-healed by now and I’ve got a gym available at work.

And! I have health insurance, so I don’t have to just guess whether it’s a fracture, I can actually find out and get treatment.  What a radical departure from the last 10 years.

It’s that time of year again

Published at January 2, 2011 in Domesticity, Health, Home improvement, Money, Library stuff, Sports, Clotheshorsery, Vanity, Frivolity, Food, work work work and Travel. 5 Comments

Time for resolutions I won’t keep!

I’m going to try something different this year and set some concrete goals that will be easier to reach than something vague like “Eat better.”  Many of these goals are craft-related, since I inherited my mother’s propensity for starting projects and not finishing them.

1. Speaking of Mom and projects she never finished, finish the sweater she started knitting for me, oh, ten years ago (she died just over eight years ago).  Finishing this sweater was the reason I took knitting lessons in the first place, but I kept putting the bag with the unfinished sweater aside, or in a closet.  Part of that was due to it being kind of painful to look at the thing after she died, part of it was that I gained a lot of weight after she died and wasn’t going to fit in the sweater even if I did finish it.  But now I can look at the thing without getting teary, and I’ve lost enough weight over the years that I can wear it.  Plus, it’s motherfucking cold in my apartment and I NEED a big fuzzy sweater.  I’ve now got the skills to do it, too.

2.  Quilting projects: I’m making a quilt for my sister, and I also want to finish a quilt that my great-grandmother pieced and never finished, both because it would be a great way to honor Babushka and also because of the aforementioned state of motherfucking cold.

3. Home decorating: I need to locate my stud finder, so I can hang the pictures I already have, and then I need to go out and get my other pictures framed and hung.  I have a desk to paint, chairs to paint and re-cover, and at some point I should get a few more chairs and a vase or two.  Plus mirrors.  I also need a filing cabinet, badly.  This may not be a year in which I do anything with my bedroom, but I’m okay with that for now since I don’t really have a vision for it like I do with the rest of the place.

4. Sports: I haven’t lifted weights since last July, when I fell on the sidewalk and injured my shoulder, and then re-injured it in September.  I’ve decided to go a slightly different direction, doing a combination of yoga, running, and eventually some scaled-back weightlifting.  Running has gone very well; unlike in years past, I seem to have resolved some of the issues with my knees so that I’m not wearing my patella in some strange place after only a few weeks of the C25K plan.  I’m on Week 7 now (actually for the second time — I’d reached it in September, right before my second fall, which also rolled my ankle) and so far, so good.  My knee’s a little tender, but the exercise is actually doing it good.  I’d like to do a half-marathon and marathon this year, using the Jeff Galloway run/walk program.  Brooklyn Half-Marathon is in May, with the particular day yet to be announced, and I’ve signed up for the lottery for the NYC Marathon.  I’m also planning on doing the Bay to Breakers 12K in San Francisco in May, which will probably be the week before the Brooklyn Half.  If I don’t get into the NYC Marathon, I’m going to try for Chicago or Marine Corps.  All of these will be not only goals in and of themselves, but also opportunities for travel to places where friends and/or family are.

5. Food: I’m back to being mostly vegan, which is pretty easy since it’s a little hard for me to eat out much here if I have to walk everywhere I go; I also work in a place where the lunch options are very very limited.  I’ve got access to a really great food co-op and live around the corner from a grocery store, so I can easily get good, fresh ingredients and do a lot of cooking.  I’ve got a freezer packed full of individually-portioned meals I can just grab and go, and I’m working hard on using my cookbooks for more than just the old standbys.  My big goal this year is to stop eating mindlessly and to pay attention to and enjoy what I eat.  I’ve also made a special effort to clean off the dining room table, now that I have a dining room, and to have dinner AT my table with napkins and placemat and candles.  Bonus: the dining room is the only room that really gets heat.

6. Appearance: I managed to weed a lot of crap out of my wardrobe just before I moved, so I do wear a lot of what I have.  But I’m not wearing all of it, so I need to figure out why not and make any necessary adjustments.  For example, if I’m not wearing something because it doesn’t fit, I can make it fit or get rid of it; if I’m not wearing something because I don’t really like it after all, it has to go.  It *is* pretty nice having a lot of closet space free.  I also want to figure out this year what my style is, so that I can have some kind of consistent look.

7. Financial: I’ve started using Mint to track my money, and my new job has TIAA-CREF, so I’ve gotten started on a retirement plan (matching doesn’t happen until I’ve been employed a year).  I’ve identified several areas where I spend disproportionate amounts of money, so I can work on cutting that back. I’m also saving for a car; I plan on spending less than $2500 for a mid-90s Honda or similar that will run for a while.   Just like with the eating out, living here has curtailed my spending because I’m not passing stores and places to spend money all the time.  I’m also not reading like I used to, so my book habit is not being fed. My book habit really is shameful; I’m a librarian, after all, and I should be borrowing books rather than buying them.  And I should be selling off what I have; I see Amazon keeps asking me if I’d like to sell some of the books I’ve bought through them, so I may just take them up on that.

8. Personal: I’m still not into the idea of dating, but I want to make some friends here outside of work.  The yoga studio I attend seems to be a good place to meet people, especially since you’re asked to introduce yourself to the people on adjoining mats before class starts.  I’m also a member of the food co-op, and that seems like a good way to meet people as well; working there is optional, so I plan on signing up soon.  There are also extension classes to take and the local running shop organizes group runs every week, which will help with my half/marathon training and get me out a bit.  I’m also planning on taking advantage of the first paid time off I’ve had in about 10 years to do some travel, including a horsepacking trip through backcountry out here as part of the extension classes.

9. Professional: I’ll start teaching legal skills in the fall, which will give me some great experience.  I’ve also committed to writing a couple of articles, I’m involved with some committees and caucuses in my professional association, and I also have opportunities to do some outside work for pay and recognition.  I’m doing all this partly because I’m positioning myself for a return to New York or a move to another big city for my next job, and partly because I really do like my new career.  I made a good choice.

Well, that takes talent

Published at October 17, 2010 in Health. 5 Comments

I chipped my tooth this morning.

While eating cereal.

Dental insurance kicks in 11/1.  I’ll be making an appointment for as close to then as I can.

Fat and Health: A Response

Published at September 6, 2010 in Health, I see fat people and Dipshittery. 17 Comments

I swear on a stack of pancakes that I didn’t read Atheling’s piece before I wrote this.

    First Things First:  What’s It To You?

I’ve been living in New York a long time (and am reluctantly about to leave it).  One of the most useful sayings I’ve picked up here is, “What’s it to you?” *

That handy phrase pretty summed up my first reaction to reading Monica’s post about fat and health.  Why, if she doesn’t experience any kind of weight-based discrimination at the doctor or elsewhere, does she get invested in defending the BMI against feminist criticism?

And then I got to the donuts, and all became clear.  Monica appears to have fallen into the trap of conflating weight and health, and attributing moral laxity to the overweight — who of course couldn’t have gotten that way had they just eased off the donuts.  Donuts being the go-to shorthand for the moral failings of fat people.  Oh, sometimes it’s pie, occasionally it’s cake, but it’s usually donuts, those tasty little rings of deep-fried sloth.

While I don’t relish having to address such misconceptions again, it’s worth doing the pushback.  However, I don’t want to do a point-by-point fisking of Monica’s piece, partly because comments are closed and I missed the window when they were open.  Partly because it’s somewhat jumbled, and there were some points raised in comments that throw a different light on the original post. Also?  The commenters did a pretty damn good job of refuting particular points.  I also don’t want to make this about Monica.

Instead, I want to talk a bit about fat and health and why fat hatred is a feminist issue.

Continue reading ‘Fat and Health: A Response’

Well, hello there

Published at July 24, 2010 in Iron, Library stuff, Kitties, Health, New York Fugging City, work work work and Vanity. 0 Comments

Been some time since I dropped by this place.  I’m still alive.  I can’t even say I’ve been terribly busy lately, what with having graduated library school and gotten laid off sometime in May.  I *can* say that I’ve been wiped out by the heat and not really all that interested in writing.  I don’t even read many blogs anymore, just a handful, and a lot of them are design blogs.

I’ve spent the summer looking for a permanent library gig, and it’s going well so far.  I had nothing, nothing at all for months, but this month everything’s started happening.  I’ve got some local interviews, and some on the West Coast; any of them would require me to move from my current apartment, if not from New York, so I’ve started packing up. All things being equal, I’d rather not have to change cities and buy a car.  I like my life here.

From what I’ve been hearing from some of my references, the potential employers who’ve been checking up on me don’t seem to really understand what it is I’ve been doing for the past ten years since I jumped off the partnership track — even though I’ve told them in the interview, and on my resume, etc.  It’s like they don’t understand that you can practice law even if you’re not employed by a law firm as a full-time associate on a traditional path.  Well, at least a couple of them have now been educated by my references.  This won’t really be a concern when I go for the next job, because I’ll have a track record as a law librarian, which is something they’ll understand.

Personally?  I’ve been using my time off to focus on fitness.  I looked back over my logbook, which I started in January, and I haven’t really been going to the gym as often as I’d like to think I do.  A lot of that had to do with injury, but a lot of it was just mismanaged time — I’d get a late start to the day, and then didn’t want to start a workout at 8pm when I had to go to work in the morning.  But now I have not a whole lot else to do, since it’s been so hot that a lot of the outdoor stuff I’d like to do seems unappealing.  The gym, however, is air-conditioned (though the weight room’s unit’s been out).  I’ve also just — like, this week — started running again.  It’s going well so far, though I know from experience it’s not until week 5 or so on the Couch to 5K plan that things start really going haywire with my ITB.  My plan is to do each week twice, and hope that’s enough time for my body to adapt, and to foam-roll the living fuck out of my lower body.

Dating’s sort of not been happening.  I’ve gone on a couple, but reluctantly since I don’t know if I’ll be here in a month.  Nothing’s come of them, but they were pleasant enough ways to pass the time.

The pets are both bad and good.  They’re all currently in good health, but Sugarplum had cancer surgery in April and just wasn’t healing, and wasn’t healing, and wasn’t healing.  Every time it looked like her wound was closing, I’d go to check on it and there would be A GIANT HOLE IN MY CAT.  The vet even did a second surgery to clean up the edges, but it still wasn’t healing, and he started taking it personally.  Finally, they decided she has really poor circulation and needed to be treated as if she’s diabetic.  So she spent three weeks at the vet’s office in a sterile cage, getting compresses and wound care and mainlining antibiotics and — strangest of all — snuggling up to the staff.   Amazingly, when I picked her up, the giant hole was down to nothing, and she was indeed all cuddly, for about a week.  Then she became the crankypants I know and love.

I was not expecting the odor

Published at October 16, 2009 in Aging gracefully or not, Health, Vanity, Travel and Uncategorized. 13 Comments

I just got back, as I said in the last post, from Montreal. The primary reason I went there was to get Lasik (Canada has more advanced technology than the US, and even when the FDA approves certain equipment, such as the particular laser I was treated with, the earlier approval means that Canadian eye surgeons have more experience with the equipment than their American counterparts. Plus, it’s cheaper. And it’s Montreal). I was tired of being extremely nearsighted, and what with the onset of reading glasses* and all, it was looking like I’d be in very expensive and unworkable progressive lenses before too long. Why not get the nearsightedness fixed, and then worry about the aging-related reading glasses as a single prescription?

So I biffed off up North, where the many public wi-fi networks refused to speak to my netbook. And after a few days of sightseeing and wonderful meals and lovely chocolat chaud, I went to the clinic for my surgery. The pre-op and post-op is being done locally, but I went to Montreal for the actual surgery.

I knew there would be Clockwork Orange eyelid clamps. I probably should have guessed that, yes, everyone makes the same Clockwork Orange joke when the clamps are put in. I knew there would be some “pressure,” though I hadn’t really been clear on what it was for (apparently, to make you go temporarily blind so you don’t see the blade that’s cutting the flap in your cornea) or how much it would hurt when my orbital bone was pushed on.

I did not, however, know that there was going to be an odor — specifically, the odor of burning hair. It was apparently just the laser burning some carbon in the air, not my eyeball getting vaporized. But disconcerting, nonetheless.

It was over in minutes. The first half-hour afterwards was just fine, if things were blurry and I had the world’s goofiest-looking eye shields on my face. Then the anaesthetic wore off, and the burning and itching and feeling of sand-in-the-eyes started. That lasted four hours or so, during which time I was instructed to rest but not sleep — as if I could fall asleep with my eyes burning like that — and to blink at least every five minutes to keep things lubricated. I got very familiar with the limitations of my hotel room, which featured not a separate bathroom, but a sink, shower stall and toilet closet right in the room. As a concept, not terribly objectionable — until you realize that the legroom in the toilet nook leaves a little something to be desired, and it’s not possible to both take the wide stance necessary to position yourself correctly AND pull your pants down. Others before me had similar issues, or at least that’s how I interpret the fact that the seat was forever popping out of place.

After four hours or so, things started feeling much better, but I had to leave the shields on nonetheless until the following morning. Whereupon I removed them and went back to the clinic for my first-day checkup. My vision was 20/15, which is right about where it should be, since they overcorrect due to the fact that as the eyes heal, they naturally settle out a little, so I should end up with 20/20. I had a little inflammation in one eye, so they had me use the antibiotic drops more frequently for the first two days; I also have dryness, which is normal, so I have drops for that as well.

I’m quite pleased.  Things are kind of foggy, I’ll need to use reading glasses for a few weeks until the overcorrection settles out, I have haloes at night, and my eyes are dry, but that’s all normal and should go away within a few days or weeks.   But for the first time since fourth grade, I can fucking SEE without glasses or contacts.  Yay!

____

* About those expensive progressive lenses that optometrist tried to push on me:  turns out I NEVER ACTUALLY NEEDED THEM AT ALL.  The doctor who did my pre-op for surgery figured that my contacts were overcorrecting my vision, which made reading a little difficult.  So he put me into weaker contacts, and that solved the reading problem while still enabling me to see distances.  Boy, am I glad I pushed back on those instead of spending almost $500 to solve a problem I didn’t even have.

This week in fat hatred

Published at August 14, 2009 in Health, Food, I see fat people, Woman-Hating and Dipshittery. 4 Comments

Item the first: Anti-donut signs can get you fired from your job as a county health director, but only if you name and piss off local businesses:

A 38-year-old former Army doctor who served in Iraq, Newsom returned home to Panama City a few years ago to run the Bay County Health Department and launched a one-man war on obesity by posting sardonic warnings on an electronic sign outside:

“Sweet Tea (equals) Liquid Sugar.”

“Hamburger (equals) Spare Tire.”

“French Fries (equals) Thunder Thighs.”

He also called out KFC by name to make people think twice about fried chicken.

Then he parodied “America Runs on Dunkin’,” the doughnut chain’s slogan, with: “America Dies on Dunkin’.”

Some power players in the Gulf Coast tourist town decided they had had their fill.

A county commissioner who owns a doughnut shop and two lawyers who own a new Dunkin’ Donuts on Panama City Beach turned against him, along with some of his own employees, Newsom says. After the lawyers threatened to sue, his bosses at the Florida Health Department made him remove the anti-fried dough rants and eventually forced him to resign, he says. . . .

In May, lawyers Bo Rivard and Michael Duncan, co-owners of a new Dunkin’ Donuts, asked Newsom to take down the “America Dies on Dunkin’” message. Newsom already had run other anti-doughnut warnings, including “Doughnuts (equals) Diabetes,” and “Dunkin’ Donuts (equals) Death.”

The businessmen had the backing of County Commissioner Mike Thomas, who owns a diner and a doughnut shop. Thomas called for Newsom’s ouster, saying the doctor shouldn’t have named businesses on the message board.

Note the two statements I’ve bolded. If that’s not conflation of health and thinness/aesthetics, I don’t know what is. But what I find a little disturbing is that his bosses were okay with this kind of hatefulness being funded by the taxpayers until the businesses he called out by name lawyered up.

Continue reading ‘This week in fat hatred’