Category Archives: Health

Relax(er)ed…

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The last time I was on muscle relaxers, I remember sitting at my desk listening to a phone ringing… and ringing… and ringing… and ringing and looking around in frustration wondering why someone wasn’t picking the damned thing up. Of course it was my phone. Sitting three feet away from me on the desk. Ringing off the hook while I was busy being blissfully unaware of pretty much anything going on around me. It’s a good time, but it’s safe to say that productivity levels suffer as a result.

The hardest thing I do on any given day is keeping the thoughts that pop into my head from simultaneously popping out of my mouth. I suspect for the next week or two that task is going to become even more difficult. If anyone catches me with a look on my face like I’m about to say something ragingly inappropriate for whatever environment we happen to be in, please give me the benefit of a jab in the ribs instead of just sitting there waiting for the punchline. There’s a very, very good chance that I’m going to be far too relax(er)ed to judge that sort of thing on my own.

Back…

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I’ve been ignoring it for a little over a month and mostly expecting that the situation would resolve itself, but the sad reality is during the last big snow I did something to jack up my back in more than the usual way. The fact that I literally had to roll out of bed this morning was enough evidence that my usual ignore-it-until-it-goes-away plan of action was proving insufficient to the challenge. I knuckled under around lunch time and made an appointment with my angry Germanic doctor in the hopes that he’d have some sort of snake oil that will let me stand or sit for more than 15 minutes without my whole lower back locking up.

I’d probably be willing to let it ride indefinitely, but with spring weather coming on fast, I’m in no condition to even think about using a weedeater or hedge trimmer. Just thinking about it makes me cringe just a little. Whatever the problem is, we’ll need to get it resolved quickly, because a look outside shows the yard isn’t waiting… and if anyone reading this thinks I’m going to let the place look like a foreclosure just because of a searing pain in the back, you clearly don’t get my level of OCD when it comes to lawn care.

Hopefully by this time tomorrow we’ll be on the way to knowing just how badly I screwed myself up. Sadly, I don’t think the answer is going to be “just go ahead and keep eating ibuprofen by the hand full.”

Intolerance…

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(c) The MCLA Beacon

(c) The MCLA Beacon

After a childhood filled with downright crippling stomach troubles, I was officially diagnosed with lactose intolerance when I was in elementary school. With that knowledge, as long as I popped a couple of Lactaid tablets before eating anything my stomach was happy to tackle anything thrown at it. I had a little blue case filled with the things and self-medicated with wild abandon. Fortunately, this was the 1980s, so a kid carrying around an unmarked container of pills didn’t raise any eyebrows. All was right with the world.

As I got older, the effects of my intolerance decreased to the point where I could generally suck down a milkshake or a block of cheese without suffering any ill effects. These days, I can usually eat whatever I want and walk away just fine. I’ve miraculously been 99% cured. The problem was (and is) that being “mostly” cured means that every once in a while – that pesky 1% of the time – I’m suddenly not cured at all.

So without going too far into the gory details, I re-learned last night that from time to time, I still have a price to pay for enjoying dairy. It took into the small hours of the morning, but I’m finally feeling like balance has been restored… which means I’ll spend the rest of the day sitting quietly and trying to avoid doing anything that might tempt my system to go back out of whack. If I’m feeling exceptionally adventurous, lunch might even be a piece of dry toast or a couple of saltines. Yeah, I feel better already.

Frozen…

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Having spent my formative years in Maryland’s snow belt, there’s not much in the way of winter precipitation that really bothers me. Of course it helps having a large 4×4 vehicle, too, but mostly it boils down to being confident in the knowledge, skills, and abilities earned while driving hither, skither, and yon through everything form a dusting to a couple of feet of the white stuff. I don’t go looking to drive around in it (like I did when I was young and more risk tolerant), but I don’t really shy away from it if there’s something I need to go out and do, either.

All of that logic goes out the window, however, when it comes to freezing rain. Even the mighty Tundra isn’t going to get traction when that starts building up on every flat surface. Freezing rain is that thing that shows up unseen until you stride onto the deck first thing in the morning ready to grab the world by the throat and then suddenly find yourself laying flat on your back wondering how they hell you got there. Sigh. If anyone needs me, I’ll be on the floor trying to get my back to unkink.

Stationary hell…

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I know a few of you out there are all gung ho about your exercise routines. You run marathons, lift six times your body weight, and participate in all manner of physical exertion. More than a few of you have commented about how the effort leaves you feeling energized and wanting to go harder and do more. See, right there is where you lose me. I’ve tried a lot of it over the years – free weights and machines, walking, jogging (aka my feeble attempt at breaking into a run), stair climbing, resistance training, etcetera and so on. Where these activities leave you feeling energized, they leave me feeling tired, achy, sweaty, and generally like there are a dozen other things I could have spent that hour doing that would have left me feeling more productive for the day. It’s not that I reject the obvious benefits of these activities so much as it is that I find them mostly dull, tedious, and often painful. Hard as it might be to believe, that’s not the exact recipe for keeping me interested in something.

However, my semi-annual visit coming up in January to my Teutonic doctor and he’s going to ask the inevitable question about doing a minimum of 30-45 minutes of cardio a day. I won’t lie to him, because lying to your doctor is just bad policy, so with the impending visit in mind, I’m back on the wagon. And by wagon, I mean the cursed stationary bicycle that lives in the basement and for the last three months has served as an improvised laundry drying station. So at least when he asks, I can tell him with a straight face that yes, I’m doing the requisite number of minutes per day. I’ll leave off the bit about hating every minute of it since I’m fairly certain that’s not medically relevant.

I envy you people who find your exercise regimen personally fulfilling. For me it feels an awful lot like three hours a week that I’ll never get back.

Open wide…

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Life is full of ironies. When I was a young careerist just starting out you, I barely had two hours of vacation time to rub together. What I did have were almost limitless invitations to go places, do things, and generally raise hell while I was young and stupid. Since I never seemed to have the vacation time, I took a pass on most of those opportunities and hoped against hope that I wouldn’t get sick and need to burn off any of my limited reserve of days off.

Now, after a a decade or so of experience, I’m sitting on a pretty respectable war chest of paid time off. What I seem to be lacking are the invitations to raise hell and be stupid. While that’s probably for the best, there’s something disheartening about taking the vast majority of days off over the course of the year to do things like having bloodwork done and going to the dentist. I’m sure this is not how 25-year-old-Jeff planned to spend his days off when he was 35, but there you have it.

Sure, it’s a four day weekend, but I’ll be spending a big part of the first day with my mouth hanging wide open letting complete strangers poke, prod, drill, and fill. If I can manage not to spend the afternoon drooling all over myself, I’ll consider it a victory.

First day of school…

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After almost a week of Congressionally imposed exile, it’s back to work for most Department of Defense Employees. It feels a bit like the first day of school after a long summer of not giving a damn. Suffice to say that I am something a little less than motivated. What can I say, I’m having a significant emotional response to being told for a week that my services are unessential and then getting a call after 9PM on Sunday to hurry up and get back to work. Look, I know the old hurry up and wait is the Army Way and all, but seriously, taking care of your people should involve more than jerking them form pillar to post around the time many of them are headed to bed. Decent behavior and a basic level of respect are apparently expectations that are all out of proportion to reality. Good to know.

The great irony is that I’m going to be missing at least part of this first day of school. Instead of being on my way to the office, I’m killing an hour or two before heading out for my second root canal in the last seven days. Is it bad that dental surgery almost seems like a better way to spend the morning? It probably is, but Uncle Sam is currently ranked higher on my shit list than the dentist. As sad a state of affairs as that is, it doesn’t seem at all unreasonable.

What I Did on My Furlough Day (Part 3 of 11)

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Someone furloughed shouldn’t be working as hard as I am. I got up at 6:30 this morning (Hush, that is sleeping in for people who normally wake up around 5:00), drank a pot of coffee, emailed my usual anti-furlough rant to the members of the Maryland Congressional delegation. I thought about calling them out on Facebook and Twitter, but thought better of it since I was on a schedule. I was on a schedule because I had my six month check up with the ol’ sawbones this morning. Ironically, I picked this doctor at least in part because his practice is not far from the office so it would be easy to slip out and back for appointments. Being Furlough Friday, of course, I believe I have discovered a flaw in what was an otherwise logical arrangement. And, please, don’t get me started on their rescheduling the appointment from yesterday to today with about 18 hours notice.

I could turn this into a long story, but I won’t. As usual the doc is annoyed that my blood pressure is good, blood sugar is well within tolerance, and the acid reflux has been gone now for well over a year without meds. They pulled blood in the hopes of finding something wrong, but I have no reason to expect it will come back as anything but “normal” as it always has in the past. So it was a typical visit – lose weight, less meat, nothing over 10g of sugar.

OK, look, doc. At some point we’re going to have to have a serious discussion about not just health, but also quality of life. Maybe if I eat nothing but tofu, almond milk, and salad with no dressing for the rest of my days I’ll live to be 106… but I’m not sure 71 years without steak, pizza, craft beer, or blue cheese dressing is a world I wish to inhabit. Sure, I’d be alive, but I’m not sure I’d really be living.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Well, it seems like the question really answers itself at this point, doesn’t it? But since I know nobody is going to let me get away with a simple “it’s self explanatory,” here we go…

1. The common cold. We have machines that can scan the human brain. We can replace human heart valves with pork parts. We can perform knee replacement surgery on dogs. But do you know what we can’t do? We can’t cure the common goddamned cold. Are you effing serious? Through the miracle of modern science, the best we can do is dope someone up on decongestants, antihistamines, and nasal sprays so that they’re too stoned to care how bad they feel. WTF, science? What have you been doing for the last 400 years? I think it’s amazing that you can cure a disease that one person in 100 million will actually contract, but it would be even better if you could track down a cure for the thing that 5 billion of us will catch once or twice a year.

2. Daytime TV. After two and a half days of not doing much of anything besides sitting in front of the television, I can say with some authority that TV pretty much sucks between the hours of 8AM and 8PM. I’m sure there are some people out there watching, but I can’t understand why they would think there wasn’t something better to do with their time… like sleeping, or possibly gouging out their eyes with sharp sticks. I’m thanking the old gods and the new that we live in an age of Hulu and Apple TV.

3. Being “medicated.” I despise the feeling of being medicated – that feeling you get when you’re taking lots of meds that make your head feel like it’s full of cotton and not necessarily attached to your body. Maybe I’m not describing it right, but regardless, I don’t like it. I’m not a billionaire, I’m not an athlete, and I have no practical skills like welding to fall back on. My brain is what I’ve got going for me and what keeps me from living in an overpass-adjacent cardboard box. When it’s not firing at full speed, well, I’m sure it’s bad… I just can’t quite articulate why at the moment. Stupid brain.

Sick and tired…

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I complain alot about Uncle Sam’s half-assed approach to managing his people… and God knows I’m not going to withdraw any of those previous commentaries. They all have the convenient aspect of being statements of fact rather than simple opinion. The one thing, though, that I won’t fault Uncle on is his policy on sick leave. We rack up 104 hours of sick leave every year and the unused balance rolls over from year to year assuming you don’t use all 13 days earned. Not a bad deal compared to some of the paid-time-off schemes out there.

The only reason I bring it up is I’m currently on the second day in a row sitting here on the couch alternately burning up and shivering. It’s good times. Really. I heard from several people yesterday that men are babies when it comes to dealing with the average case of “sick.” Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. I tend to go with the latter. I’m still keeping up with feeding and watering the zoo, taking care of the three S’s every morning, and making my own trips to the drug store. I’ve even managed to feed myself for the last 36 hours – which has been pretty easy since the only flavor I can really taste is salty. I even think I’m getting along with a minimum amount of complaint.

Maybe the deciding element for “being a baby” has to do with not feeling the compulsion to go sit at my desk while I’m hacking and wheezing all over everything. I know some people do, but I just can’t see any up side to it. If I’m going to spend the day shooting weird neon colored snot out my nose, blowing through two boxes of tissues a day, and generally feeling sick and tired, I’d rather do that in the privacy of my own home than have ten people listening in on my progress. If that makes me a baby, well, fine… but I’d go more with responsible adult.

Now if anyone needs me, I’ll be watching House reruns and trying to diagnose myself.