Tag Archives: Health

Of McRib and self-denial…

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In my mind I’m sure that “diet” will always be among the most unpleasant 4-letter words in the English language. Over the last five months, though, I’ve learned a lot by tracking every bite and morsel that’s found its way into my mouth. Calories, macronutrients, I’ve plugged them all into my fancy little nanny app after giving everything a proper weigh and measure. It’s certainly changed how I view a “serving” size… some for the better, but most for the worse. 

The most important thing I’ve learned in tracking everything, however, is that over time I’m found ways to continue eating a fair number of foods I enjoy. Not all of them, of course – a Chipotle burrito and a big slice of my home-made lasagna remain well out of bounds – but I’ve been able to start re-introducing some old favorites. 

For instance, I found that if I scale back hard on breakfast and lighten up a bit on dinner, I can manage to cram in a McRib value meal for lunch.

I know that doesn’t exactly sound like an accomplishment for some people. Hell, the European Union probably doesn’t even consider it food… but I’ve loved the damned thing since I was working the grill at my local McDonald’s way back in the late 1900s. Its arrival each fall is something of a minor personal celebration here.

Yes, the sandwich and fries are a touch high in calories and saturated fat, but not prohibitively so if I tweak the rest of the day’s menu. In my mind at least it’s something well worth doing if only as a reminder that at some point I’ll again exist in world of food beyond variations on baked chicken and brown rice. Sadly, I’ve had to replace the Orange Drink with a Diet Coke. I haven’t yet come up with an acceptable way to offset the calories in a fully loaded soda yet… but it’s a compromise I’m willing to make if it means I get to enjoy the rest.

I wish I could say this process has been some kind of life changing, electrifying wonder experience. The reality is, though, even as I begin slowly adding back foods with flavor, it’s been mostly drudgery. Necessary and probably long overdue drudgery, but none the less, not an experience I’ll spend a lot of time remembering fondly. 

I’ve still got miles to go as the poet said, but I’ve suffered though much longer than I figured I’d stick with it. The real question now that I’ve passed well beyond the halfway mark is how much longer I’ll manage to stick with fairly rigid self-denial. It’s not an activity I’ve ever been particularly well suited for and one that still feels decidedly unnatural. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Heartburn. You know what you should definitely throw at a guy who’s trying very hard to get his cardiac health improved? A sudden onset burst of god awful heartburn, that’s what. Because there’s no chance at all that would trigger 17 bloody flavors of panic and hundreds if not thousands of dollars in fun new medical tests and their corresponding bills. This week proudly continues 2023’s ongoing effort to be marked out as the worst of my 45 years… so far.

2. Samples. Well, the do it yourself stool sample package they sent me home with in hopes of ruling out a stomach ulcer and more or less confirming acid reflux has definitely unlocked a new level of disgust. It also reminded me that modern medical science is apparently not nearly as far away from reading entrails, casting bones, and balancing the humors as they like to think they are.

3. Fall yard work. It’s not so much that it’s a lot to do as it is that fall yard work is just bloody continuous. In the summer, I cut the grass once a week and trim every second week unless it’s growing unusually fast. In the fall, however, the minute I’ve finished mulching up leaves and blowing what can’t be mulched, the yard is every bit as covered as it was before I started. Yes, I know this was a self inflicted wound when I decided to live in the woods, but still it’s just a little bit maddening.

Around the eyes…

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I went for my annual eye exam on Friday. Wilmer was well organized, prompt, thorough, and personal. It was not cheap, but I was pleased with the Hopkins approach to eye care. I supposed that’ll just be where I go from now on.

I got a good report of no eye disease present… which is a nice change from the rest of this year’s medical appointments. I have, however, earned a bump up of my magnification that will hopefully make the evening reading a bit easier.

I really hadn’t planned on my blog becoming all medical all the time, but that feels like it’s been my theme for the last four months. Maybe eventually I’ll get back to bitching and complaining about normal day to day stuff, but it feels like today isn’t that day… and tomorrow isn’t looking so good either.

The second week of COVID…

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It’s the second week of COVID. The good news is that I seem to have avoided hospitalization or death. That’s absolutely a win.

The bad news is that I still largely feel like chewed dick. Yes, it’s absolutely a better grade of crud than I was enjoying at this time last week, but I’m still hacking, wheezing, sneezing, and generally sounding like a plague carrier. I’m not the kind of company you’d want to come take a seat at your dinner table. 

It’s a busy week at the office and I tried to be a good remote trooper today, but by noon all I could think about was closing my eyes and having a good rest. I hung in a while longer, but don’t expect I did myself or anyone else much good after that point.

I usually manage to power through these sicknesses. There’s no time for a man cold when there’s animals that need tending and a household to run. My brush with the Great Plague though, has been a pointed reminder that sometimes you’re going to slow down whether the spirit is willing or not. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Meds. One of the fun parts of being on the new blood pressure meds is that it puts most common decongestants on the embargoed list. If there was ever a motivation to get my weight down and off the prescription medication, it’s 100% so I can take a goddamned Sudafed and a shot of NyQuil instead of just raw dogging cold and flu season with hot beverages and an occasional spoonful of honey.

2. Covid. There’s been a time or two I’ve felt worse, but my week with Covid is definitely ranked. From the raging sore throat, to rivers of sinus drainage, to sleep no longer being a thing I do in any appreciable block of time, it’s just unpleasant. Add in the 36 hour saga of trying to get some antiviral meds and this third week of October is going in the books as a shit week of what has already been a shit year.

3. Protestant guilt. I’ve hoarded sick leave since the day I started working for our wealthy uncle. Last time I looked I’m sure I had something like 1800 or more hours of it on the books. So far this week I’ve taken 23 hours from that total. So why the good old fashioned Protestant guilt? Despite having more than enough in the bank, I know that my being out this week means there’s mostly been one guy doing what three of us were doing a month ago. I hate knowing he’s getting dicked over because I finally walked into the viral buzz saw. Admittedly, even if I were there I wouldn’t be capable of doing more than warming a seat while trying not to hack up my left lung. I hate that when I get my feet back under me there’s going to be a hellacious backlog of whatever came pouring into my mailbox this week. I feel badly about all of it… but I’m keeping in mind that sick leave is one of the more valuable components of my total compensation package and I’d feel even worse for not using it.

Thoughts at fifty down…

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The internet is chock full of sites about weight loss, exercise, and healthy eating. You don’t need to worry about this turning into one of them. Everyone wants to tell you about their “weight loss journey,” or how happy they are, or how it’s been the most wonderfully transformational experience of their life.

Yeah. I’m definitely not one of them.

As of late last week, I’m down 50 pounds. My reasons have nothing to do with looking better or giving much of a damn about having transformational experiences. My sole motivator is doing whatever is advisable to keep my heart from attempting to race out of my chest for no apparent reason while I’m sitting in the living room watching television on a random Wednesday night. Full stop. If we arrive at a final diagnosis that doesn’t include weight as a contributing factor, you can rest assured that I’ll go on a burrito, and cheesesteak, and lasagna eating binge the likes of which the world has never seen.

The simple truth is, I don’t feel any better. I don’t feel more energetic. I certainly don’t feel “transformed.” What I do feel is just about constantly hungry. I also feel mad as hell that recipes I spent 20 years perfecting are now in the ash heap because the “appropriate serving size to stay within your caloric goals” is a 2-inch by 2-inch square or 1/2 of a cup. 

If you happened to think my mood was a bit surly before, well, this new, lighter Jeff is just wandering around looking for a reason to pick a fight. 

Look, if you’re one of the people who gets thrilled and excited by this sort of thing, more power to you. I’m envious. For me, it’s more an experience to be endured while I ponder if what I’ve given up is worth the few extra unpromised miles I may or may not tag on the end of the trip. 

In time, maybe I’ll get to acceptance… but just now, I’m perfectly happy to sit here stoking the low-grade rage. 

Security blanket…

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For the last five weeks I’ve had an electronic security blanket. Far away, wherever Philips giant data center is located, computers monitored the output from their Mobile Cardiac Outpatient Telemetry (MCOT) devices, and their algorithm has been plugging along keeping a remote eye on my ticker. 

The only feedback this little wonder device gave me was that occasionally one of the leads came unstuck and needed to be reaffixed. I’ve just been operating under the assumption that if there was something catastrophic happening, someone might have called or cut the testing short. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but in the absence of clear guidance, I’ve created my own. 

I hate to admit it, but I felt just a little bit better with this little bit of plastic and silicon chips quietly doing its thing in the background.

The fact is, these last two months have been the only time in my adult life I’ve honestly been bothered by living alone. The only difference from June 28th to today is the fact that I now have evidence that something could go horribly wrong rather than simply knowing it as a purely intellectual exercise. That evidence is enough to leave me feeling decidedly uneasy now that my security blanket has gone away. 

Taken as a whole, the last two and a half months have been disconcerting in a way I’d haven’t previously encountered. I don’t know that there’s anything to be done about it other than to accept that I’ll now have a new nagging thought in the back of my head for the foreseeable future. Moving someone in just to make sure I haven’t accidentally dropped dead as I go about my day-to-day activities, feels like it’s probably a wildly excessive overreaction… but don’t think the thought and a hundred other derivative ideas haven’t been banging around my head this weekend. 

Anyway, I kind of miss my security blanket. 

Good news… it wasn’t a heart attack…

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There are, as you know, things that I don’t discuss on social media. It’s an old fashioned notion, even sharing as much as I do, that some things at least ought to remain private. I say that only to note that what follows is an incomplete telling of the tale. The salient points, however, are unmolested.

My trouble started on a Wednesday night. I wasn’t doing anything more dramatic than sitting in the living room watching TV after dinner. Out of nowhere, my heart revved up to a roaring gallop and stayed there. No pain. No trouble breathing. No light headedness. I’ve never understood what people meant when they said they experienced an impending feeling of doom. I do now though. All in, the trouble lasted maybe an hour or 90 minutes before it began subsiding.

After first trying to power through it and then consulting the family medical professional, I eventually conceded that it was probably something I needed to have checked out. Shortly thereafter, I was being given the once over at the local emergency department, where they quickly ruled out a heart attack and monitored me for four hours before sending me on my way.

The next night, same time, same place, same experience. Well, not quite. It wasn’t as bad and didn’t last as long. It was still deeply disturbing and I spent the rest of the night felling like absolute trash.

By Friday morning, I still felt decidedly “off,” for lack of a better description. I later described it as feeling like someone had filled my head with wool and then pressurized it. I knew if I called for emergency services they’d just dump me back where I had been on Wednesday night. That wasn’t an especially comforting thought.

Whether it was entirely advisable or not, I drove myself over to the “main campus” facility of the local hospital system. After many of the same tests given to me two days earlier, but finally having met with two cardiologists, they confirmed that I wasn’t having and didn’t have a heart attack. Their most likely diagnosis was supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) – essentially a (probably) not life-threatening electrical problem in one of the upper chambers of my heart that can cause an erratic heartbeat.

They prescribed some new meds to slow my heart rate and scheduled me in for a proper cardiology appointment after which I assume we’ll start the full battery of diagnostic tests and determine a long-term treatment plan. My first proper cardiology appointment is later this week. 

I haven’t had any more incidents, but I spent the better part of a week feeling entirely wrung out. If it wasn’t for needing to feed the herd, it’s hard to say how little I’d have forced myself up off the couch. All told it was every bit of two weeks before my head stopped feeling wooly and I was able to concentrate for any length of time. Even the meds they gave me as a temporary expedient aren’t entirely benign. Over the last week or so a couple of side effects have gotten more pronounced and working with the medicos to get that dialed in has been significantly less than fun.

Look, I’m thrilled that the diagnosis is “not a heart attack,” but going into the second month of feeling like warm trash isn’t exactly the summer adventure I envisioned for 2023. I’ll know soon enough if this week marks the end of the beginning or if just kicks us right back to go. Given the abuse I’ve hurled at my body for 45 years, I should probably be impressed that it’s just now starting to seriously object. I only wish the good times would last a little longer. That not being the case, we’ll just have to play the ball from where it lies.

An entirely unplanned month of down time…

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Some of you may have noticed that I basically took the entire month of July away from posting here. I didn’t exactly give up writing – my proverbial cup of post it notes and electronic memory aids runneth over. Whether anything will eventually become of those snippets remains to be determined.

When I started off this self-imposed sabbatical, I was wading through a health issue that left me decidedly unmotivated and challenged my ability to string together any kind of coherent paragraph. My attention span for a couple of weeks was just about nil. I doubt I could have written well with either a proverbial or literal gun to my head. Instead of forcing the issue and inevitably being frustrated by the results, I opted to just not.

What I wasn’t going to do here was half ass my way through it. That’s the kind of thing you reserve for writing you have to do – like in the office. It’s not the way you treat a blog you’ve been tinkering around with for well over a decade. If I couldn’t give it a fair shake, I’d much rather just bide my time until I was in a better and more editorially competent head space. 

There are still days when I feel I’ve mostly got cotton between my ears, but I’m happy to say that I do seem to be over the initial hump. I’ll give you a bit more information on that next time, but for now suffice to say that I’m feeling mostly like myself again. More importantly, I feel like the words aren’t a constant struggle to get down on the page.

Back in early July, when I made the decision to take a pause, I was afraid I’d miss the day-to-day rhythm of these posts. I missed the writing to be sure, but it turns out I didn’t miss the self-imposed daily deadlines. Knowing that, I’m taking the daily deadlines off the table for the time being and intentionally scaling back from five posts a week to a more manageable schedule of posting on Monday and Thursday (with the inevitable extra thrown in when the mood or breaking news begs for something more immediate). 

I’ll be keeping What Annoys Jeff This Week? as a regular Thursday feature. Monday’s post will be the usual wide-ranging sort, but hopefully will make use of the extra time to flesh out ideas a little more fully and exert some additional editorial control over the final products. As time and other circumstances allow, I fully expect to bring more days back into the schedule over the coming months. For now, I want to use this as an opportunity to focus on improving quality versus simply hitting quantity goals.

So, as we prepare to slip into August, I’m pleased to be back and eager to begin once again dispensing full-throated snark into the void.

Better than buying magic beans (probably)…

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Having cut my teeth with a cat who was essentially a small dog, I obviously missed some of the fine points of raising felines. After losing Hershel to a urinary blockage, my slightly obsessed tendency towards doing extracurricular reading and knowing things let me down a number of intellectual rabbit holes. One of those research projects led me to discover that most domestic cats tend not to drink enough and hover constantly near a state of dehydration. It explains at least some of what makes male cats so damned prone to urinary tract issues.

Knowing something, having the information, is only worthwhile when it leads to improved decision making, I’d always kept Hershel on high quality dry food. While that most likely wasn’t the outright cause of his demise, it could easily be a contributing factor – and something I’d done unwittingly because at the time I lacked better information.

Now, with a bit of upgraded knowledge, Anya and Cordelia have their own filtered water fountain as well as access to the other strategically placed water bowls around the house. I’ve also opted to augment their kibble with twice daily wet food. They seem to enjoy it and the extra moisture is supposedly to their advantage. Aside from what feels like an absurd price for big boxes filled with three ounce cans, I’m reasonably satisfied it’s better for them overall than the way I use to do things. I will, however, refrain from naming specific brands here because the internet is an utter shitshow of people who want to dive in and criticize every choice and brand if it’s not precisely how and what they do themselves. That’s mess enough on Reddit that I won’t invite the same kind of engagement here.

In any case, the gang is eating and appears to be performing all other bodily functions normally so if nothing else, this change in process meets the baseline standard of doing no harm. I may never know if going over and beyond very basic feeding and watering makes a difference. If it does, that’s terrific and I’ve bought Anya and Cordy a marginally improved quality of life. If it doesn’t, I’m only out some money… and I’d have probably just pissed that away on magic beans or something anyway.