Tag: health

Self-evident

It’s humbling to think about how little I know, and disturbing to ponder how much I’ve learned and forgotten, or how often I learned, retained, and applied wrong information.

The information was sometimes wrong because we thought that’s how things worked back when we learned it. Then, later, you discovered, “Oh, shit, that works for everyone else, but it doesn’t work for me.”

Yes, this is another Big Lie rant. The Big Lie is that we’re all the same. Eat these foods, gain these nutrients, do these exercises, and you should be good to go.

Yeah, they then admit — you know they, the great aggregate of society, social media, medical professions, governments, you know, they — well, they admit, there are some exceptions. Like, you may be diabetic because your body rejects the insulin it makes. So you’re like, whaat?

Maybe you’re allergic to things. Or you may have problems because your body doesn’t process certain vitamins and minerals well, rejecting them. Maybe you hear things different. Perhaps you hear shapes, or you taste something because you hear a sound.

Whacked, right?

I grew up learning that people that talked to themselves were most likely not right in the head in some way. Now we’ve learned, no, they’re probably fine. Their personality is different from your personality. Conversely, telling me to come out of my shell and socialize more works on the assumption that I’ve made a choice to stay in my shell and not socialize, and not because of the components at work inside me.

Not all people we called slow were slow thinkers, but they didn’t benefit from the learning environment. Too bad for them, back then, because we didn’t know.

We keep learning that there’s a lot that we don’t know, and that what we thought we knew and pushed as truth was wrong. This was sometimes done deliberately to further someone’s wealth — remember how they told us for years that smoking cigarettes aren’t bad? — or to achieve a political advantage.

That takes me to food shopping. Oh, lawdy. I’ve decided to cut down on processed foods and reduce my sugar intake, so I’m reading labels more intently than before. A correlation often exists; if a food is low-fat or non-fat, it’ll be loaded with sugar. If it’s sugar-free, it has a lot of fat.

They say — now — that supplementing your diet with vitamins and minerals probably doesn’t do anything for you, if you’re healthy. You really can’t tell that from the advertising and commercials that abound, can you?

If you’re not healthy, too much of one mineral or vitamin can cause greater problems. All this comes with that caveat, for some people. You need to learn early that you may be some people. You learn by observing your body and reactions to different inputs, studying those differences, and consulting experts when necessary.

And these deficiencies can have profound effects. Constipated, tired, and depressed? You might have a potassium deficiency. Or something else. Just saying.

Consulting experts — or the Internet — doesn’t always work out. Some experts dismiss study results. Reasons vary for why they dismiss the results, or skew them. It could be from ignorance, religion, or false information that they acquired. It could be because they’re being paid to dismiss the evidence, or they’re pathological liars, or protecting someone or something else. This spectrum about why is as broad as humanity.

Even when you find your flaws and shortcomings and address your patterns to cope, it ain’t over. Your body and brain, and our society, are dynamic. Our body is changing, sometimes from aging, sometimes from abuse. Sometimes, it’s just a slow shift because of habits.

As a society, we’re always learning new information, or revealing old frauds, or finding something new about the human body. Our food security gets exposed in unimaginable ways. Consider from this week:

Cocaine in shrimp

Cocaine in salmon

Blood absorbs sunscreens

In each case, these findings surprised scientists and investigators because it wasn’t expected. The sunscreen lotions were most interesting to me. They’ve been around back to a time before governments, industries, or individuals worried about the active ingredients in sunscreens, so they were never tested. That was partly propagated by the good ol’ common sense approach that sunscreen is rubbed on your skin; how the heck would it get into your blood? (That’s typically followed by mocking chortles because doesn’t that seem so self-evident?)

Yeah, there’s a lot that isn’t self-evident, isn’t there?

3

May I Continue?

Well, writers, musicians, artists, poets, essayists, and novelists, we made it to May. Sometimes, in Feb. and March, May seemed like an impossible goal. But we kept going, didn’t we? Sure, there were a few stumbles. New bruises and injuries were acquired, but here we are again.

March and April were good, and not good for me. That’s how life often seems, though, doesn’t it? One area is going great and another area collapses like a calving glacier. My setbacks were in health. First, there was a long time where I had a severe cold. It seemed to be touring my body. Just when I thought it’d done it’s farewell show, the tour would begin again.

Next, whatever steers these things enlarged my prostate and shut down my bladder. It wasn’t a joyous experience but I survived. I’m fortunate to be financially comfortable and have health insurance. Besides being painful, uncomfortable, and inconvenient for a while, the issues meant that coffee, caffeine, chocolates and alcohol needed to be sliced back. I allow myself one cup of coffee a day. Drinking it centers around my writing. I used to drink a glass of red wine each night; no more. I haven’t had chocolate in weeks. I still have a beer once or twice a week. I last had one a week ago. I going back to the doctor in a month to see if surgery is required, or what.

Many writing days were lost in March and April. I’m surprised to discover that the novel I began writing in January is eighty-eight thousand words, three hundred forty-five Word pages, and almost finished. I thought, how did that happen? I guess it demonstrates the power of just sitting down and pushing. I didn’t write for five straight days in March, although I tried. I stopped posting my goofy little things for a few days, too.

When I read the work-in-progress that I’ve written, I enjoy it. Then I read someone else’s novel and fall into dejection because my novel is a piece of crap in comparison. Then I read my work-in-progress again, and think, no, this works.  It reminds me of George Jetson. Know him? He’s a fictional character in the animated cartoon series, The Jetsons. When the show ends and the credits run, George is walking the dog on a conveyor belt. The cat jumps on, and the dog begins chasing the cat. As the belt goes faster and faster, George falls down, and the cat and dog jump off to watch as George haplessly goes round and round, shouting, “Help. Jane, get me off this crazy thing.”

That’s how I sometimes feel with my writing efforts.

My exercise practices took a hit with my illnesses. Some days, my walking dropped to two and a half weary miles a day. Weekly totals plummeted to thirty-two miles. I gained eight pounds.

I’ve lost five of those pounds. The weekly totals of miles per week are back up into the mid-fifties. I recorded ten miles yesterday for the first time since the end of February. So, I’m making progress, and will cling to that.

That’s my recap. I hope you guys are all doing well, making progress, and not going insane or becoming depressed. Thanks for reading.

Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

Cheers

 

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Floophet

Floophet (floofinition) – a housepet gifted with abilities to foretell the future.

In use: “The Dalmatian floophet always knew someone had arrived before others, and divined if they were a stranger before they reached the door, announcing the differences with unique barks, but she also knew when someone was becoming sick, even before they knew, immediately comforting and treating them with gentle tongue licks and a constant presence.”

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Dandelions

I was eating some dandelions the other day. It wasn’t quite a whim. It’d begun with yard work.

We have lawns. We don’t pesticides or fertilizers on them, except some fertilizer from our compost barrels. We compost a lot of kitchen waste.

I used to pull the weeds from my lawn. We stopped doing that as we read about the bee decline and witnessed how the bees enjoyed our dandelions. Butterflies, too. But, for fire reasons, we cut the grass back to four inches high. That height also protects the roots so watering the lawn isn’t required often. In the even of drought or water shortages, of course, the first thing I do to save water is to stop watering the grass.

While I was doing the back yard cutting the other day, I was taking stock of all the dandelions we had. I knew that people used to eat dandelions as part of a basic diet and wondered about dandelions’ health impact and their taste. To the Google! Sites claim that dandelions are tremendously healthy. Here’s an excerpt from Nutrition-and-You.com:

  • Certain chemical compounds in fresh dandelion greens, flower tops, and roots are known to have antioxidant, disease preventing, and health promoting properties.
  • Fresh dandelion leaves carry 10,161 IU of vitamin-A per 100 g (about 338% of daily recommended intake), one of the highest source of vitamin-A among culinary herbs. Vitamin-A is an essential fat-soluble vitamin and antioxidant, required for maintaining healthy mucosa and skin.
  • Its leaves packed with numerous health benefiting flavonoids such as carotene-ß, carotene-α, lutein, cryptoxanthin, and zeaxanthin. Consumption of natural foods rich in vitamin-A and flavonoids (carotenes) help the human body protect from lung and oral cavity cancers. Zeaxanthin supposed to possess photo-filtering functions and therefore, may help protect the retina from harmful UV rays.
  • The herb is an ideal source of minerals like potassium, calcium, manganese, iron, and magnesium. Potassium is an important component of cell and body fluids which helps regulate heart rate and blood pressure. Iron is essential for red blood cell production.The human body uses manganese as a co-factor for the antioxidant enzyme, superoxide dismutase.
  • It is also rich in many vital vitamins including folic acid, riboflavin, pyridoxine, niacin, vitamin-E and vitamin-C that are essential for optimum health. Vitamin-C is a powerful natural antioxidant. Dandelion greens provide 58% of daily recommended levels of vitamin-C.
  • Dandelion is probably the richest herbal sources of vitamin-K; provides about 650% of DRI. Vitamin-K has a potential role in bone strengthening by promoting osteoblastic activity in the bones. It also has established role in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease patients by limiting neuronal damage in the brain.

Sounds impressive. Curious about how they taste, I went out in the morning, harvested some fresh dandelions from the yard, and chowed down on the raw leaves and flowers.

Turns out that they taste like mildly-bitter Romaine lettuce to me. Super, I thought. I liked being able to eat it because. It’s a great added bonus to helping the bees, and it helps reduce our yard waste. I guess I have a new pastime this year, harvesting dandelions and trying new recipes. Bet they’d be pretty tasty on a grilled pizza.

I’ll let you know.

7

Wobble Like Crazy

I’m back in the writing space following some unpleasant medical issues. In the last three days, I’ve averaged two thousand words each. It’s delicious to feel like I’m moving forward, no matter how word counts fall upon the writing spectrum in regards to their importance. I didn’t plan any word counts but they’re proof of something happening, a minor validation that I’ve been doing more than daydreaming.

After some arguing with the muses, me interrogating them to explain every thread, decision, and insight, and them laughing at me, I followed their instructions to, “Just write.” Some of the writing could be permanent but some of it might be delicately sculpted away or blown away with heavy explosives. Doesn’t matter. What I’ve written before during other writing projects may not help me this time. Each time that I write another novel, it’s a new adventure in learning how to be a better writer. I must write to have the material to shape, an interesting cycle. Write, edit, write, re-write, write, revise…where am I?

Well, I’m on the novel-writing spectrum. I slide along, following paths, retracing, forging new paths, falling off cliffs, and climbing back up. So it goes until there’s finally enough coherency for a novel to take shape, and then, finally, enough satisfying story in a reasonable order arrives, and then, at last, I pick a place where it can be comfortably ended with reasonable reward for readers who ventured through my thicket of words.

Can you say run-on?

I’m permitted a cup of coffee a day. I apply my allowance to my writing.

Illness is depressing, not because I have it, but because of its limitations. Bending down to pick up a piece of paper, scratch a cat’s chin, or put on my shoes and socks is slow and tedious and brings a measure of stinging discomfort. Walking remains uncomfortable and difficult, but not impossible. Of course, I have a history of rushing the healing processes. Press on, regardless, right? When I had a broken neck on Okinawa and wore a halo device, I pushed to go back to work and ended up dislodging that metal mother twice, sending me back into hospital. Anyway, I wobble around at a slow and careful pace, watching the ground to find the threads and seeds that the muses leave, then trying to parse their guidance.

Yeah, just write, baby. Stop critiquing, doubting, wondering, fearing, worrying, and questioning. Just get ‘er done. Pitter-patter.

Done writing like crazy for at least one more day. Sloshy, my drain-collection bag resting against my calf, is filled. Time to wobble on and empty him.

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A Modified Process

I live now with a catheter in my bladder, draining my urine into a bag that I drain several times a day. I have a night bag and a leg bag. The holding bags and their tubes offer their own challenges about swapping and draining them. Given the catheter’s retention location on my upper thigh, it also makes bowel movements an interesting exercise. Bending and walking are also problematic.

Getting the catheter in was an experience. Living with it is another. Having it helps me respect the medical events and treatments that people endure. I’ve had it good as such things go. Although they sound like they’re something — broken and displaced wrist, broken neck, stitches in my skull, ear lobe stitched back on, hernia, toe-tip cut off by a lawnmower, bronchitis, mono, broken ankles, broken teeth, etc. — they’re small things in the greater order of existence and endurance. Better, they’re temporary, with end dates.

Our warfare kills on large, constant scales, and the warfare results in people without limbs, scarred by burns, and shattered by trauma. Many people endure chronic or terminal diseases, relentless illnesses that erode their strength and energy, chipping away from who they were and what they could do, haunting them until they’re dead. Others are abused and betrayed, resulting in destroyed mental and emotional faculties. Others are born with handicaps and genetic deficiencies. I’m fortunate. My afflictions are short-lived and allow me to observe and learn from them.

This catheter is expected to be in me seven to ten days. It impacts my writing process because I can’t walk as I’ve done for lo these several years. Yet, I have to write. I must find a way to sit down and put words into the computer. I’ve not written in four days. The need doesn’t go away. It builds as the muses feed ideas that I explore. Scenes explode into my mindscape. Dialogue is heard.

I originally developed the write and walk process to enable my writing efforts in my military career’s final year. I expanded on it when I was working for startups, and then for Tyco and IBM, the companies that swallowed the startups, carving out time for myself and putting writing as a higher priority in my daily to-do list. I needed a process to remove me from sales, marketing, and product development, and put me in a frame of thinking to create fiction.

A new process is needed because the dream and desire to write remains. Got my hot tea. I’m in my home office. A cat is snoring nearby. Another is asleep on my feet. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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Personal Daily News

Awoke at two in the morning with some issues with urinating, went to the hospital at seven, was referred to another hospital at nine, and was discharged and home with catheter in my bladder by one fifteen.

When I awoke at two, I was thirsty. Had a drink and a pee. The pee was problematic because it was a tiny trickle. Drank more water shortly after that, and entered a prolong state of tiny trickles and increasing pain. The pain was in my lower back, flank, and groin, and shut down my ability to sit or stand in comfort. I headed to the hospital with my wife shortly before seven.

Once there, I went into emergency care. I stripped naked, put on a backless hospital, and introduced to a bed. A bladder scan showed my bladder holding eight hundred plus CCs. A full bladder is about one hundred CCs.

My blood pressure was two-thirty over something. A pain med was injected into my right ass cheek by my hip, and an anti-nausea med was given. Attempts were made to enter my bladder with a catheter. First, a size sixteen was employed. It was painful having a catheter pushed up my urethra through my penis. Everyone kept telling me, “Breathe through it.” My wife said, “Pretend you’re giving birth.”

The med team met a wall which appeared to be an enraged prostate gland. The sixteen wouldn’t go into the bladder, but I pissed out a bunch during the attempt. A new bladder scan showed I was down to six hundred CCs. Between that reduction and the pain meds, I was comfortable, and my BP was down to 180/130.

With a numbing agent first injected into my urethra, another attempt using a smaller catheter was made, and failed, and resulted in some bleeding from my penis. The fourteen size catheter lacked the strength and rigidity necessary to reach the bladder. Consulting me, they decided to try another sixteen. This time, a doctor would try. After having the same results, a call was made to a urologist at a sister facility and a transfer referral to the other hospital’s emergency room was issued. I then puked several times. More anti-nausea meds were given via an IV. I was discharged forty-five minutes later.

It was a ginger walk back to the car.

I’d been warned to keep my eyes closed during the thirteen mile drive to avoid nausea. I ended up retching five times once I was in the next emergency room. My stomach didn’t have material to puke.

One again, I was led to a room, took everything off, and put on a backless gown. A new bladder scan showed I was down to five hundred eighty-three CCs of urine in my bladder, but I wasn’t having any pain, thanks to the meds. BP was lower. A new attempt to reach my bladder was attempted. This time we went up to a twenty. Yowza, that hurt. It failed, but more urine was drained out. Hurrah. A urologist arrived with a plan to put a camera up my urethra to see what was going on and determine why they couldn’t reach my bladder.

I was given Fentanyl. The plan was a long, messy, and painful effort, but attempt number five worked in the end. A guide wire was introduced. The guide wire managed to reach the bladder. With it and the camera in place, a catheter was inserted. At last, my bladder was emptied. After that, a nurse gave me my new tube and bag with instructions on how to use it. I was given a cloth to clean up and then dressed. As before, my bed and garments were soaked.

That was my morning and early afternoon. Back home, I tested my movement limits while my wife made me a small meal of scrambled eggs with toast. We joked about how little my poor pecker had looked during these procedures, and how many strangers had handled it that day. I drank twelve ounces of water, ate, and then explored my new catheter and bag arrangement. Some fluid was in my bag, but more was in my tube. Gravity wasn’t letting it empty into the bag. Removing the bag and tube and examining it, I realized it the bag was reversed, which pinched off the receiving end. I fixed that, and now have a steady flow going into the bag.

Through it all, my med team were professionals and polite. They communicated with me about everything, constantly apologized for my pain, and checked on me. Most supporting and powerful, though, was my wife. She made a huge difference by being there with me throughout the day, talking to me, holding my hand when possible, or rubbing my feet.

All this curtailed any writing and walking efforts today. That’s the downside. The upside is that I’m not in any pain, although there’s a small pain where the catheter is in my bladder and bending over and walking have their difficulties. I should have this out in ten days, and then will proceed with addressing the prostate issue.

5

Less than Six Degrees

They — you know who they are — are always talking about how closely we’re connected. Here’s close for you. You cough from your chest, spewing out air, phlegm, and sputum, and at the same time, you fart, and a little urine squirts out of your urethra.

That’s connected.

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“This coffee tastes like piss.”

I wonder, as many probably do, how my piss tastes. I also pondered whether I’d ever eaten my boogers as a child. Mom has never mentioned it, but many children do, and I was a child who did a lot of things because I was curious.

I’m not sure how I feel about eating baby feces.

This isn’t a gross-out post. Honestly. Perhaps it is, from your point of view. That’s why I bring it up, not to gross you out, but to bring the subjects into the light.

The three subjects, tasting urine, eating boogers, and eating baby poop, are part of a larger subject, the human body, and trends. Thinking about them came from conversations and reading. I finished reading An Instance of the Fingerpost this week. Book One is about a doctor. He mentions tasting people’s urine as part of the examination process in the sixteen hundreds. Yes, I remember from other reading, doctors tasted urine when they were examining patients long before the sixteen hundreds.

I don’t think many doctors do that these days. Most people are probably horrified about it, but I dipped my finger into my stream this morning and gave it a lick. I thought, why not? I’ve tasted my blood, sweat, and tears before, because I wanted to know how they tasted, so why not my pee?

I have ideas about how urine should taste, based on statements like, “This coffee tastes like piss.” I’ve read a few things about it, and we’d discussed it once while talking about survival training. Today’s piss reminded me of a bitters beer. I don’t know if that’s normal. An ongoing cold and head congestion are sabotaging my taste experience this week.

That done, I turned to the question of eating boogers. A friend, talking about his grand-daughter, mentioned that she often picked her nose and not infrequently ingested her boogers. Another friend present, a retired doctor, talked about that and said that some booger eating can be beneficial.

That second person is also the one that talked about eating baby feces. He and I had read about probiotics in infants’ fecal matter, and he’d read other periodicals about how a small amount of baby poop could be therapeutic restoring digestive systems. I pondered what kind of beer or wine would go with baby poop.

Well, I didn’t eat a booger, and I haven’t sampled baby feces yet, that I know. Tasting my piss was my step forward today.

 

4

Another Complaint

I’m one of those people who look into the hankie or tissue after I blow my nose.

Apparently, this offends or horrifies some people. The very idea of blowing their nose seems terrible, terrible, to them.

I’m surprised. That stuff coming out of my nose offers clues about what’s going on inside my body. As often as my body frustrates me with its secrets, I need to do everything I can to find clues about what it’s up to.

It’s the same thing about having a bowel movement and checking out what’s in the can afterward, but I won’t go there. I can already imagine the horror spreading across the net. Then there’s menstruation, which I’m sure has many crying, “Enough!” I don’t menstruate but I’ve learned from my wife that menstruating can offer a lot of clues to what’s going on inside.

Admittedly, I had a hard time considering it when she was menstruating. Yes, it was blood, and that was part of it, and it’s coming out of her was another part of it, and from that body part contributed to my initial discomfort and revulsion. Then I started thinking, why did I react like that?

We really need to re-think how we socialize ourselves about our bodies and its processes. Some steps have been made. Everybody Poops has been out for years. Period. End of Sentence., a film about menstruation, won an Oscar this year. So, yes, progress is evident, but we’ve got a long way to go.

Next: “Let’s Talk About Farting”

 

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