True to my word, I radically changed my diet. Out were all dairy, red meat, pork and a great deal of the salt I'd been eating. In were fiber-rich fruits, veggies, grains, plus Egg Beaters, turkey sausage, chicken and fish for protein. My theory was that the the weight, cholesterol and blood pressure would drop in dramatic levels with those fatty and caloric restrictions. And the weight did drop. Kind of. A little bit. Not exactly dramatically, but gradually, to the tune of about a pound a week. It still galled me that I'm not even 40 and am already having to take old man pills, but if it would keep me out of the cardiac ward I figured it was worth it.
Unfortunately, the blood pressure didn't seem to give a wet crap what I did or didn't eat. After three weeks on the new regime, I asked the wife to test my BP and it was still through the roof. We called it in to Dr. Ralph, who then put me on Lisinopril, an ace inhibitor and the eventual source of my hacking cough.
I stuck to this diet for three months, with only one or two breaks for a cheeseburger or pizza the whole time. I was proud, though not precisely enjoying myself, but it was still a doable thing. My next checkup was in November. To my and Dr. Ralph's delight, my blood pressure and cholesterol had not only returned to normal levels, but had dropped to enviable levels. He was astounded that I'd been able to make such great strides. Not astounded enough that he wanted to immediately drop all meds, but astounded. I agreed to stay on my meds for another three months and immediately went and ate a massive bacon, egg, cheese and potato biscuit for lunch to celebrate my good fortune.
Jump ahead to December, during my coughing fits and the wife pronouncement of
"Ohhhh! You have an ace cough." Such fits, she explained, were one of the possible side effects of Lysinopril in a small percentage of its users. The onset of my ace cough had just been unfortunately timed with a cold so its cause was masked. She advised me to drop that med and see if the cough went away. After all, my blood pressure had been great at my last visit so I should be fine. What I didn't realize was that it takes a couple of weeks for the ace cough symptoms to go away, so dropping Lysinopril was not an immediate fix. I continued to hack and wheeze well into the new year and had only ceased the fits for a handful of weeks before my next appointment with Dr. Ralph.
It was around this time, in January, that our video game situation took a major turn as well. Since Thanksgiving, I'd been looking into gaming systems and was still pretty well convinced the PS3 was the way I wanted to go. But I also hate paying retail for anything. I kept waiting for some kind of massive PS3 sale online, but none seemed forthcoming. (This was before I learned how much crackdown Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have on retailers who discount their systems.) And to paraphrase a line from my all time favorite film, Raising Arizona, soon I even found myself driving by Gamestops that weren't on the way home. At the wife's suggestion, one day, I even went into one and had a look around--just browsing, mind. If it had been up to me, we would probably have just browsed and left, but the wife knows me better than I admit to knowing myself, and after having a look at some of the games there and talking to the manager, she said, "Oh, just get one, already!"
As I said, the Play Station 3 is the first game console I've owned since the Atari 2600. As great as my expectations for the machine were, the PS3 surpassed them by a good distance. It's one thing to know that the PS3 is capable of syncing up to your wireless network and streaming Netflix, but my experience with home theater appliances being able to do that has been limited to our LG Bluray player, which can't hold a wireless connection for any useful amount of time and causes one to spend most of one's viewing time constantly doing pushbutton wireless connection for it. (In fact, we went without Netflix streaming for around 6 months because the LG refused to behave and I'd been unable to convince it otherwise after an entire afternoon spent trying to do so.) I expected that sort of hassle from the PS3 but I did not get it. It took one login to the network and that sucker has run smooth ever since. And the Netflix streaming software it runs is leagues better than LG's, not to mention it's a Bluray player to start with. In fact, if our LG Bluray player ever sees power again, it'll be because it's hooked to a different TV altogether--possibly in someone else's house.
And, of course, there's the gaming aspect of it. Of course, I loaded up with the Half-Life Orange Box, so I can play through the last few Half Life episodes. But it also came with Portal, which I like almost more than Half Life. The wife picked up Oblivion, too, but has spent more time playing Infamous--a more modern day RPG style game. However, the game that has charmed us more than any other thus far has been Little Big Planet. I adore any game where I can customize things to suit my wishes and LBP has that going for it by the bucketful. We've not done a lot of game buying and most of it has been from the used game section of Gamestop, but we really like the system. And the cool thing about being so behind in the gaming world is that there are SO many now classic games for us to catch up on.
Meanwhile, I had my third visit with Dr. Ralph a couple weeks back. My blood pressure was still good, but my occasional dalliances with bacon and cheese since my last visit have lingered in my system, for my cholesterol had risen above recommended levels again. It's still not at the boo scary level it had been, but it was enough that Dr. Ralph upped my intake of Crestor to 10 mg a day. Which, I guess, means for the time being I'm still a slave to big pharm. And big turkey.
Showing posts with label Soul Coughing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soul Coughing. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
TFTLM: Got Them Soul Coughing Video Game Addict Blues (Part 4)
Before the wife finished with the old company, I decided to take what advantage I had left of our job insurance and get my eyes checked. So on a Tuesday in August, I went for my eye exam at the same place I once swore I'd never set foot in again. The only reason I was going back on my vow and allowing my foot to land upon their floor again was because that office had done my wife a good turn a couple months back by seeing her after hours and with no appointment after a different optometrist flaked on the appointment my wife had made with her. Such good turns should be rewarded, I figured, so I gave them a second chance. And for my second chance, they did me a good turn.
The exam went well, I was seen quickly, initial testing done, eyes were dilated and while that was kicking in I was sent up to browse frames. I'd already decided that I would just stick with my current drill-mount rimless frames, as they've held up amazingly well despite repeated dog attacks. I expected the lady in the frames section (a different lady than Liz, though she's still around), to give me a hard sell on a new pair, but after asking me to put my regular frames back on my head, she agreed that they were the right style for my face and looked good, so there was no need for any change. Sweet. Only after I was ushered back into the chair did problems occur--not on the part of the office staff, but on the part of my eyes.
I began to suspect something might be amiss when the doctor spent a good five minutes examining the interior of my eyes. When he finished, he looked a bit concerned and asked if I'd had any problems with high blood pressure.
"Not that I know of," I said.
"Have you had your cholesterol checked recently?" he asked.
"No."
"Hmm," he said. He went on to explain that while there might not be a huge cause for worry just yet, there had been some definite change in the vessels within my eyes in the past year of the kind that wouldn't normally occur in a healthy individual. Arterial venous nicking, it's called. He recommended I see a doctor.
Now, I'll be first to admit that I've not exactly been in fantastic shape in the past year. I exercise every day, whether it's going to the gym or walking the dogs through our hillyass neighborhood, but my exercise regimen could not be described as rigorous. I can still make it up our gravity hill driveway with no breathing problems at all, but I don't spend a great deal of time on intense cardio otherwise.
So in I went to see Dr. Ralph, my wife's partner at her old clinic. Blood was tested and the results tallied. Not only did I have extremely high cholesterol, but it had tag-teamed with high blood pressure to put me in a very sorry state. I was instantly insulted that my own body had turned against me. I was also dead set against taking medication for it, because it was my firm believe that I could tackle the problem by adjusting my diet. The way I saw it, I'd practically been existing on bacon and cheese and bacon-wrapped cheese for months. Surely if I dropped red meat, pork and dairy from my diet, everything would even back out and then I could reintroduce my favorites slowly. I mentioned this plan to Dr. Ralph and he agreed that it was solid enough, but suggested we try me out on a daily intake of 5 mg of Crestor as a backup and try and lose some weight. According to him, for my height I was ideally supposed to weigh 165. I explained that I hadn't weighed that since probably the 8th grade and that even at my thinnest in college I had only gotten down to 175 before falling off the cheese wagon. I haven't seen the underside of 200 since then, though I came within sight of it a couple of times. But if I put my mind to it, I could stick to a dietary program with little problem. He told me to do that and if the blood pressure didn't come down some, he'd put me on lisinopril to help out. If everything came down with Crestor and diet, we could talk about ditching meds altogether. His point to me was that these conditions were likely inherited, as evidenced by my Papaw, who was thinner than Kate Beckinsale and had 3 heart attacks before one finally got the upper hand on him. For folks who had genetics going against them, AND were fatasses like myself, drugs such as Crestor were tools to even the odds. This made sense, so grudgingly I agreed.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
So in I went to see Dr. Ralph, my wife's partner at her old clinic. Blood was tested and the results tallied. Not only did I have extremely high cholesterol, but it had tag-teamed with high blood pressure to put me in a very sorry state. I was instantly insulted that my own body had turned against me. I was also dead set against taking medication for it, because it was my firm believe that I could tackle the problem by adjusting my diet. The way I saw it, I'd practically been existing on bacon and cheese and bacon-wrapped cheese for months. Surely if I dropped red meat, pork and dairy from my diet, everything would even back out and then I could reintroduce my favorites slowly. I mentioned this plan to Dr. Ralph and he agreed that it was solid enough, but suggested we try me out on a daily intake of 5 mg of Crestor as a backup and try and lose some weight. According to him, for my height I was ideally supposed to weigh 165. I explained that I hadn't weighed that since probably the 8th grade and that even at my thinnest in college I had only gotten down to 175 before falling off the cheese wagon. I haven't seen the underside of 200 since then, though I came within sight of it a couple of times. But if I put my mind to it, I could stick to a dietary program with little problem. He told me to do that and if the blood pressure didn't come down some, he'd put me on lisinopril to help out. If everything came down with Crestor and diet, we could talk about ditching meds altogether. His point to me was that these conditions were likely inherited, as evidenced by my Papaw, who was thinner than Kate Beckinsale and had 3 heart attacks before one finally got the upper hand on him. For folks who had genetics going against them, AND were fatasses like myself, drugs such as Crestor were tools to even the odds. This made sense, so grudgingly I agreed.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Monday, February 28, 2011
TFTLM: Got Them Soul Coughing Video Game Addict Blues (Part 3)
It took several more weeks, but with diligent work and treatment the wife eventually did get over her pneumonia. The first couple of weeks back at work, she had to stop and take breathing treatments throughout the day, but her strength was returning. Meanwhile, she was enjoying Elder Scrolls for the PC.
And as for my cold, I got over it, too. At least, mostly. The odd thing about that, though, is that while my major snot-based cold symptoms diminished, the hacking cough never quite went away. It wasn't a constant irritant, but at least once a day I would be hit by the same violent tickle in the back of my throat and would then be sent into a fit of dry hacking coughs that had little to no effect on alleviating the tickle. The only successful ways I found to combat the tickle were gargling with salt water (which only worked half the time), using a Neti pot (or "Drowny pot" as I call it) to irrigate my sinus passages, or sucking on a lozenge. Usually these coughing attacks would happen in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, the coughing was so violent that I began to feel like a Little Big Planet sack person whose stitches were coming loose--just to bring things back to video games.
Toward the end of December, I began asking Dr. Wife what was up with this. The trouble with having a doctor for a wife, though, is that by the time she comes home she's fed up with having to deal with sick people and doesn't want to hear it. Her typical response to any medical questions from me becomes something akin to "I don't know. What are you asking me for?" After the cough continued for another week and a half, though, she suddenly realized the answer.
"Ohhhh! You have an ace cough."
"Do whuuut?" I said.
Let me back up.
One of the major things that's happened to our family in recent months has been a change in position for my wife. After a smidge over two years working for the hospital-based family clinic that brought us to Borderland in the first place, my wife resigned her job there in order to take a position with a local urgent care clinic. It was a decision made with a good deal of consideration, because it meant leaving the patients she had come to know for the past two years. But the hospital clinic job had been stressful and life-consuming to a ridiculous degree from near the beginning and it was taking a real toll on her. When she first interviewed for the position, she had made it clear to her future employers that she was not willing to devote all waking hours to the job, spending all her time on call at the hospital and never getting to spend time at home. She told them that if that was the reality of the job, they needed to part ways then and there. She'd been assured by them, though, that this wasn't the case, her call time would be minimal and she'd have plenty of time off. However, these assurances proved to be wild underestimations. She had two nights of call per week, which meant having to round on patients she admitted during those nights until they were discharged. So two nights on call technically, but days of after hours rounding beyond that in most cases. Then she was asked to take on call duties with a local psych hospital for one night a week, which led to similar after hours time when the docs there were only too happy to turf their patients to her. The draw of a new job with fewer responsibilities, only 14 shifts per month, and better pay to boot was incredibly attractive.
And, having been on the job for nearly six months, she can attest that the new place is pretty much as amazing in reality as it was on paper. She still has a few late nights when they get busy and she has to go over charts afterward, but she's very happy and a lot less stressed out. In fact, when former coworkers and patients ask if she misses the old job, her answer is always "No-hohohoho!"
And as for my cold, I got over it, too. At least, mostly. The odd thing about that, though, is that while my major snot-based cold symptoms diminished, the hacking cough never quite went away. It wasn't a constant irritant, but at least once a day I would be hit by the same violent tickle in the back of my throat and would then be sent into a fit of dry hacking coughs that had little to no effect on alleviating the tickle. The only successful ways I found to combat the tickle were gargling with salt water (which only worked half the time), using a Neti pot (or "Drowny pot" as I call it) to irrigate my sinus passages, or sucking on a lozenge. Usually these coughing attacks would happen in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, the coughing was so violent that I began to feel like a Little Big Planet sack person whose stitches were coming loose--just to bring things back to video games.
Toward the end of December, I began asking Dr. Wife what was up with this. The trouble with having a doctor for a wife, though, is that by the time she comes home she's fed up with having to deal with sick people and doesn't want to hear it. Her typical response to any medical questions from me becomes something akin to "I don't know. What are you asking me for?" After the cough continued for another week and a half, though, she suddenly realized the answer.
"Ohhhh! You have an ace cough."
"Do whuuut?" I said.
Let me back up.
One of the major things that's happened to our family in recent months has been a change in position for my wife. After a smidge over two years working for the hospital-based family clinic that brought us to Borderland in the first place, my wife resigned her job there in order to take a position with a local urgent care clinic. It was a decision made with a good deal of consideration, because it meant leaving the patients she had come to know for the past two years. But the hospital clinic job had been stressful and life-consuming to a ridiculous degree from near the beginning and it was taking a real toll on her. When she first interviewed for the position, she had made it clear to her future employers that she was not willing to devote all waking hours to the job, spending all her time on call at the hospital and never getting to spend time at home. She told them that if that was the reality of the job, they needed to part ways then and there. She'd been assured by them, though, that this wasn't the case, her call time would be minimal and she'd have plenty of time off. However, these assurances proved to be wild underestimations. She had two nights of call per week, which meant having to round on patients she admitted during those nights until they were discharged. So two nights on call technically, but days of after hours rounding beyond that in most cases. Then she was asked to take on call duties with a local psych hospital for one night a week, which led to similar after hours time when the docs there were only too happy to turf their patients to her. The draw of a new job with fewer responsibilities, only 14 shifts per month, and better pay to boot was incredibly attractive.
And, having been on the job for nearly six months, she can attest that the new place is pretty much as amazing in reality as it was on paper. She still has a few late nights when they get busy and she has to go over charts afterward, but she's very happy and a lot less stressed out. In fact, when former coworkers and patients ask if she misses the old job, her answer is always "No-hohohoho!"
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Tales from the Lost Months: Got Them Soul Coughing Video Game Addict Blues (Part 1)
One of the questions asked of me before I jumpstarted this blog again was whether or not my 5 month absence was due to being addicted to World of Warcraft. My answer was "No," but with the caveat that there had been an increase in video game activity around Chez Juice.
As I've mentioned in a previous story here, back at Thanksgiving we had a WHOLE MESS of people at our place. For Thanksgiving day we had family, friends, inlaws, outlaws, and all but one of our five godchildren under our roof. In total, we housed eleven folks, beyond ourselves and had an absolute blast doing it. Most of the actual family part was on the wife's side, but I represented too by importing from Mississippi my buddy Joe, his wife Leigh Ann, his son Jonah and his brand new baby Rhys to join the fun. Between my wife, her mom, her sister, her sister's daughter and our niece Kayley taking turns, Joe and Leigh Ann hardly had to touch their baby the whole time.
Since the Borderland area isn't exactly an exciting place and the weather wasn't cooperating enough for us to travel to some of the more beautiful places in the area, and since no one in the family had any desire to do black Friday shopping, I had worried there would be too much downtime for folks with not enough to do. Ahead of time, I requested that Joe and my brother-in-law Jim bring their respective gaming consoles, which we set up on two different TVs. Joe is an avid PS3 guy, but Jim swears by the XBox 360. Leaving off one of the 1st gen Game Boys from the early `90s, I've not owned an honest to goodness gaming console since the Atari 2600, like 28 years ago. As you can see, I'm not a huge video game guy.
Don't get me wrong, I do like video games, but I tend to only play them on PC and not all that often. In 1999, the wife (then the fiance) bought me a copy of Half-Life for PC and then spent years regretting it. I played that game all the way through several times over before branching out into the spin-off sequels and generally loving the universe it set up. Unfortunately, by the time Half Life 2 and subsequent episodes were released, my computer had become just obsolete enough that it could only run the games for a few minutes before crashing. I eventually upgraded my video card (between Half Life 2 and Half Life 2 Episode 1), but the technology had jumped again so I was back in the crashing boat.
I enjoy console games as well, but have never had access to them long enough to get any good. I also have some childhood issues with arcade games, due to their requirement that you spend lots of money in order to get enough practice to become good at them. My allowance money tended to go toward comics, and any spare change my dad had I knew would be better spent on food for us all. So I eschewed video games for much of my life. I also tend to resist playing them even at the console level because I don't want to look like an idiot, mashing all the wrong buttons. It's not that there are too many buttons on modern controllers, either, as there are far more keys to press in PC games. It's just a coordination problem adapting to those buttons.
While Jim was here with his XBox, the wife decided she was going to have a go at it. She's even worse with modern controllers than I am, but she was determined to have some fun. She played a zombie shooter game for a bit, then Jim suggested she switch to Fable III, which is a fantasy RPG style game. She loved it and would have spent the day playing it except she had to put down the controller long enough to go help cook. By the end of the visit, Jim was threatening to leave his XBox with us. He argued that the XBox Kinect had just been released, so he was thinking about buying a new XBox/Kinect bundle. We might even have taken him up on the offer, except that my sister-in-law had already alerted us that she'd already bought the Kinect as Jim's Christmas gift, so we knew we couldn't borrow his system out from under him.
Then, barely a day after everyone left from our holiday gathering, two ugly things happened. A) The wife went into video game withdrawal; and B) she was hospitalized with a wicked case of bi-lateral pneumonia.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
As I've mentioned in a previous story here, back at Thanksgiving we had a WHOLE MESS of people at our place. For Thanksgiving day we had family, friends, inlaws, outlaws, and all but one of our five godchildren under our roof. In total, we housed eleven folks, beyond ourselves and had an absolute blast doing it. Most of the actual family part was on the wife's side, but I represented too by importing from Mississippi my buddy Joe, his wife Leigh Ann, his son Jonah and his brand new baby Rhys to join the fun. Between my wife, her mom, her sister, her sister's daughter and our niece Kayley taking turns, Joe and Leigh Ann hardly had to touch their baby the whole time.
Since the Borderland area isn't exactly an exciting place and the weather wasn't cooperating enough for us to travel to some of the more beautiful places in the area, and since no one in the family had any desire to do black Friday shopping, I had worried there would be too much downtime for folks with not enough to do. Ahead of time, I requested that Joe and my brother-in-law Jim bring their respective gaming consoles, which we set up on two different TVs. Joe is an avid PS3 guy, but Jim swears by the XBox 360. Leaving off one of the 1st gen Game Boys from the early `90s, I've not owned an honest to goodness gaming console since the Atari 2600, like 28 years ago. As you can see, I'm not a huge video game guy.
Don't get me wrong, I do like video games, but I tend to only play them on PC and not all that often. In 1999, the wife (then the fiance) bought me a copy of Half-Life for PC and then spent years regretting it. I played that game all the way through several times over before branching out into the spin-off sequels and generally loving the universe it set up. Unfortunately, by the time Half Life 2 and subsequent episodes were released, my computer had become just obsolete enough that it could only run the games for a few minutes before crashing. I eventually upgraded my video card (between Half Life 2 and Half Life 2 Episode 1), but the technology had jumped again so I was back in the crashing boat.
I enjoy console games as well, but have never had access to them long enough to get any good. I also have some childhood issues with arcade games, due to their requirement that you spend lots of money in order to get enough practice to become good at them. My allowance money tended to go toward comics, and any spare change my dad had I knew would be better spent on food for us all. So I eschewed video games for much of my life. I also tend to resist playing them even at the console level because I don't want to look like an idiot, mashing all the wrong buttons. It's not that there are too many buttons on modern controllers, either, as there are far more keys to press in PC games. It's just a coordination problem adapting to those buttons.
While Jim was here with his XBox, the wife decided she was going to have a go at it. She's even worse with modern controllers than I am, but she was determined to have some fun. She played a zombie shooter game for a bit, then Jim suggested she switch to Fable III, which is a fantasy RPG style game. She loved it and would have spent the day playing it except she had to put down the controller long enough to go help cook. By the end of the visit, Jim was threatening to leave his XBox with us. He argued that the XBox Kinect had just been released, so he was thinking about buying a new XBox/Kinect bundle. We might even have taken him up on the offer, except that my sister-in-law had already alerted us that she'd already bought the Kinect as Jim's Christmas gift, so we knew we couldn't borrow his system out from under him.
Then, barely a day after everyone left from our holiday gathering, two ugly things happened. A) The wife went into video game withdrawal; and B) she was hospitalized with a wicked case of bi-lateral pneumonia.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
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