Tag: Health

Tuesday, Oct 1st, 2024

Blog

Nothing like a visit to the Doctor to give you a reality check.

For the record, I’m 54, and both my father and my grandmother were cursed with heart problems. Both were the recipients of angioplasties, stents, and were members of the zipper chest club from the bypasses they both had. Over the weekend, I began having very sharp chest pains, one on Saturday Night, one on Sunday Night. When I say sharp, I mean stop you in your tracks, right in the sternum, radiates down both arms all the way down to the fingers and through to between your shoulder blades in the back, and sweating like nobody’s business. I had already had a Doctor’s appointment on Monday afternoon, so I told the wife that I would keep the appointment and if they sent me to the ER then I would go and we’d get this taken care of.

I walked into the little room and got the weight and medication information taken care of, and while the PA was taking my blood pressure I mentioned what happened to me over the weekend. She excused herself and soon returned with a box, out of which she took the various attachments for an EKG. She took the test, removed everything but the tape from my chest at my request (“I’ll do that part myself, thanks”) and left. 10 mins later, the Doctor arrives and asks me if I knew that I have had a heart attack in the past.

Wait, what?

”Yeah, your EKG shows that you’ve already had a heart attack. Any idea when that might have been?”

Some years ago when I first returned to the gym, I had what I thought was a really bad muscle cramp in my pectoral muscles on the way home. I had done the chest fly pretty hard that day, so I thought I was just having a reaction to that. But then I remembered all the things that happened along with that cramp. Sweats, radiating pain, the works. “Oh,” I said, “Yeah, I think I have an idea.”

“Ok, well, we’re going to send you to a cardiologist, since I knew your Mom and Dad and their issues. Not playing with you.” That’s the advantage (or disadvantage) to having the same doctor since the age of 15.

Last night was spent re-evaluating a lot of things, as you might imagine. I am prime breeding ground for high blood pressure, cholesterol, heart problems, and cancer. All of this runs in my family. I thought I had dodged this bullet getting to the age of 54 without having any problems, but here we are. I had a problem and didn’t even realize it, and I can’t stress enough what kind of a mindfuck that was.

Time to make some changes. Again. I’m just not ready for any of this yet.

The big joke that you slowly come to realize through your life is that when you’re 18 you think 54 is old. Then you get to 54 and realize that you’re nowhere near old if you don’t want to be.

The really funny part? Doc doesn’t think I had a heart attack this weekend. He thinks I might have overdone the caffeine (totally possible), and that I had really bad acid reflux from what I ate. No damage was done over the weekend to my heart, otherwise the EKG would have shown that instead of the old damage that he saw in the readings. Still, it sent me a very clear message.

Believe me, I’m listening.

Sunday, February 19th, 2023

Blog

Welcome back. That’s more for me than it is for you.

  • I haven’t had as much time for blogging–or anything else– as I have for other things that require my time. Specifically, in the past little while, my cat died, my wife’s parrot died, and my wife almost died. So, I’ve been busy. I haven’t been well, but I appear to be returning OK. It’s incredible what having access to the meds you need to be a functional human being will do for you. It would appear that my mental situation was directly tied to my lack of access to those medications. In this case, it was not my anti-depressant; it was the fact that I am now a Type 1 diabetic and am now insulin dependent. My A1C, a metric of my blood sugar levels over 90 days, was 10.1. A person who does not have diabetes would have an A1C of under 7.   Today, my estimated A1C is about 7.7, which has led to clearer thinking, more energy, and in this case, depression. I feel a lot more like my usual chaotic good self, so I’ll see if I can get back into creating more things.
  • At the beginning of the year, I set out a list of goals, separated by quarter. Due to the above, I’ve not met any of those goals for the 1st quarter. Let’s go over those:
    • WORK: Professionally, identify one area of my job where we could improve the workflow–DONE
    • WORK: Average between 700-750 items a week at my job.  — FAILED (managed 500-700 items a week. More than anyone else on the team by a lot, so might need to revise.)
    • WORK: Outline and propose Multimedia Training for my department — ADDRESSED, REJECTED due to Personal information being the hangup. PII Security is important in my line of work.
    • CREATIVE: Podcast and Patreon at least once a week in 1Q — FAILED; see above.
    • CREATIVE: Gain 25 subscribers on Patreon.  — PENDING
    • CREATIVE: One Tentpole article a month — FAILED; see above
    • CREATIVE: One Photo and one Video Essay in 1Q — PENDING
    • ACADEMIC: Dedicated Learning Time once a month in 1Q — PENDING
    • FUN:  Karaoke once a month — PENDING
    • FUN: Photo Challenge once a month — FAILED; see above
    • FUN: New song on guitar once a month — FAILED; see above
    • FUN: Something that doesn’t involve work or creativity once a month – well, depending on how you look at it, spending more time in a hospital than anyone should qualify, but FAILED in the spirit of the intention.

      Since I feel better and things are getting as close to normal as things get, I intend to try and catch up on some of those pending and failed items, but we’ll see how it goes.


  • I didn’t go into much detail about this, but you’ll notice that this website has returned to a WordPress site. I don’t have a bad thing to say about Squarespace; I no longer require or desire the bells and whistles they provide. Still, even WordPress doesn’t quite capture what I want. The closest thing that captures what I wish is Dave Winer’s Scripting News, run on Dave’s outliner program Drummer. To get as close to that as possible, I make one post a day with all the items I want to cover. I don’t believe I have the ‘fu’ required to create something in Drummer. I intend to try, and if I’m successful by some quirk of fate, I may redirect the domain there. In a perfect world, I’d try to run it from my server, but it doesn’t look like that’s possible. I could be wrong. In the end, what I want is (maybe) simple:  One date per day, my writing for the day underneath with anchor tags for each item, and the ability to post those items to Twitter, Mastodon, etc.
  • Speaking of social media, I’m frankly getting sick of it. Facebook sucks, Instagram no longer focuses on photography,  Elon is intent on making Twitter a garbage fire, TikTok is OK, but mainly for fun, and LinkedIn is not what I’m trying to reach. Mastodon is OK, but I feel meh about the whole thing.   I no longer have a clear understanding as to why I’m on social media at all. It was to try to direct eyeballs here, but I spend so much time on those platforms that I spend next to nothing here where I should. I’ve half a mind to cancel all my social media accounts and work on optimizing everything for search to come here. That sounds like the direction I want to go. Or, I cross-post links to those places and not deal with them outside of that. The bottom line is that I no longer think that social media serves any purpose other than to agitate, and I don’t need that drama anymore. I certainly don’t need the distraction.
  • Not sure how this post is going to work going forward.  I’ll either post it in the evening, or write a bunch of stuff and post it the next morning.  Frankly, I’m leaning towards the latter.  That waym I might have the time to research anything that comes up and give you something more than my usual gas-filled take on things.  We’ll see.  if that’s the case, the next post will probably be Tuesday.