Posts Tagged ‘health’

The latest commercial from Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" movement is an illuminating one, especially if you've never really internalized the fact that models on magazine covers and advertisements are Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives. Everyone "knows" that, of course, but still there's that hidden (or not-so-hidden) belief that someone who looks like that actually exists somewhere outside of a Barbie box, and that if women just try hard enough — and buy the right things — they can look like that too.

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent yesterday morning sitting on crinkly paper, looking at an exploded illustration of a urinary tract — at least, I really hope, for the poor model's sake, that it was an exploded illustration — and worrying about my future. I had reason.

A few months back I had a transient ischaemic attack, or TIA, or "ministroke," or "all the fun of a stroke without the crippling part." From my point of view, it was like being whacked in the side of the head with a factory, one of those big industrial jobs; blurry vision, inability to think coherently, bricks falling everywhere. I spent the next 35 hours experiencing the joys of morphine, the latest in medical imaging tests, and the magical wonders that are only available in an emergency room in Daytona Beach during Spring Break.

As it turned out I was extremely fortunate. Ministrokes are warning shots, like your car's transmission slipping occasionally to let you know you need to get to the mechanic before the engine falls out in a comical fashion. I hied me hence to my doctor immediately to find out how to fix my carburetor, as it were, and there I was told many silly things.

First, I was going to have to start using math. On a daily basis.

There's this stuff in your body called cholesterol, a waxy substance that floats around in your bloodstream. Some of it is "good" cholesterol, which builds cell walls and produces certain hormones and, in the dark of the night, sneaks out of your body and fights crime. Some of it is "bad" cholesterol, which smokes and gets tattoos and hangs around in your bloodstream blocking it and daring your blood to make something of it. I had enough of the bad stuff to start a cholesterol prison farm. The way to get rid of it, aside from medication, is to reduce or eliminate all the foods that have dangerous levels of fat, cholesterol, and taste. And that meant math.

Numbers bother me, especially when they gang up, and more than three numbers in a row cause me to lie down with a cool washcloth on my forehead. But now I would have to start reading nutritional information and adding up my meals to meet specific daily limits. Does this chicken have saturated fat? How much fiber is there in a Dorito? If I starve myself for three days, can I save up for a chimichanga? (Answer: No.) Did I see me carefully tallying up my intake like Rain Man to see if I could safely eat a cookie that day? Nope, not really. Fortunately my wife Teresa reads those little nutritional information boxes on food and she roamed the grocery store to find healthy alternates to most of my favorite foods.

Second, I had to give up Cokes. I'm not a big sweets eater, apart from an almond roca now and then and the occasional office birthday cake. I don't drink alcohol, don't chow down handfuls of chips, and I even ate vegetables voluntarily before I had to. But when the doctor asked about soft drinks I suddenly became fascinated by a cross-section of a spleen.

Cokes — and the physical activity of a houseplant — are responsible for my current pear-like shape. I have single-handedly propped up the corn syrup distributors and the entire bottling industry with my regular and near-constant consumption of Coca-Cola for 35 years and this has resulted in a proud gut, a manly gut, a gut that a hippopotamus would be honored to call his own. If I were to get serious about my health, I would have to wave goodbye to the Coca-Cola company as a symbolic gesture of cutting all ties to an unhealthy lifestyle and because their diet product tastes like swallowing a chemical set. If I were to get serious, that is..Teres picked up a variety of drinks for me to try until I found a substitute I could addict myself to.

And I had to eat right, several times a day, smaller portions, yadda yadda yadda. Thing is, I felt perfectly fine. Despite a minor little, horrifically painful incident it hardly seemed necessary to subject myself to such sacrifice because I know, deep in my heart, that nothing I eat has any effect whatsoever on my health. I know it. I've known it since I was a teenager and used to eat anythng I wanted, including raw lumber, at any time of the day. Future health concerns were too nebulous to me to affect my dining decisions now and I saw no reason to change just because I had a little stroke. An early death just wasn't important enough for me to stop buttering my steaks. But for two months I went along with the joke. read the charts. I added the numbers. I bought the healthy food. I ate smaller portions. I took my meds. And yesterday I waited for the results.

The nurse told me I had lost a pound and a half since the last visit, but she had me remove my shoes last time and didn't this time so, assuming my sneakers weigh roughly 26 pounds, I felt pretty good about it. And then I waited, and worried.

As I said, not about my health. But I did worry about Teresa.

I realized, right there and then, that it's not fair to her for me to treat myself badly. It's not fair to put her through another 35 hours of sleepless terror in the ER, especially if the ending isn't as happy this time, just so I could eat what I wanted. She had been tirelessly hunting for ways to make my change easier, more painless, more convenient. My health was no longer just my concern. There and then, waiting for the results of my new test, I vowed to do whatever it took to prevent her worrying, even if I had to eat tofu, have fat removed by commercial vacuums, or even go to extremes, like exercise. Because nothing is more important to me than my wife's happiness. With that realization my life changed forever.

And then the doctor gave me the word. My cholesterol, previously in the danger zone, is now very nearly healthy. The meds and my altered diet are working.

I high-fived him, did a victory lap around the examining room, and left to go eat an egg and cheese biscuit the size of my head because, you know, too much health at one time isn't good for you.

So, got tested again and saw the doctor this morning, and here's where I'm at:

My total cholesterol, which was 227, and needs to be under 200, is now 159.
My triglycerides, which were 211, and need to be under 150, are now 158.
My HDL cholesterol (the good kind), which was 38, and needs to be over 40, is now 40.

My BP was 120 over 80. Didn't catch my heartrate or temperature but the nurse didn't shriek so I'm guessing all was well. My doctor told me I'd lost a pound a half since the last visit (in clear contradiction to what my bathroom scale has been telling me, but then last time the nurse had me take my shoes off and this time she didn't, so I'm assuming my shoes weigh 7 pounds) but that things were going well and to keep going.
Also found out, through an ultrasound a few weeks ago, that I have a fatty liver (Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH) which is not a problem at the moment and whose treatment is… pretty much exactly what I'm doing anyway.

All in all I am extremely pleased, as I was afraid that after the dieting and (sigh) total abandonment of nondiet soft drinks my cholesterol would be higher or something and I'd have go vegetarian. Looks like I can continue as I have been, and start adding more exercise to bring the weight down.

Just keeping everyone in the loop.

or, "How to Have a Stroke Without That Twisty Arm Thing."

Realized I haven't mentioned my ER visit of a few weeks ago. Funny story…

It started on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-March when I started seeing spots, like I'd been looking up at the sun. Not a lot of suns in my office, though. It stayed with me, making it difficult to work and giving me a headache trying to focus through. I went out for a walk and it cleared up. That night at home I got another killer headache and went to bed around 8, very unusual for me. Both the bedtime and the headache; I rarely get headaches at all without obvious reasons, such as weather pressure changes or large men with pipe wrenches.

The next day at work I started getting blurry vision and suddenly, in the middle of writing an e-mail, I couldn't type. Couldn't string together words, couldn't spell anything. I rewrote the same sentence six times (badly) before banging the keyboard and leaving. Outside I started hyperventilating. I called Teres, who told me to get to the ER. By that point I wasn't up to driving, Teres called a friend of ours that works with me and she came out, found me, and took me to emergency.
Read the rest of this entry »

Friends and neighbors, I come before you today to say the Internet is not just an invaluable tool for researchers, not just a best friend to every lonely single guy in the world, not just a source of entertainment and community and wonderment and video game cheat codes. It's also the greatest boon for hypochondriacs ever created.

I know this, because I live with one.

Actually my wife Teresa is more of a hypochondriac hobbyist. She doesn't panic or stalk her doctor around the ninth green with meticulous charts of her bowel movements and the latest Reader's Digest list of trendy diseases. Instead, whenever she feels ill she looks up all the possible medical conditions she could conceivably be suffering from, no matter how obscure, and picks the absolute worst one imaginable. Only then can she relax, take a couple of Tylenol, and go back to bed, strangely content.

This was fine when she was forced to read through medical books the size of engine blocks to find her favorite infirmities because it kept her occupied and just picking the things up was good cardio. But now, thanks to www.medical-library.org, www.yourdiagnosis.com, www.easydiagnosis.com. www.wrongdiagnosis.com, www.ecureme.com, and many, many more, I get instant messages at work like this:

Teres: I have Hansen's disease.

Chris: What?

Teres: Paucibacillary Hansen's disease. Or maybe multibacillary. I'm not sure yet.

Chris: You're telling me you have leprosy.

Teres: All the signs are there. I even got a second opinion from a different site.

Chris: You have a rash. A small rash. And you got it right after you planted flowers next to that three-leaf plant.

Teres: You know, it's that kind of discrimination that forces people like me into leper colonies.

Chris: What people like you? Crazy people?

Teres: I'm going back to bed now, I'm exhausted. Don't nudge me when you get home, something might fall off.

My browser suddenly sprouted bookmarks for Lyme disease, ulcerative colitis, and endometriosis. One whole summer she was convinced she had benign prostate hyperplasia. I tried explaining that she didn't, medically speaking, have a prostate, but she simply said, "That's why it's benign," and smiled a sad, brave smile.

Last Saturday I threw my back out.

As is required by law, it was while doing something meaningless. I bent to open a bag of dog food and spent the rest of the evening eating Advil, walking like Mr. Burns in a high wind, and staying in the shower until I'd used up all the hot water in the Volusia County area.

Just for the heck of it, purely for fun and to get my mind off the spasms that woke me at 4 a.m., I went online and tried looking up "lower back pain."

An hour later I was spinning (carefully) from all the possible disorders that might have struck me down. I could have transverse myelitis, Cushing's syndrome, or a herniated disc. I could have gall stones, kidney stones, or intercostal neuralgia. Pancreatic cancer! Scheuermann's disease! Post streptococcal glomerulonephritis! Even worse-sounding stuff! Some with pictures!

Here I'd been thinking it was because I was out of shape, had terrible posture, and hadn't lifted anything heavier than a bagel since 1986, but no! I was host to a veritable plague of potential plights! Suddenly I didn't feel helpless any more.

I felt afflicted, which is way cooler.

I wasn't suffering from a lame-sounding problem that happens to old guys in sit-coms. I was a victim of random and possibly malicious diseases I had no control over. And some of them were rare indeed, which made me special. How many other guys suffer from chlamydia, huh? Huh?

Now I take quiet pleasure in discovering new and exciting conditions to adapt as my own. Japanese encephalitis? Had it last week. East African Trypanosomiasis? It's a struggle, but I get by, I get by. No longer just some guy with a bad back, I am now the guy with the really interesting out-sick excuses and the cough that can cause a public health emergency if even half the stuff I found out is true.

And now I have to go lie down. All this typing wears you out.

Lately I've become aware of the need to get into shape. I thought I had achieved this already, since the shape I had previously chosen was that of a Bartlett pear, but I was wrong.

Like many middle-aged guys, I've long held the bone-deep conviction that no matter how out of shape I get, a couple weeks of pushups will get me back to a 32-inch waist. My pleasant delusions were recently shattered. On our last visit to Blue Springs a 'friend' snapped some shots of the kids swimming alongside what appeared to be a bull manatee wearing purple shorts. It took several expert witnesses and conclusive analysis by an independent lab before I'd admit that it might be me, but I was finally convinced.

I just don't see it unless I make the effort. In the bathroom mirror I may not be appealing, but I don't look huge. It's from the side that I show, much like a pregnant woman in her final trimester. If it's a boy, I'm going to name him 'Carl.'

But the real problem isn't my appearance, all evidence to the contrary. It's the health aspects. My recent cholesterol count would make a very respectable SAT score, and of late, I've noticed myself getting winded after negotiating high curbs. Changes must be made.

The Atkins Diet is in vogue again for those who believe that clearing out all those unhealthy fruits and grains and loading up on bacon, butter and prime rib is a good thing. That part's easy, but I have problems with the restriction against sweet tea. I can easily envision myself strapped down by orderlies, sweating and screaming about snakes and free refills.

Other diets recommend sensible portions and the elimination of rich, fatty foods, i.e. those with dangerously high levels of taste. But the difficulty lies in which foods to ban, a problem that plagues health experts from year to year.

Meat is bad for you, or it's good for you. Alcohol kills brain cells, but a glass of red wine a day is good for the heart. Margarine is better for you than butter, except when it's worse. Eggs are good for you. No, bad. Wait, good. Bad. Good, as long as they're cooked completely. And they prevent breast cancer!

Finally I devised my own diet, based on what I can handle. It's been carefully plotted for a reasonable weight loss over a long enough period of time, measured the same way they measure glacier movements. Feel free to use it yourself (ask your doctor or insurance agent before beginning any humor column diet).

8:00 a.m. Breakfast: soggy, wheat-laden cereal. Think really hard about exercising.

10:00 a.m. Arrive at work, jog up stairs, grab healthsome bottle of water. Feel smug.

10:30 a.m. Bathroom break, where I quietly chug the 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola I've hidden inside the paper towel dispenser in the handicapped stall.

12:30 p.m. Lunch: dry turkey sandwich on real wheat bread (the kind with stalks), lettuce, tomato, three carrot sticks (w/leaves), water.

12:45 p.m. Helpless bout of self-loathing, followed by period of longing for a magic diet pill that lets you eat handfuls of cake.

3:30 p.m. Bathroom break. Five candy bars taped inside toilet tank.

6:00 p.m. Leave work. Wonder if the people begging for food at the stoplights get a decent return on the time invested.

7:00 p.m. The abomination we've diplomatically agreed to call 'Dinner.'

7:30 p.m. Walk the dogs. Fight the impulse to help them eat whatever they find by the road.

8:00 p.m. TV and light bitching.

11:30 p.m. Refrigerator visit after stomach growling wakes me up, results in angrier stomach since there's nothing in the house either of us is prepared to accept as food.

12:10 p.m. Lay in bed and stare at sleeping wife, think how much I want to stay healthy for her.

12:25 a.m. Eat an entire box of raw, low-fat macaroni noodles.

1:30 a.m. Sleep.

I don't like to brag, but so far I've been sticking to this every step of the way. Health awaits! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to visit the bathroom.

Just for the heck of it, I'd like you to think the word "massage" and see what sort of mental images you receive. Go ahead. Say you saw the word in passing, on a billboard or in an article. Would you think of stark white rooms, gurneys with white sheets, and oddly-shaped pillows? Terrifying women named Helga? Little old men with grey t-shirts and evil-smelling liniment? Or would you picture sensuous people anointing each other with scented unguents as they sit naked in their ashrams, surrounded by clouds of suspicious smoke? You might even think of the ways you massage your lover with one of those carved wooden rollers from The Body Shop, or the vibrating hi-tech wonders from Brookstone, or even the sexy devices from Good Vibrations.

Forget 'em, all of 'em. Massage is ultimately nothing more than using the sense of touch to make someone feel good. You may have given your guy some massage action this morning and not even realized it. It doesn't require a time commitment or a special table. It doesn't even require oil or an encyclopedic knowledge of muscle clusters. Just take those loving caresses one step further.

I have nothing against the more professional versions of massage, but I have known people who shy away from it because of their preconceptions — "I don't know what the muscles are," or "I never have the time." No worries. This is not an attempt to teach you arcane acupressure rituals or how to make chiropractic adjustments; it's me trying to get you to touch your lover more than usual. Just pay heed to the following important guidelines. Please use some common sense and modify these suggestions for your own situation — a person with a second-degree burn is unlikely to appreciate direct pressure no matter how erotically you do it.

Massage is for anytime

First and foremost, I want you to realize that massage can be as quick and spontaneous as stroking your lover's hair and rubbing their neck for a few minutes. Just apply some steady pressure and use a rhythmic stroke so they can anticipate your moves and brace against it. Rub his back, pull on her toes, do something with your hands to help alleviate some of their stress. Not only does it feel wonderful physically, it lets them feel pampered and treasured for a moment. Yes, hour-long massages with hot oil and music playing are wonderful, but don't limit yourself to that. First thing in the morning, before he wakes up, run your hands down his back over and over. Reach over in the car and scratch her head for her, all over, and then do it again.

All you need is you

There isn't a vibrating device existing in the world today that can compare to a dedicated, enthusiastic lover's hands. You can search out and find knots that they can't reach. You can kiss one shoulder while you're rubbing the other. You can let your fingers stroke firmly along the shape of his face until he falls asleep. You can pick up her leg and hold it firm while you run your hand along her calf muscles, and not even the Hitachi Magic Wand can do that.

For the casual massage you don't really need oil, although a quick dollop of hand lotion or even a shot of baby powder can help your hands move smoothly.

Why stop with your hands?

You can use almost every part of your body to soothe (or excite) someone else. Here's some highlights:

• Use your hands creatively. Use the tips of your fingers for smaller areas or deeper pressure, use the flat of your hand to shape to her body's contours, use your fist to rub a bit harder on those larger muscles in the back and butt.
• Use your arms. Rest your forearm across her lower back and sweep upward while applying pressure.
• Use your mouth. Not just the ways you'd expect — put some pressure on your lips and tongue. Cover your teeth and then try to take bites. It is an indescribably terrific feeling to have someone run their mouth over your head that way, and it's a great thing to do to the back of someone's neck.
• Use your hair. If it's long enough you can drag it across your lover's body for a maddening, teasing form of massage. If your hair is short you can rub it on specific areas for a more direct approach.
• Use your head. This is great for the back, just put your head against his back and press in a circular motion, moving around as your whim takes you. Don't hurt your neck.
• Use your breasts. You may want some lubrication to make things glide more easily, but it's a move your lover will appreciate.
• Use your feet. You don't necessarily have to walk on your lover, but if you're sitting on opposite ends of the couch put your feet on either side of her spine and rub. You can easily keep some big circling motions going and it's amazing how strong the average toe is.
• Use your whole body. If you're about to apply pressure then your lover will need to be braced against something. Why not you? If you're in bed, roll her over on top of you and rub her shoulder blades. Put her face-down, straddle her butt, lay your chest on her upper back and press in slow circles (run your mouth through her hair on the upswing for an extra touch). Let your lunchtime hug stretch out a bit. My personal favorite is in the shower — she can rest her head on my shoulder, the hot spray is making everything slippery, I can easily stroke up and down her entire back, and I can't say the feeling is at all unpleasant from my side of things.

Do it twice as long as you think you ought to

Massage is like oral sex or petting your dog — no matter how long you do it, the minute you stop the recipient looks at you like you're a criminal. Time is extremely relative and making that extra effort to keep going just a little bit more is worth the trouble. Don't hurt yourself, but if your hand starts cramping up switch to your other hand, or another part of your body, or even just a different area of her body where you'll be rubbing at a different angle. Matter of fact, that's a good suggestion for massage or oral sex. Or even petting your dog.

If it helps, don't think of it as "massage," just think of it as another way to touch.