September 2006

katy’s health watch 2006

I forgot to mention in my last post, for those of you keeping up with Katy’s Health Watch 2006: My rotator cuff injury is almost completely healed. My torn left hamstring is healing… maybe about 50% there. My poison ivy is now just a series of fading reddish-brown dots on my arms, legs, and stomach. Only a few little scabs left. I’ll be rubbing vitamin E oil into my skin for the next few weeks. My stress fracture is still very much fractured. Running makes it feel worse; not running makes it feel better. This has sure been a year for injuries. I’m amazed by the sheer number of things that have gone wrong with me this year. I hope it’s not a sign that the ol’ 34-year-old body is beginning to fall apart.

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down, but not out

I have cut WAY back on my running, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because it will give my leg a chance to start healing; bad because there is probably no way that I will be able to complete the half marathon on December 10 without walking a large portion of it. I’m slowly coming around to acceptance of the fact that I’m injured, and staying on my previous training schedule is not only going hamper the healing process, it will undoubtedly make the injury worse. It is so frustrating because I really really wanted to do this crazy impossible thing; I’d set my mind to doing something quite alien to my nature, to challenge and stretch myself, and I was going along so well and making so much progress and I was in the best shape of my entire life and my successes were making me want to become even better… and my overeagerness has screwed me. This week I ran 3 miles on both Sunday and Monday, and about 2 on Tuesday, and I have paid for it in pain. There is no question in my mind now that I have a stress fracture. I took Wednesday and Thursday off completely, and only went to yoga class today. My leg feels much better, better than it has in a long time, after feeling the worst it’s ever felt on Tuesday after my 2 mile run. Had I not fractured it, I would have been running at least 9 miles at a time on the weekends. That’s not going to happen for a while. Yvonne and I think that maybe this is just not our year. I AM STILL GOING TO COMPLETE THE HALF MARATHON ON DECEMBER 10. And I will run across the […]

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nap dreams

I had some nightmares while napping this afternoon. One sad, one scary. I was in a large house in a neighborhood that backed up onto a river, a very small river that was really more of a creek in size. There were rows of rickety wooden lawn chairs between the house and the river, facing the house. I was sitting in one at dusk with my feet up on the wall of the house, and I looked down and realized the legs of the lawnchair were only about 2 inches from the rim of the riverbank. I moved the lawnchair closer to the house and continued reading my mail. One piece was a flyer for a dentist’s office that featured a large photo of a little girl that looked just like Brittney might have at that age. Another one was for an insurance company that also featured a large photo of Brittney, and I knew that she didn’t know they had used her photo. The house I was at alternated between being Auntie Fran’s house (although it didn’t look anything like her actual house) and a shed on Grandma’s property (which she didn’t actually have in real life). I got out of my lawn chair and realized that I could go see Grandma’s house. On the other side of the river were rows of new condominiums and fancy shops, facing away from us. I knew that her house was somewhere in those rows of condos, and that the beach and ocean must be on the other side. Bob came outside and we decided to walk across the “river” and onto a sidewalk on the other side that paralleled the river. We walked for a little ways until we came to a T where the sidewalk turned and went between two […]

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feeling a bit better

After my night of misery and sleeplessness, I relented and went to the doctor. She confirmed that indeed I do have a bad case of poison ivy. I got a steroid shot in the hip, and also a steroid cream to rub on the rash. And something called Zyrtec, which I think is an allergy pill, to help me sleep at night. She told me to avoid hot showers because they would irritate the itching, which does seem to be the case, so I’ve been taking barely-warm ones. Kathryn told me, though, that hot water, as hot as you can stand it, actually can help once you get beyond the first few minutes of “this hot water is making the itching worse!!” Lots of people have pointed me in the direction of home remedies, which I’m not opposed to, but most of them seem to be geared towards stopping the spread of the rash when you’ve just contracted it. I got it ten days ago, so I think that the point at which most of that stuff would work is long past. Today I look awful, but at least I don’t feel quite as awful today. With skin cream freshly applied about 2 hours ago, the itching has subsided to a low-grade background noise. If I thought about it I would probably need to start scratching, but it’s not an overwhelming urge right now. The cream goes on twice a day, so I didn’t even bring it to work, but I do have Calamine to treat “spot itches,” although I’m doubting its actual effectivenes. Other things that I have learned: The reason that it can pop up later in unexpected places is because the poison travels internally through the bloodstream. Most cases of poison ivy last anywhere from 12 to […]

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misery

Things always seem magnified in the middle of the night — jokes are funnier, ideas more brilliant, fears worse — and I think I’ve figured out why. It’s because I’m supposed to be SLEEPING and my body is PISSED at me for not being so, and all events get interpreted through a lens of subconscious freaking out. Hi. It’s 3:30 a.m. and I’ve had maybe 30 minutes of sleep with more looking unlikely. My body’s pissed and now so is the rest of me. The barely-broken-in upstairs air conditioner chose to cease operations about six hours ago, and since it is Texas in September (not as bad as August but still in the 90s during the day and 80s overnight) we are sleeping downstairs on the futon, which is rather comfortable as a sofa and not bad as temporary sleeping quarters, but it ain’t my Tempurpedic. And it is small, so we are sleeping (or not sleeping) nearly touching, and the body heat generated by my wonderful nuclear furnace husband is intense, so even in the relative cool of the one working a/c unit I am hot and sweaty. I’ve spent most of the time that I’ve lain awake trying very very very hard to ignore the fact that my arms are itching intensely due to poison ivy. This is easier to do when my mind is occupied by, say, writing, or work, or television, or running errands. Not so much when I’m lying still and trying to will myself to sleep. I did finally drift off sometime after 2:30 a.m., but woke myself up at 3 scratching. I just don’t know how I can possibly control what I do in my sleep. At least it was only one arm this time, but it was intense and I could not […]

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a poisonous lesson

I have learned the following very important life lesson in the past week: If you see something that looks like this growing on your back fence, do not go out in your jogging bra and shorts, wearing only gardening gloves for protection, and spend 30 minutes ripping it down. Leaves of three, let them be. Here is what my stomach now looks like: And my right arm: And my left arm: I posted a few days ago that I thought a little ant or spider had chewed on me in the night, leaving a series of little bites on my arms. WRONG! Little did I know that the inocuous-looking vine growing on the back fence was poison ivy. It took me several days to make the connection because it didn’t show up until about 48 hours after I’d touched the plant, and also I’ve never had poison ivy before. Hi! Love you, poison ivy! New areas of INSANE itchiness have been gradually spreading across my body, probably because I’d gotten the urushiol oil on my clothing, and did laundry a few days later — picking up the poisonous clothes once again and spreading it to new areas. I have learned that Benadryl doesn’t do jack shit for the itching, but it sure will put me to sleep, so maybe it kind of accomplishes the same goal in a different way. Topical hydrocortisone also does not do jack shit. Calamine lotion does seem to work a little but turns me a sickly pink color, like I’ve been bathing in Pepto Bismol. It’s so hard not to scratch. I’m pretty much in a state of low-grade itchiness all the time that I just try to ignore by thinking of other things. Once I start it’s basically impossible to stop. Warm showers make […]

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the diva cup

This is probably more than any of you wanted to know, but I decided to try out something called the Diva Cup. It’s basically an alternative to tampons. You can stop reading here if you don’t want to know more! Still with me? Good. I got myself a Diva Cup last weekend, and I will spare you most of the squishy details other than to say it works really well, after an initial period (ha!) of getting used to it. You cannot be squeamish about your body if you want to use this device; you will be getting up close and personal with yourself. It took me about a day to get comfortable with positioning it properly. And it feels a little odd initially, but after it heats up to your body temperature you don’t even notice it’s there. It is neither messy nor gross, which were my two initial thoughts when I first heard about it. This is going to save me a ton of money on what manufacturers euphemistically term “feminine hygiene products” each month, not to mention not contributing those products to landfills (the average woman uses over 11,000 tampons in her lifetime). There’s no risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome. I’m not putting bleach and dioxins and god knows what other toxins into my body. And you can wear it up to 12 hours if you like, so I won’t usually have to mess with it at work. Anyway, I really love it so far, for reasons even more numerous than those I listed above. If you want to know more feel free to email me and I’ll answer any questions you might have!

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