Health

my latest malady

I’ve had some sort of cold for the past week and a half or so. It’s not so bad that I’m lying shivering in bed all day, but it’s enough to make me cranky and very tired. It’s not the sniffly/sneezy kind of affliction; it’s more the coughing/hard to breathe/thick-chest-feeling kind. I’ve been trying Theraflu liquid and caps, and Nyquil at night, but so far none of that seems to have had any effect. The Nyquil doesn’t even help with my insomnia, although I am quite sleepy all day. About an hour ago I took a “Bronkaid” decongestant capsule, which we have from when Doc was sick a few years ago, to see if it would have any effect. The thickness in my throat does seem a bit looser (for lack of a better word) (bingo! I thought) but I started to feel reeeeeeeeeally weird. Shaky and vibrating and weak and just strange. That’s when Doc told me that they are basically amphetamines. D’oh! I’m speed-tweaked. No wonder I feel so strange. I don’t like this. Unless the congestion magically disappears, I think I’m going to go throw the rest of the Bronkaid out.

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diva cupdate

If you don’t want to know details about my Diva Cup and menstrual processes, do not read any further. Seriously, I mean it! You will be sorry if you do! It took me a while to get comfortable using the Diva Cup, but overall I’d have to say that I’m pretty happy with it. I have mostly gotten the hang of proper positioning, which is harder than you might think, and it’s popping open on the first try most of the time now. I have noticed a change in my flow from when I was using conventional feminine hygiene products — the last 3-4 days of my cycle used to be a very gradual trickle-down until eventually it would end, but it was kind of a slow, lingering, annoying process. Now it’s pretty much a full-on stop, and my cycles seem a day or two shorter now. Something kind of freaky happened to me last week. On Monday, I started my period, but it had only been 16 days since the start of my last period. This is not normal. I went to the doctor Tuesday, and she said that it could be stress, or it could be a hormonal fluctuation, but she did have me go to the lab for bloodwork. I haven’t heard back yet, so I’m not sure if they found anything. The cycle I had before this one also started early, though not nearly as early as this one. Doc joked that since Yvonne is pregnant, perhaps I am having a sympathy period for her since she’s not having any now. I told him that I am not taking THAT bullet for anyone!!

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i’m not sure i’ve complained enough lately…

…. so let me complain some more. I have thrown out my back again. Goddammit. I don’t know why they say “thrown out.” In fact, I hesitate to use that phrase when I’m telling people why I’m walking funny with tears in my eyes and a pained look on my face. “Thrown out” sounds so active, so agressive. It was appropriate the time that I was pitching fastballs in the World Series (that’s baseball, right?), and OOPS! I threw out my back. Or the time that I had to dash out onto a highway to save 5 year old twins AND their twin kittens from being squashed flat by traffic, and I threw out my back in the process but didn’t notice until later because I was too busy saving lives and what with the dashing between cars and all. So anyhow. This time, “thrown out” doesn’t fit. And it’s not a cramp, or a sprain. “Muscle spasm” is actually quite accurate but it sounds so… I don’t know. Almost dirty somehow. The truth is, I felt a strange *twinge* in my mid-back, right side, as I was ROLLING THE TRASH CART OUT to the street this morning (quite a sexy and adventurous way to be injured, eh?). And it’s not like it was full of heavy things like bowling balls or tree branches or severed alien heads; in fact, it didn’t have anything in it besides a bag of cat poop (3 cats, 2 day’s worth, to be exact) (maybe they’re alien cats). I stretched a little bit before getting into the car, to ward off the possibility of it turning into something worse, but I guess it was going to happen no matter what. By noon I was in pretty severe pain and left work at the insistence […]

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fat and lazy

It’s not that I’ve completely quit trying… but maybe I kind of have. My marathon training has fallen back to April/May levels, if that. Part of it is that I was trying to give my stress-fractured leg a rest for a while, to see if it would maybe magically heal itself over a 4 week period. Part of it is that it really hurt to run. Part of it is that Yvonne, for her own reasons, probably won’t be running the whole thing either. I have realized over the past couple of days that I’ve actually been forgetting about my training. Like, it doesn’t even occur to me anymore to exercise. I had gotten into the habit of almost daily doing a run after work, or in the morning on the weekends, more-or-less happily striving towards my goal. And now it’s not even entering my mental “to-do” list. I hate the feeling of realizing that I’ve forgotten something like that. It’s the same sick feeling I get when I think about one of my worst fears: forgetting to take care of something I’m responsible for, and having it die or other horrible consequences. Plants, animals, children, mortgage, etc. I think I have dreams like that a lot, where I realize that I’m supposed to have been doing something all along. I also feel like my eating habits have been … what is the opposite of “improving”? Yeah, that. I want to get back into a routine now, though. Leg pain or no leg pain, I have to do something. The weather is cooperating and has cooled down nicely (58 right now, I have the windows open and thick socks on), which will make outdoor runs much less painful. Something occurred to me the other day, though, as I was trying […]

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the week’s update

I’ve been working on my other website a lot this week so I haven’t had much time to write. Last week kinda sucked, between feeling downright awful for several days (bad period) and some crazy shit going on at work involving deadlines and last minute changes and having to say no and things maybe not working right and the possibility of a trivia slideshow to be presented in front of 2500 rich people going down in flames (it didn’t, but it was nervewracking getting there) and talking to managers about lessening the craziness of the crazy shit and just generally being extra crabby. It was a bad week for a lot of people that I talked to. Also, I barely ran any at all last week; my leg is still not feeling any better. Now it’s doing this thing where if I put any weight on it, it feels like it’s going to buckle! Good times all around. I’m going to try to get back into it this week, maybe run some on the elliptical machine, which I like better than the treadmill and it feels better on my injury. I got a slew of new freelance work and billed for quite a bit from September. I feel that the projects are coming at a good pace now. Nothing like the craziness of the book project. That should be printed and might deliver this week (thus the reason I was working on my business website; my URL is printed in the credits). We did have a good time out on Saturday night with Kirk, Brittney, and Stan. We ate at a steakhouse and then went to the crazy bowling alley-slash-event and entertainment center. We didn’t do any actual bowling, but played some video games, then went to Steak and Shake […]

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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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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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