Category Archives: Health

On the one hand, I’ve got so much to get done and so few spare hours to get it done in. Yet I spend hours and hours every day doing NOTHING except snoring loud enough to wake the dead and having leg cramps.

On the other hand, I would kill right now for a couple more hours’ sleep every night. I’m barely getting six at best most nights, and even that is of the “barely better than nothing” variety. See “leg cramps,” above.

So there it is in a nutshell. I would do almost anything to do away with it altogether while at the same time I would do almost anything to get about 35% to 40% more.

Isn’t that something like the definition of an addiction? Just asking…

Think about it – aside from the fairly immediate panicked thoughts burbling up from the pre-amphibian parts of the brain stem, wouldn’t it be great to never have to sleep again? Think of what you could get done with those extra five or six or eight hours a day!

Oh, right. We would spend that extra time just watching more stupid reruns on cable or something equally mind-numbing and useless.

Snarky comments aside, if Morpheus (which is a particularly apt name for this train of thought) gave you the:

• red pill, which would give you a solid eight hours of sleep and waking refreshed and alert every morning for the rest of your life, or
• the blue pill, which meant that you would never sleep again and would never get that mental lethargy that saps your will when you’re starting to drift off and can’t keep your eyes open any more and you wouldn’t go insane or die from some physiological booby trap caused by a lack of sleep

which pill would you take?

When I started working again, I soon discovered that I wanted (sort of needed) to wear a watch again. Normally I haven’t, primarily because I didn’t have a good, functional watch. I have one that’s functional (an old Timex Ironman, one of the metal ones, not the plastic ones) and while it works and I like it, the display is dim and hard to read after probably fifteen-plus years. I also have a nice Torgeon pilot’s watch, but it went glitchy a couple of years ago and tends to die after only a few weeks, even with new “two-year” batteries installed every six months.

As so many do in this day and age, my phone is my watch, as well as my always at hand internet connection, GPS map, book collection, movie collection, music player, camera, computer, and so on. But if I just want to get the time, it’s awkward to have to pull out every time I want to check, especially if I’m sitting.

I also need to get more mobile and active, especially now that I’m in an office at a desk job (more or less), so I have been looking at the watches and “portable electronic assistants” that will keep tack of your activity, steps, and so on.

There are a growing number of these devices that combine a little bit of all of that. The Apple Watch is at the top of the list, and I wouldn’t mind paying $350 or whatever for one, but for what I want there were a couple of drawbacks. One is that they don’t have internal GPS, but instead take it off of the linked phone. If you don’t have your phone, you don’t have GPS, which limits it as a watch for monitoring and tracking runs, walks, bike rides, hiking, or whatever. The other drawback is that, while they’re a bit “water resistant,” they’re far from waterproof. For $350+, it needs to be more rugged.

The device that I had my eye on was the Garmin Vivoactive smart watch. Garmin has long been a leader in sports watches with built-in GPS – I still have an old Forerunner GPS running watch that I got about four years ago. The Vivoactive is waterproof and reasonably rugged, and has all of the apps I’m used to in the Forerunner for running, walking, or biking. It also has built in apps for swimming or golf, with the ability to download a database of maps for every golf course in the US. Not that I play golf, but that’s still cool.

In addition, the Vivoactive will link to your phone and buzz to let you know you have a message, or do some simple changes to the music play list, or get the weather, and so on. It’s nowhere near as versatile as the Apple Watch, but what it does it does better. Since I primarily wanted and needed what it does, and not all of the potential things that an Apple Watch might do, and because most head-to-head reviews gave the Vivoactive much, much better battery life than the Apple Watch, and because the Vivoactive runs about half the price of the Apple Watch, I wanted the Vivoactive.

I was going to get one as a personal reward when I started the new job, but I was just too busy. Then I was going to stop and get one when I finished the first week of work. Then it was when I got my first paycheck. Then…

Then it popped up when I was doing my last minute Christmas shopping on Amazon, and I figured it was time to quit screwing around with the decision. I bought it for myself for Christmas.

So far I like it. We’ll see what it does over the next few days.

It wants me to target 5,000 steps a day, which should come out to about three miles or so. Today I’m only at 944 steps, which isn’t that bad considering I didn’t power it up and start it until well after noon, and I spent most of the day watching movies with The Long-Suffering Wife.

Yet another toy to try to save me from myself. But a nice toy. A clever toy.

AND it tells me the time at a glance!

You remember how, don’t you?

I know, sometimes you forget. There’s so much to focus on and your body will take care of the breathing, right? It’s your automatic system! Autoneurotic system? Autonomic system? Close enough!

The new job is great, having a wonderful time every day so far. But there’s so much to learn and so much to do and getting up to speed and hitting the ground running and putting your shoulder to the grindstone and your nose to the wheel is easy when there’s adrenaline involved (ask for it by name!), but it does take it’s toll.

And the holidays! And the family! And dealing with the missing mother and dog! And deadlines, some of them shooting by like exploding flak over Berlin as you tear though at 500 mph in a Spitfire or Mustang. (By the way, if you want to see a real, flying Spitfire or Mustang, or even ride in the Mustang, well…you know.)  And the self-imposed need to get something creative out here every night, even with an inattentive and possibly substance abusing muse. (Although she’s doing pretty well tonight, I had none of this ten minutes ago.) And no time to exercise or run, despite how much you know you should, even though you don’t want to, and you know the more you don’t want to and the more you don’t have time means all the more that you really should do it. (Okay, I said the muse had some great ideas tonight. No one said anything about paragraph structure or grammar.)

And all of a sudden you realize that while you’re breathing, you can’t remember the last time you were BREATHING.

So all of you reading this, now or later, here or there, hither or yon, hunky or dorey – STOP.

A deep breathe in. Slowly. All the way. Stretch that diaphragm. Fill yourself up.

Hold it. Three. Two. One.

Let it out. Slowly. Get ride of it all. Empty your lungs right down to your kneecaps.

Hold it. Drei. Zwei. Eins.

Repeat as needed.

You’re welcome.

There are a couple of great ideas rolling around in my head, just waiting to get written out and posted here. (Really, there are!) Unfortunately, there may also be alien larvae or something else equally horrifying in there.

Four weeks ago, when I was in Washington, I started to come down with a cold. As I usually do, I hit it hard with Cold Eeze (zinc lozenges), Dayquil, and Nyquil, and it cleared up in a day or two. Except for my eustachian tubes.

For those not familiar, those are the tubes connecting your ears to your sinuses. When you “pop” your ears with a change in pressure (like going up or down a mountain, or in a plane) it’s to equalize the pressure in those tubes. If you have them really well blocked and fly anyway, it can lead to excruciating pain.

I had them blocked and flew anyway.

Fine, had to get home. Figured that it would clear up along with the cold in a few days. Constantly trying to yawn or wiggle my jaw to clear them was a pain in the ass, but no big deal for a day or so.

Thirty days later…

Let’s skip all of the grisly details and just say that it’s non-fatal, but really, really annoying. And it’s such a stupid little thing! I’ve tried all of the suggested treatments from my hospital’s online site, the Mayo Clinic’s site, WebMD, and FamilyDoctor.org. I’ve taken this, and that, and drunk this, and eaten that.

Nada.

OK, even for such a “stupid little thing,” tomorrow I see the doctor. I want a prescription for a big, long piece of surgical-grade pipe cleaner to put in this ear, pull out the other, then run back and forth like Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck would to clear it up.

Or better meds than I can get over the counter. Same thing.