Category Archives: Health

September 20, 2013 · 19:50

A Good Night’s Sleep (Or Lack Thereof)

Never underestimate the value of a good night’s sleep.

It doesn’t matter if you get four hours or ten hours of sleep, as long as that’s what’s right for you and what your body needs. I’ve often been envious of those who can blissfully be alert and energetic all day on four or five hours of sleep, because they get an extra four or five hours a day to get stuff done!

I usually need closer to eight hours but have almost never gotten it. For years there was full-time college and a full-time job. (A college professor told me that I was burning the candle at both ends, I figured it was more like I was putting the candle into an industrial strength microwave and just nuking it.) Then there were kids and a job. Then there was that whole single dad and kids a a job thing. Now that I’ve gotten older and the kids are gone (and for the moment, unfortunately, so has the job) I find that there are other things that keep me from sleeping. Some years I feel like I just can’t get a break.

The dog is sometimes an issue. If she needs to go out or if she’s restless, I’m usually the one to get up and take care of it. In the past there have also been other household beasts that have been sources of nocturnal interruptions.

Various ailments are sometimes an issue. I’m particularly susceptible once or twice a year to some kind of rash or allergy that itches like crazy. Makes it tough to sleep.

I’ve also had kidney stones in the past, so I’m a bit fanatical about staying well hydrated. (If you’ve ever had kidney stones, you know what I’m talking about.) So as I’ve gotten older it’s gotten tougher to get a solid eight hours (or even six) without waking up and needing a trip to the bathroom.

My most recent problems have come from nocturnal leg cramps or “charlie horses”. If anyone has an actual treatment or cure, they’re keeping it well hidden from the medical community. I guess there’s not as much money in solving that problem as there is in coming up with a new treatment for baldness or erectile dysfunction. But if you’ve ever had night leg cramps, you know the joy of waking up in agony with your leg(s) in knots. WebMD, the Mayo Clinic site, the family MD, the CDC — none of them have a clue other than, “Yeah, it happens as you get older. It’s a bitch. Live with it. We’re clueless.”

Whatever the reason that you (by which I mean “I”) get your six or seven hours of sleep in three or four stretches of sixty to ninety minutes a time (when what you really, really need is a solid eight hours), messing up your REM sleep that much is going to leave you punchy at times and grouchy. (I know, that’s why coffee was invented. I don’t drink coffee.) Even if you do your best to “shake it off”, it’s like having a compromised immune system, only for your spirit and sense of humor instead of for your physical body. It doesn’t take much to tip your mood off kilter when you’re on the thin edge of exhausted all day.

I guess my point is that it’s important to remember that when you’re feeling a bit on the ragged side and it feels like the universe has you down by two touchdowns late in the fourth quarter, you should see if maybe a fifteen-minute nap might not help.

Sometimes it’s the simple things.

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September 3, 2013 · 20:06

A Pint Low

Today I donated blood at the local American Red Cross donation site. This is not by any means the first time that I’ve done this, nor will it be the last, but it had been over two years since I have been able to donate due to some policies of the Red Cross which I don’t agree with. (I hear that they’re not the ones making up these rules, but the CDC is.)

20130903-200617.jpgIt’s funny to me these days that I’m a regular blood and platelet donor, given the need for needles and poking involved. As a child, when we would all get taken for our vaccinations, I had to be carried kicking, screaming, and crying into the clinic. As the oldest of eight kids and supposedly the one who was supposed to be setting the example, this were not my most gracious moments. A stint in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy when I was thirteen, along with all of those IV’s and shots, left me no longer upset by needles.

I think that I first donated blood when I was a college student, but I know that I started donating regularly when I got involved in science fiction fandom. Robert Heinlein, another Grand Master in the field and one of my favorite authors, was a huge proponent of blood donations since he had a rare blood type. Beginning in the mid 1970’s, because of Heinlein’s efforts in fandom, blood drives at conventions became fairly common. While not at every con, most larger cons and annual recurring cons schedule blood drives.

A few years back, since I also have a slightly rare blood type, I was asked by the local Red Cross office if I would consider donating platelets. For those who have never done it, platelet donations are similar to whole blood donations, but generally involve two needles instead of one and can take up to two hours instead of fifteen to twenty minutes. Your blood is removed from your body, centrifuged to separate the platelets out, and then your blood (minus the platelets) is pumped back into you. Where whole blood can only be donated ever eight weeks, platelets can be donated every two weeks. They do a great job of keeping you comfy while donating platelets, keeping a big supply of DVDs to watch and putting you into a comfy chair with a screen and headphones. The downside is that if you’re properly hydrated it’s tough (at least for me) to not have to pee for two hours, and you can’t stop in the middle of the donation, so sometimes it gets uncomfortable and awkward. The other mild side effect comes from an anti-coagulant that the use due to the length of time that your blood is being pumped in and out; it can leave a funky taste in your mouth.

A couple of years back, I was donating platelets about every three weeks, and occasionally donating whole blood just to give myself an eight-week break. Then to my surprise, I was “deferred”, told that I couldn’t donate for a year. The reason was that the Long-Suffering Wife and I had taken a cruise to the Mexican west coast. Cabo San Lucas and Puerta Vallarta were no problem, but apparently there was a case of malaria reported within 100 miles of Mazatlan, so I couldn’t donate blood for a year for fear that I might have been exposed.

Uh-huh.

The year went by (while I still got calls a couple times a month from the ARC asking if I would like to schedule an appointment to donate) and finally I went back in. And again I was deferred for another year. It seems that in the intervening months I had gone to Asia, and while China and Japan were fine, there was a problem with being in Korea. I triggered their system by flying in and out of the country through the airport at Inchon, and Inchon is a no-no for exposure to malaria. The fact is that I never left the building or was exposed to the outside in Inchon – I flew in, stayed in the terminal long enough to get my luggage, got on a train in the terminal, and left for Seoul, then reversed the process five days later. I was told that being in Seoul was not a problem, but that Inchon was, regardless of the fact that I was there for less than an hour each time and I never went outside. No more donations for another year. No exceptions.

Uh-huh again.

I can go off on a rant about the logic behind those policies some other time (in fact, I know that I will!) but the second time I just figured it was their loss. I still got called on a regular basis and emails about once a week asking me to schedule a donation, but they just got ignored. I really think that they can use some better database management on their calling setup, but I haven’t gotten that job yet.

Now the second year is up and it was time to donate again. I was half expecting some other problem, and I offered to donate platelets instead of whole blood since platelets are more valuable and can be donated more often, but they wanted the whole blood. OK, “not my float!” (Remember that phrase as well…)

In the tradition of the great Robert Heinlein, let me encourage all of you to donate blood (or platelets!) if you can. Help to save a life! There are restrictions if you’re too young or too thin or if you’ve been exposed to certain diseases or taken certain medications or if you’ve ever participated in any “risky” behavior. You will be asked some rather blunt questions about your sex life and possible drug use, since keeping the blood supply clear of the AIDS virus is still critical.

But if you’re not in any of the groups that they consider risky, please take a look at donating either at a local blood drive or at a local Red Cross center. If you’ve never donated and have concerns or questions about the process, there’s a lot of good information here on the Red Cross site. If you’re concerned about needles, don’t be – even a world-class wussy-boy like me can do it.

Fortunately, today’s donation went without a hitch, easy peasy. (Well, at least my donation was easy.) I was in and out in less than an hour, and the actual donation itself only took about fifteen minutes.

It was a good day to be a fast bleeder.

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Filed under Fandom, Health, Not My Float, Paul

August 30, 2013 · 21:31

Random Blatherationings for August 30th

What? I haven’t done a Random Blatherationings post for August yet? (If you’ve been fortunate enough to let the “rules” leak out of your brain, they’re here.) Time to fix that! Tonight’s three random seed words are “hemisection” (a division along the mesial plane or one of the parts so divided), “quizzism” (the art or habit of quizzing), and “dietetic” (of or performance to diet or to the rules for regulating the kind and quantity of food to be eaten).

Right, then…

Hemisection My first random Google adventure takes me to the Wikipedia entry for Brown-Séquard Syndrome, apparently because “any presentation of spinal injury that is an incomplete lesion (hemisection) can be called a partial Brown-Séquard or incomplete Brown-Séquard syndrome.” The short version for the non-medical professionals out there (me, first of all!) is that “lateral hemisection” is a fancy medical term for cutting, and when it happens to the spinal cord it shows up as paralysis, and Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard was the guy who first described this in 1850.

The history of physiology is not my strong point (glad I didn’t get that for the “forgotten final“) but it’s obvious that people knew prior to 1850 that if your spinal cord was cut there was going to be paralysis. (Actually, I’m pretty sure that death in such circumstances was far more common than paralysis.) It seems that what Brown-Séquard figured out was that certain neurological messages were carried in different fibers of the spinal cord, so that if there were partial cuttings of the spinal cord you might lose your ability to feel temperature or pain.

But the real golden nugget of information in the Wikipedia article about our pal is that he was “known for self-reporting ‘rejuvenated sexual prowess after eating extracts of monkey testis’.” If you’re going to have something truly bizarre listed in your biographical material 119 years after your death, I say you should really go for it, and that one’s setting the bar pretty high. Where does one go to find more details on these self-inflicted “experiments”? And why were they necessary in the first place? Granted, they didn’t have Viagra in the 1880’s, but was he really that desperate?

He sounds like an “interesting” guy, for many reasons.

Quizzism Ignoring all of the Google entries that just take you to a definition, the first random web surfing leap takes us to a listing for an e-book from Google. “Quizzism: And Its Key Quirks and Quibbles from Queer Quarters, A Mélange of Questions in Literature, Science, History, Biography, Mythology, Philology, Geography, Etc. Etc. with Their Answers” was published in 1884 by Albert Plympton Southwick.

How interesting. The 2013 internet in all of its randomness has shown us a book from 1884 about “Quirks and Quibbles From Queer Quarters” immediately after an article about a really bizarre physiologist from the late 1800’s.

The mind boggles.

First of all, how can Mr. Southwick’s first and biggest question not be about Brown-Séquard’s monkey testicle diet? I can’t imagine that not being a prime topic of debate in the 1880’s! I’ll have to get this e-book to find the answer. It says the answers are included, right there in the book title that’s 36% too freakin’ long to fit into a 140-character tweet!

(I swear, this is being written in one draft, sequentially, stream of consciousness, totally random, and so on. I only wish I were a skilled enough writer to be making this shit up.)

Secondly, how can I not use the name “Albert Plympton Southwick” as a character in a novel some day? Really? Just let the name roll around on your tongue for a moment and you can practically see him there in the flesh. No doubt to be played by either John Cryer or Rick Moranis in the movie version. And even more odd – there’s no Wikipedia entry for Albert Plympton Southwick, but there is a Facebook account under that name? I have got to meet this dude!

Finally, how much does one have to shell out for this treasure trove of ancient wisdom? It’s free! (Gotta love Google!) But there aren’t any reviews of it yet, at all. (What a huge surprise that is!)

We’ll have to fix that. Now it’s a quest! We’re on a mission from God!

Dietetic No big surprises here, an “I feel lucky!” Google search sends us to the web page for the Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics. Good, I’ve got a few choice words about a “dietetic lifestyle”.

I understand that eating double cheeseburgers and fries and ice cream three meals a day with candy and salty snacks in between is bad for you. I’m not an idiot. (No matter what the Long Suffering Wife’s family says!) Despite knowing that it wasn’t good for me, I ate like that for a long time – BECAUSE IT TASTES GOOD! When I got done eating I WAS FULL and all of the little happy receptors in my brain were firing off and I could go into a blissful food coma.

Now that I’m a little older, I’ve had to spend the last fifteen years or so paying the price for that. First it was the salt that had to go, in order to keep my blood pressure under control. Then it was the sugar and sweets, so that I could lose a few (dozen) pounds. Throw in a bunch of exercise and running to help things along. Just when I thought that I was doing a great job and should be getting an “Atta boy!” from the doctor, instead I get told that I have to drastically cut the pizza and the pasta and the bread and the rice and all of the other carbs and even many of the things that I had thought were “good” and “healthy”. (For example, Jamba Juice.) SHAZBATT!!

Now that I’ve lived with that last dietary adjustment (and by “adjustment”, I mean “restriction”) for about two years, eating teeny, tiny portions of anything that might have actual taste and ginormeously huge portions of bland, raw veggys and salads, I’m finally (sometimes) getting my “Atta boy!” from the doctor. I’m exercising more, losing weight, have good blood pressure, and I get spectacularly wonderful A1C results. Despite all of that, most days I would kill for a burger, fries, and a chocolate malt.

Every once in a while, just because there needs to be a teeny, tiny bit of moderation in addition to those teeny, tiny portions, every once in a while I’ll justify “falling off the wagon” just for one meal. Once a month or so if I’m at a ballgame or someplace where there aren’t a lot of healthy dinner choices, I’ll have a couple of hot dogs and an ice cream sandwich. If one of the kids is home or we’ve had a rotten day and everyone’s tired, I’ll let myself have pizza or Chinese food. Just so that I can occasionally remember how wonderful all of that “bad” food is, I’ll allow myself to indulge without guilt.

Here’s where karma bites you in the ass.

That pizza or candy or burger or malt or fast food or whatever that you just KNOW tastes so freakin’ good (and in your head actually tastes even better, like ambrosia, because you can’t have it), that stuff absolutely tastes like crap after your body has adjusted to a steady diet of “healthy” food. Eat it and you will feel like a poisoned slug for days. Despite how “good” it is supposed to taste.

That sucks big time, in a totally cosmic way. That’s just the gods messing with our heads because they can. You take something that you want soooooooo bad, you get it taken away, and when you are finally able to indulge just a tiny bit in order to again experience how wonderful it is for just a few minutes, it turns out that YOU have changed so that the wonderful, wonderful thing is now complete garbage to you. It’s still wonderful for all of the other folks who are still “poisoning their bodies”, and at the other extreme there are the sanctimonious “healthy people” who think that the salads and granola and water are the best thing ever. But stuck in the middle, EVERYTHING TASTES BAD.

I tried once to express this (politely) to a dietitian who was silly enough to ask how I was doing with my new diet restrictions. I got a look of scorn, disdain, and pity that I’ll never forget. She was enlightened and no doubt filled with angelic joy as she ate her salads and drank her 1% fat almond milk. I was a simply a lost soul who couldn’t accept her truth.

Yeah. “Dietetic”. I’ve got a few things to say about that word.

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July 15, 2013 · 22:39

Jenny, Jenny, Who Can We Turn To?

The producers of ABC’s “The View” have decided that their latest hostess on their afternoon talk show will be Jenny McCarthy.

Ms. McCarthy has a couple of notable highlights to her career. She was a Playboy centerfold in 1993 and later Playmate of the Year. She has done some modeling. She has had some roles in some truly forgettable films and won a couple of Razzie Awards for them. She played a recurring character, a ditzy, buxom, blonde, on “Two & A Half Men”. (What a stretch of her acting chops!)

And she has become quite the spokesperson campaigning against childhood vaccinations, loudly and proudly pushing the completely false and discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.

Why is she now a hostess on a daily, mid-afternoon talk show aimed at the stay-at-home mom demographic? Her track record shows that she meets the definition of “pretty” used by Hugh Hefner and the mythical Charlie Harper. And…

That’s it. There is no second qualification that I can see.

But she is passionate, if ignorant and terribly misguided, about telling other parents to NOT let their pediatricians give their kids immunizations for measles, polio, chickenpox, diphtheria, hepatitis, flu, mumps, pertussis, rubella, tetanus, and so on.

Others have been making a fuss over this far more eloquently than I can. For example:

  • The James Randi Educational Foundation in 2008 gave Ms. McCarthy a Pigasus Award for contributions to pseudoscience.
  • Phil Plait (“The Bad Astronomer”) has a great article on his Slate blog here.
  • Time magazine’s television critic James Poniewozik has an excellent article here.
  • The Anti-Vaccine Body Count is keeping score.
  • Google “Jenny McCarthy Vaccine” and just watch all of the news articles pop up.

Parents get to make choices every day on how their kids are going to be raised, and with a very few exceptions that’s the way it’s supposed to be and has to be. (Sorry, those exceptions – if you’re raising your toddlers with rattlesnakes as babysitters, for example, that’s probably over the line in my book.) Parents should always be trying to do their best to make informed decisions on behalf of their children, not just following anyone blindly.

But too many people can’t or won’t make a distinction between a medical expert that they see in the flesh every few months and a “celebrity” they see sitting next to Barbara Walters on an “entertainment” show every day. They take that celebrity’s word as fact, when it’s really 100% opinion, and an opinion that’s been repeatedly proven to be horribly, dangerously wrong.

In this case it’s even worse, because it’s not just the anti-vaxxers’ children who are going to get sick. When they get sick they spread the disease to others. Google for articles about the upswing in measles and whooping cough caused by the failure of parents to immunize in the past couple of decades, even though these diseases are almost entirely preventable. Judge for yourself the damage that has already been done throughout society by these misguided, inaccurate, discredited campaigns of fear and ignorance.

Do you think that having tens of thousands of kids with preventable diseases every year is helping to drive down the cost of health care for you and me and everyone else?

Who do you want to listen to when making life and death decisions for your children. Your doctor, who went to eight or ten years of medical school and is backed by tens of thousands of researchers and decades of data and clinical trials?

Or Miss October 1993?

What’s that old song by Tommy Tutone? “Jenny, I got your number… 8-6-7-5-3-0-9”

We always thought it was a phone number. Maybe it’s the number of children who are going to suffer and possibly die from completely preventable diseases now that ABC has given Jenny a pulpit.

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Filed under Death Of Common Sense, Entertainment, Freakin' Idiots!, Health

May 29, 2013 · 21:55

Bloody Numbers

It’s that time of year, when my annual medical tests need to get done. I was supposed to get my blood work done in April but had let it slide. Now they are on my case to get it done before the end of the month, so today was the day to skip breakfast and hustle off to get poked and drained and tested.

I’m happy to report that it’s all good, in fact, the best that I’ve done in ten years acording to the online data. Even my “good cholesterol”, my bugaboo that is always almost in the acceptable range, made it this time. I’m golden, across the board!

In a couple of weeks I’ll see the doctor for the rest of the annual check-up (mmmm, the smell of lube and the snap of the glove…) and once again I’ll be waiting to see if I get any kind of credit for watching what I eat, exercising, losing a few pounds, not drinking or smoking…

I look at these ten-year charts and say, “Wow! look at how much better I’m doing right across the board!” The doctor (a nice guy) says, “Well, ok, maybe. But you should still lose another twenty pounds, thirty would be better, and your cholesterol numbers, while in range, could still handle some improvement.”

Would it kill him to give me a little “Atta boy”?

Today I had salad, vegys, and just about zero carbs for dinner, fruit for lunch & breakfast, and lots of water all day. I’ve been good.

Now I’m going to go have some ice cream. Moderation in all things. Including moderation.

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