Category: Health

by James Wallace Harris, 8/4/21

TRIGGER WARNING: Don’t read this if you’re under 65 or prone to depression. I don’t want anyone blowing their brains out because I’ve bummed them out.

This past year I’ve been sitting in countless waiting rooms with other sick souls waiting for the M.D. After our name is called, why do we say “Great” or “Fine” when the nurse asks us how we’re doing? Aren’t we all lying? Are we so overjoyed the waiting is over that we lie? How do we really feel? What if we actually told her.

The next time the nurse is in the doorway and yells “James Harris” and then asks me as I approach her, “How are you doing today?” I’ll give her this blog.

People ask me all the time about how I’m doing. I’m afraid to tell them. Oh, I make up funny anecdotes about the urologist, or laugh about my gallstones, but is it socially acceptable whine about how we really feel?

Lately, I’ve been asking myself, “How do I feel?” Mostly I’m stoic even to myself. I don’t want to admit that life is starting to suck. It’s not all bad, but so many of my organs are breaking down that I want to trade my body in for a 2022 model. I’m retired and have all my time free – which my young friends envy, and I’m not suffering like many folks on the nightly news every evening. But retiring and getting old is nothing like I imagined.

When I was young I thought turning old meant going bald and becoming wrinkled. I figured I could handle that. Then in my forties and fifties I started having various medical “issues.” However, doctors would fix me, and there would be long periods of feeling good. I realize now that getting old is when the periods of feeling good get shorter and shorter. I assume old old is when we give up hoping for symptom-free days.

I haven’t had a day where I felt normal, much less good, in so long I can’t remember. There’s always some body part yelling or kicking about something. Luckily, it’s been mostly little slaps to my innards, but they are starting to get a lot more forceful. I can’t imagine what daily life will be like in ten or twenty years.

And I have no reason to whine. I know people with all kinds of horrible cancers, chronic pains, conditions with scary names, failing body parts needing replacements, mental maladies, or worse. A quarter of the people born the year I was, 1951, are now dead. Of course, I know people my age, even ten and twenty years older, that are still healthy (if they aren’t lying). Aging begins in different decades for different people. And I keep hoping I can get my current broken parts repaired so I can feel normal again – for a while at least. I’d love a whole normal year, or even a couple months. Hell, right now, a week would be wonderful. I’m starting to worry that some of my ailments might be chronic. I’m like an antique car that runs but is always up on the rack.

Aging wisely I suppose, is learning to accept the increasing time required for parts maintenance. I sure it took Sisyphus time to adapt to his task too.

It used to be simple. The head aches, take an aspirin, it stops. My stomach complains, I change my diet, it shuts up. My heart has tachycardia episodes, I get a cardiologist to zap the right spot, it ticks like a clock. That’s what I thought would happen with my pee-pee-peeing problem. I’d see a urologist, have an operation, it would be fixed. That didn’t happen this time. I had an operation. It didn’t fix everything. My doctor is still trying, but things aren’t simple.

Right now my bladder is driving me nuts daily, every few months I have a gallbladder attack, and I’m getting rather gimpy because of my spinal stenosis. For years I’ve had stomach problems, but if I gave up certain foods my tummy would play nice, sometimes for months (until I started sneaking in junk food). I’ve now given up all the fun foods gurus told me were bad, and my stomach still bellyaches. I suppose it’s the gallbladder, but I don’t know. My doctor is wait-and-see watching me. It used to be docs would just rip out the gallbladder but they don’t seem to be so quick with the scalpel anymore. They’ve discovered there are long-term consequences to living without your GB. I’m trying to find if I can live with my gallbladder and stones or need to have that sucker laparoed out, but while I ponder I have indigestion, reflux, and sometimes painful attacks. It’s a quandary. It’s certainly taken the enjoyment out of mealtimes. I never know when I’ll eat a culinary grenade.

I’ve been taking a drug that helps me piss less, but it gives me dry mouth, and nasal congestion. If I stop taking the drug I pee over thirty times a day and have all kind of weird sensations in my bladder, prostate, and penis. Taking the drug quiets all that, but the trade-off is those head symptoms. Right now I’d rather feel bad above the neck than below the bellybutton.

One reason I don’t blog as much is I don’t feel like blogging. But today I’m making myself write because I’m starting to believe that another lesson to getting old is just pushing through, learning to ignore shit.

When I see sick young people, especially tragic ones that have to stay at places like Saint Jude Hospital, I feel how it’s unfair they didn’t get their decades of normal health. I wish I could tell the healthy under forty crowd not to waste or jeopardize their future vitality, because I certainly regret my six bags of M&Ms a day habit now (and all the other tons of junk food I massed consumed).

It’s weird, but I felt my best when I was eating all the things health nuts said things were bad for you, and now that I’m almost vegan, I feel bad all the time.

If you’re healthy, do everything you can to stay healthy. Don’t worry about getting old, worry about wear and tear on your body parts. If I had to spend one day a month when I was a teen feeling like I do now, I would have given up drugs and junk food, and joined a gym in 1964.

JWH

by James Wallace Harris, Monday, 1/11/21

After years of controlling pains in my back and leg with exercise and diet I’ve had a relapse. What have I done wrong? It took me years of learning about many good and bad habits to get that pain under control. What have I done to screw things up? It’s a mystery that I’m trying to solve but complicated by the many different factors involved.

Many years ago, I was diagnosed with spinal stenosis. I had gone to orthopedic doctors because I thought my hip was going out, but the pain went all the way down to my foot. After an MRI the showed my hip was okay, but I likely had stenosis I was sent to a pain management doctor. He told me to avoid surgery unless things got unbearable, set me up with a physical therapist, and prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs.

I quickly learned that sleeping flat on a bed aggravated my condition and switched to sleeping in a recliner. That dramatically reduced my pain. I also learned my 3 mile a day walks were annoying the hell out of my leg, so I stopped walking as much. That reduced the pain, numbness, aching, tingling, etc. a good deal more.

Also, during the time period, I had to have a stent put in my heart and I lost about thirty pounds trying to help that problem. I assume losing that weight might have helped my leg, but both my regular doctor and back doctor were doubtful.

Concurrent with those lessons I also learned my stomach couldn’t handle NSAIDS anti-inflammation drugs, but the physical therapy exercises paid off big time. Before I gave up on the drugs, I became aware of what it felt like to have lower inflammation. Because of that I became aware of which foods set off inflammation – mostly fun foods. So, I began avoiding them. That helped too.

Eventually I supplemented the PT exercises with exercises by Miranda Esmonde-White that I discovered on PBS TV. They helped a lot! Even better than the PT exercises.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been doing intermittent fasting, and that seems to have helped with inflammation, but I’m not sure.

All these efforts got things mostly under control, and the pain and numbness almost went away. It became low level enough to ignore, and I was good for a few years.

However, things have gotten bad again. Not as bad as when I first started going to the back doctor, but it’s heading that way. Over the years I’ve had flareups and could fix them by being more diligent about my exercise and diet, but these quick tweaks aren’t working.

I assume my present flareup is because I’ve gotten lax about my exercising and intermittent fasting. Over the holidays I’ve indulged in some fun foods and gained five pounds and might have increased inflammation. But there’s one new factor that’s bothering me. At my annual checkup in November my doctor told me I my legs showed signs of poor circulation, and some of my aching legs symptoms could be that. She wants me to have tests done but not until after I get the Covid-19 vaccine. A stent in my leg might fix things, but I won’t know for a while.

Because my doctor scared me about the poor circulation in my legs I went back to walking regularly. I tried walking 1 mile twice a day. At first that seemed to help, but then my leg got bad again. I had been walking 1 mile several times a week. It makes my back and leg hurt for an hour or two, but that kind of exercise helps my heart, so I figured the short-term pain was worth it. But that extra walking is another clue to the leg flare up.

I also remembered that statins caused my legs to ache. Over the last twenty years my doctor has been having me take different statins and dosages trying to find the right combination that don’t produce side effects, which were pains in the legs. I was on 5mg every other day, but in November she had me go to every day, and even wanted to bump up the dosage to 10mg. So that might be another factor.

Now I have the mystery of the aching leg and wondering what’s causing it. My doctors have always told me things could get worse, but I’ve had so much success controlling pain with lifestyle changes that I don’t want to believe they’ve stopped working now.

I wish we had a little computer to plug into my brain and read body health like those car code readers decipher automobile problems. It sure would simplify things.

Did that extra walking caused this flare up? The gaining of weight? Enjoying a bit of cheese danish every day? Too many meals with cheese? Switching to statins daily? Skipping my exercises too often? Or is it hardening of the arteries in my legs? Do I need to go back to my 16:8 intermittent fasting? I just remembered I had to give up my protein drinks because they were driving my bladder crazy. That’s 30mg less of protein. I switched to eggs and yogurt, which may or may not affect my clogged arteries.

I know two types of people. Those that eat anything they want and don’t exercise and seem to do fine, and those with growing ailments that are constantly trying to find solutions that involve just the right combination exercise and diet.

Unfortunately, I’m in the group that always has a health mystery to solve. Sorry to bore you by complaining about my ailments, but writing these blogs are my way of thinking things through. This essay has helped me, but not to come up with a specific answer. I’m going to eat better, do more good exercising, walk less, take less statins, watch my posture, and try to lose weight. I hope that helps, but it won’t solve the mystery of what actually caused my leg to get worse.

JWH