The last time I went to the doctor was right before our quick visit to the Taylors, our cousins in Arizona. I was thinking that that would be the last time that I'd visit in a long time. My BG was under control and I was hoping that I was going to be able to keep from getting sick with the bronchitis now that I had the silver water and the allergy stuff however...
When we were going to Arizona I felt something that felt like a fish flopping in the right side of my abdomen area. That's what it felt like, it was probably a muscle or something, and I felt it a few other times on that trip. It didn't bother me while I was exercising in the week following so I wasn't that worried about it, then last Tuesday for the whole day it felt like I'd been kicked in the groin. Particularly the right testicle. I thought I had a hernia and made an appointment to see the doctor. He said that I had an infection in that area that was causing the problem and gave me an antibiotic to take. It was a wide spectrum antibiotic that makes you sensitive to the sun so I've been wearing long sleeve shirts and a hat (when I remember) since then. I thought it would be something that I would get over quickly, but the doctor said to come back if I wasn't feeling better in 3-7 days. I kept exercising, and on Saturday I went for the first long bike ride I'd done this summer.
I've been planning on taking a long "real" bike ride every week, as opposed to riding my exercise bike in the mornings. However, things have turned out so that I've only gone on one bike ride with Mark when Teandra and Mark were visiting. I rode just under 25 miles and I was pretty excited about it because my average velocity was 11.9 mph which is the highest average I've ever had riding that route. For some reason I thought that it'd be a good idea to stop by Grant Stoddard's house in the morning and surprise him that I'd ridden that far and say "Hey Grant lets go for a ride." I figured I'd knock quietly on the door and then if someone was up they'd hear the knock and if everyone was asleep it wouldn't bother them. Well I knocked and then the dog started barking. Great idea. No one answered and I kind of slunk away with my tail between my legs. Then the next day, Sunday, I asked Grant if he'd been home on Saturday and he asked me if I'd been the one that knocked on their door early in the morning. Man do I have good ideas.
Then I gave Tanner Boren a hard time about him not going on the hiking trip that we're planning on for next week. I called him a sissy and said that was the only reason that he wouldn't be going. Then I started noticing that I wasn't really feeling any better in the infected area. On Monday I was thinking about calling the doctor because it didn't feel like anything was getting better, but I didn't. Then yesterday it felt like I hit a wall. I just started feeling completely fatigued. I called the doctor and got an appointment for today. He said things were about the same and gave me another antibiotic. The thing that has me concerned is that I'm totally fatigued today, and I don't think that's a good thing when you're messing with an infection, that and it's still pretty painful. I woke up this morning weighed myself, then took my medicine and went back to bed, which is something that I rarely do.
I've told the bishop that I don't think that it's a good idea for me to go on the hike next week with painfully swollen man parts that could get worse. Now I'm going to have to put up with being called a sissy by Tanner when I see him next since the only excuse for not going on the hike is being a sissy.
I've also got two painful canker sores. I guess that silver water can not over come stupidity. I had these two canker sores that I kept biting over and over. Both of them were bleeding, and on one of them I could feel a loose piece of flesh. That's got to be a sign of stupidity that you bite yourself until you bleed. Anyway they became pretty painful, but every time they really start hurting I rinse with silver water which seems to take away the pain and help with the swelling. At least that's what it seems like to me. I've had this happen before and it seems like it was much more painful then, although I may have selective memory.
I was also wondering why I would get an infection when I was taking the silver water. The guy who sells the generator one time said that silver water wasn't like a magical elixir that would make you live forever and that there were some things that it can't deal with. When I thought that I remembered that I'd had something like this happen on my mission that had me laid up for a couple of days. However, that was much more painful than this is, but the symptoms seem similar, so maybe the silver water is working. The thing on my mission seemed to go away quicker though. Of course I was 20 then so that might have something to do with it.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Three Weeks Have Flown By
Wow three weeks have just flown by. The last time I wrote on the blog was the day after the Los Conchas fire started. That fire is the biggest in New Mexico history. Last I heard it was something like 140,000 acres, which I actually have no idea how big that is but I'm sure it's pretty big. Sounds big.
I didn't mention this last blog but when I left for work on June 27th I hadn't heard that the lab was closed. I missed the train that morning, which turned out to be a blessing, and as I'm driving towards Santa Fe I see this hugh cloud and I'm hoping that it might rain, but when I get to it I see that it's all smoke, so I look up towards where Los Alamos is and it's dark up there and I think to myself that no one could possibly breath in that so I decide to call the hot line to see if maybe work was canceled. What the heck it's worth a try. The hot line says that the Lab is closed and I was passing an exit on the freeway and slammed on my breaks and took the exit and came home.
Apparently I was the only person in my family who hadn't heard on the news, or some other source that the Lab was closed. So I decided that I would start to clean off the side yard. I say side yard but it is actually the area out the outside of our fence next to the road that the city says that we're responsible for and every year they come and say that we need to weed it. Karen has planted some wild flowers there and they look really nice for a couple of weeks, but pretty scruffy the rest of the year. When we first moved in we tried putting down some crusher fines to keep the weeds down, but we didn't get enough delivered the first time, and perhaps we couldn't afford to cover it all at that time but I didn't finish. Also, the red lava rocks that we'd laid down had a bunch of weeds grow up in it and it looked bad. I'd been thinking of cleaning it up and decided to start while I had this unexpected time off. I started on Monday and thought it would take a day or two to finish. I actually finished with everything that Saturday so it took 6 days instead of a day or two. I think it looks a lot better now. Karen says she misses the wild flowers but I don't.
On July 4th we went to the ward breakfast in the morning with Goosy, then in the afternoon we went to a party with her that someone from her work was giving. Goosy really is growing up when she get invited to "adult" parties from work that we get to go to. (The Goosy growing up part gets way worse in this blog than this.)
The Los Conchas fire was gotten under control and we had to go back to work. On the first day that I went back Karen asked me about my crappy lungs and how I would fare in smokey Los Alamos. A few years ago I was tested for asthma and while I don't have asthma the doctor told me: "You have crappy lungs. It's a good thing you don't live somewhere with pollution like LA." I told Karen I'd be OK, but by 9 that morning I was starting to get very congested lungs and was losing my voice. I looked at the Park and Ride schedule and found out that the last bus had left about 3 minutes before, so I called Karen and asked her to come pick me up, and she very kindly came up and picked me up. I took the rest of that Wednesday off, and Thursday. I also went and bought a hepa filter for my cubicle for when I got back to help keep the air around me cleaner. It seems to have worked. Right now the air up there is pretty clean and I think that I'll start trying to figure out how to bring the filter home.
That Thursday Cathy called and said that she was going to be taking Grandma Evans to Arizona to see Aunt LaVon at their Arizona family reunion. She said that Beth (my cousin) would be there, Lisa would come as well from Mayer and did we want to go with her? Cathy loves to plan things out in advance. It was a lot of fun to be go and see everyone and get to spend time with my sisters, and to see my cousins. We hadn't seen everyone since the last time we went there. It was fun to spend time with Grandma as well, but she doesn't visit very well. We stopped at Earls in Gallup and ended up getting Karen about $100 worth of jewelry. Gooey went with us as well. It was a fun weekend, even if it was thrown together at the last minute.
I went back to work and the HEPA filter worked pretty good, but I had to leave my cage quite a bit, and my lungs started to get a little congested. It was especially bad when I walked to the bus stop because the fire was still burning down south and the smoke would get blown in and it was very smokey and that was bad. However, I saw that a couple of people had gotten the face masks that Occ. Med. was handing out. I asked if they worked and was told that they worked really well, so on Tuesday I went and got a mask and got made fun of, but it seemed to help a lot.
This last weekend we had the youth conference and had a very interesting service project. We went to the Catholic cemetery and picked up trash and weeded. We picked up a ton of trash. They divided up the cemetery into six zones and I was working in the first zone and didn't realize how much was getting done until I took my first full bag on weeds to a trailer and saw how heaped it was. By the time we were done it was a mountain of trash. I was talking to the high councilor that was there and he said that the caretaker was pretty much overwhelmed with gratitude. It was a hot day, and Karen got a touch of heat stroke, and I was pretty wrung out so we left in the afternoon when Karen stood up to sing a song and said that she nearly passed out.
So that's pretty much what has happened in the last few weeks. Karen and I are in the 3rd week of the maintenance phase of the hCG diet. Karen is following the rules pretty good but I'm not. However, things seems to be going to way that I would like them to. I've gained 8 lbs but 6.9 lbs of that is lean body mass (muscle) and 1.1 lbs of body fat. I was worried about how much muscle that I lost during the dieting phase and I've gained about half of it back. I have to admit that I was hoping I would be able to gain the muscle and lose more fat. Actually I'm amazed that I'm able to gain weight at all with how few calories I'm eating. I'm averaging around 2100 a day, as well as I'm still exercising pretty vigorously in the morning (now that I have some more muscle) so I would think that I'd be losing weight but I'm not. The body is a pretty amazing thing.
I also went and had another HA1c test. It was 5.5 which averages out to 111 which is pretty good but I was hoping that it would be a little closer to 100. I don't know when I'll go back and get the next test I'll just have to wait and see. However I've gone from 7.6 (171) to 6.4 (137) to 5.5. That's pretty good and I'd have to say that I've got my BG better under control. I'm taking 2 grams of metformin a day because I like eating fruit, and I'm pretty sure that it would be higher without the metformin. In fact I've forgotten to take it a couple of time and I can see that my BG has gone up every time. Hopefully after the next round of the diet I'll get my weight down even further and the control will be better. I'll just wait and see, but right now I'm thinking that it's worth taking the the metformin to be able to eat fruit. Fruit is the only thing that I've added to my diet that I didn't eat before.
I didn't mention this last blog but when I left for work on June 27th I hadn't heard that the lab was closed. I missed the train that morning, which turned out to be a blessing, and as I'm driving towards Santa Fe I see this hugh cloud and I'm hoping that it might rain, but when I get to it I see that it's all smoke, so I look up towards where Los Alamos is and it's dark up there and I think to myself that no one could possibly breath in that so I decide to call the hot line to see if maybe work was canceled. What the heck it's worth a try. The hot line says that the Lab is closed and I was passing an exit on the freeway and slammed on my breaks and took the exit and came home.
Apparently I was the only person in my family who hadn't heard on the news, or some other source that the Lab was closed. So I decided that I would start to clean off the side yard. I say side yard but it is actually the area out the outside of our fence next to the road that the city says that we're responsible for and every year they come and say that we need to weed it. Karen has planted some wild flowers there and they look really nice for a couple of weeks, but pretty scruffy the rest of the year. When we first moved in we tried putting down some crusher fines to keep the weeds down, but we didn't get enough delivered the first time, and perhaps we couldn't afford to cover it all at that time but I didn't finish. Also, the red lava rocks that we'd laid down had a bunch of weeds grow up in it and it looked bad. I'd been thinking of cleaning it up and decided to start while I had this unexpected time off. I started on Monday and thought it would take a day or two to finish. I actually finished with everything that Saturday so it took 6 days instead of a day or two. I think it looks a lot better now. Karen says she misses the wild flowers but I don't.
On July 4th we went to the ward breakfast in the morning with Goosy, then in the afternoon we went to a party with her that someone from her work was giving. Goosy really is growing up when she get invited to "adult" parties from work that we get to go to. (The Goosy growing up part gets way worse in this blog than this.)
The Los Conchas fire was gotten under control and we had to go back to work. On the first day that I went back Karen asked me about my crappy lungs and how I would fare in smokey Los Alamos. A few years ago I was tested for asthma and while I don't have asthma the doctor told me: "You have crappy lungs. It's a good thing you don't live somewhere with pollution like LA." I told Karen I'd be OK, but by 9 that morning I was starting to get very congested lungs and was losing my voice. I looked at the Park and Ride schedule and found out that the last bus had left about 3 minutes before, so I called Karen and asked her to come pick me up, and she very kindly came up and picked me up. I took the rest of that Wednesday off, and Thursday. I also went and bought a hepa filter for my cubicle for when I got back to help keep the air around me cleaner. It seems to have worked. Right now the air up there is pretty clean and I think that I'll start trying to figure out how to bring the filter home.
That Thursday Cathy called and said that she was going to be taking Grandma Evans to Arizona to see Aunt LaVon at their Arizona family reunion. She said that Beth (my cousin) would be there, Lisa would come as well from Mayer and did we want to go with her? Cathy loves to plan things out in advance. It was a lot of fun to be go and see everyone and get to spend time with my sisters, and to see my cousins. We hadn't seen everyone since the last time we went there. It was fun to spend time with Grandma as well, but she doesn't visit very well. We stopped at Earls in Gallup and ended up getting Karen about $100 worth of jewelry. Gooey went with us as well. It was a fun weekend, even if it was thrown together at the last minute.
I went back to work and the HEPA filter worked pretty good, but I had to leave my cage quite a bit, and my lungs started to get a little congested. It was especially bad when I walked to the bus stop because the fire was still burning down south and the smoke would get blown in and it was very smokey and that was bad. However, I saw that a couple of people had gotten the face masks that Occ. Med. was handing out. I asked if they worked and was told that they worked really well, so on Tuesday I went and got a mask and got made fun of, but it seemed to help a lot.
This last weekend we had the youth conference and had a very interesting service project. We went to the Catholic cemetery and picked up trash and weeded. We picked up a ton of trash. They divided up the cemetery into six zones and I was working in the first zone and didn't realize how much was getting done until I took my first full bag on weeds to a trailer and saw how heaped it was. By the time we were done it was a mountain of trash. I was talking to the high councilor that was there and he said that the caretaker was pretty much overwhelmed with gratitude. It was a hot day, and Karen got a touch of heat stroke, and I was pretty wrung out so we left in the afternoon when Karen stood up to sing a song and said that she nearly passed out.
So that's pretty much what has happened in the last few weeks. Karen and I are in the 3rd week of the maintenance phase of the hCG diet. Karen is following the rules pretty good but I'm not. However, things seems to be going to way that I would like them to. I've gained 8 lbs but 6.9 lbs of that is lean body mass (muscle) and 1.1 lbs of body fat. I was worried about how much muscle that I lost during the dieting phase and I've gained about half of it back. I have to admit that I was hoping I would be able to gain the muscle and lose more fat. Actually I'm amazed that I'm able to gain weight at all with how few calories I'm eating. I'm averaging around 2100 a day, as well as I'm still exercising pretty vigorously in the morning (now that I have some more muscle) so I would think that I'd be losing weight but I'm not. The body is a pretty amazing thing.
I also went and had another HA1c test. It was 5.5 which averages out to 111 which is pretty good but I was hoping that it would be a little closer to 100. I don't know when I'll go back and get the next test I'll just have to wait and see. However I've gone from 7.6 (171) to 6.4 (137) to 5.5. That's pretty good and I'd have to say that I've got my BG better under control. I'm taking 2 grams of metformin a day because I like eating fruit, and I'm pretty sure that it would be higher without the metformin. In fact I've forgotten to take it a couple of time and I can see that my BG has gone up every time. Hopefully after the next round of the diet I'll get my weight down even further and the control will be better. I'll just wait and see, but right now I'm thinking that it's worth taking the the metformin to be able to eat fruit. Fruit is the only thing that I've added to my diet that I didn't eat before.
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