A Few Health Comments

A FEW HEALTH COMMENTS

A few minutes ago I searched this site for sleep apnea & cpap with few results; a couple of people complaining about having apnea, a technician explaining how sleep trials are done, a few people peddling whatever they can and are allowed. I am surprised by how few posts there are on this subject; I read this morning that 60% of diabetes sufferers probably have apnea as well; personal experience taught me that a good night’s sleep is essential in managing fibromyalgia; depression is influenced by fatigue from lack of sleep; most recently I found that heart failure, mine, probably is associated with apnea. Those are four big areas of health, I don’t know what these ailments cost but it has to be in the billions every year. There is the always present quality of life which cannot be measured so clearly.

This is what started me writing this post: I have had depression for the first sixty years of life; I had fibromyalgia for the last three decades; I am borderline diabetic; I was recently surprised by the onset of heart failure and a. fib.; recently came severe apnea.

My previous posts tell more than anyone would want to know about my depression and what I do to manage it. There are a few posts that describe how fibromyalgia is controlled with the help of the Chronic Pain Clinic at RIC; there are more posts on the heart business than can be of interest to anyone but myself; and now the apnea has been diagnosed and is being managed, 40 awakenings per hour are coming under control.

That all of these ailments and all of the managing methods are connected is obvious; that the sleep problems are common to all of them is known. In my happiness over the management of sleep problems I imagined that everyone in the world should be tested; a fantasy because not everyone wants to explore the ways that may make them feel better. It isn’t just men who avoid feeling right, there are a fair number of self-absorbed neurotic women who won’t search beyond their prejudices (herbals &c.).

I don’t expect anyone will change the way they handle their life because of my haranguing, and yet I do continue to nag every now and again. So many people might have better lives than they have if they had the courage to go at what is hurting them, spiritually, physically and psychologically.

I have known more than a few who have died through avoidance, died unnecessarily, and there will be so many more in the future. But damn it, I am not going to live a miserable life if I can help it.

UNCERTAINTY

There are times that bring on feelings of uncertainty or helplessness, they may arrive at four in the morning or as I walk down Michigan Avenue on a beautiful spring day. There are times when I look to what I have depended on and trusted, only to find that they are not enough or have disappeared. These are the times when I am sure there are no alternatives left in my cupboard.

When this happens I have found out that there is a reason:That somehow or other I have put myself in the center of my universe, this weak bearing. If I then imagine that I am not the center, and even though I can’t put into words or images what is I do know, I am certain of its Presence and know instinctively that it doesn’t disappear or disappoint. And when I do manage to get my head around that idea I find that I am in a better place, a place where I ought to be.

This is not a piece of any religion or cult, just something I discovered that fits right, and so I thought I’d pass it along.

Fibromyalgia, etc.

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In looking for a subject of a five-minute writing exercise I realized that it has been a while since I passed along how I am doing with my fibromyalgia; as I wrote previously I have had it for over three decades, could find no way to manage it and was suffering quite a bit when I heard about Lyrica which I tried for most of one year. The drunken side effects became too much and I got a physician’s order to go to the Pain Clinic at RIC; they immediately put me on Cymbalta even though the approval had not yet come through from FDA—it relieved my pain within two days of beginning. Along with the other therapies from the clinic I have been pretty much fibromyalgia free since the middle of last July. I almost forgot to list the side effects because I only have one, and I can live with it alright.

Not only does it help me manage the pain it is good for my mood; those of us who have fibromyalgia probably have depression lurking around the corner and paying the occasional visit. The double acting whatever it does has helped there as well; recently I was found to have heart failure and concurrent to that a major family problem, both are under control as much as is possible, my mood through all of this has been the vehicle that carried me. As with any illness more than half of it is a mind game, that is a condensation of my latest on the field action.

Fibromyalgia, etc.

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In looking for a subject of a five-minute writing exercise I realized that it has been a while since I passed along how I am doing with my fibromyalgia; as I wrote previously I have had it for over three decades, could find no way to manage it and was suffering quite a bit when I heard about Lyrica which I tried for most of one year. The drunken side effects became too much and I got a physician’s order to go to the Pain Clinic at RIC; they immediately put me on Cymbalta even though the approval had not yet come through from FDA—it relieved my pain within two days of beginning. Along with the other therapies from the clinic I have been pretty much fibromyalgia free since the middle of last July. I almost forgot to list the side effects because I only have one, and I can live with it alright.

Not only does it help me manage the pain it is good for my mood; those of us who have fibromyalgia probably have depression lurking around the corner and paying the occasional visit. The double acting whatever it does has helped there as well; recently I was found to have heart failure and concurrent to that a major family problem, both are under control as much as is possible, my mood through all of this has been the vehicle that carried me. As with any illness more than half of it is a mind game, that is a condensation of my latest on the field action.

THE DONUT HOLE

I just don’t have an extra $1,200 in this year’s budget; that is what it will cost me extra out of pocket for Rx’s now that I am in the Medicare Rx donut hole , I still pay my monthly Blue Cross and Medicare payments, it is just that this is additional.

It took me a fair while to find that Cymbalta is the right drug for my fibromyalgia (30 years), and that it does great things for my mood disorders as well; now comes the decision that I have to believe many people are faced with making: Do I take less medicine? Do I search for a foreign source that might be problematic? Do I search for something generic that just might do the job? I just don’t have an extra $1,200 in this year’s budget: I still work and receive Social Security, I live on a pretty tight budget, one that was right for me until I was admitted to hospital with heart failure and then discovered that damned donut hole in my path.

Of course I had heard of it, and didn’t think that I would come anywhere near it, until I was admitted to hospital and then was off work for a few weeks. The surprise and shock of exploring for alternatives is something I could do without.

It is not that I am asking for disability or charity, I am not, I plan to continue working for a long time yet, it is just that my resources are less, that is why my budget is less. Something about this situation strikes me as not being right, that it is a bigger problem than was obvious; perhaps older people don’t post as many weblog comments and complaints, perhaps many of them are tired and have given up much as long term unemployed often give up. I don’t know why there isn’t more disturbance about this, maybe we have been living under conservative rule for too long and learned their lesson of not talking about things that disturb us. Anyway this is something I want others to be aware of more than we all are; this kind of decision is not the kind I want to be making at this point in life, I have other things about to be concerned.

I don’t know if my complaint comes from the right or the left, I tend to think it is neither, it is an aspect of conditions here and now, one that needs to be addressed.

Hatching an idea

I feel the need to write because I want to break through, to discover something that is just about here and needs a bit of a push.

That’s what I thought until I put those words down here; for weeks now I have been banging and crashing around in a search for the idea that is about to break out, the idea that needs release, I need to proclaim some kind of discovery. That’s what I though until I wrote that first paragraph, and until I looked at it long enough to realize that there is no great idea ready for hatching, that I have been planning a coming-out party when there is nothing new about to emerge. I was planning the party in order to have a party, nothing more than that ego trip of self-proclamation. I don’t have anything new to say, nothing new to address, nothing new to conquer; but I like the idea of thinking that I do.

Here is the background for what I am trying to say: I enjoyed writing a few satisfying posts during the winter, when they came out well I felt good, when a few people read them and commented I felt better; they were early morning discoveries that added meaning to my day, and then the well went dry. I had nothing to say other than the few things I had done, I have no new way of saying the old ideas, I have no message that can’t be found many other places. I missed that writing.

And then I began to make explanations for my frustration, some discovery was about to burst forth with my help; I felt that I now had a serious chore to find a new idea and share it with everyone—-but I don’t, it was a fool’s errand, and here is why.

The idea that tomorrow will be as today, that the continuum has no breaks or quantum jumps was depressing. I want the excitement of a brand new idea or challenge, and so I manufactured one, a Potemkin’s village made out of the following:

I am about to turn seventy this Halloween, a significant number, no longer will I be anything other than seventy and counting. The second thing is that the work I have been doing at the Chronic Pain Clinic is making me healthier than I have been in decades, a most unexpected result. The third thing is that I have been put back on anti-depressant medication for the pain, but it is also doing things for my mood, I had thought that anti-depressants were something that I had long got past, that my brain was making its own feel-good molecules and needed no assistance; this is known as denial. I am going backwards and forwards at the same time; healthier in body; and yet needing medication to alter my mood, just as I had used them years before.

I walked past a senior-center that the City of Chicago runs just around the corner from me, I was out doing my cardio-vascular exercises when I looked in through their window, saw the umpteen individuals sitting and doing what appeared to be board games. There was something important for me to see here; the Pain Clinic doesn’t care about my age other than for calculating my target heart beat, the subject doesn’t really come up over there; and yet here were people of age similar to mine hunched over boards, moving their markers, killing time and chatting. I couldn’t get that image out of my mind.

There are dozens of platitudes about age and aging that are as helpful as breasts on a boar; this is a complicated business that has no role models that fit me exactly; I don’t know if they fit anyone exactly, or do people fit themselves into the model of the geezer that is put before them. A good friend asked me recently what role model I was using for this next chapter of my adventure?, I have none.

John McCain is an active older guy, but his mind was frozen into the patterns of long ago, he is just a champion for what he thinks was right back then. There are older businessmen, but life has shown that I am no businessman, they take that stuff seriously, they really believe that acquisition and control are important. I have never written anything for publication, so don’t know that road enough to find my way very far down it. I never earned a college degree, could never figure out which direction to go there nor reason to expend all of that energy; I was too young and unformed. I can’t find a future down any of those paths.

What I am trying to say is that I had erected a monument to being a person of a certain age who should be acting and feeling a certain age—-and the monument was made of cardboard. The new idea that I have been incubating is that there is no new idea, no roadside marker telling me to change my ways to those of someone who should be getting ready to shut down, preparing to wrap it up, or in love with the past. There may have been a valid sign years ago when bodies wore out quicker, minds could be in love with the past; but I don’t find that to be so now.

I don’t know if and what changes I will find in life as I go on, but I am beginning to think that there will be less than I thought, that the jokes of old age may be becoming passé.

I do feel better, clearer for having written this; but it isn’t over, this is the first draft of an attitude that I need to install in my soul, I hope to refine it.

Spring morning

There are mornings when it seems impossible that I will be able to work in the afternoon, this is one of them. It has become predictable that if I work a hard shift one day I am going to have a high level of pain and fatigue the next, I won’t bounce back as I used to. I feel aches and sharp pains from everywhere, all stations are reporting in; and I feel very tired.

Yesterday I made sure that I did all the exercises, walked for about a mile, then worked until past midnight; this morning is rough. I took a full load of medication the first thing this morning, perhaps everything will turn better by afternoon. Meanwhile I will feel whatever it is that is going on; and worry about the future.

It is a tough thing to understand that I cannot bounce back, have the stamina to be who I was; it is a tough thing to figure out how I am going to be who I will be for the future. I need to work, have always worked, need both the work and the money. It is a really tough, but important, thing to make the most of where I am right now, take advantage of what I have learned, how I have changed, what I know that is different than what I knew before.

On the other hand I am in a pretty good mood; I have recently been bringing myself around to knowing and accepting how others are, what they are about, than I used to be. Living a critical and judgmental life is lousy, it brings disappointment and isolation, it takes a lot of energy to find and point out the failures in others. This business of being judgmental comes from a bad source within me, or more accurately it comes from the absence of a good idea somewhere deep in my soul.

To change how I see the world I needed to find that sour idea that put the judgmental and unloving tint on everything, find it and replace it with one that works better, that makes me happy, that feels a right fit. This is what I have been about lately, it is a big job, one that isn’t quite finished, a private piece of work that ordinarily I wouldn’t write about; but why not? I can’t think of how I might be embarrassed by admitting this little thing.

I have intuitive knowledge that much of what is fibromyalgia, blood pressure, general healthiness is connected with how I feel, how I see the world, how I process whatever it is that is going on–that everything is connected. I won’t be so foolish as to think that a good and loving attitude will keep me from becoming sick and dying, nor will it put off that date; it is something other than that, it is that whatever comes down the pike I am more likely to treat it as it really is, enjoy it, and then get on with whatever is coming next. Being healthy is different than having a body without pain, being healthy is knowing something special, something that connects all of this stuff, as I said it is an intuitive thing; which means I could be full of bullshit.

I’d better proof-read this and publish it before I realize that I have been more open than I had planned. Finish the coffee, wait for the medicine to kick in, read Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow, and hope that by mid-afternoon I’ll feel a little better than right now.

That’s the way it is this early spring morning after the storm, when everything is drying out, bright sky and a light wind will soon get rid of the surface moisture, will remind us of all that we are in the middle of springtime again.

Another gray day

A gray morning following the gray day of Thursday, the forecast for today is gray; does this morning reflect a mood or does it cause it?

If the day was bright and warm, if birds were singing and people were out and around, doing spring things in the warm sunlight; if that was the day would a mood be different?

Both of the above are examples of my superficial mood, one that has no more substance than the underwear I put on today and the underwear I put on yesterday, or that I will put on tomorrow. I have automatically put on the mood of this gray, cold morning, I have let what is there determine what is here. I have forgotten earlier comments about the depth and layers of our being, that I am more than the superficial and shallow; when perhaps I am not so much.

There is nothing going on right now that is bright, nothing that will bring excitement or surprise; isn’t that the definition of a ‘gray day’?

I know that what I have just written is wrong. We are in a gray time, the only brightness in the sky comes from fireworks that last ten seconds before becoming a wisp of dirty smoke. The forecast doesn’t have promise, and that’s the way it is. Perhaps here is an opportunity to see the difference between a series of gray days and the defeat of depression; a chance to realize again that we are more than bright days and sunny beaches, that we have always been more than that.

I hope that beautiful weather will come soon, no one will enjoy being out in it more than I will; but if it doesn’t come soon or at all we will not be changed, the only difference will be putting on long winter underwear or light and roomy boxer shorts. Nothing more important than that.

Weather Forcast

At long last it appears.The promise shows a touch of being here—–today.Spring is paying a visit to our little community; the prediction is for a clear and sunny day with temperatures approaching 50° F. And I have the day off of work. Asking for more would be just wrong-headed.My intention is to walk up to Wicker Park, carrying a book that has always been good friend to me, an unread copy of the New York Review, and to wear my new hat, the one bought while winter was still flogging our souls.

Our souls have been flayed by this long season, almost unrelenting dreariness and lack of promise; person after person I know has had the temperature of their souls decreased. Now it is over, as we all knew it would, there has always been a spring, etc., etc.

Do something joyful to celebrate: feed a pigeon, fuck a new friend, find a bookstore, fix that broken outside stairway.

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On a somewhat different note is the lesson I had a chance to learn, again, during my recent bout with what I now call rheumatism I neglected to exercise; my pain levels were above 8 for long periods, there was nothing I wanted to move, not even my eyelids; as a result when the Lyrica finally tamped down the pain I was left with muscles that hadn’t done anything other than flinch for several weeks. Flabby muscles make their own brand of discomfort, this is something that everyone knows, has always known —but I forgot it until reminded.

I ran into a guy I know who is a running coach, trains people to run marathons and other such strange behavior; I was limping and grimacing, he took one look at me and said “you haven’t been doing those core exercises on that disc I gave you, have you?” No I hadn’t.

The results of starting them again were felt immediately, the creakiness from stretching tissues that had been allowed to shrink makes me wince, but in a good way. The lesson is to not forget to keep things stretched even when other things are pressing on the agenda.

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I for one have had enough of dark weather, crabby people, backward looking practices; I for one intend to be out of here within the hour. I hope that everyone else is of the same intent.

Making Soup

If your larder contains a bushel of broccoli and a bushel of chicken bones, and you are hungry, there is a pretty good chance that you will be eating broccoli soup for dinner. The protein from the marrow of the bones satisfies appetite, and it’s smooth texture feels good going down the gullet. The broccoli has its particular flavor, a strong green color that looks good in the bowl; animal protein combined with vegetables works in all the ways necessary for a good dish.

I have been thinking of the governor who is about not to be governor, who has made an interesting dish so far, perhaps he will continue in the kitchen, make other meals, explore other flavors; it really isn’t important anymore, he was only important in that he governed, now he doesn’t govern, what he makes in the kitchen now is for private consumption.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when making soup: Cook the vegetables until they are just at the height of taste and color, quench them in cold water if necessary to keep from overcooking. Watch out handling the stock, whether beef or chicken, stock is very good for growing bugs, laboratories use it to grow bugs; keep the stock below 38º F or above 145ºF, don’t let it cool on the counter, use the fridge. When the ads suggest serving soup piping hot, the idea of keeping the bug population low is behind that suggestion.

Here is a method for seasoning soups and sauces: Don’t add any seasoning until after the soup is made, this includes salt. Salt has the property of bringing out the main flavor of the soup, it will be responsible for making the tomato soup have the maximum tomato flavor. Pepper and the other seasonings should be considered as accessories, as compliments, never the reason for the soup. Salt is added until as much of the tomato flavor is there as possible, beyond that the soup will taste salty; so how do you know when the height of flavor is reached? Put a few tablespoons of the unseasoned soup in a small glass, taste it, remember that taste, add some salt, taste it, remember that taste, repeat. You will know when the soup tastes salty, remember how it tasted just before that, that will be your target for the potful; add salt to the pot, taste, compare the taste to what you remember from before. Now you see some of the craft of cooking.

If you have forgotten the taste at the height you can reverse the action by adding a few more tablespoons of soup to your glass, do the experiment again.

There are many more things I could say about soup, but maybe I should leave it right here for now; if you practice the above you will feel good about your ability, about cooking in general, it will be your dish for your table.

There has been letters and comments in the newspapers about the effect on the children of what the father did, what parents do; certainly everything that parents do leaves a mark of some kind on a child, everything my parents did, your parents did, that is the nature of being a child and a parent. If the kids are hungry enough they will make a nourishing life from what they have; this is the nature of becoming an adult.

I happen to have fibromyalgia and anxiety, among other ingredients: I do a fair amount of introspection and meditation because of how I am, the result of inner knowledge is something that I could not have known otherwise. I once came within minutes of dying, I didn’t die but I did come to understand the presence of the spirit, a religious experience, a something or other that has always been present, is present in each one of us; this is something I would not have had otherwise.

In cooking school I was given Bibb lettuce, from which I made a summer soup; lettuce doesn’t have a great deal of flavor, I needed to have a light touch with the salt and the other seasonings, I didn’t want to overwhelm that subtle lettuce flavor. I remember that it tasted pretty good, I had hoped to make tomato, everyone does, but lettuce is what I was given, that is what I used.

To make a good soup one needs ingredients, more importantly one has to want to eat, has to have desire for enjoyment.