Tag: health

Bio-Break Blues

One thing I’ve read* about drinking soda is that it dehydrates you. I’m pretty sure it’s the Carbon Dioxide in the carbonation that does it, but caffeine might play a role too. I could Google that but I’m lazy. The effect of drinking lots of soda all day long is that you are drying your insides out. Sort of.

So what happens when you stop drinking soda? I suppose that all depends on what you replace it with. In my case, I have replaced it with water. So what happens when you stop drinking soda all day and start drinking water all day?

Well… you don’t get dehydrated, right? Okay, so what does that mean? It means a lot of things, none of which I know anything about what with me knowing dick about biology. One thing I do have a lot of knowledge about is… well… it’s embarrassing and well into TMI territory but…

…I am peeing all the time. I am living in Urination Nation right now. I’m really lucky that there is a bathroom attached to the room I spend all day working in because I only have to take about 8 steps and I’m ready to go. I am most definitely not taking the piss when I say that every five minutes I am taking a piss. It feels like every time I manage to drain the main vein it is full again within 20-30 minutes.

The math seems to work out: Drink water all day = Taking a leak all day. Even Geordi La Forge would understand that**.

*Maybe if I had proof read this post I would have noticed that there was a typo on the fourth effin’ word. I fixed it, but come on, Robert.

**Remember that scene from Star Trek First Contact when Zephram Cochran has to explain to Geordi what taking a leak means and Geordi thinks it’s the funniest thing he’s heard in years?

Distilled Water Watch

Last month I decided to use this here ol’ bloggerino to keep track of how long a gallon jug of distilled water lasts through regular CPAP machine use.

The first bottle lasted 18 days. I just emptied the second bottle. Care to guess how long it lasted?

18 days. Woah! Sounds like a trend!

Dude, I should make a spreadsheet!

YES!

Surgery: Chosen

I’m home from meeting the doctor who will hopefully be chopping up my innards. The meeting went well as far as I can tell (rhyme!). She talked over the two bariatric surgery options including the pros and cons and I decided which one I want to have. I’ll probably tell ya’ll which one at some point. More likely there will be some future post where I mention it as if you all know what it is already. As if all of you millions of readers hang on every word, right? I’m totally not talking to myself here… crickets… well, talking to myself and a slew of spam accounts… crickets…

Next week I have a Zoom call with the Dietician. I am dreading that one because that’s when I expect to be told all of the delicious and wonderful things I will never be able to eat again. We all know it’s coming. Caffeine and carbonation were just the tip of the banned iceberg. I’m ready for it though. I won’t like it, but it will absolutely be worth it in the end. Don’t forget, in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make. So there. Suck on that, diet pepsi.

Now what do you say I go cook some dinner for my Valentine? Let’s do that.

Absent Minded Putz

I have a notebook I’m using for jotting down everything that comes up at these weight loss appointments.

I’m at the appointment, patiently waiting to meet the doctor.

Where is my notebook? Why it’s sitting on my desk at home. Where else would it be?

I’m such a putz.

Appointment Day

I am meeting with the surgeon who will (please please please) eventually carve up my stomach today. The appointment is about two hours from now.

I am starting to freak out.

Why?

I don’t know. It’s not like I am going to get sliced up today, it’s just a meeting. We will hopefully discuss the two surgery options and decide which one to go with. I can’t imagine she’s going to look at me and decide I’m not worthy and just tell me to go fuck myself up a tree or something.

The future of the human race is not in the balance here. I need to calm my idiotic self down.

One hour and 56 minutes to go.

Stop freaking out.

The Activity App Tried to Kill Me

The iOS activity app that’s tied to the Apple Watch gives these little challenges every now and then and I like to complete them because I am easily manipulated by technology.

It had a challenge for the Lunar New Year to do one workout of at least 20 minutes between February 1st and 15th. I decided that today was the day. I was going to hop up on that exercise bike and ride for 20 minutes. I brought up an episode of Tacoma FD (s3ep12 Pickleball) on my iPad and put it on the little iPad holder on the bike’s handle bars. Then I told my wife that if she heard a loud crash coming from the bedroom it was likely because I died trying to ride the bike for 20 minutes, and off I went.

I actually went for 21 minutes. The Activity app triggers exercise time based on your heart rate and for the first minute of my workout (which I tracked in the Workout App because I am not only easily manipulated by technology, but I am also chemically dependent on using technology for everything imaginable) my heart rate did not increase enough. I wanted the 20 minute workout, but I also wanted 20 minutes worth of exercise time on the app, so I had to throw in an extra minute.

What a feeling of accomplishment! Well… I assume I would have a feeling of accomplishment for catching the little carrot that the little app dangled in front of me, but my legs hurt so much that I can’t acknowledge any feelings other than aches and pain and a general sense of blissful, pain masking numbness.

The next challenge is to do 30 minutes of exercise on Valentine’s Day. That’s no worry. I want to do 30 minutes total every day, so it’s a gimmie. Assuming I can get my legs to move again. That’s sort of a big if right now.

Cheap Soda

My company has soda machines all over the place. The cans of soda are nearly free for staff. We have to pay the $0.05 state deposit and that’s it. Picture it; me, a lifelong dedicated fanatical soda drinker working in a building where cans of soda cost a nickel. Basically heaven.

Except that I can’t drink soda anymore. Shit.

I am in a new building now. Did I mention that? Probably. We were in Waltham, which was closer to home for me than any other company building, but they sold the Waltham building during the pandemic. We were moved to Westwood, which is further away than Waltham but was the next closest building to home. When we had our brief return to office experiment over the summer we had to setup our new desks and get used to the new place. Now it’s just where we go. No big whoop, right?

There was a point in time during our Waltham stay where I was trying to eliminate caffeine in the afternoon. I started bringing a water bottle and filling it up from the water cooler in the kitchenette. It tasted really bad. If I added a ton of ice it would get cold enough that the bad taste was sort of masked, but even if I put my go-to grape flavoring stuff in it, the taste was still crappy.

Now I am under doctor’s orders to no longer drink soda (Robert wipes away a single tear) so I’m back to the water bottle. There’s a little cooler in the kitchenette here too. I just filled up… nervous that this water would be bad too…

It isn’t. It sure ain’t the Poland Springs wonder that is our cooler at home, but it’s okay. I can live with it.

That sound you heard all over the surface of the Earth was my emphatic sigh of relief.

Half Way There

My lunch break is coming to an end. I am halfway through the work day. Halfway through my first day back in the office.

I had planned to bring my AirPods Max with me. I forgot to pack them. I’ve been using air buds like some kind of caveman. I also forgot that they centralized the trash barrels. Instead of having a barrel at every desk they have one in the middle of the room. My lunch trash is just sitting on my desk. I’ll chuck it out the next time I get up, but when will that be?

It’s sunny and 50 degrees out. Practically Spring, right? I made sure to open the blinds in the bedroom so the plant clipping can get good light today. I’m hoping there will be a new leaf opening up when I get home. Fingers crossed.

There are more people here now than there were the last time I posted. Still no one close enough to make me nervous, but still. I’m Covid safe, but not as Covid safe as I’d be if I were working from home. Sigh in frustration.

I got a phone call from the weight loss clinic. They confirmed my appointment for Monday. Yet another teeny tiny hurdle crossed. Monday should be a huge hurdle crossed. I’m nervous, but I am okay with it for now. That’ll probably change once I see a doctor holding a knife above my guts. Crap.

Okay. Back to work.

Banned Things

Over the last 5-6 months or so I have banned some things from my life. Well, banned or boycott. Whichever is more appropriate. How am I doing on these things?

The most recent ban started six days ago when I started working to remove carbonated beverages and caffeine from my diet. If I am going to go through with the weight loss surgery process, then these two items will be permanently removed from my diet forever and ever. Apparently they are both stomach irritants and when you surgically mangle the stomach the way I plan to, then irritants are really bad.

I first learned of this development on Thursday 2/3 and my first day without either of them was Friday 2/4. I’ve made it six days. So far so good, I guess, but it’s definitely not a second nature sort of thing yet. Not even close. My quarantine routine over the last 23-24 months has involved filling up a bottle of water before I go to bed (with grape flavoring, always). If I don’t finish the bottle then I finish it the next day, but not until sometime in the afternoon. I’d have soda, diet pepsi, in the morning and early afternoon. Caffeine and soda. Now I am just drinking water all the time so the night time water bottle carries into the morning. That probably sounds more complicated than it is, but the point here is that every morning I continue to leave the water bottle next to my bed as if I was going to have a morning soda. No. You’re not. Six days on and I still forget that I am not drinking soda anymore pretty much every morning. That needs to end.

So the dietary bans are still going well, though not quite a routine yet. What was the other ban? Facebook. August 27, 2021 was the day I sort of spur of the moment banned Facebook from my life. That was a little more then five months ago. It looks like five months is pretty much long enough to get to the point where I don’t even notice it anymore. It hasn’t been 100%, but I think I can count the number of times I’ve visited on one hand. FoMO brought me back to clear off some notifications once, and once I went on to just mention I wasn’t going on anymore. That was probably pointless. The last time was a couple of weeks ago when I found out one of my Aunts wasn’t well and I checked my cousins accounts to see if I could learn anything. I was only on for a few minutes but I’ll fess up and admit I was there.

Other than those few times I’ve been able to stay away. I don’t think about it anymore. In fact, I got a notifications email the other day for the Lizardfish group and I had to look at it twice to remember what it was talking about. Sometimes it needles me, like when a YouTube show or a podcast that I am a regular viewer/listener of makes a mention of their respective Facebook groups, of which I am a member, and I don’t know what’s going on. I feel out of the loop. FoMO starts creeping in, but I forget about it quickly enough.

So my personal cancel culture targets are still going strong. Facebook is a big nothing to me now. Caffeine and carbonated drinks are going to be tougher to deal with. I can do it though. Absolutely.