Thursday, December 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Can't Wait Until This Year Is Over!
It hasn't been a good few weeks.
The elderly relative we care for, the one who lives an hour away, suddenly had no heat on the first day the outside temps stayed in the 20's. Twice that week we had to drive over after work and stay until 1am while the utility company did its thing. We still had to get up at 4:30am the next morning. Then my husband had to use his last vacation day of the year the next week when they came to remove the old, broken furnace and install a new one. They left at 9pm, leaving her with a new working furnace but also a clogged up sink and a broken radiator, the one they installed a new steam vent on hours before but was now spurting brown water like a deranged Old Faithful! They eventually told us to get a plumber, that it's no longer a utility company job. Since my husband used up all vacation days and won't be off again (not counting New Year's Eve, when the plumber isn't working) until January 17th for Martin Luther King Day, she is now without a sink or radiator in her downstairs half-bath. OK, she can live with that.
Then her kitchen phone starts breaking. It was a $100+ phone with special volume boosters for the ringer and handset, but now it's so low that even my husband, he of the animal-ears and can hear a mouse squeak 3 rooms away while the stereo is on, had trouble hearing anything. I ordered a new special phone from a company that specializes in items for the hard of hearing and deaf, but it won't arrive until next week.
Her hearing is getting worse and she not only can't hear her alarm clock, but she no longer hears the radio part of that alarm clock even though the volume is on full blast, nor does she hear the bedroom phone ring and it's mere inches from her head. I ordered one of those loud ringers with the strobe light flasher that attaches to the phone. We had bought one last year for her kitchen phone so now she does hear that ring if she's anywhere downstairs. We also bought an attachment for the new flasher that goes under the mattress and is supposed to shake her bed when the phone rings, but my tiny cell phone vibrates more than the shaker does so we're returning that. The ringer/strobe arrived at our house the other day, but we haven't been able to get to hers yet to install it.
Why the rush to get this thing installed? She's now gotten her days and nights reversed and stays awake until almost dawn, sometimes stays up 2 days in a row. She's asleep in bed when her homemaker is trying to get in at 2pm. So it's now my job to phone her and wake her up before 2 so she can let the homemaker in. But she doesn't hear the phone! I start dialing her number around 11 am and keep trying until she answers, and last week alone we had to send the homemaker home twice because I couldn't wake the aunt up after three hours of phoning her. Only one of those days was after a 1am furnace call. We're paying over $20 an hour (three hour minimum) for a homemaker who can't get in the house because the aunt is puttering around the house at 3 in the morning instead of sleeping.
At least once the ringer/strobe is installed she'll wake up on the first phone call. Why hasn't this ringer been installed yet?
Have you looked outside (or on the TV, if you don't live in the NY/NJ area)? We got 22 inches of that ugly white stuff the other night and our car is completely buried by the drifting snow. Nobody on our side of the street has been able to dig out yet. The other side of the street got less than 6 inches because the wind blew it all over this way. Everyone across the street has already been driving their cars since the morning of the blizzard.
The snow is up to his shoulders, and that's our car in the upper right corner there.
The homemaker phoned yesterday - she has no where to park her car. The aunt's city only plowed the main streets, streets that allow no parking on normal days. None of the side streets have been plowed, and the neighbor that uses the aunt's snowblower only makes a footpath from the back door to the garbage can and down the driveway to the sidewalk, and a path on the sidewalk. He doesn't clear her whole driveway - and we don't expect him to - because she no longer drives. Luckily her next door neighbor saw the homemaker's dilemma and told her to park in her cleared-out driveway for the 3 hours she was going to be there. Hopefully their city got around to clearing side streets since then so she has somewhere to park today. We're going to ask the neighbor around the corner from her if the homemaker can use his driveway if he's not going to be home. The only other thing to do is for her to find a space a few blocks away in the town's shopping district and walk over. The service's office is there and they have a parking lot. I don't know what else to do. We may wind up having to cancel the homemaker until that city finally clears its streets.
On top of all this, my son has been sick. It started out as the sniffles and went into a full blown ear infection and strep throat. He's 27, and has been sick for all but 2 Christmasses in his life. This is the first time he's ever had an ear infection though. Even as a baby he never got them. I'm the one who always had the ear problems, which is why I'm partially deaf since childhood. Anyway, he was glum enough at the lack of employment opportunities around here and being unemployed since he graduated 2 years ago, then his best friend went away to Thailand with his family for the holiday season and won't be back for a few more weeks, then he had to get sick at at time I had to be out of the house and at the aunt's place playing with the furnace. Poor baby! He's got me now - I can't get out of the house with all this snow!
All these mini-catastrophes have upset my food and exercise routines. It's hard to get an hour of exercise in when you had only 3 hours sleep and have to drive to the aunt's place again at 6 in the morning during rush hour traffic near the Holland Tunnel. I didn't have any leftover healthy food to bring with me on those days so we relied on fatty, salty fast food to sustain us, for all three meals on a few of those days. Then comes all the holiday goodies my husband brought home from work or we got for the aunt/kid. We bought for them but they both kept waving those boxes of butter cookies under our noses. After not having any for 5 years, who can say "No?" Not me.
Luckily I insisted we hit the grocery store on Christmas Eve, when we heard the first rumors of getting more than an inch or 2 of snow. "Snow showers" is what the forecasters were saying up until then. Suddenly it was now up to "a foot or more" in a forecast an hour later. I have a freezer stocked with veggies, a pantry and extra boxes filled with all kinds of beans, tomatoes, pasta and grains. I have enough TP to last us a month. If I need anything else, my husband walks right past a grocery store every day in his journey home from work, and between our house and the light rail station he passes not just that store but about 5 mom & pop delis, a Walgreen and 7-11 if I get desperate.
My lab work was drawn the morning the aunt's furnace went out. I was supposed to get the results this past Monday, but with the doctor stranded in his home city and the office workers stranded in their homes in this one, the visit has been rescheduled for next Monday. Even if my car is still buried I can walk over there. If my B-12 is low he can give me an injection right there and I can increase the amount I'm taking at home. If my Vitamin D is low I can order a vegan version of supplementation from on-line. If the thyroid med needs to be increased the office can phone it in and my husband can pick it up on the way home from work (Since he already walks past Walgreen, anyway). Any other prescription changes will get mailed in to our long-term pharmacy, but I don't foresee anything else changing. It took a long time to get the right combo of asthma meds and I'm sure he's not going to mess with them.
One good thing about being snowed in - I have no excuse not to do my exercises, and have done my workouts every morning since the furnace business was finished, including Christmas morning. My meals have been back on plan, but with those cookies still in the house, well, a few always find their way into my tummy. There aren't that many left and I told my son last night to keep them in his room and enjoy them, NOT to try share them with us any more. They lasted this long because of his sore throat. We'll probably get him more when he's feeling better and I'm back on plan for a while and strong enough to resist them again.
After all this, I only gained one pound this month. That is a miracle in itself. With diligence and sticking strictly to my food plan, that pound will be gone before I hit the doctor's on Monday. Unfortunately I'm up 7 pounds since my last visit to him 3 months ago. I'm sure the thyroid med is going to need to be increased again.
I know I'm hoping 2011 will be better, but know it won't. Already my husband had to use one of next year's vacation days because none of the trains, busses, or light rail were running yesterday so he couldn't get to work. And with the aunt getting more and more confused she's going to need care a lot longer than for 3 hours a day. During the furnace fiasco (started because she forgot it needed to get flushed and have water added) she asked "Where does the coal go in?" even though she has had a gas furnace for over 60 years, and most days when I call and wake her she can't remember who I am. So it looks like this is the year we'll be moving in with her. God help us all!
The elderly relative we care for, the one who lives an hour away, suddenly had no heat on the first day the outside temps stayed in the 20's. Twice that week we had to drive over after work and stay until 1am while the utility company did its thing. We still had to get up at 4:30am the next morning. Then my husband had to use his last vacation day of the year the next week when they came to remove the old, broken furnace and install a new one. They left at 9pm, leaving her with a new working furnace but also a clogged up sink and a broken radiator, the one they installed a new steam vent on hours before but was now spurting brown water like a deranged Old Faithful! They eventually told us to get a plumber, that it's no longer a utility company job. Since my husband used up all vacation days and won't be off again (not counting New Year's Eve, when the plumber isn't working) until January 17th for Martin Luther King Day, she is now without a sink or radiator in her downstairs half-bath. OK, she can live with that.
Then her kitchen phone starts breaking. It was a $100+ phone with special volume boosters for the ringer and handset, but now it's so low that even my husband, he of the animal-ears and can hear a mouse squeak 3 rooms away while the stereo is on, had trouble hearing anything. I ordered a new special phone from a company that specializes in items for the hard of hearing and deaf, but it won't arrive until next week.
Her hearing is getting worse and she not only can't hear her alarm clock, but she no longer hears the radio part of that alarm clock even though the volume is on full blast, nor does she hear the bedroom phone ring and it's mere inches from her head. I ordered one of those loud ringers with the strobe light flasher that attaches to the phone. We had bought one last year for her kitchen phone so now she does hear that ring if she's anywhere downstairs. We also bought an attachment for the new flasher that goes under the mattress and is supposed to shake her bed when the phone rings, but my tiny cell phone vibrates more than the shaker does so we're returning that. The ringer/strobe arrived at our house the other day, but we haven't been able to get to hers yet to install it.
Why the rush to get this thing installed? She's now gotten her days and nights reversed and stays awake until almost dawn, sometimes stays up 2 days in a row. She's asleep in bed when her homemaker is trying to get in at 2pm. So it's now my job to phone her and wake her up before 2 so she can let the homemaker in. But she doesn't hear the phone! I start dialing her number around 11 am and keep trying until she answers, and last week alone we had to send the homemaker home twice because I couldn't wake the aunt up after three hours of phoning her. Only one of those days was after a 1am furnace call. We're paying over $20 an hour (three hour minimum) for a homemaker who can't get in the house because the aunt is puttering around the house at 3 in the morning instead of sleeping.
At least once the ringer/strobe is installed she'll wake up on the first phone call. Why hasn't this ringer been installed yet?
Have you looked outside (or on the TV, if you don't live in the NY/NJ area)? We got 22 inches of that ugly white stuff the other night and our car is completely buried by the drifting snow. Nobody on our side of the street has been able to dig out yet. The other side of the street got less than 6 inches because the wind blew it all over this way. Everyone across the street has already been driving their cars since the morning of the blizzard.
The snow is up to his shoulders, and that's our car in the upper right corner there.
The homemaker phoned yesterday - she has no where to park her car. The aunt's city only plowed the main streets, streets that allow no parking on normal days. None of the side streets have been plowed, and the neighbor that uses the aunt's snowblower only makes a footpath from the back door to the garbage can and down the driveway to the sidewalk, and a path on the sidewalk. He doesn't clear her whole driveway - and we don't expect him to - because she no longer drives. Luckily her next door neighbor saw the homemaker's dilemma and told her to park in her cleared-out driveway for the 3 hours she was going to be there. Hopefully their city got around to clearing side streets since then so she has somewhere to park today. We're going to ask the neighbor around the corner from her if the homemaker can use his driveway if he's not going to be home. The only other thing to do is for her to find a space a few blocks away in the town's shopping district and walk over. The service's office is there and they have a parking lot. I don't know what else to do. We may wind up having to cancel the homemaker until that city finally clears its streets.
On top of all this, my son has been sick. It started out as the sniffles and went into a full blown ear infection and strep throat. He's 27, and has been sick for all but 2 Christmasses in his life. This is the first time he's ever had an ear infection though. Even as a baby he never got them. I'm the one who always had the ear problems, which is why I'm partially deaf since childhood. Anyway, he was glum enough at the lack of employment opportunities around here and being unemployed since he graduated 2 years ago, then his best friend went away to Thailand with his family for the holiday season and won't be back for a few more weeks, then he had to get sick at at time I had to be out of the house and at the aunt's place playing with the furnace. Poor baby! He's got me now - I can't get out of the house with all this snow!
All these mini-catastrophes have upset my food and exercise routines. It's hard to get an hour of exercise in when you had only 3 hours sleep and have to drive to the aunt's place again at 6 in the morning during rush hour traffic near the Holland Tunnel. I didn't have any leftover healthy food to bring with me on those days so we relied on fatty, salty fast food to sustain us, for all three meals on a few of those days. Then comes all the holiday goodies my husband brought home from work or we got for the aunt/kid. We bought for them but they both kept waving those boxes of butter cookies under our noses. After not having any for 5 years, who can say "No?" Not me.
Luckily I insisted we hit the grocery store on Christmas Eve, when we heard the first rumors of getting more than an inch or 2 of snow. "Snow showers" is what the forecasters were saying up until then. Suddenly it was now up to "a foot or more" in a forecast an hour later. I have a freezer stocked with veggies, a pantry and extra boxes filled with all kinds of beans, tomatoes, pasta and grains. I have enough TP to last us a month. If I need anything else, my husband walks right past a grocery store every day in his journey home from work, and between our house and the light rail station he passes not just that store but about 5 mom & pop delis, a Walgreen and 7-11 if I get desperate.
My lab work was drawn the morning the aunt's furnace went out. I was supposed to get the results this past Monday, but with the doctor stranded in his home city and the office workers stranded in their homes in this one, the visit has been rescheduled for next Monday. Even if my car is still buried I can walk over there. If my B-12 is low he can give me an injection right there and I can increase the amount I'm taking at home. If my Vitamin D is low I can order a vegan version of supplementation from on-line. If the thyroid med needs to be increased the office can phone it in and my husband can pick it up on the way home from work (Since he already walks past Walgreen, anyway). Any other prescription changes will get mailed in to our long-term pharmacy, but I don't foresee anything else changing. It took a long time to get the right combo of asthma meds and I'm sure he's not going to mess with them.
One good thing about being snowed in - I have no excuse not to do my exercises, and have done my workouts every morning since the furnace business was finished, including Christmas morning. My meals have been back on plan, but with those cookies still in the house, well, a few always find their way into my tummy. There aren't that many left and I told my son last night to keep them in his room and enjoy them, NOT to try share them with us any more. They lasted this long because of his sore throat. We'll probably get him more when he's feeling better and I'm back on plan for a while and strong enough to resist them again.
After all this, I only gained one pound this month. That is a miracle in itself. With diligence and sticking strictly to my food plan, that pound will be gone before I hit the doctor's on Monday. Unfortunately I'm up 7 pounds since my last visit to him 3 months ago. I'm sure the thyroid med is going to need to be increased again.
I know I'm hoping 2011 will be better, but know it won't. Already my husband had to use one of next year's vacation days because none of the trains, busses, or light rail were running yesterday so he couldn't get to work. And with the aunt getting more and more confused she's going to need care a lot longer than for 3 hours a day. During the furnace fiasco (started because she forgot it needed to get flushed and have water added) she asked "Where does the coal go in?" even though she has had a gas furnace for over 60 years, and most days when I call and wake her she can't remember who I am. So it looks like this is the year we'll be moving in with her. God help us all!
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
A CFS Christmas VIdeo
I found this on the CFIDS Community on LiveJournal. It sums up nicely what many of us with undiagnosed - because there's no definitive diagnostic criteria yet - CFS go through. The maker of this video was told she needed psycho-therapy. Many of us just get told to buck-up, walk it off, lose weight and exercise and the fatigue will go away. Well, it's been over 27 years now and my weight has gone up and down but my fatigue persists, now accompanied with even more muscle, nerve and joint problems as well as increasing brain fog.
Marry Christmas.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Pathetic and Apathy
I'm still struggling to maintain my weight. Right now I really don't care too much about losing - I just want to stop gaining! I go for follow-up blood work next week and see the doc the week after, and I'm sure he's going to need to increase my thyroid med again.
Besides the weight gain I'm still very, very tired. I fall asleep during the early evening (during Jeopardy, some times!), go to bed for the night by 8:30pm the latest, and when I wake up to hit the bathroom around 2am just can't get back to sleep most mornings.
I ache. My sciatica that affects my also arthritic right hip makes most even low impact aerobics painful, and a few weeks ago I hurt my left leg doing a T-Tapp exercise known as a Hoe-Down.
The human leg was NOT made to move in extreme side directions, especially not the leg of post-menopausal women with osteoarthritis in her spine and various other joints! I still can't move my left leg/hip in certain positions and it's been about a month now.
The 2 above problems also contribute to my lack of restful sleep every night. Who can sleep when her hip is in pain?
As for the weight, I gave up trying to lose anything eating the McDougall way and for the past week have been sticking to strict Phase 1 of the Rice Diet program, the plan people who actually attend the Rice House get put on for the duration of their stay, the original plan devised by Dr. Kempner back in the 1940's. By starving myself on less than 1000 calories a day (I was already keeping sodium low since childhood) I'm now back down to the weight I was at for one day in November, about 2 weeks in March before that. But I'm starving morning, noon and night. I have increased brain fog, worse than on a bad CFS day. I have less energy than ever. I need to follow The Spoon Theory even closer than usual if I want to continue to eat this way.
That said, I would probably spend every day just lying in bed, but I do have responsibilities. I do have to shop, hit the laundromat, do the cooking and bare minimum of housework. Right now I don't even have the energy to get away from this computer and go refill my water glass.
I'm in a Catch-22 situation regarding next week's bloodwork. In order to have a great lipid profile (Cholesterol) I have to continue to eat a no-fat-added, no sugar, no animal products food plan and get a minimum of an hour a day of cardio/aerobic exercise. But if I eat enough to have enough strength to do that much exercise I'll gain weight, making my cholesterol and triglycerides go back up, making my doctor very disappointed in me.
What the heck, he's disappointed already because near starvation levels of calories aren't making my weight go down. He's been after me for over 27 years now to lose weight. Why can't either one of us accept the fact that it's just not gonna happen in this lifetime?
To assist me in accepting this, I'm first going to have a decent breakfast, once I finally peel myself off this seat. I'm going to re-read Dr. Linda Bacon's book, Health At Every Size. Last week I finally got to order Beyond A Shadow of A Diet, another book that promotes the same philosophy as Overcoming Overeating.
I already planned the labwork for before Christmas so this year I can have some indulgence for the holiday without feeling guilt. That's a start, I guess. Hopefully the TSH will prove to the doc that my thyroid med needs to be increased yet again, and my lipids will be as perfect as they were back in March so he'll leave me alone about the weight for a while.
I know, I sound like a broken record, writing the same things over and over again, year after freaking year. Does it ever stop? Will I ever not care? I was there summer 2009, then had the stress-related heart event that has me now labeled as a cardiac patient and sent me back to square one. I would love to get back there again.
Besides the weight gain I'm still very, very tired. I fall asleep during the early evening (during Jeopardy, some times!), go to bed for the night by 8:30pm the latest, and when I wake up to hit the bathroom around 2am just can't get back to sleep most mornings.
I ache. My sciatica that affects my also arthritic right hip makes most even low impact aerobics painful, and a few weeks ago I hurt my left leg doing a T-Tapp exercise known as a Hoe-Down.
The human leg was NOT made to move in extreme side directions, especially not the leg of post-menopausal women with osteoarthritis in her spine and various other joints! I still can't move my left leg/hip in certain positions and it's been about a month now.
The 2 above problems also contribute to my lack of restful sleep every night. Who can sleep when her hip is in pain?
As for the weight, I gave up trying to lose anything eating the McDougall way and for the past week have been sticking to strict Phase 1 of the Rice Diet program, the plan people who actually attend the Rice House get put on for the duration of their stay, the original plan devised by Dr. Kempner back in the 1940's. By starving myself on less than 1000 calories a day (I was already keeping sodium low since childhood) I'm now back down to the weight I was at for one day in November, about 2 weeks in March before that. But I'm starving morning, noon and night. I have increased brain fog, worse than on a bad CFS day. I have less energy than ever. I need to follow The Spoon Theory even closer than usual if I want to continue to eat this way.
That said, I would probably spend every day just lying in bed, but I do have responsibilities. I do have to shop, hit the laundromat, do the cooking and bare minimum of housework. Right now I don't even have the energy to get away from this computer and go refill my water glass.
I'm in a Catch-22 situation regarding next week's bloodwork. In order to have a great lipid profile (Cholesterol) I have to continue to eat a no-fat-added, no sugar, no animal products food plan and get a minimum of an hour a day of cardio/aerobic exercise. But if I eat enough to have enough strength to do that much exercise I'll gain weight, making my cholesterol and triglycerides go back up, making my doctor very disappointed in me.
What the heck, he's disappointed already because near starvation levels of calories aren't making my weight go down. He's been after me for over 27 years now to lose weight. Why can't either one of us accept the fact that it's just not gonna happen in this lifetime?
To assist me in accepting this, I'm first going to have a decent breakfast, once I finally peel myself off this seat. I'm going to re-read Dr. Linda Bacon's book, Health At Every Size. Last week I finally got to order Beyond A Shadow of A Diet, another book that promotes the same philosophy as Overcoming Overeating.
I already planned the labwork for before Christmas so this year I can have some indulgence for the holiday without feeling guilt. That's a start, I guess. Hopefully the TSH will prove to the doc that my thyroid med needs to be increased yet again, and my lipids will be as perfect as they were back in March so he'll leave me alone about the weight for a while.
I know, I sound like a broken record, writing the same things over and over again, year after freaking year. Does it ever stop? Will I ever not care? I was there summer 2009, then had the stress-related heart event that has me now labeled as a cardiac patient and sent me back to square one. I would love to get back there again.
TMNT
To this day my son still owns every Turtle action figure (including the elusive April one) and video (Yes, he still has his VHS tapes) he ever purchased or got as a gift. In fact, this year for Christmas he's getting the DVD set of the 3 original TMNT movies plus the newer one from 2007.
I've got to email him the url for this video, though. It'll make his day.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Another Article about the Futility of Dieting
While I don't agree with everything he recommends, such as forcing only "healthy" foods into the school lunch programs, everything else sounds pretty good. I was one of those kids forced into eating healthy - there's no choice when mom is in charge of the food and the doctor has you on 1000 calories plus about 2 hours of exercise every day. And we had gym classes first 5 then 3 days per week, plus calisthenics in the schoolyard for a half hour twice a day, every day, rain (snow) or shine, so we got plenty of exercise! In bad weather we did them in the school basement. Not the gym - we didn't dare go into the gym in our wet boots but did have to do jumping jacks in them, plus our snowsuits 
(Remember those?).
I still grew up fat and reached my "goal" weight the year before I hit puberty then gained it all back - plus an additional 20 - on only 1200 calories in less than a month.
Dieting gets you nowhere
(Remember those?).I still grew up fat and reached my "goal" weight the year before I hit puberty then gained it all back - plus an additional 20 - on only 1200 calories in less than a month.
Dieting gets you nowhere
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Amitai Etzioni used to feel guilty when he gained a few pounds, but no longer
- Most adults stay the same size through life and regain weight after diets, he writes
- Adult weight established in childhood, he says, so public health efforts should target kids
- Etzioni believes healthy eating and exercise in childhood would help end adult obesity
Editor's note:Amitai Etzioni is a sociologist and professor of international relations at George Washington University and the author of several books, including "Security First" and "New Common Ground." He was a senior adviser to the Carter administration and has taught at Columbia and Harvard universities and the University of California, Berkeley.
(CNN) -- Preparations are on the way for Thanksgiving and I, like millions of my fellow Americans, already worry about what the bathroom scale will show the day after. Like so many others, I have been dieting for years. I used to feel guilty when I gained a few pounds, during the holiday season or otherwise, and on top of the world when I lost some.
I felt guilty when I had a piece of chocolate cake, my favorite, and very virtuous when I munched on celery sticks, which I hate. But then I came across some data that changed my life -- and might change yours.
Before I can tell you why I am making such a grandiose claim, I need to ask you to participate in a small experiment. Make a list of 10 people you have known or known of for a long time. They can be family members, friends, or public figures -- say, Hillary Clinton and Oprah. Now note next to each if their weight has changed significantly during the time you have known them, as far as you can tell.
For instance, Hillary Clinton was always on the slender side, and although Oprah changed her weight quite drastically over the years, she is about the same shape now as she was a decade or two ago. Indeed, you will probably find that about eight out of 10 people on your list seem to weigh about the same as they did years ago. As one observer put it, some are greyhounds and some are bulldogs.
How can I tell? Because studies show that, despite all the public health campaigns, diet books, diet doctors and diet pills; despite millions of Americans spending inordinate amounts of psychological energy fussing about their body mass; whatever weight they take off, they put on again. Not all people, but about eight out of 10, according to a report in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
That means that most Americans who diet spend good money, consume drinks and eat food that is artificially doctored, take medications that have side effects and engage in various fashionable diets that actually undermine their health. All in vain. In effect, eight of 10 dieters experience both the ill effects of excessive weight and the ill effects, and costs, of yo-yo dieting.
Why I am telling you all this? I am a student of public policy, not medicine. The reason is that all the hoopla about dieting, seen in the magazines at any check-out counter, deflects attention from the one group in which healthy eating, especially if combined with exercise, can make a significant difference -- children, the younger the better.
Think of body mass like cement. It is rather easy to shape when it is new, but once it settles, it is very resistant to change. Data show that weight ranges and body mass indexes are set early in life. According to a study by the Diabetes Center at Howard University, obesity in infants is only a 20 percent predictor of obesity in adulthood, but by the time children are 6 years old, it is 50 percent. By the time they are adolescents, it is 90 percent. Other data, though somewhat less dire, point in the same direction.
The lesson of all this is that the physicians, dietitians and other public health professionals who determine our health care policies should shift most of their efforts to working with parents. They should not focus on reducing the parents' body mass, but that of their kids.
Reforming the food that schools provide in their lunch programs, cafeteria and vending machines, and ensuring that gym classes are not canceled as schools face tight budgets, pays off more than focusing on obese and overweight adults.
I should pay credit where it is due. Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign, which focuses on children, is right on target. It remains to be seen if the tens of thousands of school boards across the country, thousands of PTAs and tens of millions of parents will heed the message. If they do, we all, especially the next generation, will be better for it. As for me, I still have my celery and my chocolate days, only now I do celery when the kids are around -- and chocolate cake when they are not.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Amitai Etzioni.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
Another DUH!
With all the "booga-booga - DE OBEEEEZZZEEE!!!" scare tactics out there, is is any surprise that this is happening?
Rising hospitals stays for eating disorders cited
Nov 29, 12:14 AM (ET)
By LINDSEY TANNER
Rising hospitals stays for eating disorders cited
Nov 29, 12:14 AM (ET)
By LINDSEY TANNER
CHICAGO (AP) - A new report on eating disorders cites data showing a sharp increase in children's hospitalizations for such problems.
Among children younger than 12 with eating disorders, hospitalizations surged 119 percent between 1999 and 2006. That's according to government data contained in an American Academy of Pediatrics report released online Monday.
The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality released data last year showing that hospital stays for the disorders increased 15 percent during the seven-year period. The biggest increase was in the youngest patients.
The academy advises pediatricians to do routine screening and refer affected children to specialized treatment. It says doctors can help prevent eating disorders by stressing proper nutrition and exercise to avoid an unhealthy focus on weight and dieting.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Sunday, November 07, 2010
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Sigh
Weight is UP right now, even though the doc has increased my thyroid med, I increased exercise and decreased calories since I last wrote.
Monday, October 25, 2010
D'oh, Indeed!
The scale keeps moving in the wrong direction.
Yes, some non-McDougall foods have crept back into my diet, as well as some higher-fat "approved" foods, like peanut butter and tofu. But I blame a lot of the 5 pound weight re-gain on the lack of exercise due to PAIN.
I posted back in August about the doctor visit where he changed my thyroid med. My last visit a few weeks ago he increased it again because of all the hypo symptoms I continue to have, and besides the over-whelming fatigue, the muscle pains affect me the most. While there he also gave me the yearly flu vaccination and an osteopathic treatment that's supposed to help prevent side effects, because when I had the shot last year I wound up with a 103º fever and the panic from that raised my blood pressure to dangerously high levels again.
Well, the cure was worse than the disease once again. No reaction to the shot but the next morning I couldn't move my head, I had so much neck and shoulder pain! Twice daily Aleeve, many hours with a heating pad with moist heat, and gentle movements like qigong instead of the aerobic type of exercises and three weeks later I still have right shoulder pains. This is on top of my usual aches and pains from the spinal arthritis, neuritis, sciatica and various arthritic joints. I did manage a few gentle and slower Leslie Sansone workouts, but many days I had to stop after 5 minutes, the sciatica pain was too bad.
Today was the first time I was able to do a complete 50 minute very low impact Richard Simmons workout,
my all-time favorite on, Silver Foxes. And now, an hour later, my arms and legs are still rubbery and shaky! It's going to take a while to get back to the level I was at last month.
Food-wise, I'm still debating which is the best food plan to follow. The no-added fat vegan diet didn't do that much for my cholesterol levels - the red yeast rice is what brought the numbers down - but the cardiac cath I had last year showed beautifully clear arteries so I know it's doing some good, even after Summer 1999's foray into unrestricted eating, thanks to the Overcoming Overeating philosophy (White Castle sliders and onion rings, donuts, cookies and cakes almost daily, real Italian sausages and turkey hot dogs - all my favorite foods).
I'm drooling just thinking about those foods!
But I know I can never eat them ever again, not if I want to get healthier physically. Mentally, that's another story, for I live to eat, and knowing I will never be allowed to eat another hot dog or piece of cake for the rest of my life is so depressing that life may not be worth living. I didn't even have cake for my birthday a few weeks ago, but that's nothing new. Most of my life I didn't have birthday cakes because I was forever on a calorie restricted diet, usually only 1000, even as a child in elementary school. I only started having birthday cakes when my son was young and he insisted mommy have a cake, because everybody gets a cake for their birthday. Yeah, right.
sigh
I keep watching videos from Dr. McDougall and his associates to get me back in the right frame of mind, to get back to enjoying (or at least tolerating) healthy no added fat starch based veg eating again, but it's not working. Even Jeff Novick's video where he's actually cooking only piqued my interest for a few minutes, until I remembered how those meals actually tasted.
Not bad, just not exciting. I'm the type of person who will seek out more foods to eat if what I did eat for a meal was unpleasant, unfulfilling, unexciting or bland. Dr. McDougall doesn't like exciting foods. He feels we would eat as a recreational activity, overeat, if food was exciting. He says we should strive for monotony in our food plans, to treat food as a medical necessity, taken in the smallest dose possible to sustain life. He even says to fill up on bland things like salad and brothy soups before getting to the cooked vegetables and starch portions of our meals so we fill up on the very low calorie, high water things so we don't eat as much of the filling foods. Yeah, I do that and I'm starving within an hour of the meal because the watery salad veggies and broth are already digested and out of my stomach and now it's empty again. Know what he says to do in this situation? Eat another salad and bowl of brothy soup.
sigh
I'm hungry. And tired. And achy. Brothy soup is not going to give me what I need.
Yes, some non-McDougall foods have crept back into my diet, as well as some higher-fat "approved" foods, like peanut butter and tofu. But I blame a lot of the 5 pound weight re-gain on the lack of exercise due to PAIN.
I posted back in August about the doctor visit where he changed my thyroid med. My last visit a few weeks ago he increased it again because of all the hypo symptoms I continue to have, and besides the over-whelming fatigue, the muscle pains affect me the most. While there he also gave me the yearly flu vaccination and an osteopathic treatment that's supposed to help prevent side effects, because when I had the shot last year I wound up with a 103º fever and the panic from that raised my blood pressure to dangerously high levels again.
Well, the cure was worse than the disease once again. No reaction to the shot but the next morning I couldn't move my head, I had so much neck and shoulder pain! Twice daily Aleeve, many hours with a heating pad with moist heat, and gentle movements like qigong instead of the aerobic type of exercises and three weeks later I still have right shoulder pains. This is on top of my usual aches and pains from the spinal arthritis, neuritis, sciatica and various arthritic joints. I did manage a few gentle and slower Leslie Sansone workouts, but many days I had to stop after 5 minutes, the sciatica pain was too bad.
Today was the first time I was able to do a complete 50 minute very low impact Richard Simmons workout,
my all-time favorite on, Silver Foxes. And now, an hour later, my arms and legs are still rubbery and shaky! It's going to take a while to get back to the level I was at last month.Food-wise, I'm still debating which is the best food plan to follow. The no-added fat vegan diet didn't do that much for my cholesterol levels - the red yeast rice is what brought the numbers down - but the cardiac cath I had last year showed beautifully clear arteries so I know it's doing some good, even after Summer 1999's foray into unrestricted eating, thanks to the Overcoming Overeating philosophy (White Castle sliders and onion rings, donuts, cookies and cakes almost daily, real Italian sausages and turkey hot dogs - all my favorite foods).
I'm drooling just thinking about those foods!
But I know I can never eat them ever again, not if I want to get healthier physically. Mentally, that's another story, for I live to eat, and knowing I will never be allowed to eat another hot dog or piece of cake for the rest of my life is so depressing that life may not be worth living. I didn't even have cake for my birthday a few weeks ago, but that's nothing new. Most of my life I didn't have birthday cakes because I was forever on a calorie restricted diet, usually only 1000, even as a child in elementary school. I only started having birthday cakes when my son was young and he insisted mommy have a cake, because everybody gets a cake for their birthday. Yeah, right.
sigh
I keep watching videos from Dr. McDougall and his associates to get me back in the right frame of mind, to get back to enjoying (or at least tolerating) healthy no added fat starch based veg eating again, but it's not working. Even Jeff Novick's video where he's actually cooking only piqued my interest for a few minutes, until I remembered how those meals actually tasted.
Not bad, just not exciting. I'm the type of person who will seek out more foods to eat if what I did eat for a meal was unpleasant, unfulfilling, unexciting or bland. Dr. McDougall doesn't like exciting foods. He feels we would eat as a recreational activity, overeat, if food was exciting. He says we should strive for monotony in our food plans, to treat food as a medical necessity, taken in the smallest dose possible to sustain life. He even says to fill up on bland things like salad and brothy soups before getting to the cooked vegetables and starch portions of our meals so we fill up on the very low calorie, high water things so we don't eat as much of the filling foods. Yeah, I do that and I'm starving within an hour of the meal because the watery salad veggies and broth are already digested and out of my stomach and now it's empty again. Know what he says to do in this situation? Eat another salad and bowl of brothy soup.
sigh
I'm hungry. And tired. And achy. Brothy soup is not going to give me what I need.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Thursday, September 02, 2010
The Chef and the Dietician Videos
Chef AJ, as she's known as, has been one of Dr. McDougall's "Celebrity Chefs" for a little while now, and besides working on her own cookbook she's now posting videos of various foods. Unfortunately, all of them, so far, have on the richer side of the caloric density chart, so those of us with weight to lose really aren't supposed to even think about eating them.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sorry for Posting Delay
Haven't been posting about my weight loss because there really hasn't been any.
Yes, I'm still following the , and when I had lab work in June my lipids were wonderful - total cholesterol under 150, triglycerides was almost normal at 164, but my TSH was doubled what it was back in March. Because of that my doc took me off the Armour thyroid and back onto Synthroid and increased the dose by half.
It really hasn't helped, as my weight is still yo-yoing back and forth the same five pounds it has since March. I even tried cutting way back on calories, dipping under 1000 many days, with no change.
I can't really increase my exercise or else I injure myself. Since that post about the chest muscle I've been back to the doc for a back injury and yes, did something to that chest muscle again. I can't work longer, either, as my podiatrist is already having fits at the state of my feet just doing the walking I'm already doing.
You would think with 130 excess pounds to lose that a combination hour of cardio and calories as low as 800 per day the weight would melt off, but it doesn't. So frustrating!
One good thing has happened since the last posts - we got ourselves a new computer.
Finally. We're keeping our old 1998 Gateway also. In fact, it's sitting right here, side by side to this new Dell. When I use one I move the keyboard for the other over to the side. I'm slowly transferring data files over, re-installing/upgrading old software, learning Windows 7 and finding out there are a lot of things I don't need to install because they're included with the OS. Cool!
We already crashed it once - Blue Screen of Death after being plugged in only 3 hours. My BP meter also gave me a blue screen of death when my pressure went up to over 200/100 right after that. It took about 3 days before the pressure went back to normal and chest tightness stopped. Was it cardiac or asthma related? Who knows. Even if I did go to the doc he would basically tell me to calm down, walk it off.
For September:
Super strict with the food. Tiny portions on ONLY MWLP approved foods, so no bread or pasta, no tofu, no dried fruit or juices, only 2 servings of fruit total per day. Much smaller portions. I know Dr. McDougall doesn't agree with portion control in most of his lectures and newsletter articles, but back in November 2005 he did say that volume eaters, people like me, NEED a restricted portion/calorie food plan in order to lose weight. He praises the Rice Diet. I tried it - I starved. Come on - only 800 calories a day?? WAY too low for humans!
The Rice Diet, like the McDougall Program, has changed throughout the years. Just 2 weeks ago another new version was released, along with a new book, Rice Diet Renewal
. They even revamped the web site to go along with it, although many things are missing and a lot of links still don't work. I'm debating whether or not to buy it, but after reading what I did in the preview on the publisher's web site, I probably won't. It looks like most of the book is testimonials of people who lost weight while at the Rice House, the people who lived on 800 calories a day while living in Durham and attending mandatory sessions at the House and getting in mandatory hours of exercise a day. I've read too many other testimonials from people who regained every single pound within 2 years of leaving the Rice House. It's easy to lose weight while institutionalized and being handed all your meals and forced to see the doctor or nurse on a daily basis, much harder in real life. As I said many times before, everybody can lose weight as long as they stay on a restricted food plan. But who can stay on one for the rest of their life?
Better get moving - I need to install MIRC and hit an OA on-line meeting. I haven't been to one since we got the new computer.
Yes, I'm still following the , and when I had lab work in June my lipids were wonderful - total cholesterol under 150, triglycerides was almost normal at 164, but my TSH was doubled what it was back in March. Because of that my doc took me off the Armour thyroid and back onto Synthroid and increased the dose by half.
It really hasn't helped, as my weight is still yo-yoing back and forth the same five pounds it has since March. I even tried cutting way back on calories, dipping under 1000 many days, with no change.
I can't really increase my exercise or else I injure myself. Since that post about the chest muscle I've been back to the doc for a back injury and yes, did something to that chest muscle again. I can't work longer, either, as my podiatrist is already having fits at the state of my feet just doing the walking I'm already doing.
You would think with 130 excess pounds to lose that a combination hour of cardio and calories as low as 800 per day the weight would melt off, but it doesn't. So frustrating!
One good thing has happened since the last posts - we got ourselves a new computer.
Finally. We're keeping our old 1998 Gateway also. In fact, it's sitting right here, side by side to this new Dell. When I use one I move the keyboard for the other over to the side. I'm slowly transferring data files over, re-installing/upgrading old software, learning Windows 7 and finding out there are a lot of things I don't need to install because they're included with the OS. Cool!We already crashed it once - Blue Screen of Death after being plugged in only 3 hours. My BP meter also gave me a blue screen of death when my pressure went up to over 200/100 right after that. It took about 3 days before the pressure went back to normal and chest tightness stopped. Was it cardiac or asthma related? Who knows. Even if I did go to the doc he would basically tell me to calm down, walk it off.
For September:
Super strict with the food. Tiny portions on ONLY MWLP approved foods, so no bread or pasta, no tofu, no dried fruit or juices, only 2 servings of fruit total per day. Much smaller portions. I know Dr. McDougall doesn't agree with portion control in most of his lectures and newsletter articles, but back in November 2005 he did say that volume eaters, people like me, NEED a restricted portion/calorie food plan in order to lose weight. He praises the Rice Diet. I tried it - I starved. Come on - only 800 calories a day?? WAY too low for humans!
The Rice Diet, like the McDougall Program, has changed throughout the years. Just 2 weeks ago another new version was released, along with a new book, Rice Diet Renewal
. They even revamped the web site to go along with it, although many things are missing and a lot of links still don't work. I'm debating whether or not to buy it, but after reading what I did in the preview on the publisher's web site, I probably won't. It looks like most of the book is testimonials of people who lost weight while at the Rice House, the people who lived on 800 calories a day while living in Durham and attending mandatory sessions at the House and getting in mandatory hours of exercise a day. I've read too many other testimonials from people who regained every single pound within 2 years of leaving the Rice House. It's easy to lose weight while institutionalized and being handed all your meals and forced to see the doctor or nurse on a daily basis, much harder in real life. As I said many times before, everybody can lose weight as long as they stay on a restricted food plan. But who can stay on one for the rest of their life?Better get moving - I need to install MIRC and hit an OA on-line meeting. I haven't been to one since we got the new computer.
Friday, July 09, 2010
File This One Under: Duh!
I read this news report this morning:
New RNs find job market tight
By Alison Young, USA TODAY
(click the title to get the full article)
Even as a national nursing shortage looms, many newly graduated registered nurses can't find jobs because the economic downturn has delayed retirement of experienced nurses, regulators and health care associations say.
Those who find work often can't get the better-paying hospital positions they had hoped for and instead are turning to nursing homes, home health care or other settings, says Carylin Holsey, president of the National Student Nurses' Association.
and the first thought that popped into my head was: "Duh! When has there NOT been a tight job market for nurses?"
When I graduated from my LPN program and got my first license way back in 1975, only 2 out of the 20 of us were hired right away in the hospital we trained at, both of them had parents connected not only to the school system but in local politics. The rest of us had to scurry around the state, taking not only nursing home and even state home (residences for the mentally and developmentally disabled) jobs but most of us also had to take the night shift or rotating shifts, meaning one week we'll work 3-11pm, the next work 11pm to 7am, sometimes finishing our night shift for Sunday at 7am Monday and going directly into the next week's schedule of 7am to 3pm that same morning, meaning we're now doing a 16 hour shift. Then Oops! You find out at 3pm that someone from the evening shift called out sick and since you're "the new guy" you have to cover for her, so now you're doing a 24 hour shift, then have 8 hours to go home for the first time in 2 days, sleep, and get back to work at 7am Tuesday.
It's not just medical residents who are forced to work dangerous shifts until they're so tired they're falling down on their feet!
Some of us assumed we were getting "picked on" because we were only LPNs so we went back to school to get our RN license, many of us also grabbing the newly formed BSN degrees, assuming the admission directors were right and that with our BSN degrees we would be on the fast track to not only steady day shift positions but supervisory ones. Little did we know after spending all that time and money that by the time we graduated diploma nursing programs would be obsolete and the basic entry level requirements for a registered nurse would change to demand BSN degrees just to get the same crap jobs we were trying to escape. Colleges were now offering "fast track" degrees to diploma nurses so they could get their BSN degrees in just 2 years instead of 4, and a MSN in just 3!
And at the time were never realized how lucky we were to have even those crap jobs. In the decades since then, insurance and hospital regulations have changed drastically, as well as the job duties of doctors and nurses. Things we were trained to do as LPN you now had Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) doing; jobs RN's were doing the LPNs are now handling; procedures that only a doctor or pharmacist could perform back in the 1970's are now being done by RNs; things only RN's with certification in advanced life support, etc., are now being done routinely by both RNs and LPNs right at the bedside on regular med-surg units and not ICU/CCUs.
Another casualty of all these changes are hospitals themselves. With insurance companies paying out less money for procedures that are becoming more complex and expensive, not only are hospitals cutting their staff to the bare bones, but many are closing entirely. Our city's hospital went bankrupt, was bought by some conglomerate who changed it to a for-profit institution, cut staff even more while adding more out-patient and specialty units, like cardio-vascular disease testing and bariatric surgery units. They used to have a sleep studies lab but that "fad" faltered so they did away with it, giving that space over to the out-patient chemotherapy and dialysis units. Less hospital beds mean less need for nurses, even highly trained ones. One RN can run a dialysis unit with a few trained technicians who earn about a quarter her salary instead of using all nurses.
A few years ago our local hospital, when it was still owned by the city, a not-for-profit community hospital, the powers that be decided to drop the private duty nurses' registry, the listing patients and their family used to go to when they wanted to hire a registered nurse to be by their side and care for only them while hospitalized. This registry had been in existence as long as the hospital had, and that went back to when our city was first founded, close to 200 years ago. The hospital didn't want the legal responsibility any more, they claimed. In actuality, one of the national chain nursing employment agencies opened up, the franchise owner being connected to someone on the hospital's board of directors, and now all private duty nurses, even all per diem nurses, were now going to be hired from the pool there. To become part of that nursing pool, they demanded a minimum of a BSN degree. Most of the registry nurses who were now out of work graduated during the diploma program days, back when nurses not only learned the nuts and bolts, the science of medicine and nursing, but the hands-on skills, both medical and empathetic, required in nursing. They learned by working with the patients and getting their hands dirty, not from sitting in a college classroom watching videos of procedures being done. They learned how to interact with the patients, how to bathe them top to bottom, how to make a bed with sheets so tight you could, pardon the cliché, bounce a quarter off of them. They learned how to sterile their own equipment, how to fix medical equipment in case something broke on their shift, they washed their patients' bedpans. And they knew everything about their patients - their medical status, sure, but they also knew about their family life, their social and job status, their standing in their religious group - anything that would help the nurse and the doctor make this patient's standard of living improve. Nurses today, all college trained, rarely see a patient until their third year of school, and then it's just for an hour or so a week. They graduate knowing the why but not the how or even the who of nursing care.
Anyway, the diploma graduated former private duty nurses were all out of a job. Many of them just retired from nursing or went into other fields; some continued to do private duty in private homes, finding clients by word of mouth; but those who wanted to stay in nursing in an institutional setting had a tough time of it, and still are. With no college degree or even advanced nursing certifications they couldn't get hired in any hospital setting, nor would nursing employment agencies take them on. Some found work in doctors' offices when their current nurses would retire, but that accounted for less than a handful, even 10 years later. Some kept looking, living off their savings, dipping into their retirement accounts. Many of them are now within retirement age but because they had used up their savings while searching for jobs, have to remain in the workforce.
One of my neighbors was one of these private duty nurses. It took her almost 5 years to get another nursing job after the apocalypse, and it's working part time in a nursing home, revolving shift work, earning about the same as a new graduate would. She had to give up her car years ago because she couldn't afford the upkeep or insurance, and may have to seriously consider moving in with a friend of hers because she can't really afford the rent in her apartment. This is a woman who, even back in the 1980's, was earning top dollar, had the finest of things, and frequently went out with friends to cultural spots in NYC while dressed in furs and jewels.
My sister-in-law is one of those college trained nurses who never got her hands dirty by doing actual patient care. This woman has multiple college degrees, including Masters, in various fields of study. Nursing was her latest "passion" around 20 years ago. Remember how in high school the schools had different tracks - the academic track was taken by those who planned to go to college and those students took more history, math and English courses, while those taking the technical track took courses that taught them a trade, like auto mechanics? The college my s-i-l went to offered similar tracks - those who planned on taking actual nursing jobs took one set of courses, and those who planned on going into administration took others. She opted for this, because as a former teacher who really disliked doing anything like manual labor, she naturally assumed any institution would be proud to have her as part of their management/supervisory team. She didn't realize that nursing managers and administrators started out as floor nurses and worked their way up the ranks. She graduated almost 15 years ago now and still hasn't found a nursing job, even though she's now willing to work any shift in any kind of setting practically anywhere in the state. Nobody will hire her because she has no experience, even though she's in her late 50's.
Even I've looked a few times over the years. I last worked full time as an RN back in 1983. My gynecologist strongly urged me to quit my job back then because AIDS was a fairly new and deadly disease, transferred to others by unsafe homosexual practices and IV drug users. Very little was known about its transmission other than this, and most patients who got it died from it. The unit I was head nurse in at the time had the only private rooms in the small inner city community hospital I was working in at the time (now long closed, thanks to budget problems) and because of that I would get all the AIDS patients, all of them IV drug abusers, many with long histories of violence. More than once I was threatened with dirty syringes until I gave them a dose of narcotics. This would happen so frequently to us on this unit that the hospital worked with the doctors and nurses to write up a procedure to follow when it happened. My GYN knew about all this, even though he didn't come to that hospital (No OB/GYN department since the 1940's) and was concerned for my safety, hence the recommendation to quit. I did. When I was ready to go back to work when my son was starting elementary school (but before his asthma diagnosis, which is another long story) I first went back to this hospital, now under new ownership, but they could only give me a few hours a week per diem, and in those few hours I was there I was responsible for all 8 hours of medications for an entire 60 patient unit, PLUS writing charts for 2 of the nurses aides' patients, PLUS doing the treatments for those patients PLUS covering other nurses' and aides' patients when they went on their coffee and lunch breaks, PLUS run up and down to the pharmacy to get medications that weren't on the med cart or doctors just ordered and wanted given right away, or for the out patient surgery patients that the OR called for three times already, even though they just walked in the door and hadn't even taken their shoes off or been admitted yet. I get tired and psychotic just thinking about those days! I lasted a few months before I quit. I quit not because the job sucked - any nursing job sucked at that time - but because I had so many responsibilities tossed at me, including 2 and 3pm meds, even though I was supposed to leave at 2pm, that every day I worked I wound up leaving at least an hour late and would always be late picking my son up at school. When I knew ahead of time I would be too late to get him I would call my husband, who worked just a few blocks away form the school, and he would get him and bring him to my m-i-l to watch until I got there, but too many times something came up at the last minute, or my husband couldn't get him, and the school let my son wait in the secretary's office until I got there. Finally they got fed up and said if I was late one more time they would report me to child welfare services. I called the hospital back that day, that HOUR, and quit, never to return to nursing ever again.
But now and then I look, especially in the past 10 years since the military base my husband worked in closed and he's been working one crappy low paying job after another (And he has a Master's degree!). I look in all the free nursing magazines different organizations mail out to all licensed nurses in the state. If you don't have a BSN they won't even let you apply for the majority of the jobs; ditto special certifications. If you had a Master's in Nursing you might get hired for a day job in administration or teaching. When an institution does have a job open that doesn't require advanced degrees, it's usually nights, either a 2, 4 or 13 hour shift, and somewhere out in the boondocks where you would need to drive 3 hours to get to from where I live. And if you've been out of nursing for a while, like for me it's been over 20 years, they insist you go for refresher courses at your own expense, and while you're at it, grab a few of those certification courses, too.
I guess we'll just keep on living on beans and rice meals and I'll continue to stay at home.
New RNs find job market tight
By Alison Young, USA TODAY
(click the title to get the full article)
Even as a national nursing shortage looms, many newly graduated registered nurses can't find jobs because the economic downturn has delayed retirement of experienced nurses, regulators and health care associations say.
Those who find work often can't get the better-paying hospital positions they had hoped for and instead are turning to nursing homes, home health care or other settings, says Carylin Holsey, president of the National Student Nurses' Association.
and the first thought that popped into my head was: "Duh! When has there NOT been a tight job market for nurses?"
When I graduated from my LPN program and got my first license way back in 1975, only 2 out of the 20 of us were hired right away in the hospital we trained at, both of them had parents connected not only to the school system but in local politics. The rest of us had to scurry around the state, taking not only nursing home and even state home (residences for the mentally and developmentally disabled) jobs but most of us also had to take the night shift or rotating shifts, meaning one week we'll work 3-11pm, the next work 11pm to 7am, sometimes finishing our night shift for Sunday at 7am Monday and going directly into the next week's schedule of 7am to 3pm that same morning, meaning we're now doing a 16 hour shift. Then Oops! You find out at 3pm that someone from the evening shift called out sick and since you're "the new guy" you have to cover for her, so now you're doing a 24 hour shift, then have 8 hours to go home for the first time in 2 days, sleep, and get back to work at 7am Tuesday.
It's not just medical residents who are forced to work dangerous shifts until they're so tired they're falling down on their feet!
Some of us assumed we were getting "picked on" because we were only LPNs so we went back to school to get our RN license, many of us also grabbing the newly formed BSN degrees, assuming the admission directors were right and that with our BSN degrees we would be on the fast track to not only steady day shift positions but supervisory ones. Little did we know after spending all that time and money that by the time we graduated diploma nursing programs would be obsolete and the basic entry level requirements for a registered nurse would change to demand BSN degrees just to get the same crap jobs we were trying to escape. Colleges were now offering "fast track" degrees to diploma nurses so they could get their BSN degrees in just 2 years instead of 4, and a MSN in just 3!
And at the time were never realized how lucky we were to have even those crap jobs. In the decades since then, insurance and hospital regulations have changed drastically, as well as the job duties of doctors and nurses. Things we were trained to do as LPN you now had Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) doing; jobs RN's were doing the LPNs are now handling; procedures that only a doctor or pharmacist could perform back in the 1970's are now being done by RNs; things only RN's with certification in advanced life support, etc., are now being done routinely by both RNs and LPNs right at the bedside on regular med-surg units and not ICU/CCUs.
Another casualty of all these changes are hospitals themselves. With insurance companies paying out less money for procedures that are becoming more complex and expensive, not only are hospitals cutting their staff to the bare bones, but many are closing entirely. Our city's hospital went bankrupt, was bought by some conglomerate who changed it to a for-profit institution, cut staff even more while adding more out-patient and specialty units, like cardio-vascular disease testing and bariatric surgery units. They used to have a sleep studies lab but that "fad" faltered so they did away with it, giving that space over to the out-patient chemotherapy and dialysis units. Less hospital beds mean less need for nurses, even highly trained ones. One RN can run a dialysis unit with a few trained technicians who earn about a quarter her salary instead of using all nurses.
A few years ago our local hospital, when it was still owned by the city, a not-for-profit community hospital, the powers that be decided to drop the private duty nurses' registry, the listing patients and their family used to go to when they wanted to hire a registered nurse to be by their side and care for only them while hospitalized. This registry had been in existence as long as the hospital had, and that went back to when our city was first founded, close to 200 years ago. The hospital didn't want the legal responsibility any more, they claimed. In actuality, one of the national chain nursing employment agencies opened up, the franchise owner being connected to someone on the hospital's board of directors, and now all private duty nurses, even all per diem nurses, were now going to be hired from the pool there. To become part of that nursing pool, they demanded a minimum of a BSN degree. Most of the registry nurses who were now out of work graduated during the diploma program days, back when nurses not only learned the nuts and bolts, the science of medicine and nursing, but the hands-on skills, both medical and empathetic, required in nursing. They learned by working with the patients and getting their hands dirty, not from sitting in a college classroom watching videos of procedures being done. They learned how to interact with the patients, how to bathe them top to bottom, how to make a bed with sheets so tight you could, pardon the cliché, bounce a quarter off of them. They learned how to sterile their own equipment, how to fix medical equipment in case something broke on their shift, they washed their patients' bedpans. And they knew everything about their patients - their medical status, sure, but they also knew about their family life, their social and job status, their standing in their religious group - anything that would help the nurse and the doctor make this patient's standard of living improve. Nurses today, all college trained, rarely see a patient until their third year of school, and then it's just for an hour or so a week. They graduate knowing the why but not the how or even the who of nursing care.
Anyway, the diploma graduated former private duty nurses were all out of a job. Many of them just retired from nursing or went into other fields; some continued to do private duty in private homes, finding clients by word of mouth; but those who wanted to stay in nursing in an institutional setting had a tough time of it, and still are. With no college degree or even advanced nursing certifications they couldn't get hired in any hospital setting, nor would nursing employment agencies take them on. Some found work in doctors' offices when their current nurses would retire, but that accounted for less than a handful, even 10 years later. Some kept looking, living off their savings, dipping into their retirement accounts. Many of them are now within retirement age but because they had used up their savings while searching for jobs, have to remain in the workforce.
One of my neighbors was one of these private duty nurses. It took her almost 5 years to get another nursing job after the apocalypse, and it's working part time in a nursing home, revolving shift work, earning about the same as a new graduate would. She had to give up her car years ago because she couldn't afford the upkeep or insurance, and may have to seriously consider moving in with a friend of hers because she can't really afford the rent in her apartment. This is a woman who, even back in the 1980's, was earning top dollar, had the finest of things, and frequently went out with friends to cultural spots in NYC while dressed in furs and jewels.
My sister-in-law is one of those college trained nurses who never got her hands dirty by doing actual patient care. This woman has multiple college degrees, including Masters, in various fields of study. Nursing was her latest "passion" around 20 years ago. Remember how in high school the schools had different tracks - the academic track was taken by those who planned to go to college and those students took more history, math and English courses, while those taking the technical track took courses that taught them a trade, like auto mechanics? The college my s-i-l went to offered similar tracks - those who planned on taking actual nursing jobs took one set of courses, and those who planned on going into administration took others. She opted for this, because as a former teacher who really disliked doing anything like manual labor, she naturally assumed any institution would be proud to have her as part of their management/supervisory team. She didn't realize that nursing managers and administrators started out as floor nurses and worked their way up the ranks. She graduated almost 15 years ago now and still hasn't found a nursing job, even though she's now willing to work any shift in any kind of setting practically anywhere in the state. Nobody will hire her because she has no experience, even though she's in her late 50's.
Even I've looked a few times over the years. I last worked full time as an RN back in 1983. My gynecologist strongly urged me to quit my job back then because AIDS was a fairly new and deadly disease, transferred to others by unsafe homosexual practices and IV drug users. Very little was known about its transmission other than this, and most patients who got it died from it. The unit I was head nurse in at the time had the only private rooms in the small inner city community hospital I was working in at the time (now long closed, thanks to budget problems) and because of that I would get all the AIDS patients, all of them IV drug abusers, many with long histories of violence. More than once I was threatened with dirty syringes until I gave them a dose of narcotics. This would happen so frequently to us on this unit that the hospital worked with the doctors and nurses to write up a procedure to follow when it happened. My GYN knew about all this, even though he didn't come to that hospital (No OB/GYN department since the 1940's) and was concerned for my safety, hence the recommendation to quit. I did. When I was ready to go back to work when my son was starting elementary school (but before his asthma diagnosis, which is another long story) I first went back to this hospital, now under new ownership, but they could only give me a few hours a week per diem, and in those few hours I was there I was responsible for all 8 hours of medications for an entire 60 patient unit, PLUS writing charts for 2 of the nurses aides' patients, PLUS doing the treatments for those patients PLUS covering other nurses' and aides' patients when they went on their coffee and lunch breaks, PLUS run up and down to the pharmacy to get medications that weren't on the med cart or doctors just ordered and wanted given right away, or for the out patient surgery patients that the OR called for three times already, even though they just walked in the door and hadn't even taken their shoes off or been admitted yet. I get tired and psychotic just thinking about those days! I lasted a few months before I quit. I quit not because the job sucked - any nursing job sucked at that time - but because I had so many responsibilities tossed at me, including 2 and 3pm meds, even though I was supposed to leave at 2pm, that every day I worked I wound up leaving at least an hour late and would always be late picking my son up at school. When I knew ahead of time I would be too late to get him I would call my husband, who worked just a few blocks away form the school, and he would get him and bring him to my m-i-l to watch until I got there, but too many times something came up at the last minute, or my husband couldn't get him, and the school let my son wait in the secretary's office until I got there. Finally they got fed up and said if I was late one more time they would report me to child welfare services. I called the hospital back that day, that HOUR, and quit, never to return to nursing ever again.
But now and then I look, especially in the past 10 years since the military base my husband worked in closed and he's been working one crappy low paying job after another (And he has a Master's degree!). I look in all the free nursing magazines different organizations mail out to all licensed nurses in the state. If you don't have a BSN they won't even let you apply for the majority of the jobs; ditto special certifications. If you had a Master's in Nursing you might get hired for a day job in administration or teaching. When an institution does have a job open that doesn't require advanced degrees, it's usually nights, either a 2, 4 or 13 hour shift, and somewhere out in the boondocks where you would need to drive 3 hours to get to from where I live. And if you've been out of nursing for a while, like for me it's been over 20 years, they insist you go for refresher courses at your own expense, and while you're at it, grab a few of those certification courses, too.
I guess we'll just keep on living on beans and rice meals and I'll continue to stay at home.
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Quick Request
Will somebody PLEASE turn off the heat already??
3 days of 102º heat is a wee bit too much for these poor asthmatic lungs to handle, don'cha know.
3 days of 102º heat is a wee bit too much for these poor asthmatic lungs to handle, don'cha know.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Changes Coming
Hmm, I noticed that Flickr has now changed the wording on their web site and automatically adds a copyright to anything I upload to the site. Many things I do upload to my page for use on my blog, like the Family Many photo in the post below, I do NOT hold the copyright to. When I try to just link graphics from another site, Blogger tells me that I must hold the copyright to the graphic, too. I'm going to have to figure out what to do for future posts. In the past, when everyone had their own web page on places like Geocities, the owner usually encouraged you to download the graphic to your own computer and not link to it, that it slows the loading rate on the web site, to just take it and upload it to your own site if you want to use it, so most of the graphics I have on this computer came from sites like those. Unless the owner embedded a copyright or did a watermark, I have no idea where they came from right now to give credit. I'll have to pay attention to other blogs now and see what they're doing.
In the meantime, I added the little not that the photo below is copyright Family Auto Mart 1999, because that's the year I got it from a local Orlando web site back then, maybe even the Family Auto Mart site itself. I have about a dozen of shots from that site, most publicity photos, others scans of free photos handed out to people, even postcards.
In the meantime, I added the little not that the photo below is copyright Family Auto Mart 1999, because that's the year I got it from a local Orlando web site back then, maybe even the Family Auto Mart site itself. I have about a dozen of shots from that site, most publicity photos, others scans of free photos handed out to people, even postcards.
Long-Overdue Update
I have to take back what I wrote in the last post about never injuring myself with a Leslie Sansone video. About a week after I wrote that post I wound up first in the local emergency room, and when I *still* hadn't seen a doctor or even a nurse to take vital signs (who ignores a cardiac patient at 3am complaining of chest pains??) I wound up coming back home and at 9am phoning my doctor for an emergency appointment. As it turned out, those chest pains I had been having were a contused chest muscle and bruised ribs. The high blood pressure (200/100 again - YIKES!) I had early in the morning was just from worrying about it and was definitely NOT cardiac. Whew!
As I mentioned back in May, some of the exercises I was doing just weren't getting me into the target heart rate zone, so I started put more enthusiasm into my moves and for the videos that required hand weights, I increased from my 2 pound ones to the 5 pounders.
BIG MISTAKE!!
I have a history of easily pulled muscles and once dislocated my shoulder just by putting my arm on the back of the chair next to me. I dislocated it another time doing a Richard Simmons toning video. I've pulled muscles in my legs and arms many times just doing smooth and slow movements with very light hand weights of only a pound each. I should have known better than to use my son's 5 pound weights, but I was so frustrated at this lack of weight loss (Notice the ticker hasn't changed in months!) that I was willing to do anything to get it going again. I was already eating close to 1000 calories a day and I'm eating even less now and still I'm fluctuating the same 5 pounds up and down since April, and both doctors are as frustrated as I am.
When we lived in Florida back in 1999, one of the things I loved about being there were the TV commercials for local businesses. Here in urban NJ we get all the slick ads for NYC businesses and the occasional home-grown one for a local business, but those are few and far between. I never understood it when I would watch a B-movie where they mocked local tv commercials, since I had never seen any like those to compare them to. Well, the Greater Orlando area has loads of commercials for local businesses, all the same as those ones I saw in B-grade movies! The entire family fell in love with those from this one particular car deal, Family Auto Mart, featuring The Family Man and his Family Auto Mart (and personal) Family, including the Family Boy, his brother.
photo copyright Family Auto Mart 1999
The commercials can be found on YouTube and they have a great following there. This blog post from Tacky in Orlando tells it greater than I can. My son, to this day, still sings the jingle "Family Auto Mart, where the wheeling and dealing start. . ." and ". . . run a row of boo-coo mini-vans" is now part of our DNA. A friend of my dad's even bought a used car from them in the months just before we moved there and said yes, they're as crazy in person as they are in the commercials, but they do have excellent service and great deals.
Anyway, (now why the heck did I get off on this tangent? Oh, yeah! Now I remember!) one of my favorites was always when the Family Man and Family Boy would dress as hillbillies and since this song called "Fixin' to Learn Ya." Take a peek at it:
You would think after all these years with this back injury, and my childhood history of broken bones from my tomboy days of climbing the sides of buildings and falling off roller skates, that I would be more cautious when exercising. I guess I still hadn't learned yet.
So, after a gentle chastisement from my doc, we went on to speak of other things, like my echocardiogram results. The takotsubo is completely gone and my heart structure is back to normal. He was pleased with my eight pound weight loss. Huh? 8 pound loss? According to my scale at home - and I took my weight just before walking out the door, fully clothed and with shoes - I'm the exact same weight as I was my last visit to him in April. I asked if they had the scale adjusted since then, because the nurses told me when we were there with my husband's aunt and it showed that she had a 10 pound gain, even though the woman eats maybe one meal a week, that it was at least 6 to 8 pounds off. No, as far as he knew the scale hadn't been touched since my last visit. I have more blood work being drawn tomorrow for lipids, thyroid, and liver and I'll go see him again in early July for the results.
How will the results change my life? Well, if the triglycerides are sill up I may have to switch from a starch based food plan to a protein one, and add meat and dairy back into my daily diet. I could never go low-carb - I need those starches or my blood sugar plummets. I can't add too many fats in because my cholesterol counts weren't that great to begin with, although recent studies (past 20 years maybe?) are showing that the cholesterol levels in the body have more to do with genetics than what's ingested, for the liver makes most of the cholesterol. I like many of the vegan meals I make, but I like a cheeseburger even more, even if it's made from ground chicken. And a whole wheat pizza isn't far from my thoughts, either. I may switch over to a more South Beach type food plan, anyway, no matter what the labwork shows. Starving myself on 1000 calories of veggies and grains certainly isn't doing anything to help me lose weight, so I may as well go back to enjoying my food again. As long as I don't pig out with things like daily kielbasa or mystery meat hot dogs I should do just fine. I already had been living sugar-free and using whole grain flours for years before this heart thing and do plan on continuing with them for decades to come. So what if I'm still fat!
As I mentioned back in May, some of the exercises I was doing just weren't getting me into the target heart rate zone, so I started put more enthusiasm into my moves and for the videos that required hand weights, I increased from my 2 pound ones to the 5 pounders.
BIG MISTAKE!!
I have a history of easily pulled muscles and once dislocated my shoulder just by putting my arm on the back of the chair next to me. I dislocated it another time doing a Richard Simmons toning video. I've pulled muscles in my legs and arms many times just doing smooth and slow movements with very light hand weights of only a pound each. I should have known better than to use my son's 5 pound weights, but I was so frustrated at this lack of weight loss (Notice the ticker hasn't changed in months!) that I was willing to do anything to get it going again. I was already eating close to 1000 calories a day and I'm eating even less now and still I'm fluctuating the same 5 pounds up and down since April, and both doctors are as frustrated as I am.
When we lived in Florida back in 1999, one of the things I loved about being there were the TV commercials for local businesses. Here in urban NJ we get all the slick ads for NYC businesses and the occasional home-grown one for a local business, but those are few and far between. I never understood it when I would watch a B-movie where they mocked local tv commercials, since I had never seen any like those to compare them to. Well, the Greater Orlando area has loads of commercials for local businesses, all the same as those ones I saw in B-grade movies! The entire family fell in love with those from this one particular car deal, Family Auto Mart, featuring The Family Man and his Family Auto Mart (and personal) Family, including the Family Boy, his brother.
photo copyright Family Auto Mart 1999
The commercials can be found on YouTube and they have a great following there. This blog post from Tacky in Orlando tells it greater than I can. My son, to this day, still sings the jingle "Family Auto Mart, where the wheeling and dealing start. . ." and ". . . run a row of boo-coo mini-vans" is now part of our DNA. A friend of my dad's even bought a used car from them in the months just before we moved there and said yes, they're as crazy in person as they are in the commercials, but they do have excellent service and great deals.
Anyway, (now why the heck did I get off on this tangent? Oh, yeah! Now I remember!) one of my favorites was always when the Family Man and Family Boy would dress as hillbillies and since this song called "Fixin' to Learn Ya." Take a peek at it:
You would think after all these years with this back injury, and my childhood history of broken bones from my tomboy days of climbing the sides of buildings and falling off roller skates, that I would be more cautious when exercising. I guess I still hadn't learned yet.
So, after a gentle chastisement from my doc, we went on to speak of other things, like my echocardiogram results. The takotsubo is completely gone and my heart structure is back to normal. He was pleased with my eight pound weight loss. Huh? 8 pound loss? According to my scale at home - and I took my weight just before walking out the door, fully clothed and with shoes - I'm the exact same weight as I was my last visit to him in April. I asked if they had the scale adjusted since then, because the nurses told me when we were there with my husband's aunt and it showed that she had a 10 pound gain, even though the woman eats maybe one meal a week, that it was at least 6 to 8 pounds off. No, as far as he knew the scale hadn't been touched since my last visit. I have more blood work being drawn tomorrow for lipids, thyroid, and liver and I'll go see him again in early July for the results.
How will the results change my life? Well, if the triglycerides are sill up I may have to switch from a starch based food plan to a protein one, and add meat and dairy back into my daily diet. I could never go low-carb - I need those starches or my blood sugar plummets. I can't add too many fats in because my cholesterol counts weren't that great to begin with, although recent studies (past 20 years maybe?) are showing that the cholesterol levels in the body have more to do with genetics than what's ingested, for the liver makes most of the cholesterol. I like many of the vegan meals I make, but I like a cheeseburger even more, even if it's made from ground chicken. And a whole wheat pizza isn't far from my thoughts, either. I may switch over to a more South Beach type food plan, anyway, no matter what the labwork shows. Starving myself on 1000 calories of veggies and grains certainly isn't doing anything to help me lose weight, so I may as well go back to enjoying my food again. As long as I don't pig out with things like daily kielbasa or mystery meat hot dogs I should do just fine. I already had been living sugar-free and using whole grain flours for years before this heart thing and do plan on continuing with them for decades to come. So what if I'm still fat!
Monday, May 17, 2010
My Aching Knee
Ouch! After a few weeks of doing just my Leslie Sansone videos or walking on the treadmill, this morning I had a hankering to do Richard Simmons' Sweatin' to the Oldies, the original. 
I dream (Really! Can you imagine hearing and seeing that fuzzy-headed guy all night long? I do!) about doing this video now and then, and did again all weekend. I just HAD to do it today!
First of all, I never did get my heart rate up into the working zone, even during the fastest songs. But one thing that did happen, before I even got up to "Great Balls of Fire" and The Twist, was a pain in my left knee, in the back, behind the knee joint. Just lifting my leg would cause it to twinge. At that point I knew I wasn't even going to attempt to Twist and just modified the movements.
Tomorrow it's back to Leslie. I may not do my treadmill time today to give my knee a rest.
I've never injured myself doing any of the Walk at Home videos, but over the decades I have injured myself doing Richard's videos. I dislocated my shoulder while doing a toning video about 15 years ago; more than once I injured one or both knees; my lower back got twisted a few times. I guess it's time to put these videos aside and go back to doing what I've been doing with them - using them just for the music while using my exercise bike.
In other news:
Go to the Kelly Olexa blog and read this post. She sums up exactly what I've been whining to my husband and doctors about for a while now. I see I'm not the only one frustrated with all the conflicting information out there.
I dream (Really! Can you imagine hearing and seeing that fuzzy-headed guy all night long? I do!) about doing this video now and then, and did again all weekend. I just HAD to do it today!First of all, I never did get my heart rate up into the working zone, even during the fastest songs. But one thing that did happen, before I even got up to "Great Balls of Fire" and The Twist, was a pain in my left knee, in the back, behind the knee joint. Just lifting my leg would cause it to twinge. At that point I knew I wasn't even going to attempt to Twist and just modified the movements.
Tomorrow it's back to Leslie. I may not do my treadmill time today to give my knee a rest.
I've never injured myself doing any of the Walk at Home videos, but over the decades I have injured myself doing Richard's videos. I dislocated my shoulder while doing a toning video about 15 years ago; more than once I injured one or both knees; my lower back got twisted a few times. I guess it's time to put these videos aside and go back to doing what I've been doing with them - using them just for the music while using my exercise bike.
In other news:
Go to the Kelly Olexa blog and read this post. She sums up exactly what I've been whining to my husband and doctors about for a while now. I see I'm not the only one frustrated with all the conflicting information out there.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Quickie Update
Still following McDougall but in Rice Diet sized portions in my quest to get twenty pounds off between cardiologist appointments. Eating under 1000 calories of mainly vegetables and some oatmeal a day really isn't all that healthy, but my primary care doc said I can most likely treat this cardiologist visit as the last one, so if starving myself for a month will prevent another one of his tirades, so be it. My primary care doc was very satisfied with my weight loss when he saw me three weeks ago, even though it was only 7 pounds down in three months. He knows how hard it is for this sluggish body of mine to release even half a pound! To know that I've lost almost 45 pounds since last summer is miraculous!
After the appointment next week I'll go back to regular McDougall foods, mostly MWLP, in large enough amounts that I'm not constantly thinking and dreaming about food. If I regain some of those pounds, so be it, but starvation dieting to please a doctor is NOT a healthy way to live.
After the appointment next week I'll go back to regular McDougall foods, mostly MWLP, in large enough amounts that I'm not constantly thinking and dreaming about food. If I regain some of those pounds, so be it, but starvation dieting to please a doctor is NOT a healthy way to live.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Michael Emerson on The Soup
I love this show, going all the way back to it's first host, Greg Kinnear, and especially the John Henson (Skunk Boy) years. Now this is a great clip!
Forks over Knives Trailer
"The feature film Forks Over Knives examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods."
Coming Summer 2010
Coming Summer 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
My daily exercise for the past 2 weeks has consisted of a 2-mile Leslie Sansone 
video, 5 minutes using the 
MagneTrainer for upper body work, then again for a minimum of 30 minutes in my target heart range as a recumbent exercise bike. It's been a great work out, getting my heart rate up there and making me sweat prolifically.
Then the leg pains started. First it was just above my ankle, and I blamed the shoes, the boots I wore outside to view the aftermath of "snowmageddon", or just too tight socks. But after switching shoes and making sure I never took a step without them, doing better stretches, even changing the type of socks I wore, the pain is now not only in the ankle but in the shin of my left leg. Damn! When this happened to me in the past my podiatrist told me to cut back on those higher impact aerobics. He already told me to not do so many walking exercises because of my deformed and arthritic feet but I liked the way they made me feel afterwards, and face it, those Leslie Sansone workouts are just so simple to do that a klutz like me can follow along with ease.
But now I have to back off a bit or the pain and damage will only get worse.
Today, instead of any of that fast or foot-pounding stuff, I pulled out my Francesco and Daisy Garripoli beginners qigong
DVD, and aside from tired feet from all that standing in one place, I think I got a very good workout, full of gentle movements but some just enough to get my heart rate up a bit — nowhere near my target heart rate but at least elevated. It was nice, returning to this not-so-old favorite. I just bought it a few months ago, before my heart thing, and stopped using it afterwards when the cardiologist insisted on me doing only cardio workouts, with weight loss as the main goal, even though the cardiac rehab nurses not only approved of me doing qigong but suggested I do the cardio one day and do the qigong on alternate days, that doing cardio 7 days a week really isn't healthy or sustainable, especially with my history of various arthritic spots, neuritis, and degenerative disk disease in my spine.
In the old days, I would have just not exercised until my left felt better. My, how times have changed!
video, 5 minutes using the MagneTrainer for upper body work, then again for a minimum of 30 minutes in my target heart range as a recumbent exercise bike. It's been a great work out, getting my heart rate up there and making me sweat prolifically.Then the leg pains started. First it was just above my ankle, and I blamed the shoes, the boots I wore outside to view the aftermath of "snowmageddon", or just too tight socks. But after switching shoes and making sure I never took a step without them, doing better stretches, even changing the type of socks I wore, the pain is now not only in the ankle but in the shin of my left leg. Damn! When this happened to me in the past my podiatrist told me to cut back on those higher impact aerobics. He already told me to not do so many walking exercises because of my deformed and arthritic feet but I liked the way they made me feel afterwards, and face it, those Leslie Sansone workouts are just so simple to do that a klutz like me can follow along with ease.
But now I have to back off a bit or the pain and damage will only get worse.
Today, instead of any of that fast or foot-pounding stuff, I pulled out my Francesco and Daisy Garripoli beginners qigong
DVD, and aside from tired feet from all that standing in one place, I think I got a very good workout, full of gentle movements but some just enough to get my heart rate up a bit — nowhere near my target heart rate but at least elevated. It was nice, returning to this not-so-old favorite. I just bought it a few months ago, before my heart thing, and stopped using it afterwards when the cardiologist insisted on me doing only cardio workouts, with weight loss as the main goal, even though the cardiac rehab nurses not only approved of me doing qigong but suggested I do the cardio one day and do the qigong on alternate days, that doing cardio 7 days a week really isn't healthy or sustainable, especially with my history of various arthritic spots, neuritis, and degenerative disk disease in my spine.In the old days, I would have just not exercised until my left felt better. My, how times have changed!
Monday, February 01, 2010
How?!?!
How am I going to lose more than half my current weight and not wind up in the hospital, nuthouse, or cemetery?
I'm following a very low fat, starch based food plan, keeping the sodium under 2000 mg a day and calories between 1200 - 1400.
I'm getting 5 to 6 hours of cardio exercise each week, much of it in my target heart rate zone. I mix it up between different videos, the treadmill and exercise bike. Many of the videos incorporate weight and toning work, too.
I'm using meditation and relaxation techniques, along with an ACE inhibitor, to keep my blood pressure down, and sometimes it goes a little too low, so low I'm about to pass out.
I try get eight hours of sleep a night, but some days life just interferes and I only get 6 or 7. I've been making up for it on weekends.
And my weight still keeps yo-yoing between the same 4 pound weight range that's still 140 pounds above my target weight, as set by the cardiologist in December. I haven't lost any weight in about a month.
Is it any wonder why the doc recommended weight loss surgery? Well, that plus the fact that as a surgeon he's knife happy, and probably gets a kick back from everyone he sends for a consult to one of the surgeons in our hospital's brand new bariatric surgery section, modeled after the cardio-vascular center the hospital built for him and brought in big bucks to the institution.
My food is very bland, meals are unenjoyable, and there's not much of them so I spend the majority of my days - and nights - hungry. My hypoglycemia is acting up, some mornings I wake up so dizzy I can barely walk and find my fasting blood sugars 20 or more points below the normal fasting levels. Between the low blood pressure, low blood sugars, and under active thyroid that my doctor refuses to treat more aggressively I'm barely functional!
My body is falling apart. Because of the degenerative arthritis in my back, many of the upper body movements cause pain in my shoulders, neck and upper back and the sciatica causes pains in my right hip and leg. My feet, malformed to begin with (Thanks, Mom and Nana!), are even worse, with the constant pounding on them from various exercises aggravating the arthritis, fasciitis, tendinitis, and now my podiatrist says some bones are shifting out of position, causing not just more pain but affecting my gait, which aggravates the back and hips even more. My already wide feet are now wider than any shoe on the market so no matter what I wear they don't fit right and cause even more pain.
I consider constantly changing food plans, going for a calorie counting plan like Richard Simmons' Foodmover, or even following the DASH diet, which is not only very low sodium but low calorie, too. Then I look at what foods I have available to me, not just in the local stores but what money I have in my weekly food budget to buy them, and sigh. I looked at chicken breasts yesterday that were loaded with bright yellow blobs of fat and whose packages had small puddles of "chicken juice" comprised of not just blood but I'm assuming the saline solution injected into most chicken breasts on the market today. Ground beef is constantly getting recalled for bacterial contamination, and besides, it's usually too high in fat content to be considered a healthy food, and the lower fat version is too expensive. I know, I could buy a cheaper grade and par boil it and pour off the fatty water, but then I'm left with meat that tastes blander than the packaging it's in.
I could also switch to a vegan plan that relies more on fresh vegetables - greens, mostly - and fruits and restricts starches, but I can't even find enough ingredients for one decent bowl of salad per week and certainly won't be able to find enough to make a pound of salad a day. Then there's another plan that limits you to around 1000 calories a day of mostly starches and fruit and later limited veggies. I don't think all that fruit would be good for my hypoglycemia. I may as well stick with the vegan food plan I'm already on and just pay really close attention to portion size and maybe lower the calories down to 1000 - 1200 a day again.
My hypothyroidism is as bad as it's ever been, with my PCP refusing to raise my med dosage for fear of "blowing out" my thyroid. He refuses to believe the fact that hypothyroid can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression, muscle aches, rosacea (Another ailment of mine that keeps me indoors a lot) and of course, weight gain.
I have no energy for anything by the time I finish my daily exercise. I have no mental energy to read or do any of my former hobbies, and I fall asleep at the drop of a hat, making watching even a tv show impossible unless I record it and play it back in bits and pieces. Most days I don't even get dressed.
So I plod along, constantly hungry and in pain, constantly tired and frustrated. I dread each upcoming doctor's appointment because I know I'll get reprimanded for the lack of weight loss each time, whether I lose or not. I have no energy to leave the house most days, and the few times I do it's never for anything pleasant, but for mundane things like grocery shopping or going to the laundromat or to care for the elderly relative with Alzheimer's disease. Her mind is getting worse, her finances dwindling, and we know that sooner or later we'll be forced to move in with her to care for her. Sure, she can afford live-in homemakers right now, but refuses them. We're lucky she allowed us to hire one to come for a few hours on weekdays for the winter. But her money won't last forever, so to keep her safe we'll either have to place her in a nursing home or more in. Since every nursing home we interviewed told us the same thing the assisted living place did last September, that they can't force her to stay there if she doesn't want to, we know we'll never be able to place her. With our luck, as soon as she got settled in and we were lucky enough to sell her house, she'll decide to go home, so the house has to stay, at least for a year, yet we can't afford to care for both her house and pay for a nursing home (Over $3000 a month), so moving in with her is the lesser of the financial evils. This is a woman without a friend in the world, one whose entire family hates her (Including us) and hates to spend any time with, even before she started showing Alzheimer's symptoms, a woman whose own husband used to yell at her to stop being such a bitch to her sister and go to her room until after we left if she couldn't keep a civil tongue in her head. When he husband died there was no one left to reign her in and she berated her sister, my m-i-l, until the day she died. She only has one other nephew and one niece, both live out of state, and both want nothing to do with her. Because we live the closest, her care fell to us. My husband is trying to find a way to have someone else - ANYONE else - take over, maybe make her a ward of the state, but so far no luck. He refuses to accept legal guardianship because of all the paperwork involved, mostly the financial side of keeping every receipt to prove how every penny of her money gets spent. She can't even remember to eat, much less where she spends money each week, which is why we only leave a small amount of cash in her place and took away her checkbook after she once handed it over to a contractor who knocked on her door and offered to do work for her and told him to make out any check he needed. We had to threaten him with legal action to get him to leave her alone and stop coming around. See why she needs someone to be with her as much as possible? I dread the day we have to move in with her.
Heck, I dread many things in life right now. This isn't the life I thought I would be living when I was younger. This isn't even half as good a life I was living even five years ago, five MONTHS ago. Sometimes the alternative does look better, to twist the old saying around.
I'm following a very low fat, starch based food plan, keeping the sodium under 2000 mg a day and calories between 1200 - 1400.
I'm getting 5 to 6 hours of cardio exercise each week, much of it in my target heart rate zone. I mix it up between different videos, the treadmill and exercise bike. Many of the videos incorporate weight and toning work, too.
I'm using meditation and relaxation techniques, along with an ACE inhibitor, to keep my blood pressure down, and sometimes it goes a little too low, so low I'm about to pass out.
I try get eight hours of sleep a night, but some days life just interferes and I only get 6 or 7. I've been making up for it on weekends.
And my weight still keeps yo-yoing between the same 4 pound weight range that's still 140 pounds above my target weight, as set by the cardiologist in December. I haven't lost any weight in about a month.
Is it any wonder why the doc recommended weight loss surgery? Well, that plus the fact that as a surgeon he's knife happy, and probably gets a kick back from everyone he sends for a consult to one of the surgeons in our hospital's brand new bariatric surgery section, modeled after the cardio-vascular center the hospital built for him and brought in big bucks to the institution.
My food is very bland, meals are unenjoyable, and there's not much of them so I spend the majority of my days - and nights - hungry. My hypoglycemia is acting up, some mornings I wake up so dizzy I can barely walk and find my fasting blood sugars 20 or more points below the normal fasting levels. Between the low blood pressure, low blood sugars, and under active thyroid that my doctor refuses to treat more aggressively I'm barely functional!
My body is falling apart. Because of the degenerative arthritis in my back, many of the upper body movements cause pain in my shoulders, neck and upper back and the sciatica causes pains in my right hip and leg. My feet, malformed to begin with (Thanks, Mom and Nana!), are even worse, with the constant pounding on them from various exercises aggravating the arthritis, fasciitis, tendinitis, and now my podiatrist says some bones are shifting out of position, causing not just more pain but affecting my gait, which aggravates the back and hips even more. My already wide feet are now wider than any shoe on the market so no matter what I wear they don't fit right and cause even more pain.
I consider constantly changing food plans, going for a calorie counting plan like Richard Simmons' Foodmover, or even following the DASH diet, which is not only very low sodium but low calorie, too. Then I look at what foods I have available to me, not just in the local stores but what money I have in my weekly food budget to buy them, and sigh. I looked at chicken breasts yesterday that were loaded with bright yellow blobs of fat and whose packages had small puddles of "chicken juice" comprised of not just blood but I'm assuming the saline solution injected into most chicken breasts on the market today. Ground beef is constantly getting recalled for bacterial contamination, and besides, it's usually too high in fat content to be considered a healthy food, and the lower fat version is too expensive. I know, I could buy a cheaper grade and par boil it and pour off the fatty water, but then I'm left with meat that tastes blander than the packaging it's in.
I could also switch to a vegan plan that relies more on fresh vegetables - greens, mostly - and fruits and restricts starches, but I can't even find enough ingredients for one decent bowl of salad per week and certainly won't be able to find enough to make a pound of salad a day. Then there's another plan that limits you to around 1000 calories a day of mostly starches and fruit and later limited veggies. I don't think all that fruit would be good for my hypoglycemia. I may as well stick with the vegan food plan I'm already on and just pay really close attention to portion size and maybe lower the calories down to 1000 - 1200 a day again.
My hypothyroidism is as bad as it's ever been, with my PCP refusing to raise my med dosage for fear of "blowing out" my thyroid. He refuses to believe the fact that hypothyroid can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression, muscle aches, rosacea (Another ailment of mine that keeps me indoors a lot) and of course, weight gain.
I have no energy for anything by the time I finish my daily exercise. I have no mental energy to read or do any of my former hobbies, and I fall asleep at the drop of a hat, making watching even a tv show impossible unless I record it and play it back in bits and pieces. Most days I don't even get dressed.
So I plod along, constantly hungry and in pain, constantly tired and frustrated. I dread each upcoming doctor's appointment because I know I'll get reprimanded for the lack of weight loss each time, whether I lose or not. I have no energy to leave the house most days, and the few times I do it's never for anything pleasant, but for mundane things like grocery shopping or going to the laundromat or to care for the elderly relative with Alzheimer's disease. Her mind is getting worse, her finances dwindling, and we know that sooner or later we'll be forced to move in with her to care for her. Sure, she can afford live-in homemakers right now, but refuses them. We're lucky she allowed us to hire one to come for a few hours on weekdays for the winter. But her money won't last forever, so to keep her safe we'll either have to place her in a nursing home or more in. Since every nursing home we interviewed told us the same thing the assisted living place did last September, that they can't force her to stay there if she doesn't want to, we know we'll never be able to place her. With our luck, as soon as she got settled in and we were lucky enough to sell her house, she'll decide to go home, so the house has to stay, at least for a year, yet we can't afford to care for both her house and pay for a nursing home (Over $3000 a month), so moving in with her is the lesser of the financial evils. This is a woman without a friend in the world, one whose entire family hates her (Including us) and hates to spend any time with, even before she started showing Alzheimer's symptoms, a woman whose own husband used to yell at her to stop being such a bitch to her sister and go to her room until after we left if she couldn't keep a civil tongue in her head. When he husband died there was no one left to reign her in and she berated her sister, my m-i-l, until the day she died. She only has one other nephew and one niece, both live out of state, and both want nothing to do with her. Because we live the closest, her care fell to us. My husband is trying to find a way to have someone else - ANYONE else - take over, maybe make her a ward of the state, but so far no luck. He refuses to accept legal guardianship because of all the paperwork involved, mostly the financial side of keeping every receipt to prove how every penny of her money gets spent. She can't even remember to eat, much less where she spends money each week, which is why we only leave a small amount of cash in her place and took away her checkbook after she once handed it over to a contractor who knocked on her door and offered to do work for her and told him to make out any check he needed. We had to threaten him with legal action to get him to leave her alone and stop coming around. See why she needs someone to be with her as much as possible? I dread the day we have to move in with her.
Heck, I dread many things in life right now. This isn't the life I thought I would be living when I was younger. This isn't even half as good a life I was living even five years ago, five MONTHS ago. Sometimes the alternative does look better, to twist the old saying around.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Since our last visit . . .
To see what happened to me since the last time I posted here, see my LiveJournal Blog, Suzy Bear's Wretched Mess.
I remember I stopped posting here when it became difficult to do so, but now the LJ software is giving this old computer fits so I may move over to here now. Blogger does seem to be working faster and offer more than LJ, that's for sure. Over the next week or so I'll work on fixing this place up a little better. I already removed the long lists of links off the side so it already looks a bit less cluttered.
I remember I stopped posting here when it became difficult to do so, but now the LJ software is giving this old computer fits so I may move over to here now. Blogger does seem to be working faster and offer more than LJ, that's for sure. Over the next week or so I'll work on fixing this place up a little better. I already removed the long lists of links off the side so it already looks a bit less cluttered.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
I Miss Richard Simmons
The voice, the hair, the outfits, that laugh - I miss every single thing about that glitzy, ditsy, outrageous person. Oh, yes, his workouts...
-
Haven't been posting about my weight loss because there really hasn't been any. Yes, I'm still following the , and when I had la...
-
Every now and then, in his Message of the Day , Richard Simmons reminds people how he was anorexic in his younger days and would go on fasts...
-
Unfortunately, it's all stuff we need. Fortunately, all of what I ordered helps lower my grocery store bills. First was my twice-yearly ...
