My health

I rarely reveal much about the person behind the nom de blog “N in Seattle”.  Not my style, not my strength.  This post, then, is going to be a very unusual one for Peace Tree Farm, because I’m relating a rather scary experience I’ve undergone in the last month.

Actually, I think we need to go back a couple more months, to early October.  That’s when I came down with a very nasty cold.  It was so bad that I had to take a couple of sick days, and it never really went away, week after week.  I was constantly tired, slept even more poorly than usual, with post-nasal drip, congestion.  Even before coming down with that cold, I’d decided to get a flu shot—the first voluntary flu immunization of my life.  After putting up with the sequelae for far too long, I went to the doctor with complaints about my endless cold, but he didn’t find much of anything.  He suggested cough suppressant and nasal irrigation (yuck), which I tried for a week or so without apparent change.

So I made another appointment with the doctor just after Thanksgiving, this time laying out my entire collection of signs and symptoms.  Not just the still-lingering cold, but everything from brittle fingernails to depression to the occasional short bout of what I called heaviness or tightness in my chest.  This last item piqued the doc’s interest.  Hey, I’m an obese 57-year-old male being medicated for hypertension and hyperlipidemia, definitely at risk for coronary disease even though I’m a lifelong nonsmoker.  He did a brief EKG rhythm strip right then and there, and scheduled me for a stress test to be taken on Monday, December 10.

In the interim, I continued to feel just as lousy.  Then came the early morning of Thursday, December 6.

Comments

It is so easy for us to take for granted the times when we feel well.  We don’t realize how good we have it until we get sick.  Hopefully you’ve just had a bad spell, but this might be a good reminder that we need to take care of ourselves by eating better and getting more exercise.

And, hopefully, when you do get that bill it doesn’t give you a heart attack!

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Hopefully, by now you are feeling a bit better.

This is not really related, but do you remember when we used to keep track of the active baseball players that were older than we were?

Well, if we applied the same standard for politics, I’ve recently learned that Barack Obama was born on the same day in the same year as me. Given that I was in Kansas and he was in Hawaii, there’s a good chance I’m some hours older than him. We’re both exactly one year older than Roger Clemens.

I doubt that this means that every presidential candidate from this point forward is going to be younger than me.

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N -

Sorry to hear about all this - doesn’t sound like much fun at all.  Hope you’re well by now.

Let’s catch up at DL in a couple of weeks.

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