mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Weekly weigh-in -- wow, that's a lotta water!

Okay, first weigh-in since my fainting drama of last week:

• Today's weight: 242.5 lb
• Change since last weigh-in: +6.0 lb (!)
• Cumulative weight loss: 91.5 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -2.18 lb

Assuming all of those six pounds represents water weight I put back on since going off my blood pressure meds, all I can say is: holy crap! No wonder I keeled over from dehydration!

Needless to say, I don't feel bad about putting back those six pounds--those are obviously six pounds worth of fluids my body desperately needed for proper functioning. I hate to think what other kinds of damage I could have possibly done to myself if I kept on being so severely dehydrated.

I continue to feel a tiny bit of edema-bloating happening in my feet and ankles at the very end of the day--like right now, for instance, at 10pm. Something I will continue to keep my eye on. On the other hand, ever since I went off my blood pressure meds, I have been feeling noticeably more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. At first I thought the meds might have been having some kind of psychoactive effect on me that was now removed ... and then it dawned on me: duh! I was probably faintly woozy from dehydration for weeks, without knowing it. Just add water and swoosh! Brain perks right back up.

Meanwhile, life--and the weight management effort--continue onward. I got the stitches removed from my upper lip this past Monday. On Tuesday I felt sufficiently rehydrated to try my first bout of relatively hard (for me) exercise since the fainting incident: 30 fairly strenuous minutes on the exercise bike. I felt perfectly fine afterwards, from a staying-conscious-and-not-passing-out standpoint. However, today, the ol' left knee is feeling angrified at me. Sigh. And so it goes--once again, gotta nurse the knee back to relative happiness, and remember for next time to take it easy with the bike.

Geez, it's always something with me, innit? Oh well ... onward and outward ...

The silver lining: no more hypertension meds!

Today I went in for my med-readjustment appointment with the doctor subbing for my regular primary care physician. Turns out my regular doc was being medic-on-location for one of those Susan G. Komen breast cancer fundraiser walks, so my bummer over not seeing her was lightened considerably.

So this friendly gentleman took my blood pressure a few more times and did a few other relatively non-invasive doctorly things, and decided that I should try being totally off all my blood pressure medications for a month, at the end of which I'd come in for another followup appointment.

To have lost enough weight to have made that much of a change in a significant aspect of my health is a major breakthrough. So any remaining bummer I had been harboring over the stitches in my lip, and the scar that might remain, has also been lightened remarkably.

I can't emphasize enough my feeling of satisfaction over this. Not to mention my feeling of gratitude that my basic constitution is sturdy enough that it's capable of responding so positively to my work so far.

It will be interesting to see how my body responds as it begins to shed all remaining residues of the Maxzide, lisinopril, and potassium supplement. I know for sure one side effect is already underway; without the diruetic effects of those drugs, I'm beginning to retain more of the now more copious amounts of fluids I'm pouring into myself. I can feel a very slight bloat trying to happen in my feet and ankles, and one of my rings has gotten overly tight on the finger I had been wearing it on.

No doubt I'll be back up a couple of pounds at my next weekly weigh-in. But that doesn't upset me one bit--after all, that couple of pounds represents water my body desperately needs to keep onboard to function properly. As for the bloat business, I actually think it's just a rebound effect from cutting off the meds cold turkey. I'll watch it carefully, but I expect it to even out after a few days or weeks as my bod regains water equilibrium.

Maybe I'm imagining it, but I feel like there are other subtle changes going on as well. Like, I actually feel a little more clear mentally, or something. Placebo effect? Who knows? Worth at least paying attention to.

Oh yeah, and I'll tell you one other change I'm definitely looking forward to. One of Maxzide's side-effects is sensitivity to sunlight, which has been a royal pain in the ass here in sunny Southern California, let me tell you! So while I still need to guard against basic sunburn, at least I won't have to totally take cover on super-bright days anymore. Huzzah!

A little emergency-room excitement (a.k.a. all's well that ends well)

As many of you are probably well aware, proper dosages of medications usually need to be scaled to one's body weight. A child needs to take much less of a medication than a full-grown adult; an elderly adult also often needs to take less than a younger adult due to decreased muscle/body mass. Likewise, a very fat person will need a higher dose than a skinny person, or else the med will be too diluted in that greater body mass to produce the required effect. Contrariwise, when you lose enough weight, you eventually need to get your prescriptions scaled down, or else you'll be taking way too much for your new body mass.

Now at this point I've lost around 97 pounds, which represents almost 1/3 of my original starting weight. I've been on a bunch of long-term prescriptions for some years now, including blood pressure meds (Maxzide and lisinopril), and figured I probably needed to get those scripts readjusted at some point, but somehow never quite got around to it. My excuse, and it's not such a flimsy one, is that it's a royal pain in the ass trying to get in to see my primary care physician--half the time when I call up, I get told she is booked up solid for the next couple of months, they aren't even taking appointments further out, and to call back in a month when they start taking appointments again. And then I'd call back in a month or so, and discover once again she was all booked up and they weren't taking any more appointments ...

Well, apparently all of this came to a head (so to speak!) last night.

We've been having unseasonably hot Santa Ana weather around here, so my home office has been a little sweat box. Still, I'd been soldiering on with my work, and had even snuck down to the exercise room when things cooled off after sunset for some stationary bike time. And I guess I wasn't drinking quite enough water, and then innocently compounded the mess by eating a bowl of low fat but extremely salty popcorn ... So in hindsight it was not so surprising that, around 10pm, I was sitting at my desk typing at the computer, and suddenly start to feel extremely woozy.

I was fading in and out, and had gotten as far as vaguely thinking "Gee, maybe I should go lie down..." when Mama Nature took matters into her own hands. I came to on the floor, next to my desk, with no memory of having fallen--just a head fulla fuzzy, and a lovely gash in the skin between my nose and upper lip. I still have no idea what the hell I caught my lip on--I'm thinking one of the corners of my desk, though there's no tell-tale blood spatters. In fact, thank goddess, the wound didn't bleed all that much at all. Didn't hurt anywhere near as badly as I would have expected either. But still--ow. And it was deep enough to definitely need stitches, and probably a tetanus shot too.

My roommate, bless his heart, was very oblidging about whisking me away to the emergency room of my HMO's hospital (which is fortunately less than 1/2 mile away). The ER folks of course got all concerned about why this lady fainted dead away out of the blue, as that could potentially be due to any number of things, some of them quite dire. But as they start running tests, they determined that my EKG and blood sugar and reflexes and such were totally textbook perfect, but that I was indeed severely dehydrated. And most entertaining of all was my blood pressure reading.

Time was when I'd regularly get systolic readings (the first number of a typical BP reading) up around 134, 140, and even higher. Meds would bring it down to 120-ish over 80-ish, which is considered normal. But last night, the ER folks were getting readings on me as low as 97/67. Yeowch! No wonder I fainted!

In fact, what I had experienced was a classic episode of syncope (the medical term for fainting) as is often seen with hypotension due to dehydration, such as can be brought on by the diruetic in Maxcide and by ACE inhibitors such as lisinopril, especially if there's also insufficient fluid intake. In other words, between the apparent excessive dose of BP meds due to decreased body mass, the hot weather, the not drinking enough fluids, and that damn salty popcorn, I guess I produced the perfect storm of syncopes.

So they dripped a couple bags worth of saline into my veins (it's amazing how much I perked up within a few minutes of them starting the IV), sutured up that lovely gash in my lip, and gave me a tetanus shot. They also got me an emergency appointment with another doctor in the same clinic as my primary care physician to adjust my meds--apparently even they couldn't get a toehold in my regular doc's appointment calendar, even for an urgent issue. They also instructed me in the meantime to not drive (yikes!--yep, definitely grateful this didn't happen while I was behind the wheel!).

While I'm waiting for my meds to be redone I'm also supposed to take my blood pressure daily with my home BP unit (which of course I had not done in weeks), and if it's well underl 120/80 again to just skip my hypertension meds for that day. I took it this morning and it was around 107/mumble, so no Maxzide or lisinopril for me today.

So how's that for a fun evening of excitement? (Insert glyph of sarcasm here.)

But seriously, I really am glad I had this incident in the relative safety of my own home as opposed to out in public--especially out in traffic! Obviously, I wish that somebody had warned me about the hazards of letting this meds-readjustment thing go unaddressed for so long--alas, the person overseeing my HMO's weight loss group, while a trained weight loss counselor, is not a physician. But still, I think there should be some sort of warning about this kind of thing somewhere.

Which is another reason why I'm blogging about it so extensively here. On a certain level, losing enough weight to mess with one's meds is the kind of problem you don't mind having--after all, it means you're actually getting somewhere with the weight loss. But when one's goal is healthy weight loss, it's still a problem one wants to avoid. I'm still annoyed at myself about the gash--even though the doc took great care stitching it up, I'll probably wind up with a little scar--but I'm glad that's the worst I got off with.

P.S. I'm now wondering why this problem didn't surface when I was in the hospital for the full hysterectomy this past August, or during any of the followup visits. After all, they took my blood pressure about a bazillion times throughout that. But I make a point of seeing what reading they get when they do my BP, and right now I'm not recalling any excessively low readings. I'm also wondering if the surgically-induced menopause from the removal of my ovaries might also have added to my little hypotension mess in some way. Who knows?!? It's a puzzlement to moi!

1998 NYT article sheds light on deadly E. coli variant

Link: Detective Work and Science Reveal a New Lethal Bacteria - New York Times.

One of the key details given short shrift in the recent spinach-contamination furor--and it really bugs me that it's been so dreadfully ignored--is that it's NOT all E. coli bacteria that are at fault. Normally, E. coli is a benign, even beneficial, bacterium that lives peacefully and in great numbers in the guts of many mammals, including homo sapiens. It's only a couple of rare, mutant strains of the bug that cause the potentially-deadly problems--and the story of how E. coli O157:H7, the culprit in recent US contamination crises, probably evolved is a fascinating and instructive one.

One of the reasons the extreme unclarity about this bug, well, bugs me, is simply that I'm a science geek and I hate bad science reporting, especially from news outlets on which millions of people are depending for potentially life-protecting news. But another is that implementing a fix for this problem will be greatly aided if all parties concerned (including we the people whom the fixing agencies are meant to serve) actually understand the true nature of the problem.

Meanwhile, those of us who have made a commitment to health by adding large quantities of fresh vegetables to our diets need to exercise caution in our commitment, as in my opinion those fix-it agencies are still only succeeding in sticking bandaids onto an extremely leaky food-conduit--mainly because they are not empowered or funded to achieve anything more than that. I think it's just plain old common sense that a huge corporate farm enterprise like Natural Selection--no matter how  well-intentioned--will simply have more points where things can screw up than a local organic farm, simply because the former is a much bigger and more complex organization.

Indeed, it wasn't even one of Natural Selection's dozens of organic brands from their own fields that was at fault, but spinach from another, non-organic, farm that Natural Selection bags under contract to another company's brand. With all those dozens of brands and raw-material streams, Murphy's Law can have one hell of a "field day" (yeah, pun intended).

All other things being equal, the odds of getting safe veggies are simply higher when one buys them minimally processed from smaller, local farms.

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: info about post-surgery weight gain

Interesting week. First, the numbers:

• Today's weigh-in: 241.0 lb
• Change since last weigh-in: -0.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 93.0 lb
• Average weeky weight loss: 2.51 lb

I'm pretty certain at this point that my slowed rate of weight loss is due to post-surgical recuperation. I got some support for this notion from this webpage. The fact that many womens' problem is gaining weight makes me feel pretty good that my weight is still going down at all, however slowly.

But it does also point out that I need to get a little more achtung about my favorite thing (insert glyph of sarcasm here), regular exercise. No more of this counting hauling laundry up and downstairs and grocery shopping, with sporadic unplanned bouts of walking, as adequate exercise. I'm a little more willing these days, thankfully. I very recently discovered that I can now walk several blocks without gasping for breath or feeling joints start to seize up. I have to go slow and step gently, because there is some joint discomfort, but the pleasure at walking just that little bit better is ample motivation to keep moving. I think I may have turned a corner here.

I want to make this exercise thing as attractive as possible, so I'll get kick-started into doing it. I do have the gym on premises, but nothing beats walking in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods for making me enjoy exercise. I may indulge myself by driving to attractive walking neighborhoods. Yeah, there's something ironic about driving somewhere to walk. Welcome to Southern California.

Actually ... speaking of SoCal, I think I'll make my first walking jaunt at Ocean Beach, my favorite of the beach communities. Too bad I missed the farmer's market there today...

Brief check-in: yep, still alive and kicking

Hi folks--didja miss me?

My surgery was a complete success, and in the first followup appointment the doc gave me a completely clean bill of health.

Now I'm well into the recovery phase, which is going both much faster, and much slower, than I expected. Somehow I had managed to make it almost to age 50 without ever having undergone surgery for anything, not even tonsils, so this is my first experience with how much of a blow to the system it is to undergo major surgery. Plus as this was surgery to my abdomen (hysterectomy plus a hernia repair), I have a major muscle group that is working way hard to, erm, regroup.

So my energy level is extremely deceptive right about now--holding still, or even puttering around my apartment, I feel pretty good. But I went to church on my own this past Sunday, and while I felt fine the whole time I was out, I was so tired and achey the next day that I spent most of it sleeping. On the other hand, I am apparently up and functioning much sooner, and much better, than anyone would have expected.

I am convinced that this past six months of my little health regimen had a huge amount to do with the speed of my recovery. And, except for a few days in the hospital and immediately after when my stomach was so upset that I basically ate anything that I could keep down and called it acceptable, I have stayed on my food plan throughout. (Far superior to those hospital classics, lime Jello and boiled-to-death chicken!)

While I am now cleared for making short car trips and outings, I've been tending to stay close to the nest, so I haven't been back to my HMO's exercise center to weight myself on the Official Scale since before the operation. But I did break down and borrow a bathroom scale from a friend--no idea how it's calibrated with regard to the Official Scale, but whatever.

Anyway, as of this morning the borrowed scale says I weigh something like 251 pounds, which is a significant drop from my last recorded weight, on 7/31/06, of 269 pounds. Not to get too graphic about it, but I'm sure a lot of that weight loss is due to the amount of, erm, material that was removed from my body--NOT a weight loss strategy that I would recommend! However, it is nice to know where the hell I'm at after all that.

Now, it's just a matter of getting the rest of my strength and stamina back. My doctors recommended walking as the best exercise not only for that, but also for helping my innards re-sort themselves. When I was in the hospital, this took the form of walking around the ward. Now that I'm home, I've mostly been just puttering around the apartment--but this morning I got myself down the stairs from my second-story walk-up to take a turn around the apartment complex's courtyard, and then back up the stairs again. I'm hoping to keep doing that on subsequent days, and gradually build up to longer walks.

And I'm still trying to limit my time spent sitting up at the computer, so it might be another several days before my next post here. Or not--boredom is setting in despite books and TV and crocheting and whatnot. But anyway--yep, I'm still not only alive, but thriving, and hope to be fully back in the saddle soon. Onward and upward!

Gone on temporary hiatus for health reasons

Hi gang--

You'll recall, a couple of posts back, that I mentioned confronting some potentially momentous health issues. Well, the tests are pretty much all in now, and alas I'm going to need to go in the hospital for some major (and rather serious) surgery.

Unless something really weird happens, this surgery will be going down a week from today--Monday, August 7th. I'll probably be in the hospital for a few days afterward recovering, and then home for more recovery--they're telling me it'll probably be a good six weeks from date of cutting to when I'll be 100% again. I'm hoping and assuming that I'll be fairly functional (i.e. ready to get back online) after the first week or two, but I honestly won't know for sure until I get there.

So, between all that, and the fact that the gory details of that surgery are kind of off-topic for this blog, I'm going to be putting this one on hiatus for a little while... okay, maybe if and when I'm feeling up to it, I might log in here to make some disparaging comments about hospital food. But I seriously suspect things will be pretty danged quiet on this blog for the next few weeks.

Those of you who *would* like to know all the gory details, and to keep tabs on how I'm doing, I invite you to follow my personal LiveJournal. Just about all the posts on that blog pertaining to my operation are/will be set to "friends-only,"  so you will need to have a LiveJournal account and request that I add you as a friend to view them. The easiest way to do that is to add me to your own LiveJournal friends list; I'll be checking my LiveJournal every day between now and the evening of August 6th, and if I see you've "friended" me between now and then, I will "friend" you back. How's that for a deal?

I do fully intend to continue my healthy eating patterns throughout this latest blip in my life--and I also am fully intending to come back to this blog once I'm sufficiently on the mend. In the meantime, once again I will gratefully accept any and all thoughts, prayers, or whatever other spiritual/philosophical positive energies you might feel moved to send my way on August 7th and afterward. In the meantime, y'all take care of yourselves too, and enjoy that healthy attitude!

Peace out,
/the duck

Semi-off-topic: New Menopausal Years, The Wise Woman Way: Alternative Approaches for Women 30-90, by Susan S. Weed

Link: Amazon.com: New Menopausal Years, The Wise Woman Way: Alternative Approaches for Women 30-90 (Wise Woman Herbal Series, Book 5) (Wise Woman Ways): Books: Susan S. Weed.

Okay, this book isn't about weight management as such. But it is about health issues vital to me as a 49-year-old woman who is definitely in the first stages of menopause. And it's also about sane and healthy alternatives to the brute-force bang-it-with-a-crowbar approach of the modern Western medical industry, which is totally on-topic for this blog.

As you may have noticed from this blog's sidebar, I am already a serious fan of Susun Weed and her woman/Goddess-centered, organo-groovy approach to alternative health. In this book she turns her considerable expertise and dreamy-groovy attitude loose on the subject of menopause, and it's proving to be wonderfully helpful. Not only is this book chock-full of practical advice and home remedies for all sorts of menopause-related issues physical, mental, and metaphysical, but it's also marvelously reassuring. I've been slowly working my way through it, and I find even just reading the thing to be great therapy. Buy it and let your crone-self get it on!