Tag: health

I can’t believe this thing works

September 27th, 2025

I don’t like gore and guts. I used to pass out when I got blood drawn. My shoulders scrunch to my ears and I physically shudder when people get descriptive about deep cuts, torn or lost fingernails, eyeball injuries. I don’t want to see broken bones sticking out of skin or peer into an incision during surgery. I’d never survive a cadaver dissection for anatomy or med school. I’d barf or pass out or both.

At the same time, I can’t believe we’re all walking around in these bodies that breathe, pump blood, have 200+ bones that work perfectly together to hold us up and hang all our muscles and organs and guts on, 600+ muscles to move us around, have eyes, skin, ears, noses, and tongues that send signals to our brain so we can see, feel, hear, smell, and taste our world. Our bodies create their own electricity to make our hearts beat and our muscles contract and our nerves communicate. We have hands that can grasp. We have lungs to breathe and send oxygen throughout our bodies, and this unbelievable digestive system that processes everything we eat and drink to retain and transport the necessary nourishment for this wild body that contains us, that carries us, that is our vehicle for existence.

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to Mary Roach talk about her book Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy on a podcast. She talked about watching heart surgery. She said it was astonishing to see the heart in action. How small and powerful it is. How strong. And unexpectedly, how much it moves and jumps around in there. It’s not just in our chests, quietly and gently pumping while it reads the Sunday paper. It jitters and pumps and jerks over 100,000 beats per day, ceaselessly, over days, weeks, months, years, decades, never sleeping. How could it ever last as long as it does? It is humbling. Thank you, my heart.

She also talked about musculature, and how it’s not all the shaped the same. She talked about this in the context of 3-D printing. Some muscle is helix shaped, like the heart, because it needs to twist for pumping. Some muscle, like the hamstring, is long and arranged in parallel bundles. Some muscle, like the shoulder, is fan-shaped to enable range of motion.

And I thought, it is a miracle that we exist. That all these millions of pieces developed over time to create this perfect design that allows me to sit here and drink coffee with a purring cat on my lap while I type up a blog post. To go for a walk later. To taste chocolate. To plant mums and read books and love my husband and children. Bones, muscle, electricity, chemistry, organs, brain, senses. It’s all so amazing to me.

And if that weren’t enough, we go beyond these bodies to just exist and survive in the elements. We talk, we commune, we share ideas. We build, we explore, we create technologies. We write, we play music. We paint and sculpt and film and photograph and make beautiful art. We feel emotions. We create. We love.
All amped up

August 12th, 2025

I’m ready to be off the steroids for this yellow jacket sting. I can’t sleep, my skin is clammy, and in the mornings, which are my peaceful time, my heart pounds like before a race, all full of nervous energy.

I listen to the cicadas buzz, to the wet lapping of our cat drinking the cool water I put in her bowl. The lapping sound in particular calms me. I don’t know why it tickles me so to listen to her drink. There’s something very satisfying about quenching a thirst. Maybe that’s all it is. Or that she takes so much joy from it. She sits by her water bowl and stares at us until we refresh it, and then she relaxes down and laps, laps, laps.

I’m waiting for my breakfast to settle so I can go for a run. I’m crawling out of my skin. When I swam yesterday, my muscles did not fatigue, even when I swam sprints. In fact, I couldn’t feel my muscles at all. They were numb. My arms stroked and my legs kicked, and I thought, no wonder athletes take steroids. The only things stopping me from swimming forever were time and interest. My body could have gone a lot longer.

I am in a constant state of jitters. This is the opposite of how I like to feel. I like feeling peaceful. I do not feel that right now. Usually listening to the birds brings me peace, or reading poetry, petting the cats, or smiling at the thought of my children in their beds here at home for the summer. Breathing brings me peace. With these steroids in my system, I’m having a hard time getting to a zen state, even with all those easy normal things.

The good news is that my foot is back to its normal size, and I avoided a trip to the emergency room for my wasp sting. Tomorrow is the last dose of the steroid. I hope it filters out of my system soon after that. I’m ready to feel chill again.

Daily writing prompt
What brings you peace?
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I hope gardening is not ruined

August 9th, 2025

The heat broke this week. We opened all the windows and turned off the air conditioning for the first time in two months. One morning at the pool, I commented on the welcome cool weather, and the attendant said, “Yes! My garden is a mess; it’s been too hot to weed, and I’ve just let it all go.” I was relieved to not be the only one.

All through July, I watched, dejected, through the windows as new weeds sprouted every day. Old ones reached taller than the plants that are supposed to be there. The mornings were too thick with gnats and the evenings too hot to garden, so the weeds continued to grow.

With the break in the heat this week, I finally got out after work to tidy the flower beds. Tuesday evening I tackled the front, and Wednesday, the back. I wore long sleeves, long pants, thick Darn Tough socks, and the hiking shoes I use for gardening. I started at the lowest part of the hill, up against our neighbor’s fence, pulling waist high stalks and digging out grass with my spade.

I turned, hands full of uprooted plants, and walked to the wheelbarrow to toss them in, when I felt a piercing pain in my ankle. A fierce, howling, swear out loud pain. As I cursed to the empty yard, I looked down and saw a yellow jacket stuck in my sock. I kicked at it with my other foot until I finally got it off, then turned to look where it had come from, and saw a swarm of yellow jackets at the fence. I ran away, terrified that any second I’d feel another sting.

I had only just begun my work, and I’d been wanting to get this weeding done for weeks, so I moved to another part of the garden as I waited for the pain to subside. I kept going for another hour or so.

The next morning, my ankle was swollen, and so was my foot. And they itched. Like crazy. I took an Allegra. That afternoon, my foot was twice its normal size, puffy and tight like a balloon-animal, and the skin was red, hot, and angry. I wrapped it in ice and elevated it. I took a Benadryl. I felt my calf and it was swollen, too. I googled “When should I see a doctor for a yellow jacket sting?” I sent a photo to friends. One said, I’m worried for you, I really think you should seek medical attention.

I really didn’t want to go anywhere, I just wanted to lounge and read my book, but I was worried too. I figured it’d be better to go to urgent care in the evening than the ER in the middle of the night, so my husband drove me to the clinic, where the nurse exclaimed when she saw my foot and said oh you poor thing. When the doctor came in, her eyes got big and she poked her head out the door to tell her partner provider, Come take a look at this.

I clearly had an allergic reaction, but the scary part was that in less than 24 hours, I’d gotten a skin infection, cellulitis, which I also googled and shouldn’t have. They gave me a steroid shot and a prescription for antibiotics that we picked up immediately and I took the first dose of in the car on our way home. They’d told me to watch my foot and if it got any worse, go to the ER. The infection was not something to trifle with.

I’m happy to report that the steroids and antibiotics are doing their job, thank God for modern medicine, and though my foot is still a sausage, the swelling is going down and my skin is back to a calm, cool state.

What I’m not happy to report is that the yard makes me nervous now. I don’t know if I should start carrying an EpiPen. I’ll ask my doctor at my annual next month. I do know that if I get stung again, I need to immediately wash the wound. I had no idea that was a thing I was supposed to do.

Daily writing prompt
What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?
View all responses
Not a B student

May 10th, 2022

Each year, for our health insurance through my husband’s job, we complete a health assessment: height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol. How much you exercise, how much alcohol you drink, what your self-assessed stress levels are, that sort of thing. My scores are generally in the 90s (out of 100).

This year, my score was an 87. 87! I went back and checked all my answers. I’ve had no health concerns come up since the last time I took the assessment; I hardly changed any of my answers except to update my cholesterol, which did go up a tiny bit but is still within the healthy range. My blood pressure was slightly elevated at a January doctor’s appointment, and when I switched that out in the assessment for the blood pressure reading prior to the January visit, my score came up to a 92.

That’s more like it.

I didn’t like getting that B score. I wanted an A. On an assessment for health insurance. It’s bizarre how motivated I am by a 1-100 grading scale.

Once I found the reason for the drop, I wondered, was that elevated blood pressure reading a one-off, or is this something I need to watch? I scrutinized my exercise estimates as well. I had guesstimated on those and put down what I vaguely think I do; I didn’t look at any logs to see what I actually do. Because I don’t have any logs that show what I actually do.

That original B score lit a fire under me. I’ve been pretty loosey goosey about exercise in recent years. I do exercise, but I also don’t; with no goals to measure myself against, I don’t truly know how much I do compared to how much I should be doing. And I don’t meditate even though everything I ever read or hear includes exercise, sleep, and meditation as fundamental to good physical and mental health.

So I started an exercise journal. Of course. I set goals based on my health assessment: 150-300 minutes of cardiovascular exercise (I chose 300) and two strength workouts per week. I also added in three meditation sessions per week. If I’m going to do this thing I’m going all in because I am an overachiever.

I completed my first day yesterday, and I felt supreme satisfaction when I wrote down the cardio, strength, and meditation minutes in my journal. I find this especially fun because I have a new Fitbit courtesy of a wellness perk at Automattic, where I work. The Fitbit tracks my heart rate, so it calculates my cardio minutes, and then I just write them down at the end of the day. For strength and meditation, I hate making decisions about what to do, and I get bored and won’t do them if it’s up to me to make up the workout or sit for meditation, but my Fitbit makes that easy too. The app offers strength and meditation sessions that I can just tap on, run through my TV or my phone, do whatever the instructor tells me to do, and then the Fitbit automatically logs them for me in the app. At the end of the day I can enter everything into my paper journal, where I log one week per page so that I can see the bigger picture rather than just the day.

It’s only been one day, but I’m into this. I did another short strength workout this morning and meditated right after. This afternoon, after work, I’ll go for a run or a walk. And before I go to bed, I’ll get the giddy joy of logging my achievements in a notebook. I feel like an A student again.
Grandma’s Gin and Milk

December 24th, 2014

Grandma loved to go to Sunday brunch, and when I was a kid, her favorite brunch spot was Shoney’s. We’d drive over the drawbridge from St. Simons Island to Brunswick, Georgia, and once we had waited in line for a large enough table, all the grown ups would order coffee and tea. My older brother would order the buffet, as would I, though all I ate off it were the French toast or the pancakes.

Grandma, after studying the menu as if she might get something new, would eventually order liver and onions. Every time.

My dad, her son, must have made involuntary gagging faces after a lifetime of hiding liver in napkins, out the window, under the rug, on liver Wednesdays at home, because I finally asked Grandma one time at Shoney’s, “Grandma, do you like liver and onions?”

She flicked her hair, “Of course I do!”

Then she thought a little bit and said, “Well no, not really.”

I knew this. “Then why do you order it every time?”

She looked at me as if even she knew her answer was ridiculous and said, “Because it’s good for you.”

I looked at the congealed brown mass on her plate, smothered in soggy onions, and thought, I doubt that.

Given her utter disregard for her taste buds in honor of her “health,” her reasoning for drinking gin and milk should have come as no surprise to me. But one evening, when she settled into her chartreuse chair, she sat a rocks glass filled with a thin, milky cocktail down on a cork coaster. I had seen her with this strange drink before, and it unsettled me. Milk diluted in any way is offensive, especially to an eight year old, and yet she drank this every night.

Finally, I asked, “Grandma, what is that you’re drinking?”

“Gin and milk,” she said.

Even at my young age, I knew that combination was just wrong. “Why?” I asked.

She looked at her dewy tumbler, the milky liquid even thinner around the ice cubes, and rolled her eyes at the things she did for her health. “Well, I’m on Weight Watchers now.”

I waited for more.

“And on Weight Watchers you have to have a certain amount of milk every day.”

She looked at her sad drink on the end table, polluted with skim milk. She lifted it off the coaster, which had the words “Bottoms Up” printed in thick black ink on it, flicked her bangs out of her eyes, and said, “And I have to have a certain amount of gin every day.” And she tipped the glass into her mouth.
I’m worried about my eyes

October 30th, 2013

Like you, I am prone to attacks of the Whatifs.

WHATIF

Last night, while I lay thinking here,
Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear
And pranced and partied all night long
And sang their same old Whatif song:
Whatif I’m dumb in school?
Whatif they’ve closed the swimming pool?
Whatif I get beat up?
Whatif there’s poison in my cup?
Whatif I start to cry?
Whatif I get sick and die?
Whatif I flunk that test?
Whatif green hair grows on my chest?
Whatif nobody likes me?
Whatif a bolt of lightning strikes me?
Whatif I don’t grow taller?
Whatif my head starts getting smaller?
Whatif the fish won’t bite?
Whatif the wind tears up my kite?
Whatif they start a war?
Whatif my parents get divorced?
Whatif the bus is late?
Whatif my teeth don’t grow in straight?
Whatif I tear my pants?
Whatif I never learn to dance?
Everything seems swell, and then
The nighttime Whatifs strike again!

– Shel Silverstein, “WHATIF” from A Light in the Attic

My Whatifs used to be things like, “Whatif I forget my lines in the Mother Goose play?” or “Whatif I ruin my marriage?” Then it was, “Whatif my kids hate me?” or worse, “Whatif our kids hate to read?”

Now, though, now there is a Whatif that has burrowed deeper than an earwig, has tunneled through my eardrum and my temporal lobe, and has embedded itself in my anterior insula, the worry spot in my brain: Whatif my eyes fail me in my old age and I can no longer read in bed at night?

I found a funny little meme on Pinterest the other day, “You know you’re a book lover when… you read until your eyes can’t focus.” At first I laughed, and then I wanted to cry. These days it can be as few as five minutes before the words begin to wiggle and my eyes can’t pin them down to read them. All the new aches and pains of my aging body don’t bother me that much, and when my hair grays I’ll just be one of those free-spirit women with long silver hair. But my eyes? I need my eyes for reading.

When we lived in Minnesota, I owned a soap company, and I worked on the computer all day long, editing photographs for my Etsy shop or writing blog posts for my business, and when the time came at night to lay down in bed and read, I couldn’t. Letters multiplied, an “A” becoming “AA,” but overlapping in a way I can’t recreate with my keyboard. I would squint, and blink, and rub my sockets, trying to tame the text and failing. I thought maybe my eyes were tired from working on the computer, so I took time off from the screen. But then I’d lay in bed and my vision would still go blurry, and I couldn’t read my fiction, and it was devastating to me because for all my life I’ve read before I go to bed.

I went to see the eye doctor, and after a suite of tests, after an hour and a half at the opthamologist’s office, I came to find out that my eyes are fine. He recommended that I not buy the reading glasses that I looked at at Barnes & Noble, turning that spinner around, admiring the pink leopard print frames, wondering which lens strength I might need. He said that those could weaken my eye sight if I got them too early, that my eyes would use the readers as a crutch.

“Well then what is wrong?” I asked. “Because my eyes aren’t working right, and it’s not okay with me. I read at night. I have to be able to read at night.”

And he told me, “You are an insufficient blinker.”

Say what?

“When you blink your eyes, you don’t close them all the way,” he told me. “Also, when you, or me, or anyone, works at the computer, we tend to blink less frequently – we stare wide-eyed at the screen.”

“Sooooo, how does that make my sight blurry at night when I try to read?” Get with it, here, doc.

“Your eyes are drying out,” he said. “You need to blink more.”

Um. Okay.

“You’ll have to remind yourself to blink, and make sure you blink completely – close your eyes all the way when you blink.” He pulled a small white bottle out of his crisp white pocket. “And you can use these artificial tears.”

Now, around this same time, I closed my soap business and got a job at Barnes & Noble. When I interviewed there, it was obvious they wanted me to get behind the Nook, their e-reader. I pretended I was interested so I could get the job, but really I was one of those people who said, “I want a real book, I like the way they smell, I want to turn the pages.” I was anti-e-reader all the way, but I didn’t tell the manager that.

On my very first shift, when I trained on the Nook, and I saw that you could change the size of the font (ie make it giant for my granny eyes), I saw all my problems solved. I turned to my trainer and said, Holy crap I want one of these.

So I got one. My parents gave me a Nook Color that year for my birthday. And lo and behold, when I read at night, I can enlarge the font and I can SEE without it getting blurry. I don’t have to close one eye to force single vision, I don’t have to use eye drops to read. Angels sang, and my reading and eye problems were solved. For a minute.

The problem is that I still read physical books. Not every book I want to read is available as a digital title from the library, and we’ve already covered the topic of me not buying books, font-adjustable e-book or otherwise. And even with my ability to supersize the e-reader font, I still sometimes struggle with double vision.

So what do I do about my eyes? I know audio books are the latest rage in the book world – all my favorite book podcasts are sponsored by audible.com and audiobooks.com – so there’s that option. I don’t doubt that audio books are a fabulous solution for daytime reading, but at night? Am I really going to lie in bed next to my husband with headphones on, shutting him out, reading a book with my eyes closed? That makes me feel kind of weird.

Fortunately, for now, despite this litany on the failure of my eyesight, my vision is often fine. Even though I obsess about the future of my nighttime reading life, most nights I read without a problem. And when there is trouble? I have started gathering data about the days my eyes flake out. There appear to be two factors that affect them. The first is how late I go to bed: the later I snuggle in, the blurrier the words on the page. That can be easily fixed – we can watch one episode of Scandal instead of two, and I’ll be in bed by 9:30, eyes in fine form.

The second is not so simple. The second is alcohol. That’s a sad choice to have to make, the choice between literature and the zing of gin tingling my tounge. Some days deserve a drink. Some days it’s a tough call. Some days I have to ask myself, will it be The Great Gatsby, or will it be a gin sling? Will I read Papa Hemingway, or will I drink a Papa Doble? Those days I think I’m invincible, I think I can still hang like a 25 year old, and I do them both. And then, after five minutes with my book, the words begin to wiggle and my eyes can’t pin them down to read them, and I worry, Whatif I go blind? Whatif my eyes fail me in my old age and I can no longer read in bed at night?