The sun was out, so I asked my legs for permission to walk to the mall (a 30-minute walk). My legs were, “All right, but we reserve the right to yell at you in all caps later if it turns out to be a bad idea.” But it was fine. The leg muscles are still sore, but in a distant sort of way. I can feel the soreness, but it’s buried down below.
While at the mall, I contemplated getting something to eat at the food court–how post-pandemic of me! Except in the end, I couldn’t find anything that grabbed me, and skipped it.
And speaking of the pandemic (queue segue music)…
The Omicron variant wave is ending, and we’ve been without a mask mandate for just under three weeks now. A few days in the past week have seen hospitalizations in BC go up (though they did drop today) and looking around the world, it appears that another surge is all but guaranteed, this time courtesy of the Omicron sub-variant BA.2 (“The most infectious variant yet! For now.”) During BC’s now-diminishing Omicron wave, we saw:
A high degree of vaccination
A wide public mask mandate
Caseloads go through the roof anyway. Basically, everyone ended up knowing someone who got infected with COVID-19
Hospitalizations managed to stay below critical levels, though
Now, with an even more contagious sub-variant taking hold and the mask mandate lifted, what will happen? I figure a lot of people will get infected again, hospitalizations will go up again, then peak before going critical, and the wave will subside in time for summer.
If the pandemic continues as it has for the past two years, we’ll get a very brief respite before yet another wave starts with a new variant that can infect people who just happen to exist at the same time as the virus or something. I mean, I don’t know. It all seems kind of silly and unending now.
My new hope (“Help me, Obi Wan!”) is that the pandemic will be considered effectively over, even if COVID-19 is not gone, by the end of this year. That would be nice. I like nice things.
Today was the day after my first 5K outdoors in months, which also featured 8 km of walking to and from the lake. And how did I feel?
Tired. Very tired. I napped in the afternoon.
Sore, very sore. My legs are like, “What have you done to us? We treat you so well with the mobility and such and this is our reward?”
As of writing this now (around 5 p.m.) I have managed a 15-minute walk to limber up without overdoing it and I have a little more energy. I suspect most of the fatigue and stiffness will be gone by tomorrow, but it is an interesting and fun (?) reminder of how keeping in shape requires…keeping up with regular exercise. Weird, I know.
Here is an animated gif of a cat running as reward for reading of my suffering:
The good news is I was down again, yay. I was not down as much as I should have been, boo.
And it was totally my fault. Boo again. But I am still overall encouraged, as I will explain.
Good things:
Being down is always better than being up
I did 19 workouts on the treadmill. Burning these extra calories helps!
My body fat has dropped 2.7 pounds so far this year, which demonstrates that–assuming the readings are accurate–I am actually shedding fat and becoming leaner
The exceptions that curbed total weight loss are special cases (I swear)
And here’s why I didn’t lose more weight:
I made the last batch of brownies from the megabox we got from Costco. I wanted to get rid of them to clear up space in the pantry and to get the little devil cakes out of the place. They ended up in my tummy, which is perhaps not the ideal location. But they are gone now!
Yesterday I bought a tin of smokehouse almonds because they were on sale. These very rarely go on sale and are normally expensive enough that I’m never tempted to buy. Yesterday I was tempted and their salty, “just one more” quality led to a lot more than one more. I think I actually gave myself stomach cramps. So dumb. To my meager credit, I did not devour the entire tin in one day.
I am thus overall encouraged. The workouts will continue (until morale improves) and I’m continuing to eat leaner ‘ meaner with more lean meat and salads and stuff mixed in. I am hoping to accelerate the weight loss in March. We’ll see!
Stats:
Weight:
January 1, 2022: 180.6 pounds
February 1: 178.5 pounds
February 28: 178.1 pounds (down 0.4 pounds)
Year to date:Down 2.5 pounds
Body fat:
January 1: 23.2% (42.1 pounds of fat)
February 28: 22% (39.4 pounds of fat--down 2.7 pounds)
A Christmas miracle has arrived! In January! I am down 2.6 pounds for the month. Curiously, this is also exactly the amount I was up in December, but if we track back to December 1st, my total weight loss since then is 0.6 pounds, Less impressive, but sustained actual almost-for-sure not a rounding error weight loss for two entire months? I’ll take it.
The key was likely related to a couple of things:
Much less snacking, especially in the latter half of the month when I started seeing regular dips in weight
Frequent 30+ minute workouts on the treadmill. I think my body got a bit used to exercise and may have started burning a tiny bit of fat from it as a result (16 workouts for the month, so an every-other-day average. Not bad!)
And of course, no donuts
In all, a nice trend and one I hope will continue.
Stats (rolling over yearly stats to this month, but for reference, I started January 2021 at 174,2 pounds, so I’ve got a ways to go just to catch up to where I was 12 months ago, let alone my target goal of 150):
January 1: 180.6 pounds
January 31: 178.0 pounds (down 2.6 pounds)
Year to date: From 180.6 to 178.0 pounds (down 2.6 pounds)
Body fat (year to date):
January 1: 23.2% (42.1 pounds of fat)
January 31: 23.5% (41.8 pounds of fat) (down 0.3 pounds)
The tragedy and triumph of the month that is December when it comes to waistlines and the expansions thereof.
I started the month well-positioned for weight loss, 1.4 pounds under 180. 170 here I come!
By December 4th, I had dropped to 177.9, which would sadly turn out to be my lowest point of the month, because…December. By the 8th I had ballooned up to 180.8 pounds, and it took 16 days to finally get back below 180. I held a glimmer of hope that I could carry the downward trend onward. It lasted two days. Even after a lot of exercise and old-fashioned calorie-burning yesterday, I was still up this morning to my highest point of the month at 181.2 pounds. Sigh.
However, while I am always striving to do better, I am no longer making promises to myself. I will hazard a prediction that I will be down at least a little in January, if only because the worst indulgences of the holidays will be past. But we’ll see.
Stats:
December 1: 178.6 pounds
December 31: 181.2 pounds (up 2.6 pounds)
Year to date: From 174.2 to 181.2 pounds (up 7 pounds)
Body fat (year to date):
January 1: 22.4% (39.1 pounds of fat)
December 31: 23% (41.6 pounds of fat) (up 2.5 pounds)
In January of last year, I detailed having a terrible case of the flu (first referenced in this post). This was pre-pandemic and hardly surprising, as I usually don’t get a flu shot and rode public transit five days a week and worked in a large, open office at a college. People were constantly around me, and people are fantastic at sharing horrible things like cold and flu bugs.
When I wrote on February 16th about the cold I had, COVID-19 was not on my radar at all. I knew of it, but only on the periphery–it was yet to reach pandemic stage. But looking back, the symptoms I had match up almost perfectly with COVID (while acknowledging that they also match up with having a cold or flu)
Loss of smell/taste
Coughing
Fatigue
Sore throat
Body aches
Sinus issues (plural, because I hit both extremes of plugged/unplugged)
The loss of smell is a real red flag here, because it’s so specifically tied to COVID-19. In the end, it doesn’t really matter much, as I recovered with no apparent long-term symptoms and have been successfully dodging the super-contagious Omicron variant as I await my booster (third) shot, expected sometime in January. But it’s fun (?) to think that as I worked to avoid catching the virus, I may have actually been one of the first to have had it.
Anyway, here’s hoping the pandemic actually ends in 2022. That would be nice.
We had a tantalizingly brief window back in early July when it seemed it might actually be under control and on its way out. BC moved to Step 3 of 4 in its “Restart” plan and masks became optional. Everyone (well, almost everyone) was getting vaccinated. Cases were down to a few dozen or so per day and heading toward single digits.
Then the far more contagious Delta variant hit. And in August the mask mandates came back. Step 4, originally set for September 7th, was postponed indefinitely. Today we are still seeing 300-400 cases per day–and that’s actually reflecting a downward trend! And just as it starts to go back down, the new Omicron variant arrives, which seems to be rattling a lot of scientists, though no one really knows much about it.
For me, the masks are how I gauge progress. When masks become optional (again), I will consider the pandemic to be actually winding down into something managed like the flu. I’ve asked people when they think masks will go back to being recommended rather than mandatory, and no one will even venture a guess.
But I will!
I think the soonest will be in March 2022, or roughly three months from now. But that’s only if the current trend continues, and I have no confidence that it will. A safer bet will be by summer–June 2022, or about seven months from now–more than two years after the pandemic started.
I mean, I’m still glad to have not caught a cold or the flu since January 2020, but I do yearn for the good parts of everyday life to return to normal or normalish sooner rather than later.
I gained a tiny bit of weight this month, all thanks to cookies and chocolate bars being on sale. What can I say? It was a very wet, dismal kind of month and I indulged. I was bad.
On the positive side, the weight gain was minimal, and I was trending down by a few pounds for the first half, so I know actual weight loss is within reach.
I just need to avoid sales. And buying stuff and then eating it. Easy peasy.
I won’t mention that December is likely to be even more dismal than November. Nope.
Stats:
November 1: 178.1 pounds
November 30: 178.3 pounds (up 0.2 pounds)
Year to date: From 174.2 to 178.3 pounds (up 4.1 pounds)
Body fat (year to date):
January 1: 22.4% (39.1 pounds of fat)
November 30: 23.2% (41.4 pounds of fat) (up 2.3 pounds, unchanged from previous month)
I was eating on our old couch, which is terrible and tends to turn your body into a spaghetti noodle when you sit on it. Your body just naturally tends to slouch. I sit up as straight as I can when eating, but slouching can occur.
Last night I ate and slouched simultaneously, and the consequences of doing this were rendered quickly and severely.
I began to feel a pain in my chest that said, “The food is not going down the way it should per digestion/gravity/etc.” I got up, went to the bathroom and attempted to clear my throat. This has happened a few times before and usually in about ten minutes or less, the food is sufficiently dislodged to allow me to resume eating.
Not this time.
I spent an hour with that increasingly searing chest pain, constantly trying to swallow and failing, having my gag reflex kick in, with resultant attendance to the sink to allow for any food that decided to journey through my system in reverse. It was exhausting. A few sips of water seemed to go down, but when I tried more, it did not and the pain intensified. The water eventually made its way back out.
I decided it was time to get a second opinion or replacement organs at the hospital conveniently next door.
We arrived between 7:30 and 8 p.m. I left just after midnight. It wasn’t even my longest ER visit. But it felt very long.
After checking in, I was issued a K95 mask to replace my own, then moved to a waiting area that is really just the entrance to the emergency room. The hospital has utterly run out of space, which is why I’m not objecting to the construction now happening across the lane from us, as the new hospital building looks like it’s five times bigger.
There was a woman with a baby sitting across from me and the baby was a bit fussy. I tried to not let it stress me out, because relaxing seemed very important in not making the pain worse. Jeff gave me a couple of small white towels. I excused myself, stepped outside and basically barfed into one, though at this point nothing was coming up but liquid. I threw the towel away and returned. I told Jeff to go home. He did.
I later went to the washroom and gagged over the sink. Initially I felt better. I later went back and accidentally swallowed some of my saliva, causing me to choke and cough on it. This went as well as you might expect. The pain at this point seemed unbearable. I tried to think of other things to distract me, like kittens or skateboards.
Eventually I and several others were moved to the next waiting area, to a row of seats with Plexiglas partitions between them. This was also not a real waiting area, it was a hallway, so people and people with equipment were regularly walking past me. Then they parked an XPS right in front of me, which remained there until I got moved to an exam room. An XPS is an eXpandable Patient Surface, not a sleek Dell laptop:
Not pictured: Two women sleeping in beds to the left, also in the hallway
I didn’t realize until later that the two guys with him were not paramedics, but corrections officers. I couldn’t ascertain why he was in, but when a doctor came by and talked to him, I heard something about seizures. I hoped he would not have a seizure in front of me. He did not. When the doctor left, he curled back up to sleep again.
The guy sitting to my right did not have anything obviously wrong with him (spike stuck in head, missing fingers gushing blood, etc.) but as we waited and waited he seemed to become more anxious. He would pull his mask down, take a long breath, exhale slowly, then put the mask back on. He repeated this several times. I almost asked Anxious guy if he was OK. By this point the lodged food had finally started moving down my throat as nature intended, so I was feeling better and my instinct to help kicked in. I ultimately refrained, and he got called in before I did.
I eventually also got called and was taken to an exam room around 10 p.m. By 10:23 I was thinking it would be spiffy if someone came in to see me by 10:30.
Ho ho. How naive I was!
As I slouched on the exam bed, I caught a glimpse of Anxious Guy walking down the hall, this time with his cap removed. His hair looked different than I expected. You can make your hair very mysterious by wearing a cap. I got the impression he might have been giving a urine sample. Conveniently, I could see a collection of such samples across the hall from the exam room, sitting on a counter. One of them looked almost orange. Ew. I reminded myself that I did not have to look at everything while in a hospital.
As time continued to tick by, I began fighting the urge to sleep. With the pain now gone, I was very tired. I thought about finding a nurse and saying I was splitting, that I was totes OK now. I set a deadline of midnight. If a doctor didn’t appear before then, I was getting the heck out of there.
The doctor arrived a few minutes before midnight, so my trick worked! She was very nice and immediately apologized for being so late. After some prodding and poking, she determined that:
The condition was not cardiac-related
Was unlikely due to aspirating (food going down the windpipe)
Was likely food lodging in the esophagus
Did not require urgent treatment
She recommended I follow up with my doctor and perhaps arrange to have a camera shoved down my throat to see what’s going on in there. I do tend to be a bit phlegmy, which no doubt makes these things worse.
I also promised to sit up straight when eating. She frowned on watching TV while eating. I’m like, “But we don’t even have a table to eat at in the dining room! Also, we have no dining room.” But I didn’t say this to her.
To allay my anxiousness over ever putting food into my mouth again, she suggested I eat a couple of small cookies and drink some juice before leaving, to see if anything horrible might happen. I did so without any notable issue, other than my throat feeling raw from the evening’s shenanigans. I managed to find my way to the exit and walked home under mostly clear skies. I got in at 12:09 a.m., with six minutes already on my exercise ring,. Woo!
Since i’d only had half my dinner before Throat Catastrophe 2021 hit, I decided to eat, but wanted something that would be very difficult to get lodged in my throat. I had a small bowl of ice cream. It did not get lodged.
This morning I felt some trepidation eating breakfast, but it was fine. I’m not sure how I’ll handle meals at the couch. Do they make sit/stand tables for dining?
Anyway, let this be a lesson to all those who would oppose mom’s advice to sit up straight and chew your food. Mom is right!
And no more ER visits for 2021. Or preferably ever, please.
The month started with me at 177.8 pounds and ended with me at 177.9 pounds, which is the very definition of a rounding error. While it looks like my weight stayed virtually unchanged, what happened on the other 29 days tells a different story, because the 1st and 31st are the only days I was below 178 pounds. I was up to 181 at one point and hovered around 179 a lot of the month.
This was due to making brownies and then eating them. I also didn’t run much in the first half of the month, and have started running more frequently and generally being more active in the second half of October.
I can’t say I’m thrilled with the weight gain, but am relieved that I managed to work it all off to at least end up neutral for the month.
I promise not to buy any cheap Halloween candy tomorrow.
Stats:
October 1: 177.8 pounds
October 31: 177.9 pounds (up 0.1 pounds)
Year to date: From 174.2 to 177.9 pounds (up 3.7 pounds--unchanged from September)
Body fat (year to date):
January 1: 22.4% (39.1 pounds of fat)
October 31: 23.3% (41.4 pounds of fat) (up 3.3 pounds--unchanged from September)
The good news is I am down slightly for the month, even if it is “margin of error” down. It’s still better than up.
More good news is that my body fat, despite still being up for the year, is trending downward as I exercise more.
The not-as-good news is while down for the month, I’m still up from where I was at the beginning of August, so I am still not yet back to where I was before the re-ballooning began.
Most of the month, my weight bounced right around where it ended, around 177 pounds. I mean, it’s better than 187, my all-time high, but I’d really like to break the 170 mark before collecting a pension.
I remain donut-free, though.
I will make a modest prediction for October: I will be down a little again.
Stats:
September 1: 178.4 pounds
September 30: 177.9 pounds (down 0.5 pounds)
Year to date: From 174.2 to 177.9 pounds (up 3.7 pounds)
Body fat (year to date):
January 1: 22.4% (39.1 pounds of fat)
September 30: 23.3% (41.4 pounds of fat) (up 3.3 pounds)
The weather simply wasn’t as perpetually scorching as it was in July, and today it barely climbed to 17C, which is below average for this time of year. We’ve had some actual precipitation. The bit of rain has been enough to revive lawns and take everything from tinder dry to just dry. Fittingly, the weekend promises more showers, so the FIRE DANGER signs may at last come down.
In other not-so-hot news, COVID-19 numbers have been way up. The only good part here is that almost all infections are unvaccinated people (meaning the vaccines are working), and the numbers may have already plateaued. It’s still a bummer because we have clearly regressed when many thought the pandemic was finally beginning to wane when we moved to Step 3 on July 1st. Eventually we’ll be able to go back to something similar to how things were without requiring vaccines, vaccine cards, masks or deep sea diving helmets.
