Health

Unwelcome lump of something or other: identified

I went for a follow-up with my doctor yesterday in Steveston, where it always rains, at least when I’m there.

Also, the bus trip is long and agonizing. I mean, more than a usual bus trip.

But good news was in store.

The blood sugar test showed a level of 4.7. The ideal range is 4.5-6 so I am actually near the low end. My doctor advised me to keep doing what I’m doing, which probably means “continue to not stuff donuts into my face” and “do not treat bags of sugar as a food group.”

The other news was concerning the unwelcome lump. It is still unwelcome and that will not change.

Less unwelcome is news that it is the testicular equivalent of varicose veins. It’s both kind of gross and a relief to learn that it’s nothing serious. I asked if anything can be done about them but it seems short of some form of dark magic, they are here to stay. The good news is they don’t cause any discomfort and as long as I’m not working to get someone pregnant (I am not nor do I have this penciled in on my calendar any time soon), there should be no potential complications.

So good news all around. I celebrated by having a Mars bar. Yes, I know, it’s exactly the opposite of what I should have done, but it was a yearly indulgence. I promise not to have another before 2018.

April 2017 weight loss report: Down 1.2 pounds

I have achieved the improbable and lost weight over the course of the month. Not a lot of weight, but some, so hooray.Here are the stats:

April 1: 166.3 pounds
April 30: 165.2 pounds

I weighed 165.9 pounds on January 1, so my total weight loss for the year is 0.7 pounds. It’s not exactly melting off. 😛

I’m starting to run more, walk at lunch (weather permitting, which has generally been horrible ALL YEAR SO FAR) and am working to cut down on snacks (no more chips in the house, at least).

Maybe by the end of May, I will have lost an entire pound from the start of the year. A boy can dream.

 

When a man waves a wand at your nether region

I had a vacation day today but unlike most vacation days where you do fun things like take a trip somewhere interesting, relax on a beach or simply spend time shopping or sight-seeing, I went for two medical tests.

The vacation day was due to the tests being in different cities and different times of the day. The logistics simply weren’t manageable.

The first test in the morning was for blood sugar. I got to the lab early and got in early–yay! I opted to have the vampiric removal of blood done through my right arm this time and there was no bruising, unlike the last visit, so good there.

The next test was an ultrasound (I will always think of the ultrasound as being a PC sound card, which I had back when people actually bought sound cards for computers) at Richmond Hospital. I arrived mega-early because I have a highly-developed skill in getting lost inside hospitals. You don’t want to get lost in a hospital because they are largely unpleasant places, filled with the sick, the dying and the dead. They also smell funny.

After spending a half hour or so walking around the pond/park next door and carefully avoiding a couple of geese on the path (it is a verifiable scientific fact that geese are the nastiest birds in the world) I toodled over to the main entrance, went inside and studied the map, looking for the imaging area. Almost immediately a nice older man appeared and offered to assist me. He took me to the imaging area (which I probably could have found on my own since it was only steps down the hall and even my usual bumbling was unlikely to lead me astray), I was given a number (77, they were serving 74 when I arrived) and before too long I was ushered into the ultrasound room by Chris the technician. When I left it was 3:10 p.m., which was pretty nice, because the appointment had been for 3:45.

I was told to remove my pants and underwear but could leave everything else on. I opted to remove my shoes because they would have been awkward to pull the jeans over, anyway. I did keep my baseball cap on, though. I imagine I looked a little ridiculous. I was given two folded towels to place over my manly bits. Not because my manly bits are huge and require two towels, you apparently need one to go over and one to kind of go under.

Anyway, unlike my heart ultrasound where the jelly was not warm and I fairly leaped out of my skin every time the tech touched me with the magic ultrasound wand, the jelly this time was warm. I was especially appreciative, considering where the wand was going.

In all, it only took five minutes. I had to hold my breath a few times and near the end was asked to point to the unwelcome lump of something or other. Chris then made with the wand again. He asked if the size had changed recently. I said I wasn’t sure, though a few days ago it sort of seemed like it might be smaller, which would be a good thing.

He said my doctor would have the results in a few days, that he’d clean up the towels, then left.

I put my pants back on and also left. I successfully navigated back to my original starting point at the main entrance, to my delight and surprise, and headed out into an unusually warm and sunny afternoon, thinking how the whole experience was pretty benign as far as things that can happen in a hospital. I wonder what it would be like to go through the same thing while being horribly shy. Horrible, I guess.

In a little under two weeks, I’ll discuss the results of both tests with my doctor. Here’s hoping it’s good news but even if it’s not, I’ll deal with it and move on.

I’m good with not needing another ultrasound for awhile, though.

I like donuts but I donut like buses

I had to go back to my doctor today to confer about the unwelcome lump of something or other and lay out the next steps in what to do. He also mentioned that my blood sugar level in the previous test was 2.6, which is apparently exactly on the line between “this is okay” and “this is not at all okay” so I have to get a formal blood sugar test, the ultrasound and who knows what else.

The ultrasound is already scheduled so I’ll probably get the blood work done the same day in the morning. And the ultrasound is at Richmond Hospital instead of Royal Columbian. You know, the hospital I literally live right next door to. Anyway, it’ll be a fun day with poking and prodding and the actual topic of this post…

Buses.

I had to catch a bus at the Brighouse SkyTrain station (the 410, to be specific) to get to the clinic today. I checked ahead of time, noted when it departed and all that. Then I got on the right bus (410) but headed in the wrong direction because I wasn’t paying attention. I managed to get to the clinic only 10 minutes late as a result (and still had to wait 10 minutes more) but this particular bus reminded me why I dislike buses so much. Compared to trains:

  • they can get snarled in traffic and delayed. It took five minutes just top move past the first block.
  • the seats and aisles are unpleasantly narrow. I am not a wide person but even I find the space on a bus cramped at the best of times. There’s a reason they evoke sardine cans. The cramped space also makes it difficult to exit the bus as you must squeeze your way past everyone between you and the door.
  • constant stops. For the first two-thirds of the trip, the bus pulled in at every stop and the stops were usually spaced only two to four blocks apart (WHY?!) This stretches out the trip nigh unto infinity.
  • too many drivers don’t understand that they are carrying humans, not cargo that has been secured to the floor. They stab the brakes, causing standees to stumble about, then stab the gas, causing the standees to stumble again, but in the opposite direction. They gun it before people can sit. They forget to release the lock on the back exit, even though people are standing there waiting to get off. They run yellow and even red lights. Not all drivers are bad, of course, but the point is NONE of them should be bad drivers. It’s their job.

Anyway, if I was king I’d retire every bus and put in light rapid transit all over the place. I don’t care how much it costs, I’d do it and my loyal subjects would love me. They’d call me King Transit, Master of Trains.

A possible compromise might be to put the buses in transit-only tunnels. This would effectively turn them into trains. The cost could be partly offset by plastering every last cm of the tunnel walls with ads. I’d even be okay with sponsored stops. “The next stop is Boundary Road, brought to you by the refreshingly crisp taste of Coca-Cola.”

Or better yet, someone should invent teleporters. Screw this transit stuff altogether. You can keep the flying cars, just let me beam to the doctor’s office in five seconds instead of taking over two hours.

March 2017 weight loss report: Up 0.6 pounds

The good news is that unlike February, where I gained 2.2 pounds over the course of the (short) month, in March (a longer month) I only gained 0.6 pounds.

The bad news is I still gained weight, which is not a good way to lose weight.

Here are the stats:

March 1: 166.4 pounds
March 31: 167 pounds

And February’s by comparison:

February 1: 163.6 pounds
February 28: 165.8 pounds

The worst news is that in a little less than two months I’ve gone from 163.6 to 167 pounds, an increase of 3.4 pounds. Ugh.

It looks better (?) if you compare from January 1:

January 1: 165.9 pounds
March 31: 167 pounds

The difference there is a “mere” 1.1 pounds.

In any case, I need to get off my butt and start running more, doing my walks at lunch and purging the household of all snacks except for water and celery sticks, which is just green water in solid form.

Onward to April!

The overactive bladder

You know the best part about getting older? No, neither do I.

But until I can be cryogenically frozen and thawed out a thousand years later when people live to be 2,000 years old, I must contend with the fact that now, in my early 50s, things will break now and then.

In this case, man things.

A month or so ago I noticed a sensation in my groin. It wasn’t the pleasant kind brought on by lascivious thoughts, it was more of a persistent and annoying pressure. It felt like I had to pee all the time, whether I had to or not. It even felt like I had to poop a lot, which I didn’t. I tried to put this phantom pressure out of mind but in the end, it was too persistent and so I went to my doctor.

He scheduled blood and urine tests, with a tentative prognosis of prostatitis, (infected prostate, which I’ve had a few times before but not recently). He warned that the blood test would test for prostate cancer and often came back with false positives, so I wasn’t to freak out. At least not right away.

I delayed on getting the tests done because I am a man and men are like that. I finally did and almost immediately after I began experiencing new symptoms, namely a pressure or cramping in my lower abdomen as if whatever it was had started to spread. This alarmed me. After a shower, I fondled my crotch in a non-lascivious way and found the left testicle had a neighbor and it wasn’t the right testicle. It was a hard lump of something or other. I was pretty sure my crotch (or any crotch) is not meant to have a hard lump of something or other in it and was even further alarmed.

My follow-up appointment with my doctor (to discuss the test results) wasn’t until April 6 because he was on vacation. I didn’t want to wait nearly two more weeks while the unwelcome lump of something or other cuddled up to my left testicle, so I called the doctor’s office and they scheduled me to see another doctor today at another one of their clinics. He would have the test results.

The good news is the test results came out negative. The doctor said a prostate infection seemed unlikely. He speculated that I might have an overactive bladder. I nodded in my head because I’ve often thought my bladder is about ten times smaller than average based on how often I need to pee (I even tested for diabetes a few times because of the frequency). He recommended that I avoid beverages in the evening and see if it made a difference. As I write this it is 10:19 p.m. and I have a glass filled with diet soda next to me.

I had pizza tonight. It made me thirsty!

And I’m a man. Men are kind of dumb about these things (I’ll do better tomorrow, I promise.)

I then mentioned the lump of something or other and the doctor told me to drop my drawers so he could cop a feel. He used somewhat more professional language.

He confirmed the obvious–I had what seemed to a cyst where a cyst should not be. Well, a cyst really shouldn’t be, period. He said he was going to schedule an ultrasound and they would let me know when and where.

As Wikipedia defines it:

Medical sonography (ultrasonography) is an ultrasound-based diagnostic medical imaging technique used to visualize muscles, tendons, and many internal organs, to capture their size, structure and any pathological lesions with real time tomographic images.

Pathological lesions. Hooray!

Anyway, I’m not really alarmed since being alarmed will not actually change anything. I actually feel better than I did yesterday because the initial test results are clean and the unwelcome lump of something or other is getting probed.

What I’m trying not to think about is the inevitable plan to remove it. It’s tempting to enter “how are cysts removed” into a Google search but I’d like to sleep tonight (trips to the loo to pee notwithstanding).

Anyway, this concludes more of getting old. It’s always an adventure, like a dark ride that gets stuck partway through, probably next to one of the speakers blasting awful looping music.

February 2017 weight loss report: Up 2.2 pounds

How goes my goal of getting to 145 pounds at two months into the year? Let’s have a look at the past month:

February 1: 163.6 pounds
February 28: 165.8 pounds

Weight loss gain: +2.2 pounds

Whoops.

I was 165.9 pounds on January 1, so my total weight loss for the year-to-date is:

0.1 pounds

It’s impressive in a way.

On the plus side (that’s a weight loss joke), my body fat percentage has changed in a more positive way:

January 1: 19.1%
February 28: 18.3%

Body fat percentage change: 0.8%

Also on a positive note, I met one-half of my January goals by going donut-free for the entire month, no minor feat given that donuts were present throughout the month in plentiful quantities.

My goal for March is to have actual weight loss with less body fat, too. I get three extra days to accomplish this vs. February, so there’s that, too.

An ear-ie feeling

Today I went to the doctor because my efforts to remove wax from my left ear failed, though I did manage to loosen whatever was in there (wax, actually) enough to make it even more annoying than before.

My doctor recalled the old days of the giant metal syringe, which I remember being used on me once as a child. The fact that I vividly recall this is a testament to how awful an experience it was to have water hosed into my ear via a giant metal syringe.

The procedure today was done using a much smaller tube-like device that does the same thing (shoot warm water into the ear) but in a gentler manner. The procedure required four steps to complete: hose the ear, use a plastic picker thing to hook what was jostled loose (it sounds gross and trust me, it was), then the same two steps repeated.

The two chunks of wax were not insignificant in size. The doctor noted the skin inside the ear looked irritated due to these mini-boulders being lodged in there for the better part of a year.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I have nightmares tonight with the two balls of wax appearing as evil twins to torment me.

And while I can’t say I can hear better out of the left ear now, it definitely feels better.

Stupid wax.

The curiously uneventful exercise bicycle workout

Tonight I decided to finally try an exercise bicycle workout at the Canada Games Pool and I’m still wondering if I did it right.

I know I did the clothing part wrong. Light running shorts do not protect your posterior when sitting on a bicycle seat for half an hour. It got a bit uncomfortable at times, but I was able to shift my tuckus just enough to stave off keister agony.

I chose the fat burn workout and it asked me to set a heart rate target and my age. It defaulted to 112 so I went with that but ended up boosting it several times, topping out at 130–which is still well below my usual BPM when running.

I had to pedal pretty fast to maintain my target but curiously the effort didn’t seem too taxing. I sweated a bit but never felt close to the burn I’ve felt when on the elliptical or treadmill. On the one hand, it was kind of nice. On the other, it didn’t seem I was getting nearly as much out of the half hour invested.

There were level buttons and I assumed they would adjust the resistance (gears, I suppose) but they only offered to change the heart rate target. Maybe next time I’ll just choose manual or quick start. Or just not use the bikes. The pleasantness of being able to sit while working out was offset by how uncomfortable the actual sitting was. I think I may actually prefer the treadmill.

Anyway, here are the minimal stats:

Time: 29:19
BPM: 127
Calories: 247

The sixth elliptical and I get all klutzy

For the first time in a little over two weeks, I finally returned to the Canada Games Pool and did a half hour workout on the elliptical. Or rather I did a 27-minute workout, reached out with my right hand to adjust something or other, snagged it on the cord of my iPhone earbuds and whipped the phone out of the holder of the elliptical. It landed on the right foot pad, next to my right foot.

I immediately pressed the handy pause button on the machine, reassembled phone and earbuds and then hit the pause button again–you know, to unpause (resume) the workout. Instead, it started it over. Was I supposed to hit OK? Just start going again? (My hunch is the latter is the correct answer, as that’s how you normally begin a workout). I had about eight minutes left so started a manual workout and kept going until the watch dinged at 325 calories burned, my overall goal. I suffered no other clumsy incidents for the remainder.

I had the elliptical set to 14/12 and actually kept it at 14 the entire time, adjusting the resistance from 12 to 10 for the manual restart.

I sweated a lot and forgot my water bottle. These things are related.

It was nice to be active again. Now I must resist eating an entire cake as a reward for doing so.

And get more exercising in soon.

Stats:

Calories burned: 394 (345 active)
Time: 31:00
BPM: 156