Health

My brain is complicated and is thinking on its own (I think)

As I’ve reported before, my trusty Garmin Forerunner 255 has been reporting that I have been under a great deal of stress, experiencing high stress while sleeping and generally having Very Stressful days for about two months now. At first, I thought it was misinterpreting my kidney infection as stress and acted accordingly. But I’ve been off the antibiotics for a few weeks now and haven’t seen any return of symptoms, yet the Very Stressful reports persist.

So, I thought, maybe it’s something else. What else has coincided with the infection over the past few months?

  • I have basically stopped running. This isn’t permanent, I took a break after tripping and hurting my hands on my last run on December 30, then got hit with resurgent infection, finally seemed to recover from that and now there is snow on the ground. But I will run again.
  • Dealing with the infection and aftermath (there are more tests forthcoming for other things discovered that may be innocuous or could be more serious).
  • I have done little in the way of creativity: few drawings, no work on the game. I have been writing, but it’s mainly been the nonsense you’re reading on this blog right now.
  • Dealing with condo/strata stuff, as we restarted our efforts to shed the current council and management company (the latter of which specifically started harassing us last summer).

So, that’s a lot of stuff. Some I can deal with easily. I can fix not running by running. I can fix not drawing by drawing. The health stuff I just need to put aside for now. I feel fine and there’s nothing else to be done at the moment.

But the condo stuff, this got my attention this morning when I realized something: My mind wanders over to it constantly. When I say constantly, I am not engaging in hyperbole, or even just regular bole. Multiple times this morning, I caught myself thinking about condo stuff. It just comes up, unbidden, in my mind. Really, it’s kind of weird. It’s like my brain has adapted to just slotting in thoughts about the condo/strata whenever I’m not focused on anything else.

I think this may be a large part of my Very Stressful days.

Now, I do and will have to deal with strata stuff for at least a few more months, so there is no escaping it. But I don’t need to be constantly thinking about it. So my goal is to somehow train my mind to not think about it or if I do, to quickly divert to some other thought, such as:

  • Kittens
  • Puppies
  • Pop Tarts (just thinking, not eating)
  • Grassy meadows
  • Summer
  • A nice relaxing bubble bath
  • Walking alone among sequoias
  • Etc.

Basically, anything that will focus me away from strata and onto something relaxing.

I’ll see how it goes and report my findings soon, in the name of science and possibly my sanity.

January 2025 weight loss report: Up 0.4 pounds

It was close, but in the end, I was up a bit this month–0.4 pounds, thanks to a whole lot of comfort food indulgence as January was a very bad month (see previous post) and I sought refuge in yummy food when I had an actual appetite.

The one concerning stat is body fat, which climbed a full 0.7% over the course of the month–not a good trend.

I make no predictions for February, but barring calamity (and this year, calamity always seems like a possibility), I expect these stats to all start improving as I resume some exercise and eating better, healthier food.

Stats:

January 1, 2025: 166.8 pounds

Current: 167.2 pounds
Year to date: Up 0.4 pounds

January 1: 166.8 pounds
January 31: 167.2 pounds (up 0.4 pounds)

Body fat: 
January 1: 25.3%
January 31: 26.0% (up 0.7%)

Skeletal muscle mass:
January 1: 29.8.0% 
January 31: 29.8% (unchanged)

BMI:
January 1: 23.9
January 31: 23.9 (unchanged)

Historical: January 1, 2022: 182.8 pounds

A farewell to January 2025, with my foot firmly planted in its monthly butt

Sometimes I am glad a particular month is over. Sometimes a month was mostly fun or rewarding.

And then there is January 2025, the start of a new calendar year and a month that was just kind of horrible, mostly due to health issues. Let’s look:

  • I did not run. The month began two days after I mangled the heels of my hands on my last run, due to tripping and falling hard on a sidewalk. Technically, I could still run today, but that is unlikely. Running is something that keeps me centered and focused. Not running does not help me achieve these things.
  • Any month I get blood taken three times is not a good month.
  • One day I logged 190 steps because I was bedridden, feverish and in a kind of delirium thanks to an infection.
  • Said infection plagued me for more than the first half of the month.
  • 11 days of outpatient IV therapy.
  • Having to shower, sleep and exist for those 11 days with an IV in my arm (five days left, six days right).
  • Still awaiting tests, including my first-ever MRI scan, for possible follow-up issues.
  • Speaking of firsts, I had my first CT-scan.
  • And all those IVs? The first one was also my very first.
  • Strata nonsense added greatly to my stress. I still haven’t found an effective way to deal with it. The stress, that is.
  • My camera stopped working, though technically that happened before January.
  • I leaned into comfort food a lot. I had Pop Tarts. Surprisingly, I was only up a modest 0.4 pounds for the month.
  • My sleep scores have been generally terrible–too much stress, generally not enough of everything else. I had one score of 81 (rating: good) shortly after the IV therapy wrapped up. It feels like a dream now.
  • No drawing. My last was at the end of December.
  • Blogging was down and I spent a lot of time staring at a blinking cursor.

On the plus side:

  • I got Jeff red velvet cake for his birthday and it was yummy, the perfect indulgence.
  • It didn’t snow (that may change in early February, sadly).

A stress haiku

I’ve been thinking about stress a lot lately. Well, maybe not a lot, but more than usual. I usually don’t think about it at all.

So while I contemplate yoga, meditation or becoming a monk, here is a haiku on stress.

Stress

My teeth set on edge
Body tenses, muscles tight
Time for funny cats

One of those moments where I’d like to see the look on my face

Today, getting blood work done to follow-up on some issues with my MOKI1Month of Kidney Infection, I am sitting at the lab, in the blood-giving chair, with my arm resting on the blood-giving tray. The tech shows up and is very pleasant and professional. She places some vials on the tray next to my arm. More than one or two vials. I count six.

I ask if she is going to fill all of them. She enthusiastically tells me yes, then says not to worry, I’ve got plenty of blood. I would like to know if my expression changed at all when she said yes. I think it might have, but just barely enough to notice before flipping back to whatever it had been before.

To her credit, she got all six vials filled quickly and painlessly. And I remembered to hydrate and eat before, so I didn’t pass out and slide awkwardly onto the floor.

Such is my life these days. But soon: Maybe I’ll post about other things, not related to my body or the fluids contained within!1

And now, a sproinging cat:

  1. And hey, at least I’m not talking politics. ↩︎

After 11 days, I am IV-free

I did not expect 2025 to begin this way.

On Thursday, January 9th, I was administered antibiotics for an infection that was originally thought to be in the prostate, then the bladder, but in the meantime actually moved to one of my kidneys. Every day since then I have gone back for another daily round of IV therapy, the first five at Burnaby Hospital, the last six at Royal Columbian, which is literally a five-minute walk from home, so that part was at least convenient.

On Day 5 they removed the IV from my left arm, because the apparatus had bent, and switched to my right arm. This was better since I’m left-handed. But it still meant doing a lot of things was cumbersome and awkward, and I had to be careful not to damage the IV while sleeping and whatnot. A shower or bath was weird and vaguely unpleasant.

But now both arms are free and treatment has ended. I wait to see what happens next. Did the infection sneak into my prostate, and will I start showing symptoms in a week? I don’t know. I am not a pessimist (I swear), but am resigned to a 50/50 chance of more infection to come. But that also means I think it’s possible I’ll be good.

I’ll wait a few more days, then start thinking about running (not on a sidewalk) again.

Here’s hoping the rest of 2025 is kind of dull and boring for me. If there’s excitement, I request that it be of a pleasant variety, without any Twilight Zone-style twists.

The non-foot club

I started my IV therapy at Royal Columbian Hospital on Tuesday, so today was my fourth day (I double-checked the math, I think I got it right). On each of the three previous days, every other person getting an IV had a foot issue. Usually the left foot. Left feet seem kind of unlucky.

But today was a new dawn: Someone in the chair ahead of me was getting an IV for the first time (I both did and didn’t want to look) and lo, he had two regular feet. His therapy ended first and as he left, he turned and waved at me, as if we were brothers-in-arms feet. The guy that came in as I was leaving also seemed to have two ordinary feet. Seeing these guys made me feel less odd.

I have had nine (technically 10) treatments, with two more to go. The desire for everything to be OK after that is something I cannot yet put into words.

And now, straight from Discord, a cat reacting to a foot:

I am not an idea machine

Not his month, anyway. I’ts like my brain refuses to focus long enough to get out more than a few sentences.

But perhaps I will bloviate again and at length soon.

Also, the IV has been making my right arm itchy the last few days and I can’t scratch it. I must use sheer force of will to convince myself it does not itch.

Three more days and I am hopefully done on this particular journey.

Cat:

slick cat moves

I am a human pincushion

And I love lists! So here’s a list highlighting various random things on my Health Adventure 2025 (which technically began in 2024):

  • Having never had an IV before, I’ve now had, as of today, seven IV treatments, with at least four more to go. I can’t say I enjoy them, but I am pretty much used to them now.
  • The first four were in my left arm, the last three switched to my right.
  • The switch to the right was a bit bumpy. The nurse tried twice closer to my wrist (more flexible for the time between visits) but thanks to my tiny, impervious veins, she settled on a third closer to the crook of my elbow.
  • While I had the IV in my left arm, I tried brushing my teeth with my right hand (I am left-handed). This was actually kind of hilarious. I could hold the toothbrush just fine in my right hand, but once it went in my mouth, my brain went haywire and didn’t know what to do. I am glad my left hand is available again.
  • If you had asked me if having an IV needle stuck in my arm 24/7 and swaddled in medical wrap to protect it between treatments was kind of grossbuckets before this became my reality, I would have said yes. And I still say yes. But you get used to things.
  • It always kind of hurts a little, though. I once did a full stretch and the arm with the IV needle in it sent me a reminder, something like DO NOT EVER DO THAT AGAIN.
  • Yesterday, the treatments transferred from Burnaby Hospital to the next-door Royal Columbian Hospital. It’s nice that it now only takes five minutes to go to or exit from treatments.
  • Every other person getting IV therapy in the same room has had a foot issue, so I’m now thinking of this as The Foot Room where people are sent when they need antibiotics. My foot is fine, but maybe they just don’t have any other rooms.
  • I have had two prostate exams, which are kind of like someone goosing you, but being extremely serious about it.
  • I have had blood taken three times. I have gone from being traumatized over getting blood taken to, “Yeah, whatever.”
  • The beep the machine makes when the IV bag is empty is a sound I will associate with IVs for pretty much forever now.
  • The staff at both hospitals have been very nice.
  • My partner Jeff was a veritable angel through the worst parts of it, staying with me for all four hours of my first ER visit last Thursday. Horribly, I have actually had longer ER visits in the past.
  • I was told today that inflammation is pretty close to back to normal. I was not told what was inflamed. My kidney, I’m guessing, since that’s what they are targeting.
  • Mentally, I find myself up and down like the proverbial roller coaster. I am a bit down today, but can’t pinpoint exactly why. It could just be a cumulative effect.
  • It will be very nice to sleep without an IV needle in my arm.
  • It will be very nice to be healthy again.
  • It will be very nice to resume running again while avoiding nasty sidewalks that try to trip me.
  • This concludes my list. For now.

ER visit, January 2025: New hospital, new infection!

This story begins with an upset tummy, which does not seem particularly ominous.

The sore stomach began three days ago. I was puzzled when it struck partway through the night, disrupting my sleep. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I had an inkling in the back of my mind that took the form of the word: Infection.

And here we rewind to early December, or possibly even late November, when in true guy fashion1Spoiler: Guys can be kinda dumb, I began to feel something (an abdominal ache) that I knew from previous experience was likely to be something specific (a bacteria infection centred around my plumbing) and did nothing about it. “I’ll just wait a bit and if it goes away, it’s nothing!” (And if it doesn’t, I’ve given the infection time to grow and spread. You can probably guess how this played out.) By the end of the first week of December, I began experiencing symptoms that were bad and could not be ignored:

  • High fever
  • Chills (not the cool kind of chills)
  • Body aches
  • Headache
  • The sweats (not the cool kind of sweat)

I saw my doctor and he ordered blood work. This is where the story takes its next dumb turn. DO NOT BE LIKE ME. HEED MY WARNING.

I dragged my feet on the blood test because the last two times I’d had blood taken, the experience was awful. The second was especially bad, with the tech approaching my arm like it was a dart board, and she was on her fifth beer. So I kept trying to steel myself to just go in. What are the odds I’d have three terrible experiences in a row, years apart?

My doctor prescribed me the “best guess” antibiotics in the meantime, for a prostate infection. At first, the drugs worked. Yay drugs! But over the two-week dosage, the effectiveness waned, until at the end they just plain stopped and all the aforementioned symptoms came back, as strong as ever. Just prior to this, I did muster up the nerve to get the blood work done. And it was fine. Painless, really.

The work revealed that this was more likely a bladder infection, so a week of new antibiotics were prescribed. Again, as if my magicke, the drugs worked. Yay drugs again!

Everything seemed good. I felt normal, healthy. I even went on my first run in four weeks, which may have been an omen, in retrospect. After a week, my hands were healing nicely from my spectacular trip on the sidewalk, but I was otherwise still OK.

We catch up now to three night ago, when midway through my sleep I awoke with a stomach ache, or at least what I took to be a stomach ache (this was almost certainly incorrect, but I’m no anatomy expert). I thought it couldn’t be the infection, because it feels different. Then the smart guy in the back of my brain said, “But what if the infection has spread and moved? It might feel different as it settles into a fresh, new organ.” I made a doctor appointment on Wednesday. Wednesday was bad. My doctor confirmed the infection might have spread. He ordered more blood work, then to see him on Friday.

Thursday (yesterday) felt like an extended and unpleasant dream. Per my Garmin Forerunner 255, I walked 190 steps. All of them to and from the bed. I ate about 500 calories of food, most of it soup. I burned, then froze, then sometimes did both at the same time, which is both unique and maddening. I felt horrible. I no longer wanted to feel horrible. I had met my quota, I felt.

My partner had been insisting I go to the ER instead of the lab for the blood work. My doctor also said I should go to the ER if the symptoms got worse. So we did, after I peeled myself out of the (unsexy) sweat-soaked sheets this morning.

We went to Burnaby Hospital, rather than Royal Columbian, which is literally next door to us. I did not know this in advance, so I felt a bit like I was kidnapped. But apparently RC is a trauma hospital and prioritzes people who are, like dying, so you can wait a very long time if you are not facing imminent death (the very long waits have been true for me in the past).

The visit took about four hours, but it was actually more efficient than it sounds, because a lot of that time was waiting for test results.

They took two vials of blood. It was pain-free again. They made me pee into a bottle. They had me lay on a bed and periodically someone would come by and inform me of various steps and things. I was feeling a little less gray, but very thirsty. They would not let me drink yet.

I had my first CT scan. It wasn’t as intimidating as I thought. A male robotic voice would tell me to breathe in, then hold my breath and exhale. The bed slid me under the scanner about three times. It took a few minutes. The one freaky part–which they warned about in advance–is when they inject dye into your IV. This makes your entire body go weirdly warm for a few seconds, and also makes it feel like you’ve just loosed your bladder big time (this does not actually happen).

Oh, I should mention–they started to administer antibiotics by IV before the CT scan. Because the handy machine attached to the IV drip had not reached INFUSION COMPLETE yet, they chose to have me wheel the whole thing down the hall for the CT scan. Also, I had to put on a gown, with the IV attached. It took three of us to get it on without having IV medicine spray everywhere.

Fun fact: The doctor who attended me called me James, which happens a lot. All of my names are interchangeable, and I guess James is the most popular.

After the scan, the IV concluded, but wait, there was a second bag. I’d never had an IV before, but the experience was not horrible as I’d expected, even when they turned on the pump to get the drip moving along.

I have four more daily treatments of this. The best part (?) is they keep the IV in, so you don’t have to get newly-stabbed each time. Problem: The bandaging to keep the IV safe and cozy is a tad bulky. I’m also left-handed.

It’s not muscle.

I may see if they can switch to my right arm, even if it means an additional stabbing. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll become ambidextrous as a result, and a whole new world will open up for me.

During these four hours of fluid removal and insertion, I got the results: the infection had moved up the urinary tract and cozied itself in one of my kidneys. This is not good. The five daily IV treatments are the usual, but they will reassess during the process, so I might need more. At this point I am willing to learn to love country music if it makes me healthy again.

And that was my Thursday morning. Tonight, as I type this, the fever is gone, my tummy feels normal and I have a bit of a residual pressure headache. I’m sure my watch will read my stress as off the charts, but I feel significantly improved from 24 hours ago. I don’t expect to sleep well tonight, but I do expect to sleep decently.

FINAL WARNING TO GUYS (and really, everyone): If your body show signs of something wrong, go to the doctor right away. Do not wait. Do not make excuses. Do not be macho. Do not be me (not that I am macho).

My view for most of the morning. The doctor who attended can be seen in the background.
I think you can tell I’m having a good ol’ time here. Also, I look kind of chunky. It’s the posture, I swear.