health

Clean Bill of Health

Each year, my university requires me to go get an annual physical. Well, I suppose it’s not technically “required,” but if I don’t go, then my insurance rates spike. So it’s kind of like the police don’t “require” me to go the speed limit, but if I don’t, then I have to pay more money. (Not an exact analogy, but you get the point.) For a while, they just had me do a “health coach session,” but that pretty much boiled down to me telling a person on the phone that I didn’t smoke or drink, and then finding out

Shoulder Pain Update

I can’t remember what I’ve told you all about some things anymore. Blog for long enough, and everything blurs together. But whatever I’ve said before, I’ll recap briefly now. About five years ago, something happened in my right shoulder. I don’t know what. As I recall, it started when I was driving a stick shift car in Europe. I went to a physical therapist, who diagnosed me with impingement syndrome. Basically, doing a certain action repetitively had aggravated my shoulder, and I needed to calm it down or it would only get worse. For several months, I went to appointments

Sick-a-palooza

Maybe it’s just me, and maybe it’s just confirmation bias, but I’m sitting at home sick again, and it seems like kids are much more sick than usual this fall. I know that with MC, it feels like she’s been home sick more often than she’s been at school. I suppose this makes sense. Kids went for so long either isolated at home or masked at school, that now that they’re all back together and unmasked, germs are just having a field day with everything. But then again, that leads me to a larger topic: masking. I had very much

COVID: Round Two

I missed last week’s weigh-in post, because COVID threw everything out the window. I was feeling sick enough that trying to diet on top of feeling that way just wasn’t something I was willing to subject myself to. Then, we went on a quick trip to NYC, which meant eating different food again. The good news is that this morning I was still 193.8, so I didn’t put on much weight over the two weeks. Now that I’ve been through COVID twice, I have a bit more personal experience with how it affects me. The first time lasted two weeks,

PSA: Don’t Get COVID

I realize that (hopefully) most of you already know it’s generally a bad idea to get COVID, but I wanted to complain a bit more than I did back when I said I was on the mend. Going into my bout with the disease, I reasoned I would be generally fine even if I caught it. I’m under 50, not overweight, not diabetic, not asthmatic, double vaxxed and boosted. I expected it to be like a small cold, if I even had any symptoms at all. I came down with the beginning traces of symptoms 3 weeks ago now. At