Dave's Place / Metamusing

Life and times of a webgeek

Category Archives: Health

Soolin update

Sadly, Soolin’s real 7th birthday gift was to undergo surgery to remove a fatty deposit which had been growing at an alarming rate over the last several years. We first noticed it three years ago when it was a small golf ball-sized lump in her armpit. By March this year at her checkup it was mango+ sized, and when they finally removed it Monday last week it was three pounds and about the size of a football sliced in half.

If I could do it over again I would have asked them to remove it last year, because when they removed it they discovered it had infiltrated the muscles under her arm and were not able to entirely excise it. Still, they took ~3 pounds and the overwhelming majority out. The hope now is that it won’t recur. The infiltration of the muscle works against this unfortunately, but the odds aren’t terrible (~40% is what google tells me) and even if it does, hopefully it will grow at a slower pace.

By and large her recovery from the surgery has been messy and unpleasant for her but relatively smooth. She has staples along an incision that runs from her armpit to her navel, and she had two drains installed which protected her from too much fluid collecting in the void left by the excised tumor. I had to apply hot compresses twice a day to the region and keep her dressed in a tshirt to help corral the bleeding. Her first day she barely moved and was in obvious discomfort (and on painkillers to help with it) but by the second day she was starting to perk up and move about, and seemed even better on the third day. Unfortunately she had a relapse possibly caused by us letting her go for too long of a walk that began on the 4th day and had her bleeding fairly heavily at times and again becoming immobile with discomfort. This lasted a couple of days. She had her drains removed last night and seems to be doing well – she tried to roll around in the leaves this morning when I took her out, throughout it all her appetite has been strong, and she’s starting to show signs of her normal playfulness. I’m fairly optimistic at this point. She’s still leaking from the areas where the drains were, but the flow is significantly less.

So…could have been better, but could have been much much worse, so all things considered I’m thankful that it’s looking good, and she handled it well throughout. I’ll post a few pics to the gallery with the warning that a couple of them might be disturbing.

How the brain mediates perception

There was a great piece in a recent New Yorker that had a journalist following a brilliant young neuroscientist around chatting about his varied interests and research. The piece covered a lot of ground and there were a number of really great observations and insights into how the brain mediates perception. I’d long known that the system processes latency (signals in your nerves take time to travel from the point of reception to the brain – it takes longer for a pain signal to reach your brain from your toe than from your cheek for example) by mediating your sense of time so that things appear to happen instantly when in fact they don’t. Turns out this is just the tip of the iceberg – the brain edits more out than I knew. The piece offered a great little experiment you can conduct to see evidence of your brain doing this. Imagine you were watching someone else look into a mirror,  and that person was looking at their eyes, changing their focus from their left eye to their right eye repeatedly. You would see their eyes move as they changed focus. You can film yourself doing this and see it happen. Now go look in a mirror. Look from your right eye to your left eye repeatedly. You will never see your eyes move. They do move. Your brain just filters it out of your conscious perception, presumably as extraneous detail, much as it does with the majority of sensory input you experience as you move through the world. On the one hand, banal, right? On the other, it’s a bit mind blowing to think about how you’re walking around with this subconscious editorial process constantly firing on all cylinders. Why don’t I get to make these choices! (a possible answer is that some people can, or have an altered editorial filter. We call them insane). Anyway, fascinating stuff and I loved the simple little test you can do to see this in action.

Giving up smoking gave me diabetes?

I’ve been sitting on this link for like a year as my site lay fallow. Slowly working my way through the backlog of material. Check out this blurb on the BBC site about a study which demonstrated a high correlation between folks quitting smoking and then developing type 2 diabtese. The timeline and circumstances match my own experience. Pretty freaky (if ultimately fruitless) to ponder what might have been. Even if it’s true, I’m good with where I ended up. Rather try and manage diabetes than fight lung cancer or heart disease ultimately.

The ectasy and the agony

So let me just get this out of the way – my golden retriever Soolin is the greatest dog ever. Today’s proof is here:

my dog Soolin leaping into the pool

this despite the fact that she’s got arthritic hips so creaky she sometimes has trouble making it up stairs, and a fat deposit under her front right armpit that causes her gait to be way out of whack*. So you get the full picture, here’s her sticking the landing:

spalasssh!

and paddling immediately on over to retrieve the tennis ball:

paddling over to her ball

so, that’s the good news. My dog is fricking cool and possessed of an indomitable will to enjoy herself. The bad news? She pays the price:

This is after it had healed a bit. It got her on both sides, her neck, and her back.

She got hotspots so badly on her cheeks that we had to pay the vet to shave her for us – she wouldn’t let us near them because they were so uncomfortable. She was diagnosed with a yeast infection in both ears at the same time. All told she’s on two oral medications, some goop that goes in her ears twice a day, and a topical spray that goes on the wounds 3 times a day.

My poor, fabulous, glorious Soolin. There’s no stopping her no matter the consequences.

*(she’s going in for surgery to have that removed sometime in the next month or so)

Near death experience with Nori

Fortunately this story has a happy ending, but it was sad and trying to live through. Sunday afternoon Nori, our 5 year old black lab, threw up extensively in front of Susan and I, and there was troubling stuff in it – mashed potatoes, chicken bones, and other food stuff we couldn’t identify. None of it came from us or our property – she had crept off somewhere, found it, and eaten it, and it made her really sick. Nori’s very food focused thanks to her experiences as a pup living through abandonment during hurricane Katrina, and when she wouldn’t eat her supper that night Susan and I were both mildly troubled. When she wouldn’t eat her breakfast in the morning, and wouldn’t go to the bathroom, I knew something was really wrong and after some debate Susan took her off to the vet. They immediately referred her to the animal hospital.

The hospital’s first guess was a possible blockage of her innards, most likely by chicken bone. Fortunately shortly after they admitted her she got violently ill from the rear, and at the time they thought this was a great sign and that she would soon be on the mend. They x-rayed her and found nothing foreign in her, which was a relief and another good sign.

Unfortunately by Tuesday she hadn’t really improved, and they decided to keep her for observation. She wasn’t eating, and she was still throwing up and leaking from her rear constantly. By this point they concluded she had a bacterial infection of some sort. We were worried but not terribly so.

Wednesday morning Nori ate a little bit and so by lunchtime they concluded it was safe to take her home. Susan picked her up and spent the afternoon watching her, and it wasn’t pretty. She wouldn’t eat, she was still constantly and pretty much uncontrollably leaking from the rear, she was in significant pain that was causing her to constantly pant and quake, and she was completely distressed emotionally. This was really really hard to see and absolutely heartbreaking. She was looking for comfort and spent her time trying to literally crawl under our clothing and huddle against our skin, shivering in pain and staring up at us with pleading eyes. The closest I’ve come to crying in years was that night, looking into her eyes and feeling helpless. At this point I was beginning to think she would die, and the following morning was worse – while she did seem to sleep that night, when she woke up she wouldn’t eat anything, and after drinking a little water she threw it up all over Susan. We called the hospital and they had us bring her back.

This time they did an ultrasound and again found no blockage. They concluded their initial diagnosis was still the likeliest explanation, she was just sicker than we thought, but the ultrasound did pick up fluid in her abdominal cavity. Apparently this is not unusual with bad digestive infections, but it’s also a sign of certain cancers, so they sent a sample to the lab. Meanwhile she went back on the IV and Susan and I sat on pins and needles, getting an update from the doctors every 6 hours or so.

Thursday was status quo until the evening when Nori finally ate something after 4 days of eating basically nothing, which was a great sign, and Friday morning she ate again. They decided if she ate around lunchtime we could come get her, and after she did I went up late afternoon and got her.

It was like night and day. While she had clearly lost a fair bit of weight, and has a shaved belly and rear end (a rear end that looked ridiculous when I first got her – it was literally as red as a baboons ass), she is back to her peppy self – no more pleading eyes, a not infrequent grin to share, energy to bounce around the house and, most importantly for Nori, beg us for food ;-)

So – she’s not entirely out of the woods (5 days of a diet of small portions of rice and boiled meat, a bunch of different medications, low activity), but things are definitely looking good. The lab results came back and there was no sign of cancer. Our fingers crossed that she comes through this just fine and with no lasting side effects, except perhaps more of an aversion to food from the trash/wherever the hell she found those mashed potatoes and chicken.

As a side note, we do wish we had health insurance on the dogs. This was expensive, owe $2k and we’re not quite done yet. I’d spend the money again without thinking twice, but man, it still hurts the wallet. This has been the most expensive month of my life, what with a new house, appliances, a tractor, and this being the capper. I told Susan we’re going to rent Nori out as a ‘companion’ to the neighborhood dogs to help pay for all of this l-)

New Year’s resolutions

I’m a bit behind, granted. I have a good excuse – came down with pneumonia and it really knocked the stuffing out of me. I’m just starting to feel myself again after fighting this off for three weeks, and I’m still fighting a cough and dealing with fatigue issues. Anyway, I made two resolutions this year: To get back on track with my diet and exercise regimen, and to follow an example I set myself several years ago with my buying habits.

The diet and exercise resolution has turned out to be easy thanks to the bout of pneumonia. My weight had been creeping up and by this fall I was over 180 for the first time in a number of years, something I had begun to worry about. Stomach issues and a generally slacker attitude to exercise had me off my regimen for almost all of the summer and fall, so I figured, time for a new years resolution to address it. Pressures off now though – I’m down under 170 for the first time in at least 4-5 years. I just need to keep it off. As soon as my stamina is back it’s back on the exercise regimen, possibly adding in running, which I haven’t done regularly since I left Maine.

The second resolution is inspired by a successful resolution from years ago. At that time I had gotten addicted to buying books off of Abe books, ebay, and Amazon, and my to-read pile was growing faster than my read pile was decreasing. I resolved to only buy a book after I had finished at least one, and to generally focus on bringing down the number of books in the to-read pile. It worked. I still have a huge to-read pile (>20 books) but it no longer grows and it’s no longer close to 100 books. This year I’m applying these principles to videogames, because my to-play pile is like 15 games at this point and maybe higher. I’ve resolved to not buy a new game unless I finish one, and to focus on finishing off games I’ve left partially completed. I have this terrible habit of starting whatever new game I acquire, playing it obsessively for a week or two until the next game comes, then moving on, rarely finishing anything. No more! I’m working my way through games at a rapid clip, and not opening anything still in the shrinkwrap until I knock games off the list. So far it’s working – I’ve finished 4-5 games since the year began, and this was with me unable to play games for two weeks thanks to the pneumonia.

I’m such a hopeless nerd.

I’ve also put myself on a budget. Mint.com rocks for helping you see where you spend your money. I spend too much of mine on games, and that’s stopping as well.

Anyway, to sum up a rambling post, figure on a lot of  ‘Game finished’ posts from me, especially over the next couple of months, as I focus on a game at a time instead of flitting from game to game.

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Pisgah forest hike recap

Monadnock and the forest floor from the Pisgah ridgeline

Monadnock and the forest floor from the Pisgah ridgeline

Susan and I had a great Saturday. We started the day by heading north to Brattleboro, VT, where we stopped for coffee and lunch fixings at the local coop. Then we headed East on route 9 to the Pisgah State Forest in NH, where we went on a ~7 mile hike along the Pisgah Mountain ridgeline. It was a beautiful day and the views from the ridgeline were great. By the time we hiked out we were exhausted. We headed further east to Keane, NH, where we stopped for coffee and watched the ‘Freedom Party’ crazies chatter a bit incoherently about their dissatisfaction at a small rally in the heart of Keane. After that we headed south to Greenfield, MA, and visited Greenfield Games. Last stop before home was dinner and drinks at The People’s Pint. I love that place!

All in all we had a fantastic day. The only downers were Soolin, who had to hike with her lead on because of her still-healing hotspot from last weekend, and my sore body which apparently wasn’t quite recovered from last week’s adventure. By the time we got to the car my ankle was super sore.

trail map and links to a gallery of pictures below. One note on the trail map – it’s slightly inaccurate because I had to manually edit the trailmap. If anything, the hike was a bit longer on the southern end of the trail than is represented below because the gps lost signal for a bit while we were in the deep forest towards the SW end of the trail.

Trail Map

Image gallery

You can checkout the image gallery here. Below is a sample image to give you a sense of it:

Beautiful fall colors starting to peak through around a pond on the forest floor

Beautiful fall colors starting to peak through around a pond on the forest floor

Tuesday afternoon dog walking

Still playing around with trailguru and other tools to post maps into my site. Here’s yesterday’s walk courtesy of trailguru.com:

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Low carb diet means better blood sugar control

5 years ago when I first started experimenting with a low carb diet to control my blood sugars, it was a controversial idea. My doctor and my trainer at the ADA both argued against it, the ADA person quite vigorously. There’s a saying in diabetes management that you should learn to eat to your meter, and my meter was saying this was working great, so I ignored them. Ultimately I won over my physician – he could see how well this was working from my 3 month blood tests. The ADA rep never came around. Anyway I mention all this because the results of a Duke University study confirm what I already knew – this approach works best for controlling sugars.

Ironically, just as mainstream science seems to be catching up to where I was 5 years ago, it’s also starting to conclude that sugar management is not the highest priority, at least not later in life – cholesterol and blood pressure is where the focus should be. My reading of this is that for the medium term, I’m still good to go with my current strategy. I’ll confess though – I’m starting to think I need to cave in and begin taking a statin of some kind. My cholesterol numbers have never been good, despite trying a huge variety of things to balance them over the last 5 years. I’ve avoided statins because when they first put me on them I had huge pain issues, to the point where I was waking up in the middle of the night shouting in pain. Also statins have become like aspirin – physicians are prescribing them at the drop of the hat for a ever broadening definition of who needs them. This has left me feeling like big money pharma is what is pushing the statin use, not actual health issues. I don’t know where I’ll end up on this, my guess though is I’ll try some statin this year to see how things go.

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Low carb diet contributes to cognitive issues

Here’s a report on a the results of a study indicating that folks following a low carb diet perform poorly on memory-based tests. This is serious stuff to me as I definitely have short term memory issues. The good news is re-introducing the carbs solved the issue in the folks participating in the study. The bad news for me is, I can’t without inducing blood sugar/cholestoral/heart disease issues! Oh, the dilemma: die young but witty and on top of my game, or live long and a bit dimly. For now I’m sticking with the low carbs.

Related links

More melamine news

So now it’s turning up in infant formula, (90% of the major brands) and the FDA‘s response is to change it’s categorization of acceptable exposure to melamine, without any research to back it up. We’re the ones who are sneering at Chinese food safety issues? This epitomizes the Bush White House’s approach to governance folks, and man does it ever piss me off. It pays to be extra careful about dairy products – as I predicted a couple of months ago, this stuff is going to be showing up in lots of unexpected places.

Is there anything broccoli can’t do?

Broccoli is a superfood. Almost every week there’s another study pointing out some healthful benefit of eating it. I’ve been linking over to them fairly often. Today’s example is a study presented at a recent American Association for Cancer Research conference indicating broccoli may lower the cancer risk for current and former smokers.The lesson remains the same – eat your broccoli, raw or steamed (but don’t overcook it!), it’s fantastic for you.

ware the halloween candy

No, I’m not talking about the razor blade in the apple type stuff. A reminder to folks as your kids wander about harvesting candy tonight: when companies make announcements like this (halloween candy from a particular manufacturer has no melamine problems in the US – it’s only the Canadian candy you have to watch out for) you should really watch out. I have no idea how pervasive the melamine poisoning really is, but it’s clear it’s in some and possibly many products that made it into North America. I remain concerned and if I had kids they wouldn’t be eating chocolate from anywhere I was remotely unsure of.

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Delicious food tip: celeriac

frameless
Image via Wikipedia

Susan’s a member of a local CSA farm, and she often picks up celeriac, which I’d never had until a month or so ago. Celeriac is the root of a particular kind of celery plant. It looks like a very large gnurled potato, but it has almost no starch content so it’s perfect for diabetics. You can prepare it much like you would prepare mashed potatoes, or you can dice it and steam, boil. or stirfry it and serve it as a side vegetable with your dinner. It’s great! It has a very mild celery taste, it’s versatile, and when you can find it it’s dirt cheap. Definitely worth trying if you’re looking to add some healthy variety to your diet.

Incidence of type 2 diabetes doubled in the last decade

That title pretty much sums up what recent statements by US federal health officials revealed, reported on here on US News & World Report’s website. I don’t have too much to add to this, just getting the word out. They don’t go into much detail in terms of causes of type 2 diabetes beyond the typical ‘sedentary lifestyle, obesity = higher incidence of the disease.’ The one aspect of it that I don’t think I’ve noted here before is how incidence rates are much higher in the poorer southern states than in the northern states. Education is a critical component of the disease that folks don’t seem to focus on as much – new drugs and approaches to treatment are great, but making sure kids are taught from a young age that fried twinkies + 2 quarts of soda + 6 hours of videogame daily = you’re going to be fat and get diabetes seems to be as big if not the biggest piece of the puzzle.

Are we also facing a food crisis?

Lost in all the noise about the economic crisis we’re facing is that we may also be facing a crisis in our food supply. The same rationale of deregulating the financial markets appears to be impacting the oversite of our food supply as well, the chinese milk melamine tainting scandal being only the latest issue to crop up. This stuff is creeping out in the global food supply and it’s making me increasingly leery of processed foods. From numerous ground beef issues over the past couple of years, spinache, lettuce, tomatoes, and more, there’s a constant stream of news about tainted food, and with the global connectedness it’s really hard to track where this stuff turns up. What set me off about this today was news that Cadbury had to pull some of its chocolate off the market because they detected melamine in some batches of it and another vendor of creamer for coffee had to do the same. None of this particular scandal’s food has been detected in the US food supply as of yet but I’m not going to be surprised if it does, and increasingly I feel like folks are best advised to steer clear of processed foods. That frozen pizza won’t seem as convenient if it turns out the cheese was made with melamine, and that bag salad will stop seeming like a time saver if you end up ingesting ecoli because it had cow poop on it.

I should note I’m not really sure what to make of all of this. I read an analysis in the last couple of months that suggested the food supply has actually never been safer, it’s just that regional threats like ecoli outbreaks get more widely reported than in the past. At the same time though there’s overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration systematically went after regulatory systems, and it’s not clear to me what impact that had at the FDA and other government inspection and regulatory bodies that oversee the food supply. It seems better to be prudent than sick is what I guess it boils down to.

Fortunately Susan and I eat pretty danged healthy and we don’t eat all that much processed food, so here’s hoping our exposure to risk is as minimal as it seems.

Home sick

Not as in missing my hometown, as in like, I have spent the past two days lounging about the house nursing a miserable cold. It’s not excruciatingly bad, it just features sniffles, headaches and a sore throat. Susan is suffering the same fate as I, which we’ve been debating. Is it better to both be sick at the same time, or in sequence so one partner can take care of the sick partner? We haven’t decided yet. Whatever we have has been making the rounds at the office. My weekly IT heads meeting had half the staff out sick yesterday, including me. Must be the time of year.

What happens when you don’t go to a dentist for a decade

That’s right – I haven’t been to a dentist in over a decade, with the exception of an oral surgeon who removed my wisdom teeth about 6-7 years ago. I fell out of the practice of getting annual cleanings shortly after college when I moved away from my family dentist and didn’t have dental coverage during my early career. One way or another I always managed to avoid going until yesterday. The oral surgeon didn’t help things much back when I had my teeth removed, because he scoped out my teeth and commended me on them being in such good shape. Unfortunately they’d started to stain recently, and one stain in particular was driving Susan nuts, so after much cajoling I made an appointment.

The good news: no cavities. Brushing and flossing plus some help from genetics seem to have protected my teeth over the years, which I was greatly relieved about. The bad news: I have gum disease and have to go in for some serious under gum cleansing procedures which will apparently be pretty unpleasant. Once that’s done I have to go to the dentist every three months for a couple of years for followup cleanings which should entirely clear up the gum issues and protect my teeth for the long term.

The other good news is that the stains will all come off, and the dentist thinks I should consider a bleach treatment for them once the cleaning is finished, which should remove the yellow coloration. He also thinks I should get braces to fix my front teeth. I’m not sure on the braces but I’ll probably do the bleach treatment next spring since it seems to mean so much to Susan.

Anyway I’m not sure if there are any lessons learned. I avoided a decade of the discomfort of the dentists chair with seemingly little consequence, though I’ll reserve judgement and possibly sing a different tune after I’ve been through a couple of these undergum cleansing treatments.