Category: Health

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Well, Good

Son&Heir’s dog’s skin condition has almost entirely cleared up, so now it’s easier to collect that wonderful skin conditioner: Lab oil. *heh*

Of course, that’s just one issue the vet says is associated with canine lymphoma, but since it’s clearing up so nicely with treatment, and lymph glands are greatly reduced/reducing in size (were swollen to a painful degree), this is probably an “indolent lymphoma” (follicular lymphoma, perhaps?) —much more slowly acting than was first thought. At least his quality of life is at his old normal level: lots of energy, appetite, and. . . attitude (Good Dog 🙂 )

Have to see how the course of the disease and treatments go, but for a 9, almost 10, year old medium sized dog, he is at least able to act younger than his age, and may well meet expectations for a healthy lifespan for his size/breed.

Let hope be not dismayed.

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Memory Aids. . . of a Sort

The fun thing about aging is that, while new injuries seem to take longer to heal, at least I probably won’t miss them for long, since old injuries (some 60 or more years old) continually remind me of their continuing (have I stressed “continue” enough yet? 😉 ) presence. Joy! It’s a memory boost! Maybe I will NEVER “forget” an injury! *heh*

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Post Hoc Fallacy? Not Exactly

I injured my left hand ~10 months ago. Recovery is slow (and may never be complete *shrugs*). Still only have ~80% grip strength – on a good day – and fingers still swollen (wedding ring still does not comfortably fit ring finger), but. . . after massaging some salicylic acid solution and DMSO into hand, better pain relief and a wee tad less swelling. Maybe the pain relief is just in my head, though. Placebo effect can be strong, I suppose.

Still keeping the hand exercises up and wearing the compression glove, but this seems to have effected more progress than all the other nine months’ measures have. We;ll see.

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Ah! The Burdens We Bear. . .

Are most often those we choose.

Speaking of which, 60 extra pounds (weight vest, backpack, and ankle weights) makes doing chores around the house more. . . profitable as exercise. And as an added benefit, the backpack actually seems to lessen a persistent (60-year) lower back pain, strangely enough. Pressure in juuuuust the right place, it seems. Sweet!

The burdens we choose to bear are often life’s little pleasures, in the end.

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Petty Gripes

Trimmed my beard to be what is now called a “circle beard” (a term unknown to this 50-year beard wearer until recently) to better accommodate proper fitment of a respirator*. #gagamaggot Means shaving daily, a task I abhor.

Oh, well. At least what remains of my beard easily accommodates my “scary mask,” now. *heh* (That’s the name given to one of my respirator frames by my Wonder Woman.)

(Yes, the pic was converted to grayscale and deliberately blurred. So? *heh*)

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Not Bad; Could Be Better

Resting pulse ~50-55bpm. One hour of machete, weed-whacking, etc., in 95°F heat, coupled with raking, tossing limbs and brush:

148bpm. Target:

Age

Target HR Zone according to the American Heart Association:

70 years Average: 75-128 bpm Maximum Heart Rate (nominal 100%) 150 bpm

Recovery? *meh* After 10 minutes, 118bpm. After 15 minutes, 93bpm. Could be better on recovery. (Note: my lil oximeter measures a slightly different bpm for pulse, but 96-98 on blood oxygenation, so that’s good news.)

A wee tad too pooped right now to continue working outside, so let’s just see how long it takes to settle back down to my (now “new normal” *heh*) resting heart rate.

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Holes and Gaps, Lacks and Losses. . .

Have a new fun lil “fitness-n-health” tracker (to replace one that no longer holds a charge well). Missing some features (notably a BP monitor), but has others the old one did not, like sleep monitoring, but. . . methinks the sleep monitoring is flawed, because it recorded three hours’ “sleep” last night while I was awake, doing chores, etc. I think it checks bpm on pulse, ad if one is relaxed enough, it just counts that as sleep, cos my pulse last night averaged 52bpm. (It’s all the way up to 56bpm, right now, with blood oxygenation @~95, according to my handy-dandy lil oximeter.)

It’d be nice if the old one weren’t sealed so well, and I could replace the battery, so I could have BP monitoring, but this new one is nice enough, and the phone app for the new one is MUCH better than the app for the old one. *shrugs*

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Affliction Becomes Benefit

Some folks are more prone than others to vertical ridges in fingernails as they age. Oh, anyone can experience them because of nutritional deficits or some physical malady, but mine are apparently age and genetics related. I can recall as a young boy times spent with my maternal grandfather’s mother. Spending time with Great Grandmother was an enriching experience for me in many ways, but one lil thing has remained fascinating to me over the years: her hands. She was always doing interesting things with her hands: needlework, paging down pages in her Bible as she read (sometimes aloud for me, though I was close and reading along), sharpening her always-at-hand pen knife, and even trimming her nails with that very sharp pen knife.

And then there were her nails. Yep. Ridged just like mine are now, like Dad-Dad’s (maternal grandfather) were, like my older sister’s are. I have dealt with mine by checking my nutrition (no problems there), by making them less brittle with applications of different kinds, and. . . by trimming them as short as possible in order to minimize the real problem with ridged nails: frequent splitting and chipping.

And how has this become a benefit in recent days? Ease of keeping things really clean under my fingernails (because there’s hardly any “under my fingernails” to clean, for one thing).

So, a lil piece of heritage coming around to being a benefit.

Sweet!

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Hand Sanitizer — My Fav Formula

NOT a hard and fast formula, because your available ingredients may vary from mine. For example, I list “melaleuca alternifolia oil,” but what I use is 100% melaleuca oil refined to T36C5, meaning 36% terpinen-4-ol (the active anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral portion of the oil), 5% cineole (the penetrating fraction of melaleuca oil). The “aloe vera gel” I use is also just what is available to me.

In a one ounce bottle:
25 drops of melaleuca oil + aloe vera gel to the 1/4 bottle mark
Everclear™ (95% ethanol).

Shake well before each use.

The resultant mixture should exceed 70% alcohol (CDC, et al recommend 60% alcohol in hand sanitizer that uses alcohol), plus the antiseptic properties of melaleuca oil and the skin conditioning of the aloe vera lotion. Then, of course, there is the pleasant (to me, at least) aroma of the melaleuca oil.

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Yeh, Well, I Definitely Do These Sorts of Things So You Don’t Have To

Was at my fav “fell off the back of a truck store,” today, and passed through the “$1 salvage items” aisle. Saw a $1 box of 12 bottles of BSP (buffered sodium phosphate) solution–bottled and prepped for use as enemas–and thought to myself, “Self, since thou doest always gargle salt water (sodium chloride + h2o) and this BSP is sodium phosphate+sodium chloride+water, and ingestion of “gargle water” ain’t on the menu, why not? Yeh, if and or when I get a sore throat this winter, I’m-a giving my mouth an enema. (Small amounts of sodium phosphates via mouth–traces not spit out with “gargle water”–are not harmful, and. . . prepackaged!)

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