Category Archives: health

Life Lessons with CrossFit

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CrossFit is teaching me some important lessons, but they aren’t always the lessons I expected.

Some of them are the normal lessons. For instance, today was a running day for me. I didn’t want to run because my legs are still sore from the 30 minutes of jump-roping we did yesterday, but I went anyway. And then after I was out, I didn’t want to run up the giant hill in the neighborhood, because that hill sucks real bad. But I did it anyway. The whole time I was running up the hill I was like, “I’m so strong! I can do this! CrossFit is teaching me not to limit myself! Booyah!” Then when I was nearing the end of my run and my calf muscles seized up like a motor without any oil in it, I wanted to quit early. But I kept running anyway. I was like, I CAN keep going, and so I SHOULD. That’s totally a CrossFit attitude. 10 points to me.

10 idiot points, that is. Because I just hopped out of bed to give the house the final pre-sleep lock-down and my calf muscles were all EFF YOU, STUPID. WE WILL STOP WORKING NOW. I hobbled my way back to bed using the same pivot step that my nieces use to make their knee-less Barbies strut around their doll houses.

Another thing that CrossFit has taught me is how rarely I fully extend my arms. Zack called tonight to check on me; he asked me how I was feeling, and how my elbows were doing. I had stretch out both of my arms all the way before I could verify that, yes, they do, in fact, hurt super badly. I just had previously been unaware because apparently I walk around all day long with my elbows bent.

So I just wanted to share those important CrossFit lessons of the day with you. I am always capable of more than I think I am, and, uh, also, I don’t extend my arms very often.

On Starting Therapy

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I met with a new therapist today, and I was only halfway through my first sentence when my voice cracked for the first time.

I felt I had to pause what I’d been saying, (which was undoubtedly something incredibly emotional and revealing, such as “I have been depressed for a while now,”) and explain what was going on, as if I was the first person who has ever cried during therapy. “I’m a crier,” I said, “You should know that about me. I’m going to cry the whole time I talk to you, and that’s just how it’s going to be.” She laughed and said that was fine, of course, and she would grab me all the tissues I could possibly need. “Oh, it’s alright,” I explained, as I reached around to my back pocket to grab the handkerchief I’d knowingly brought along with me. I told her, “I came prepared.”

I’m not sure why I even thought it would be possible, but I had convinced myself that I was going to be able to discuss my life with this therapist without snotting all over her couch and crying the whole time. I was so, so wrong. Before we even started talking about me, I knew I was wrong. I was sitting on the couch listening to her explain the legal forms that I’d signed–disclosure statements, right to privacy explanations, etc.– when I started to feel the inside of my sinus cavities start to tingle as if I’d just snorted a giant pile of crushed lifesaver Wint-O-Greens. I’m sure a lot of people cry during therapy, but I’m willing to bet that not everyone gets choked up while their therapist is running through her personal education background. But I do. Ooooh, I certainly do.

Before I picked up where I left off, I told her that I’d basically just shown her everything she’d need to know about me. I know that I’ve got a lot of stuff going on in my life, I know that I have problems. And even though I haven’t figured out how to fix them yet, I have learned to compensate fairly well. I understand my particular collection of -isms, and I prepare accordingly.

Then I blew my nose into the handkerchief that I’d brought, and we dove right in.

A Catch-Up Post

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A fun way to break in the brand new oven at your brand new house is by using an over-sized dish towel to pull your steak fries out of the oven, and then, in the process, setting that dish towel on fire. Don’t worry, though. Because my brand new faucet for my brand new kitchen sink has a pretty impressive spray range. I took care of it*.
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Zack heard Scout growling the other day and thought that someone was trying to break into the house. She barks at people when they come over, and she barks at squirrels and stuff in the backyard, but she never growls. She growled for so long that Zack was able to shoot a little video of it to show me.

So, there’s a pond in our new neighborhood, and that pond has ducks. Scout was growling at one of the ducks, who was across the street, in one of the neighbor’s yards. You could see it on one part of the video; it was scarcely bigger than a period at the end of a sentence. But Scout could see it, and boy, was she ever pissed.
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Zack and I decided to sign up for a run/race at the end of April to motivate me (us?) to get back into the swing of exercising on a regular basis. We’re going to go for the gusto and register for the 10K. Wish me luck, but don’t wish me good sense, otherwise I would surely back out while I still have the chance.
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I’ve slowly started to make the medication adjustments that the doctor suggested that I make. I don’t feel a whole lot happier but I do feel more stable. I explained that concept to Zack earlier by saying, “You know how sometimes we’d go to dinner and have the best time, and then on the way home I would start crying, and then I would go straight to bed? I don’t feel like that anymore.” So that’s good news(?). It’s hard to think about things in terms of emotional stability as opposed to just happy vs. unhappy. I don’t feel better because I don’t feel happier, but stable is better than unstable, so I’ll count that as a win. So far, the biggest side-effects that I have from detoxing off of Medication #1 are jacked-up sense of spacial awareness (running into walls, trying to set things down on the counter but totally missing and dropping them on the floor, etc.) and feeling like everything is happening in slow motion. Neither of these are surprising to me; I expected them both. The side-effects just leave me wishing that psych meds weren’t so miserable to adjust.
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Pictures of the house forthcoming. Zack and I have been enjoying settling into the new house. It’s perhaps a little bit obvious or redundant to say this, but we have such a sense of ownership about this place — like we’ve never had before with any of the places that we’ve rented. It’s been fun to celebrate being in this house that we’ve dreamed of for so many years while we do normally-mundane things like decide where to store the dish towels.
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*Just kidding. I mean, I really did catch the rag on fire, but I was able to put it out with a couple of frantic waves and “OH SHIT”s. Problem solved.

YogaBoarding

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It’s usually near the end of each class when the yoga instructor starts calling inversion poses. I get the thought process behind it. You’re all warmed up by the end of the class. Your muscles are loose and your core is strong. You’re feeling all balanced and zen and what not. I mean, I guess it makes sense.

But another thing that you are when you’re near the end of a hot yoga class is sweaty. You’re really sweaty. Like, really, really sweaty. So sweaty that you’ve got salty drips constantly pouring down your face. Your back is soaked, and your legs are so drenched that you can barely get your foot to stick on your thigh during your Tree poses.

So there you are, hanging out in the 95 degree classroom, with every pore on your body producing salty fluids at max capacity when the yoga instructor is like, “Hey, everybody! Let’s all flip upside down for a while!” And at first you get all excited because THANK GOD, SOMETHING DIFFERENT. Your hamstrings and shoulders are screaming-mad and all you want in this world is to do a freakin’ handstand so that you can support your body’s weight with your skull & spine and not with shoulders for a minute!

So you gladly flip upside down. Your focus changes from arms, legs, and sweat to core strength and balance. And the last thing that you’re thinking about is gravity. If you do happen to think about gravity, you’re thinking about it in relation to how you’re going to keep your inverted body upside down despite it. You’re most certainly not still thinking about all of that sweat. All of the liters and liters of sweat that have been beading out of your face and body for the last 45 minutes.

But then, you feel the warning. The drips that have been sliding down your face and chin towards your toes start to reverse themselves. The sweat that you’ve been wiping off of your upper lip has now beaded up, and it’s giving into gravity’s new direction. There’s no avoiding it: when it finally lets go, it heading straight for your sinus cavities. Then it’s all, HELLO SALT WATERFALL, STRAIGHT INTO MY PRIMARY AIRWAY.

And that, my friends, is the yoga equivalent of waterboarding. Or, as I like to call it, YogaBoarding.

Beware of inversions.

Workout Inspiration: I Has None.

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I folded all of my clean laundry and put it away tonight. As I was stuffing my freshly folded clothes into my drawers and closet, I realized that I didn’t have to open my “workout clothes” drawer to put anything away because I haven’t utilized any workout clothes in… a while.

Apparently, Antigravity Yoga is known for it’s inspirational ability. Perhaps the reason that I’m not motivated is because I have yet to do any yoga whilst suspended from the ceiling?

My Own Personal Stress Filing Cabinet

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Whenever a patient goes to to get a stent placed in one of their coronary arteries, he or she is awake for the whole procedure. At one point during the stent placement, there is a balloon that gets inflated and blocks off all of the blood that should be flowing through that artery. It’s usually not inflated for very long, so it doesn’t cause long-term problems, but the lack of blood flow and oxygen sometimes results in patients experiencing chest pain at that moment in the procedure.

We nurses, being the sadistic-but-educationally-minded weirdos that we are, really love that moment. We love it because the patients can learn that the chest pain that they experience when the balloon is inflated is the exact same pain that the patient would feel if he or she was having a heart attack. There are common symptoms of heart attacks that most people know. Pain in the chest, shortness of breath, shooting pains down the left arm, etc. There are also less common signs, though. Some people have jaw pain. Some people have pain that they mistake for indigestion. Others have back pain, or just feel overly tired. None of us knows what our particular flavor of chest pain is going to be until we experience it for ourselves. But the people who experience chest pain during a stent placement are among the few that get to know for sure that THIS is MY chest pain, and if I ever feel like THIS again, I should go ahead and get myself on down to the ER, like, STAT.

Today I went to see my massage therapist. Usually by the time I go to see her, I’m experiencing numbness and shooting pains down my arm, and have been in pretty severe pain for at least a few weeks. Though I am not very timely in my appointment making, massages are very helpful to me. I am apparently incapable of dispensing of my stress and instead choose to store it up in all of my muscles in my back. Every time I go to see Jayme, she works on me for hours. She focuses on my trouble areas, which have always been between and above my shoulder blades. I have steel cables that run perpendicular to my spine, and those steel cables are emotional hoarders. I’m sure they’re going to get a call to appear on the show any day now. It’s disgusting up in there.

I didn’t wait until I thought I was going to die before I made today’s appointment. I had a gift certificate and a day off to burn, so I decided to do my steel cables a favor and try to take out the trash. I even gloated as I laid down on the bed at how wonderful it was that I’d come in so early this time.

I had been fooled. Jayme, however, was not fooled. It took her about 3 minutes to discover that while, yes, it was true that the area between my shoulder blades were in better condition than usual, that didn’t mean that I’d done myself any favors. Instead, she told me that, “It was like I was in a totally different body.” The places that had always pained me the most were healthy, and I’d developed all sorts of new problem areas. Problem areas that were (are) so jacked that even after two hours of unusually brutal elbow-kneading, my muscles still weren’t budging. Jayme and I had to book another appointment on Wednesday so that we can pick up where we left off today.

I guess Jayme could tell that I was baffled by the change, even though my face was smushed down into the little donut pillow. As she worked on my neck and back, she gently explained that this was normal because I had just experienced a big life change. The transition from nursing school to actual nursing meant that my stressors were changing, too. Before, I was experiencing nursing school stress and nursing school muscle pain. Now, she told me, I am experiencing good ol’ nursing-as-a-daily-grind stress and muscle pain. And my body can apparently tell the difference between the two, even though my mind sometimes (most times) can’t.

I just kept thinking, “So, my body’s muscles are a stress filing cabinet*? School files do not go in the same place as work files?” I thought I knew my pain. I thought I was like that Cardiac Cath patient who had experienced his chest pain during the stenting procedure. I thought I knew how to recognize my particular brand of pain, just like I thought I knew exactly how long I could ignore it. But I was wrong. Chest pain and Muscles-Hiding-Stress pain do not play by the same rules. Lesson learned.

*Is this a good enough reason to get a label maker? I could just put little labels all over my back** denoting the area’s stress sensitivities so that I could use it as a physical map to guide me to the source of my life’s stress when I’m all freaked out but I can’t quite put my finger on why.

**Logistically, this idea is pretty difficult. I could get the labels tattooed on, then they wouldn’t come off in the shower. But I don’t know if these areas morph, so that seems a wee bit permanent. Perhaps I should just draw a picture?

Once I Was Blind, But Now I See.

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As all of you well know, I really like to make good grades on tests. My therapist thinks that it’s because I’m always looking for approval and self-validation. My friends say it’s because I’m an overly competitive super-geek. Both observations are likely correct.

It is for this reason that I’m always a little nervous about going to see the eye doctor. A trip to have your vision checked at the eye doctor’s office is always full of tests that you have no idea if you’re passing or failing. In fact, the tests are designed that way on purpose so that you don’t say things that you think are the “right” answers. But tests that don’t have right answers are the kinds of tests that make people like me, people with Winning Complexes, break out into cold sweats. One of the tests I was subjected to today was prefaced with these instructions: “Look in here, and press this button any time you see a ‘wavy blur.’”

I wanted to jump back and be like, “WAIT JUST A MINUTE.” Because, a wavy blur? What the hell is a wavy blur? And how was I supposed to recognize something that vague?! I mean, if I didn’t even know what I was looking for, I could have failed the test just because her “wavy blur” criteria were different than my wavy blur criteria! I was seconds away from an wavy blurred existential crisis when I saw the first wavy blur in my peripheral vision. Then I was like, “Oh, yeah, that looks just like a wavy blur. It’s cool.”

But as we progressed through the test, I realized that as soon as I clicked the button that signified that I recognized a wavy blur, the wavy blur would vanish. Sometimes another one appeared immediately in a different place. Other times, there would be a 2-3 second pause before the next wavy blur showed up. As soon as I realized that there was a variation in the time between the wavy blurs, I started to psych myself out. I sat there wondering if there really wasn’t a time variation, but in fact, the times when I thought there wasn’t a wavy blur there really WAS one, but it was just one I wasn’t seeing because I was FAILING THE WAVY BLUR TEST MISERABLY, AND NOT EVEN BECAUSE THE EYE DOCTOR’S NURSE AND I HAVE DIFFERENT INHERENT DEFINITIONS OF THE TERM “WAVY BLUR.”

I never got any answers. As soon as the nerve-wrecking Wavy Blur test was over, we ran through a few other “no wrong answer” kind of tests, and then nurse sent me back to the waiting room where I was forced to contemplate my probable failure, and what life was going to be like when I had to learn how to read braille and navigate busy intersections with my blind-person cane.  I moped because Zack was the one to always chose to be blind when faced with the classic “Would You Rather” scenario of Blind vs. Deaf, but I always chose deaf! And now I was sitting in a waiting room, sure that I was going to be told that I was an incompetent wavy blur identifier and should go ahead and get to work on my Vision Bucket List.

From there I was ushered into the Eye Doctor Hot Seat, where they put you into a dark room with a giant machine that sits right in front of your face and you get asked the same question over and over again, never knowing if you’re getting it right or wrong. “Tell me which one is clearer, this, or this?” the doctor always asks as he flips back and forth between two lenses with differences so minute that no human can detect a difference between them. I sat there and squirmed in my seat. “They both suck?” I’d say, hoping for some kind of validation that I was on the right track. The doctor would confirm my sentiments, but then gracefully force me to make a choice. “Yes,” he’d say, “but does one suck slightly worse than the other?” This is like asking me to tell you which I prefer more between Homer’s Iliad or Homer’s Odyssey. I can’t compare them. To me, they are both the same, and they are both terrible. But the Eye Doctor doesn’t care about my philosophical and literary ramblings. He just wants me to pick A or B. “This, or this?”

Just when you have reached the brink of insanity, it all ends. The doctor finally says, “Okay, how’s this look?” as he pops two lenses down that bring the whole world into crystal clear focus. Life makes sense again. You get the feeling that everything is going to be okay. You even forget about your devastating (possible) failure of the wavy line test until a week later when the UPS man shows up with the cane you ordered from amazon.com while you were in the waiting room.

A Post-Pumpkin Carving Epiphany

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Yesterday I carved a pumpkin for the first time in my life.

Cute, right? It was an accident how the texture of the pumpkin turned out to look like the texture of a New Mexican Mesa in the light of the rising Sun, but it was a happy coincidence.

I worked today, and all day as I moved patients from bed to bed, I felt some soreness in my right chest, not unlike the soreness one would experience if they were to do a set of push-ups during their work out. The trick is, today, that soreness was unilateral. Only on the right side. I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out why the hell I had soreness in my right chest. And then I figured it out. I am sore from carving a pumpkin.

And that’s why I’m going to go ahead and join the crossfit gym. Like, real soon.

On Rice Cake Portion Control

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You know what’s silly? The fact that rice cakes have a serving size of one rice cake. The cylindrical bag comes with two separate vacuum-sealed containers, each containing 7 rice cakes. That’s 14 cakes. The bag says that there are 14 servings per container. The bag is a liar. In all of my years of eating White Cheddar Quaker Rice Cakes, I have never-not-once opened a package of 7 and not eaten every last one of them.

WHO EATS ONE RICE CAKE AT A TIME?

These bags should list the number of servings per container as 2. That’s much more realistic.