Unwellitude – Another Update
Posted: Wed 3 July, 2024 Filed under: Domestic, Health, Thoughts Leave a comment »So, six weeks after the initial Unwellitude happened, my chest was still fairly well stuffed, ongoing coughing, and generally feeling crappy.
At night I was starting to make noises like the Predator, which is never a good sign.
So I finally got round to making an appointment with my GP, and saw them yesterday. (On a side-note, pretty impressed – called them Monday afternoon, not expecting anything to be available ’til next week, and instead got a slot at 8am on Tuesday!)
Diagnosis? A nasty chest infection – they wouldn’t say which one, but from previous experience and having done some reading, I’d say pneumonia is the most likely candidate. So a prescription for a week’s worth of hefty-dose Amoxicillin, and we’ll see what happens.
Ongoing Unwellitude
Posted: Sun 16 June, 2024 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Health, Single Life 3 Comments »Thankfully it’s not been non-stop Unwell, but everything’s taken a long time to finally start sodding off.
I was doing OK at the time of the last post, although the cough hadn’t quite Fucked Off yet. That stuck around for the next couple of weeks – not entirely surprisingly, as I was (against advice) busy and doing stuff, and not giving my body a lot of time off.
Then last weekend (the 8/9th of June, if anyone’s counting) I did a day-trip to Manchester (see above about not giving myself time off) for a restaurant visit. (Which was excellent, and well worth the trip) My table companion had been doing a lot of air travel and so on, and also had a similar cough to me.
I *think* that what happened there was that I picked up a second blast of what had already hit me. Or, if not the exact same thing, then at least bloody close to it, but different enough to get past any already-set-up immunity.
So this week was a kind of return to how I was a few weeks back. It didn’t mess me up *as* much, but still left me with a couple of very rough days.
It seems to be back in abeyance now, and hopefully that’ll also mean that this dry cough has a chance to piss off as well. We’ll see.
Unwell
Posted: Wed 29 May, 2024 Filed under: Covid, Domestic, Health 1 Comment »Over the last three weeks, I’ve been unwell – nothing major, “just” a seriously heavy cold, but it’s absolutely knocked me for six.
I say “heavy cold”, because despite symptoms including about 60% of the current “Is it Covid?” guidelines, it never showed up as Covid on an LFT test. Not even the thinnest of thin blue lines. But it’s *felt* like Covid, and as a result I kept myself out the way of everything for two weeks.
It all started with a sore throat (almost like the feel of tonsilitis) , temperature changes (feeling both too hot and too cold) and head cold – the combination of which meant I felt awful and didn’t actually sleep for three days. That lead on to some deeply weird and unpleasant sleep-deprivation side-effects, and a feeling of deep oddness.
Once I did finally get some sleep, the dreams were strange and uncomfortable. I won’t detail them here (because telling people about dreams is deeply effing dull) but they’ve added to the ongoing sense of slight disconnection with things. I know it’ll settle down again, but *wow*, it’s been odd.
For some reason it’s also altered some core things – appetite has changed, body clock is buggered, an ongoing awareness of exhaustion, and even a change in the amount of Coke Zero I’m drinking.
I’m pretty much through it all now – albeit still occasionally coughing up chunks of Finest Green™ – but it’s definitely been No Fun.
ColdFree
Posted: Tue 14 February, 2023 Filed under: Domestic, Health Leave a comment »Following on from last weeks “Bleurgh” post about having a cold, I’m happy to say that it’s now faded off, as expected.
It’s been pretty manky along the way, and I had a couple of days of being deeply under-the-weather, but it’s all eased off again.
Happy day.
Cold
Posted: Thu 9 February, 2023 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Health 2 Comments »I’ve not been feeling up to writing much recently. Primarily it’s down to my usual combination of keeping myself busy, a lack of impetus, and keeping on thinking “You know, I really should write something”. However, this week that’s also been tempered by the addition of a large and rotten cold. (And yes, it’s just a cold – nothing flu-based or Coviddy, thankfully)
I don’t get them that often, and bloody hate it when I do have one. For whatever reason, I just end up with a streaming nose, and currently look like Rudolph.
It started on Saturday, and has got steadily heavier through to today, so hopefully it’ll now start to ease off a bit before the weekend!
All fun and games. And snot, of course. Lots and lots of that.
*Sigh*
Working It Out
Posted: Mon 9 January, 2023 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Getting Organised, Health, Travel Leave a comment »Over the last five years I’ve been involved with a fitness group in Bedford that was set up for overweight men over 40. We started as part of a larger organisation that did three months of longer sessions including an hour of information about nutrition, portion sizes etc., and an hour of physical exercise routines. It was a fairly decent programme, and certainly helped some of the group with losing weight.
Once that first course was over, the organisation lost the contract they had with the local authorities, so it all collapsed a bit. However, we worked with the trainer who did the exercise side, found a village hall in Bedford that could/would take us, and spawned off into our own group – and then two other related ones in other nearby locations where that organisation had also held courses.
The trainer turned out to be fairly disorganised and flaky, but it gave us a good grounding in what we wanted, and we ended up with a decent group that worked fairly well and met twice a week for an hour’s workout session. Not really enough to enforce weight loss, but also far better than nothing.
Just under three years ago the trainer buggered off to an overseas posting, and our group was the only one that had anyone daft enough to step up and keep it going, organising the sessions and workouts, as well as paying for the centre we used and so on. The trainer came back to take it all back, but proved to be even flakier, and quit completely about eighteen months ago.
So at that point I took it over completely. I sorted out insurance, organised workouts, and sorted out stuff that had always been promised previously but had never appeared. I’ve kept it going since then, and it’s been fairly successful, keeping about 80% of the initial members.
When I moved, it was just coming up to the end of the current quarter’s sessions, but without enough time to hand it over cleanly to someone else – so I made the decision that I’d be the one to keep it running ’til the end of 2022. It’s added a lot of mileage over the last three months, and been a bit of a bind, but in general it’s been worth the effort.
Now, though, I’m done. Things didn’t work out perfectly on timing, so last week was my final session – and today is the first time since moving here that I’m not now belting down the M1 to do the group and then come home. And that’s a very odd feeling after so long (both there and here) but also quite a nice one.
I’m honestly not sure if the group will continue now I’m done with it. The other members have said they want to do it, but no-one’s been prepared to take on the whole thing so it’s now being “run” by three of them (which amuses me quite a bit, having done the entire thing on my own as well as that extra dollop of mileage in the last three months) and we’ll see how it goes. I’ve been able to hand it over as ethically as possible – they’ve got a whole load of prepared workouts and so on, so it should actually be easy to run, but… I don’t know. I hope it does, but I’m not holding out much hope.
But anyway, I’m going to be sitting here doing my own thing on a Monday evening for the first time in far too long, and I’m pretty happy about that.
Health Check
Posted: Tue 22 November, 2022 Filed under: Covid, Domestic, Health, Thoughts Leave a comment »I usually try to get a fairly regular health check every couple of years with my GP, just to keep an eye on things (and with particular awareness of the family history with a whole horde of fun conditions) However, what with Covid, lockdowns and life in general, it hadn’t happened since 2018. I was just about due for the 2020 one when all hell broke loose, and my GP refused to do anything except urgent on-the-day appointments which I try to not take up (none of what I’m doing is urgent, and there’s plenty of people with more urgent concerns than me getting a bloody health check!)
So anyway, when I moved I registered with a new GP, got a message a couple of weeks ago that I was due for a health check, and booked it in.
That day was today. And I’m pleased to say that it all went well. They took bloods for further analysis (nothing to worry about, all part of the process) but the highlights so far are :
- Blood pressure of 140/70. Absolutely fine and within NHS acceptable levels.
- Pulse – about 70. Not ideal, but nowhere near awful.
- BMI / Weight – too high, but that’s nothing unusual. They’re both absolutely normal for me, so I’m not going to worry too much. As always, I’d like to lose some, but nothing so far has really worked, so 2023 is going to involve some other stuff.
- Cardiovascular Risk – so far (and this one is also connected with those blood tests, so it may change) my results indicate I’m at something like a 5% risk of having a heart attack in the next decade.
I’m also booked to get further blood taken in a couple of weeks in order for proper checks of some of those family-history points.
I’ll also get a call in a couple of weeks to go over the results properly, but for now I’m happy with these data points, and happy to have been able to get it all done again with a bare minimum of hassle and inconvenience.