Recovery Continues

So August is here and what's happening with my body. By day, I'm feeling pretty good. I can walk more or less normally but my left ankle is still not quite right. After walking 4.7 km today, my left foot was visibly swollen but not painful. Some Arnica applied to the region reduced the swelling. My fingers still feel slightly stiff but I can play the guitar without difficulty and my grip strength has largely returned to normal.

By day things are generally OK but the nights are a little different. Awakening from sleep, I often find my fingers kind of frozen and I need to move them to regain normal mobility. Sometimes my shoulder or wrists can be painful. Overall, I'd say that I'm about 80% of my former self, that is to say my pre-fall self. Whether I'll ever recover the lost 20% remains to be seen. 

I am walking nearly everyday but I've sadly neglected my isometrics. My thymoma is noticeable mainly when I move about in bed at night but during the day it's hardly noticeable. Transiting Uranus will station within a couple of degrees of my natal Moon on September 1st and I'm hoping that this won't lead to any unexpected health problems. I won't go into the astrology here as that's better addressed in the appropriate blog (AstroWatch).

I have been making sure that some days I walk around 10 am when the Sun is rising but it still hasn't reached the meridian. The Sun in Jakarta is too powerful after that to do any sustained walking until about 3 pm. I'm hoping that this will boost my Vitamen D levels.

Monitoring My Exercise And Diet

My resting pulse rate is 63 beats per minute and, with light clothing on, I weigh 70.9 kilograms. I've been walking regularly of a morning, at a fairly brisk pace, and covering about 2.2 kilometers. However, yesterday (Saturday 14th July) I had a not so good day. My right shoulder joint had been hurting in the night and I woke up feeling stiff in my fingers with my ankle causing discomfort as well. I also felt discomfort in my chest when getting out of bed.

Today, Sunday, I feel a lot better comparatively speaking. I wonder if it's diet-related. Yesterday I had my usual toast in the morning following by pasta at two different times of the day plus a couple of pastries in between. On the Thursday and Friday prior my bad Saturday I'd two eggs with mayonnaise on toast, even though I'd been advised to eat only the whites of the eggs and not the yolks. Could this have triggered my subsequent discomfort?

I did some very brief and mild isometric exercises for my arms on either Thursday or Friday. Could this have triggered the discomfort behind my sternum? It's hard to say and thus it's probably a good idea to monitor my intake of food and drink as well as the amount of exercise that I undertake. Should I start another Airtable database or should I record the information using some other software, perhaps a spreadsheet? Before deciding, I should carry my phone with me whenever I leave the house so that any distances that I walk can be recorded. My daily walk around the block is about 2.2 kilometres.

For the moment I've opened a fresh document in Google Docs and will begin recording there. I'll see how that goes. I'm rather averse to phone apps or other online methods of monitoring diet and exercise. A simple pedometer is sufficient for recording distance walked.

State of Play

As my creaking old body approaches its 75th birthday, I've made some changes to my exercise regime. Having mislaid my pantyhose stretch band for a second time, I've taken to doing replacement isometric exercises. I'm finding these are working quite well and my legs are definitely feeling much stronger.

Balancing while standing on one leg for the count of fifty is another exercise for leg strength. Pushing away from the wall with my hands, front on and side on, helps to maintain upper body strength and step-ups provide aerobic exercise. I still go for walks of course but the step-ups are a good alternative if it's raining, if it's the wrong time of day or if I just don't feel like venturing out.

My neck is creaking and cracking and so I make sure to keep my flexibility in that area via neck rotations and various other stretching movements. Living in a house of steps is an added blessing and I keep busy in the garden and doing general cleaning around the house, both of which boost my fitness level. Overall, at the moment, I don't feel too bad. The discomfort in the area of my solar plexus has subsided a little and pain from my broken teeth is quiescent.

Figure 1 shows my median life expectancy based on 2016 data to be 87.17 years (using Wolfram Alpha). The prompt used was "life expectancy for an Australian male born April 3rd 1949":

Figure 1

We'll see about that. What was disturbing is Wolfram Alpha's low predictions for the length of life of Indonesians. Regardless of how long I last, I need to combine long periods of sitting with periods of physical activity. It's quite common for me to be seated watching episodes in a series for two or more hours. This must be balanced by physical activity of some form or another.