The Morning After

Oh dear. 15 posts to this blog for 2022 compared to 100 for my mathematics blog. It's clear where my priorities are. Nearly all my days are sober nowadays but on New Year's Eve I did cut loose and downed about one and half bottles of wine/champagne. The next morning I felt fine physically but not psychologically. For about three days afterwards, I didn't feel myself psychologically. 

Perhaps my astral body had been knocked out of alignment with its physical counterpart. I didn't feel all that comfortable in my physical body. It was only yesterday, January 4th, that I felt more or less my old self. It wasn't a comfortable experience and I'll think twice before I indulge in the demon drink again anytime soon. Perhaps the link between my astral and physical bodies is more fragile than it used to be in my youth and more easily disrupted.

I do know that I need to be more attentive to my body and more protective of it. To this end I've made my leg strengthening exercises a more or less daily routine along with some full squats and hand grip exercises. I regularly keep my neck flexible by use of appropriate stretches and rotations. I keep busy around the house, going up and down the many steps within it, which proves a good source of exercise in itself. There's a lot more I could do of course but then again any excess on my part is quickly punished. If I do expand my exercise regime, I need to do it by small increments.

My thymoma is quiescent but always present, its effects being felt whenever I put any stress on the area surrounding the solar plexus. When I was heading off to attend a twenty year reunion at a school I used to teach at, I was feeling a little nervous and had an attack of gastric reflux which was unusual for me. This might or might not have been related to the thymoma. Sometimes I forget about it altogether, for a day or two at least.

I keep clipping health articles that I come across to Pocket. I should review some of the articles here while I'm at it. Here's one that caught my attention (link):

Minute-long bursts of vigorous exercise during daily tasks linked with lower risk of death: study

“A few very short bouts totalling three to four minutes a day could go a long way, and there are many daily activities that can be tweaked to raise your heart rate for a minute or so.”

I've long believed this to be true but still fail to practise it because of an ingrained belief that I have to embark on an "exercise session" which I habitually procrastinate about undertaking. If only I could regularly undertake a brief burst of activity whenever the idea of doing so came to mind. 

This site is useful in providing specific burst activities and helpful diagrammatic summaries:

Some exercises, involving bending over, are not suitable for me. When I do this, I really feel the effects of the thymoma putting pressure on things. I'm lucky that the house I live in has so many steps, as this means that even normal movement around the house involves exercise.

Internet to the Rescue

 

The growth on my bottom eyelid had been causing me increasing trouble over the past weeks and months. Recently it the growth had become quite sensitive to the touch and contemplated seeking help at a hospital or skin care clinic. 

Fortunately I first sought help on the Internet and it was quick and easy to find. The best suggestion concerned the use of a compress made by adding grains of rice to a sock, tying it off and heating it in the microwave for about 30 seconds. The compress is then applied to the eye. I did this several times over a couple of days and miraculously the growth shrivelled and disappeared.

I shudder to think what might have happened to me had I sought "medical help" (those two words are almost an oxymoron nowadays). The experience was a valuable one in that it reminded me to attempt to heal myself first.

A Therapeutic Shot

Although it's been several weeks now since I've imbibed coffee, I decided today to indulge in a cup again in an effort to reestablish a more regular sleep pattern. For some time now I've fallen into the habit of sleeping for about four hours during the day and another four hours at night. The two periods are widely separated. 

The problem has become more acute of late as I seemed to be sleeping far more than I should be. I woke up today about 1am and normally I would have slept or still be sleeping now at 2pm. Instead I decided to drink a cup of coffee in an effort to stimulate myself to stay awake until after dark. By the time the caffeine wears off, it will hopefully be around 7pm to 8pm and I can sleep for eight or so hours and get up around 3pm to 4pm.

Balzac's work habits were legendary. He wrote from 1 am to 8 am every morning and sometimes even longer. Balzac could write very rapidly; some of his novels, written with a quill, were composed at a pace equal to thirty words per minute on a modern typewriter. His preferred method was to eat a light meal at five or six in the afternoon, then sleep until midnight. He then rose and wrote for many hours, fueled by innumerable cups of black coffee. He often worked for fifteen hours or more at a stretch; he claimed to have once worked for 48 hours with only three hours of rest in the middle. Source.

That's the plan anyway. I can only wait and see what happens. So far the caffeine is kicking in and I'm feeling "stimulated". I'm ready to write that novel that everyone has inside of them. I can understand what propelled Balzac, an inveterate coffee addict, to write as prodigiously as he did. The danger is that I'll revert to my previous addiction, a problem with every addict. While I'm tempted to indulge in an early morning cup of coffee on a regular basis, I certainly won't go back to drinking tea for the remainder of the day as I used to do. I'll stick to water.

Health-wise I seem to be OK but I find myself thinking that every twinge or pang is the harbinger of my demise. It's remarkable that my body has held up for this long (almost 74 years). I was watching a video of a young woman living in a van who a couple of years before suffered some health crisis that required the removal of her entire large intestine. She needs to use a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. It made me realise how fortunate I was to have enjoyed good health for so long. My only health crisis occurred in late July of 2016 when I needed to have my gall bladder removed. Hopefully my next health crisis will be far off and will be my last. 

Overdoing It

After feeling quite fit and healthy following my caffeine abstinence, I embarked on some reasonably intensive physical activities around the house over a couple of days. I soon payed the price and I've been feeling poorly for a couple of days now. The discomfort in my chest has returned and my energy levels are low.

I can plead guilty to most of the above. I could see that cleaning needed to be done and I determined to do it but at what cost? It's disconcerting to find myself physically challenged by activities that a few years ago I would have completed with ease. Any intense activity involving the upper body will quickly lead to chest discomfort.

Abstaining from all upper body physical exertion however, is likely to lead to an acceleration of the inevitable age-related sarcopenia. While I need to be physically active and must remember not to overdo it.

Post Caffeine

It's been more than a couple of weeks now then I quit caffeine and I can say that I haven't felt this good in a long time. I'm sleeping better, my head is clearer and I have more energy. With our maid gone, I'm finding that just doing chores around the house is sufficient exercise for me. Fortunately, our house has many steps and this is what makes the difference. I'm not roaming around on the one level but constanty climbing or descending. 

It was only a couple of days ago that I resumed my leg exercises after a break of a couple of months. I want to continue these. It was last night that I resumed my faux sit-ups but paid the price today with discomfort in my solar plexus area. Prior to this I'd been feeling very little discomfort. I'm debating whether to continue these or not. As usual I launched into the faux sit-ups at my pre-break levels, ignoring common sense that would have warned too much too quickly.

Normally I weigh myself before breakfast but today, even after eating a breakfast of two pieces of toast and two cups of water, I weighed just 72.5 kg which I'm happy about. Overall though, the increased feeling of well-being is more than adequate compensation for foregoing the stimulation of caffeine via tea and coffee. The world may still run on coffee but not my world. I'm finally free of it. 

Illness

It was on August 24th that felt unwell after having breakfast of avocado on toast with a cup of coffee. The symptoms that followed over that day and the next two were identical to those that I'd suffered some months before when I suddenly stopped my consumption of caffeine: aching hip joints, general malaise and acute brain fog.

I can only assume that my symptoms this time were also a product of caffeine withdrawal. Despite giving up caffeine, I had slowly returned to my old ways and by the time of the morning in question I was really back to where I'd started. My body is telling me quite firmly to give caffeine up again and this time forever. 

It's unfortunate but, like alcohol, I know that as my body ages it becomes more sensitive to toxins that I was able to tolerate in my youth and it's saying it can't cope with caffeine anymore. I need to listen. I've also stopped drinking the goat's milk that I was prescribed. I don't think that was helping me either.

So now, instead of tea and coffee, it's just clear water and, fortunately here in Indonesia, it's not fluoridated. My weight is back down in 72.8 kg which is good and hopefully I can shed a couple of more kilograms. I still get fatigued easily and there's no denying that I'm not the man I once was but all I can do is carry on.

Six Weeks of Indolence

After six weeks of holidays, I've eventually returned home and my weight was disappointing but not surprising. In shorts only, I weighed 74.5 kg. I say not surprising because I did very little exercise, even neglecting my leg strengthening exercises with the stretch band. I'm basically back to zero so anything I do from this point on will be of benefit.

Just before heading back home, I had the opportunity to have a brief session with my psychic healer who said that my lungs and heart were not in synch, meaning that my rate of breathing and my heart rate were out of synch. He recommended that I consume three sachets of SuperGoat per day. I was somewhat surprised at this prescription, after all drinking goat's milk sweetened with palm sugar isn't exactly my style. See Figure 1.

However, I have faith in his healing and have been dutifully consuming my three sachets daily for some days now. I can say that I've noticed some definite improvement in my condition since beginning the regime and I'm motivated to continue. My condition, as I've diagnosed it, is a thymoma or thymic cyst but my healer made no mention of kelanjar  or gland this time as he'd done on a previous occasion. 

Figure 1

Meanwhile I need to get my body back into some kind of shape, slowly of course. The goat's milk has provided me with a little more energy to embark on this enterprise. Before I was feeling too lethargic to even begin. At this point in my life, the goal is to simply hold on. Sooner or later, something will carry me off but hopefully it will be quick and, in the interim, I would like to maintain an acceptable level of physical health and cognitive functioning.

HOLD ON