Category: Personal

Somehow it wasn’t wrecked by the cats sitting out overnight! (We put a towel over it each night before we finished it.)

The green felt underneath allowed us to move it and even roll it up while we were working on it (it ended up getting worked on in three different spots). But I think it was more of a hindrance than a help, because it was really hard to shift the pieces over when they were a little bit out of alignment.

Today is the last day of my almost-two-weeks-off from work (I decided not to take Monday, December 23 off, although almost everyone else seemed to). We had a mix of busy-and-lazy for most of it: We went to San Francisco one day, Half Moon Bay another day, walked downtown on Christmas Day and got Italian for lunch, watched Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, watched a bunch of TV and movies at home, and had people over to hang out and play some games on New Years Eve afternoon. We’ve also been working on a puzzle, something we haven’t done in many years.

Debbi went back to work on Thursday, but I took a couple more days off, mostly hanging around at home.

But I’ve been feeling kinda down since New Year’s. A little of it is watching “The Time of the Doctor” leading up to midnight on New Year’s Eve – it’s not a very good episode – manipulative and frustrating in various ways – but its manipulativeness certainly includes the obligatory sadness that’s accompanied most Doctor Who regeneration stories since “Logopolis”. But this was the least of it – it just set the tone heading into the new year. (We shoulda just turned on one of the generic New Years Eve shows, but we had inertia after watching the far superior “The Day of the Doctor” previously.)

I think some of it is my age. I’ve been trying to think and talk about my age less since my birthday last year, but it’s difficult sometimes. This year I started thinking that I’ve probably got less than 40 more New Years to experience myself. Realistically unless I get in much better shape, I probably won’t be around to see 2060. We also have our 16-year-old cat, Roulette, who is really in great shape for her age, but we probably won’t have her for many more New Years either, and if she declines like Newton did over his last two years, it won’t be an easy time. Stuff I think of when the calendar rolls over, I guess.

Or maybe it’s a touch of seasonal affective disorder. Or despair over Trump’s latest act of idiocy and its fallout. Or not being ready to go back to work. Or being more ready to go back to work and get back to my routine than I realize. I dunno.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get over it. I have a puzzle to complete.

The first thing that made me realize I’m getting older is that I’m shorter: I’ve lost about an inch from my peak height. A couple of years ago I had to ask them to measure me twice at the start of my physical exam. It didn’t help.

But what made it hit home is that my vision has started going. I’ve always been nearsighted, but around age 47 I started getting what is colloquially called farsighted but which is properly called presbyopia, and which interacts poorly with nearsightedness (because without lenses I can only clearly see things close up, but I can no longer easily change my focus to view things that are close). This has been predictably annoying: Reading small text up close is getting harder. Bright light helps. iPhone flashlights are great for reading the menu in dark restaurants – you may have noticed older people using them. Well, that’s why.

This year I’ve had some new developments. In June I went running one morning as usual. After lunch I went for a walk, also as usual. Around 3 pm I got up to walk to coffee with my cow-orkers, and I had a serious pain behind my right ankle, so bad that I was limping with my foot turned sideways to mitigate the pain. I have no idea what happened, but this was about a week before our flight back east so I decided to give it a few days to see if it got better, by taking time off from running. It did. By Saturday it was a dull ache, and by our vacation it felt almost all better. But it hasn’t completely gone away, although it hasn’t impaired me at all since then. I suspect I pulled my Achilles tendon, but I don’t know how.

The latest thing is the bane of middle-aged overweight guys everywhere: Knee problems. My left knee started hurting when my dad was visiting at the beginning of October, and got worse over the next couple of weeks. And then my right knee started hurting too. So I took a 2-week break from running – though I substituted some walks instead – and things got better. It’s still not 100%, but I’ve been slowly ramping up my running, and have been glad not to have sore knees for the last couple of weeks. Debbi thinks I went too long before replacing my sneakers and inserts, so I replaced them when I started up again.

All of this is strange because I don’t feel older. A little slower, maybe, but I’ve never been terribly athletic and my physical endurance has always been pretty lousy. Most of my cow-orkers are over a decade younger than me, and I don’t feel like I have a problem keeping up with them. I’m just annoyed that some things aren’t working as smoothly as they used to. It could be a lot worse, I realize; this is just normal getting-older stuff.

Anyway, a week and a half ago I was doing some shopping and on impulse I bought myself reading glasses. They help. It’s weird.

Now that I’m fifty, I “get to” start some of those rites of passage for older citizens in our society. The AARP mail has started rolling in, of course, but the other milestone is that yesterday I had a colonoscopy. I wanted to document my experience, partly for anyone searching around for personal accounts of the procedure, and partly for my own reference the next time this rolls around.

Spoiler: The exam didn’t find anything. I don’t know whether I’d be writing this post if it did find something. Writing about medical issues is something which is, well, maybe not frowned upon exactly, but something people often don’t do, due to a lot of different personal and internal pressures, as far as I can tell. I’m not terribly shy about it myself (though TBF I’m also pretty healthy), but I don’t think people really want to hear about it either. But as something which was a pretty significant subject for me over the last week, I decided it seemed reasonable to write it up.

I got a referral for the procedure when I saw my PCP last March, but I put it off for various reasons, not least worry about the difficulty of preparing for it and finding out what the results would be on the other end. But since I knew my schedule would be clearing up early this month, and not wanting to put it off into the holiday season, I made the call and was happy to find out I pretty much had my pick of dates for when to do it. So I scheduled it for noon yesterday (which, for those gliding into this entry in the future, was a Tuesday).

The pre-prep involved picking up the laxative for the day before the exam, and stopping eating nuts and seeds a week before, I guess because those take longer to digest. Although not specifically called out, I also avoided nut products like peanut butter. It also occurred to me that there are incidental seeds in a lot of things, e.g. sesame seeds on buns, those whatever-they-are on the bottom of English muffins, etc. I didn’t kill myself trying to cut out everything, but I avoided anything obvious, trying to generally stay in the spirit of things. I was also supposed to skip aspirin and ibuprofen, which was easier.

The real ‘fun’ started on Monday, when I was supposed to stop eating anything except for white liquids (lemonade, white cranberry & white grape juice, chicken broth, etc.). I did go to work and had a low-energy day. Fasting was not as bad as I thought it would be – my stomach had a dull ache all day, but it wasn’t growling out of control and leaving me weak and woozy. But it was probably the worst part of the preparation.

I left work early and went home to take the laxative (under the brand name SUPREP) at 6 pm. This involved mixing a 6-oz bottle of the stuff with 10 oz of cold water, drinking the whole thing, and then drinking 32 oz more water over the next hour. I had heard a few stories about the taste of the stuff, but it was actually not that bad. It smelled kind of like cherry NyQuil, tasted a little worse, but was pretty easy to chug down with a pause for breath in the middle. Honestly drinking another 32 oz of water over the next hour was harder, because that’s a lot of water in a short time.

My big worry was that the results of the stuff was going to be miserable: Sitting on the toilet for 2-to-3 hours, or dirtying my clothes or furniture, and I was braced for it to have an immediate effect after drinking it. In fact it took about 40 minutes before I felt the effects, and I had the usual amount of control over my bowels throughout the experience. The effects lasted about 4 hours – which is presumably why I had to drink it at 6 pm, so I could get a decent night’s sleep – and overall was not so bad. Better than not being able to eat, honestly.

As my procedure was scheduled for noon on Tuesday, I woke up at my usual time at 6 pm and showered, and then drank the second dose of laxative, and, well, let’s just say that it was pretty clear that the medical brain-trust knew what they were doing to prescribe two doses. The experience was basically the same as the night before, except that I had to stop drinking around 9 am. But I did drink some extra water before that.

Debbi stayed home in order to drive me to and from the appointment and keep an eye on me afterwards, so we went in well before check-in time, and a little after 11 I went through the whole check-in process. Since I would be somewhat sedated during the process, they put some monitors on me and an IV drip. Apparently being dehydrated makes it more difficult to put the needle into a vein, but fortunately they got it in in a single try. That was probably the worst part of the pre-op procedure. Well, that and the fact that I was cold all morning, which they said was a side-effect of the prep procedure.

While they were wheeling me into the room I reflected that the last time I was on a gurney being wheeled around a hospital was when I was 17 having surgery for a pilonidal cyst. (I remember the date because it was the summer of 1986, because I started watching baseball while recovering from that surgery in the hospital.) Before that was probably when I was 7 and had surgery for a hydrocele, which I barely remember except during recovery was the only time I’ve ever found Cheerios to be tasty. I guess I’ve been pretty lucky to have avoided this experience for the last 33 years.

The actual exam had me lying on my left side, but almost as soon as I turned onto it my memory goes blank. I assume the sedative kicked in and I either fell asleep or just got too groggy to remember. The nurse said it’s common for people to not remember or have one brief flashes of memory of the exam. I remember taking up near the end of it and seeing the screen they were looking at, which was weirdly mesmerizing, watching something tunnel around inside my innards. It was like some weird Doctor Who special effect. It was vaguely uncomfortable, but not painful. Then it was done and they wheeled me to toe recovery room.

Debbi met me there and the doctor came in and said that they’d found nothing during the exam, no polyps or anything else they needed to monitor, which means I don’t need to do this for another 10 years. Woo! Apparently I do have a few diverticuli, which the doctor says is very common and is unlikely to cause any problems.

Since I had been sedated, I was instructed not to drive or drink alcohol (or “make important decisions”) for the rest of the day. I think I was still a little groggy – without feeling groggy – because I don’t really remember getting dressed, but I remember everything after that. I basically felt normal, but I trusted that I wasn’t, really.

Debbi drove us home and I ate some soup and an English muffin, and had a quiet rest of the day. Around 3 pm I fell asleep for a couple of hours, and then Debbi made dinner. I was not as ravenously hungry as I’d expected to be, though we did also go out for ice cream. I also felt well enough to go to a walk before dinner (thus keeping my 4-month Apple Watch move goal streak alive!).

This morning was a normal day (plus a call from the doctor’s office to make sure I was feeling okay), and so far no after-effects from anything in the procedure. It’s a big relief to have it over, and to have had a positive outcome. I tried not to worry about it too much, but I did have some anxiety about it regardless. I’m very glad I don’t need to do it again for a decade.

Last weekend I ordered a couple of things with Amazon Prime. They were supposed to be delivered on Tuesday, but Tuesday afternoon I got an e-mail saying my items were delayed because they’d been delivered to the wrong carrier facility. Okay, unusual but not a big deal; I wasn’t in a hurry to get them, really.

Tuesday night I got another e-mail, this time saying my package wouldn’t be delivered at all because it had been damaged. Moreover, it was being returned to the sender and my credit card would be credited.

Which is weird, because Amazon’s site said that both items I’d ordered were still available. Why refund my money rather than send me new items?

Anyway, Thursday I get another e-mail , saying that one of the two items is out for delivery. Yeeeeaaaahhhh, I didn’t believe them. It never showed up. My guess is that it was actually out for delivery to be returned to the sender, and their system didn’t handle that well.

The refund hit my card today, backdated to Thursday. So that was weird, too.

Anyway, I still want the items, so I guess I’ll order them again. One of them was from a small vendor, although it was supposedly shipped by Amazon, but I have a feeling that both items were really shipped by that vendor, and something went wrong somehow. I dunno. Maybe I’ll order them separately this time. Because Amazon Prime means not having to hit a threshold to get free shipping.