Gratuitous life update #2: The State That I Am In

It was a warning shot across my bow, and I count myself lucky that I have an opportunity to fix it before it's too late. Now to follow through!

***

At the urging of my betrothed, I paid a visit to my doctor - - -

Wait, wait, wait. Ever since ol' Doc Beemblossom passed on some years ago, I haven't really had a doctor to speak of. Even so, it had been about. 17 or 18 years since my last visit to someone I could call my family physician. I had gone to various walk-in clinics or ERs since then for a cornucopia of maladies, accidents and hypochondrial heart scares, but as far as a doctor that I know and trust, who knows about me and my bodily quirks and foibles, no.

Anyway, I set about acquiring a new family doctor and found one. (Again, at my wife's urging. She's been on me for years to see a doctor, just to make sure all is as it should be as I cross into the backside of 30.)

(... the short side of time ... Back on the bottom, with no hill to climb.)

(I don't care what you say, I'll put John Conlee up against any of those early '80s country singers any day of the week. "I Don't Remember Loving You," "Rose Colored Glasses," the just-quoted "Backside of 30" ... mmm. About the only real clunker he did was "Common Man," a trite, cliched piece of pablum about being - you guessed it - a common man. [Who drives a common van. His dog ain't got a pedigree. Et cetera.]

(I would imagine that he closes his shows with it these days.)

(Let it be known that, on the date and time of this post, this is the first time in the short history of blogging that John Conlee and Belle and Sebastian - in the title of this post - have been intentionally quoted in such close proximity to one another. Someone call the Guinness Book.)

It took random smoking-related numbness to finally convince me to go (not to mention "get me to quit smoking"). So I went and answered all the questions and got signed up for some blood work. He congratulated me on putting down the cigarettes - how disappointed he would be to see me now, as I guess the rules of quitting smoking don't include "continue to smoke a pack a day."

The results of my blood work came back a short time later. Several of my irrational fears, chief among them being diabetes, did not come to pass, so I was thrilled about that.

But.

"Your cholesterol is moderately high." The nurse practitioner rattled off a set of numbers regarding bad cholesterol, good cholesterol, LDLs and whatnot, none of which I remember save for the overall number of 236.

I can't say that it was a total shock to my system - I've known for years that my diet is pretty lousy. I love my fried foods and my red meat and my Long John Silver's and my McDonald's. I've convincingly faked an allergy to vegetables. So, yeah, the numbers weren't surprising.

But my eyes were opened when I went to my follow-up appointment.

I had a choice to make: did I want to go ahead and get on a cholesterol-lowering drug that I would have to take every day for the rest of my life? Or did I want to make some lifestyle changes and see where we stood in 6 months?

Obviously, I opted for the latter. I'm not ready to start considering "the rest of my life" yet. It seems so finite, and yes, it *is*.

But right now, at 33, I feel like I'm still within the reach of "limitless possibilities," and when you put a punctuation mark on that, it tends to limit the limitless.

Maybe that's just the irrational optimist in me talking.

***

Irrational optimist that I am, I nevertheless moped around the house for a solid week afterward until my wife finally got pissed off about it and let me have it.

There are two types of people in this world:

The first is the kind of person who it can be said, "If he/she ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." It's not that that person is a black cloud, it's just that the sheer force of their personality leads people to do whatever they can to keep them happy.

The other is the kind of person who it can be said, "If he/she ain't happy, then everybody's happy." If you read my old posts about Doom, then you know that that's the kind of person he is. The ludicrousness (is that even a word?) of what comes out of their mouths when in a state of unhappiness is comic gold.

My wife, on the other hand, falls into the former subset of the population. I ended my pity party before the cake was even served and got to the task at hand.

***

So, now what?

I used to joke that the only two things in my house that I didn't read as much as I should are food labels and The Bible.

So I'm reading food labels now and, while I'm still eating a lot of the same things as previously, I eat them much more in moderation.

I've been drinking those little 3-ounce shots of Promise Activ. Phytosterols and all that. Tastes like a tiny smoothie, so I can deal with that.

Spending much more time outside with the boy, planting trees and trying to get a garden in the ground, though the monsoon season in Indiana hasn't allowed for much progress on that end.

Stopped eating donuts. (Like with most things, it's pretty easy if you don't buy them.) Replaced with Cheerios.

All of this with an eye toward October. That's when I have my next round of blood work. If I can get my numbers down where they should be, or at least make significant progress - how hard is it to knock 40 points off your cholesterol in 6 months? - then I'm good to go for a couple of years.

And if not, then I'll have an idea of what "the rest of my life" will entail.

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