• Lose Weight
  Yeah, it’s not the first time I’ve said it, and might not be the last, but failing at it doesn’t make the need go away. It’s worse than ever, and it’s undoubtedly tied to a lot of other health and esteem issues.
• Clean Up The Apartment
  It’s a mess, and I really need to sort through all of my stuff and decide what I really need to keep and what I can throw away. Seriously, I haven’t seen the top of my dining table in months. I have an ISA serial port card in one of these boxes. It’s been over 20 years since I’ve seen a computer that would actually be useful in.
• Get Presentable
  I need new glasses, clothes that are at least semi-fashionable, to keep up with haircuts more often… It’s not really a matter of giving up and conforming; my current ‘style’ is more the result of sloth and apathy than anything else. It doesn’t really make me feel any particular way, and I’m not gaining anything from it, but it does sometimes feel like people don’t take me as seriously as I’d like. Gotta get that weight down first though…
• Get A Car
  Man, I don’t even have a driver’s license. It’s never really felt like I’ve had to get one, but as time goes on it does feel like the lack of one is limiting my options more and more, whether it be in determining where I can live, just getting out to see people, traveling without having to tolerate the alternatives, etc.
• Develop A New Hobby
  Yeah, I’ve always loved computers and video games, but…I admittedly probably spend a bit too much time on them. It’s kind of depressing when I look at another person and wonder what I might have in common with them and the answer winds up being “well, maybe they have a level 75 paladin…” I’ve always kind of wanted to be able to draw at a level slightly beyond stick figures at least, so I need to crack open that art instruction book a friend got me and put some more time into it.
• Make More Friends
  Not that there’s anything wrong with you guys, of course (assuming anyone other than Google’s bots actually reads this), but without more local friends there’s just too many nights left alone, no reason to get out of the house, no face-to-face meetings to develop relationships further…
• Focus On Work More
  It feels like I’ve been slacking off a bit too much at the office. Not taking enough initiative, not keeping up with the current trends and techniques, not coding as robustly as I should… I don’t know if a new job is really the answer as the current one is still pretty good, so…I don’t know yet.

I’m 37 years old. I should have had this crap sorted out ages ago.

It’s not just so that the ladies will swoon over my magnificent abs, but I really need to start being more concerned about my general health. I’ve been feeling terrible lately, it’s only going to get worse if I don’t do anything about it, and I remember how great I felt when I was actually close to a normal weight.

The plan is pretty much the same as before: a reasonable calorie budget (around 1600-1800 per day for now), and more exercise. That means giving up things that had become bad habits like the morning brownie/rice krispie treat, mid-day snacks from the office vending machine, and stopping by the store every day and picking up more food for dinner than I really need. If I have a light breakfast bar in the morning and some simple soup or stew for dinner, that still leaves me enough calories for a decent lunch, so I don’t have to give up all my old habits.

Exercise for now will be limited to walking to work when I can. I hope to eventually get back to small workouts and walks around the neighbourhood again, but that’ll have to wait until…other problems have been fixed.

It was also a bit of a surprise that it had taken this long to get a summons (the first in my life), but I guess we just don’t have enough crime…

So it’s off by about 30%, which isn’t too bad for an inexact science like this. I suspected that the calorie counts on some days might be underreported a bit due to uncertainty about sizes and inexact matches in the database, and the physical activity level is very rough and leaves a lot of room for error.

If I assume that the calories consumed is correct, then the average number of calories I burn per day is actually closer to (12,227 + 2.2 x 3500) / 7 = 2847. If I assume that the calories burned is correct, then I’m actually consuming (22,337 – 2.2 x 3500) = 14,637 calories, about 20% higher than what I entered. But the reality is probably somewhere in the middle between the two.

This scale also measures body fat, though that won’t really matter until towards the end (right now all it really needs to say is “too high”). It’s debatable how accurate these kinds of scales are for that, but it’s fine as long as I can actually see a difference occurring.

You’ll also be able to click on the “Change” field on the right for a graph of my progress. Well, once there’s more than one data point…

I’ve also been avoiding pop for the last couple weeks, as I used to drink a lot of diet colas but started to get worried about all the caffeine. The local Safeway has a lot of lightly-flavoured waters, but it’s tougher whenever I go to a local cafe for lunch or the food courts at the malls, as then it’s either pop, way-overpriced small bottles of water, or nothing.

So far I think it’s made me a bit more tired in the mornings, but that might be because it’s affected my sleep a bit. I’m getting to sleep more easily, but still waking up a bit tired; I’d been getting by on 6-7 hours of sleep before, but I seem to need a bit more now.

But that was a couple years ago, and I’ve been moping around in my current condition for far too long, so it’s time to do something about it again. Roughly the same plan as before, as it was working fairly well (the main problem was psychological), with a couple twists:

1) I can’t really start out exercising like I did before, due to some complications, so I’ll be relying mostly on controlling food in order to kick off the weight loss until I reach a point where it’s more practical.

2) And in order to track food, I’m going to try using The Daily Plate, and you can even spy on what I’m eating here. It won’t be entirely accurate as you sometimes have to fudge or guess the numbers a bit (damned if I know the exact weight of the noodles in the Chinese food I had for lunch), or settle for a close match in their database, but it’s better than nothing.

Not with DDR, the primary cliche of geek exercise, though. Instead, I found a title called yourself!fitness, that’s supposed to analyze your current fitness, set up a workout program depending on what you want to focus on (weight loss, upper body strength, flexibility, etc.), coach you through the exercises, and track your progress. I have it set for weight loss for now, but the other goals will come in useful as well, lest I wind up thin-but-wimpy… You can also tell it if you have any extra equipment like hand weights or an exercise ball, and it will incorporate additional exercises using those. There are also different difficulty levels, so that you can bump it down to something easier if you’re having trouble keeping up, or ramp it up if you’re not exerting yourself enough (for example, at lower levels you do bent-knee push-ups instead of proper full-body ones).

I originally set it up for half-hour sessions every day, but hesitated and set it to 15 minutes for the first day, just to test. The workout went well enough, but upon waking up this morning I was still too sore to do a morning workout as I had planned, so I’m definitely way out of shape and can forget those 30-minute sessions for now.

The only problems so far are that it assumes that you have a lot more free space around you than I have in my living room, and it takes a while to familiarize yourself with the different exercises. Each workout goes through a number of different stages and exercises, and by the time I’d figured out how to match my movements to hers, that part would be half-over. And, of course, you look like an idiot while doing most of these, so make sure the blinds are closed…

There’s a meal planner as well, for sticking to a certain calorie limit. I’m a horrible cook and lazy though, so screw that. I’ve got better things to do than track down huge lists of exotic ingredients every day. :P

Now if only they had a 360 version so I could earn gamerscore points…

No, I’m starting to think that the answer may actually be that I’m afraid of success. Succeeding always sounds great, of course, but it always brings additional complications, responsibilities, and other unknown factors into your life, and I think that’s what scares me the most. I’ve gotten comfortable in my little life as it is, and become suspicious of any potential changes to it.

Damned if I know how to fix it, though.

(Warning: long, boring, full of self-pity, and possibly TMI)

For the past few years, I’d been having attacks of moderate abdominal pain. They only occurred once every few months or so, would start as a slight ache after having a bit too much to eat, and intensify later on in the evening or night. I thought it was just plain old indigestion or heartburn, due to the correlation with food and since it would go away after an hour or two after taking some Pepto or Rolaids. Just part of the process of turning into an old fart, right?

Well, around a month ago, I had an attack that was slightly different. A minor ache that started just after a group pizza lunch on Wednesday at the office flared up to a full attack sometime around midnight. The pain was only slightly stronger than usual, but still strong enough that I paced around the apartment just to try and get my mind off it, and sleep was out of the question. It didn’t really seem any different than the previous times though, until the vomiting started a couple hours later. Normally I’m like Seinfeld, in that I couldn’t even remember the last time I threw up, so that was definitely unusual. I kept waiting it out though, hoping it would clear itself up as usual.

When 5am rolled around without any relief and a couple more visits to the porcelain bowl, I finally said to myself “fuck this.” Not being very familiar with the medical community, I wasn’t sure if I should head to a clinic or what first, but offhand I didn’t know any that were open that early anyway, so I called a cab and headed to the emergency entrance at the Foothills hospital. If you’ve never been to the emergency admitting of a hospital, it’s not nearly as hectic as TV might lead you to believe. Unless you have trauma or are about to keel over dead, you just get to talk to bored clerks as they fill out forms, interspersed with waiting in a hallway until the next person comes along with more forms.

Eventually though, they led me to an emergency bed, where I got to put on the traditional gown and wait for the doctor. The nurses gave me some morphine for the pain, but it didn’t seem to do much good and just triggered my nausea instead, leading to a scramble to find a plastic bowl. The doctor arrived, and after some poking and prodding, came up with a potential suspect that I wasn’t expecting at all: gallstones. I was whisked away for an ultrasound, which quickly confirmed that my gallbladder was indeed inflamed and full of gallstones, one of which was probably firmly stuck in the bile duct.

The doctor and I discussed options, but there really aren’t very many when it comes to this. There are drugs which can dissolve the gallstones and sonic techniques to break them up, like kidney stones, but the drugs are expensive and neither solution gets rid of them entirely, so they’d just be back again in a year or two. Surgery to remove the gallbladder entirely is really the best option for people who can withstand it, since it fixes the problem once and for all. The surgery is usually done laparoscopically, so the impact is pretty low and recovery fairly quick.

They couldn’t send me home in my current condition though, as the pain still wasn’t going away, so they admitted me to a regular bed and put me on an antibiotic regimen to try and reduce the inflammation. If that was successful, they could then schedule surgery at a time more convenient to both the hospital and myself (which could have been a week, or ten months down the road, depending on your opinion of the state of our hospitals :P). After a day and a half on the antibiotics, with only intermittent sleep, the pain had gone down by about half but was still there. Based on that and the blood work, they must have decided that it wasn’t working well enough, and Saturday morning I was notified that they had put me on the emergency surgery list.

It’s still a relatively low-priority operation compared to other emergencies that they have to handle though, so I still had to wait a while. I watched some soccer, my mother arrived that afternoon to help out, and later on in the evening I tried to get some sleep. It didn’t last long though, and at around 11pm they woke me up and told me that it was time. I didn’t even know that they still did surgeries that late, and thought they’d just bumped it to the next day. Preparation for it was fairly uneventful; they wheeled me around a lot, I talked to the anaesthetist and answered questions about my medical history for the zillionth time, signed some forms, and got wheeled into the OR, where they strapped me down, plugged me in, and knocked me out.

When I woke up, I was full of gas. Laparoscopic surgeries pump your abdomen full of carbon dioxide, and after the surgery your body suddenly has to reabsorb a lot of it, so I was already burping nonstop as I regained consciousness. That only added to my disorientation, and I was apparently babbling incoherently (or trying to, between burps) about something or other. The staff soon realized that I wasn’t freaking out for any particularly important reason, and left me to belch myself silly in the recovery room. It was about 3am by this point, and I soon fell asleep.

The next day, I was feeling…different. The gallbladder pain was gone, but it was replaced by intermittent rolling waves of pain, from gas. There were still pockets trapped in my body, which would gradually get reabsorbed over the next few days as I moved around. There was also pain from the surgery sites whenever I moved around, and I was hooked up to a machine that would deliver morphine on demand, but again it didn’t seem to do much for me, so I barely used it. My mobility was also limited due to post-surgery fatigue, so there was also a set of pneumatic sleeves around my legs, to prevent blood clots from being immobile. Recovery was fairly quick though; by the afternoon I was moving around a lot more and by the next morning a lot of the gas pain was gone. By Monday afternoon I was feeling a lot better and had no trouble getting back on solid food (I had had nothing to eat or drink in the two and a half days between being admitted and the surgery itself, aside from an IV), so I was able to be discharged that afternoon. Total time in the hospital was about four and a half days.

There was still one slight glitch, though. After being discharged, I was supposed to call the doctor’s office and set up an appointment later that week for the removal of the surgical drain that was still inserted. When I called though, the receptionist said that they usually don’t take them out until after two or three weeks. Yikes! She said she’d check with the doctor and get back to me, though. It turned out that the doctor thought that I’d already had the drain removed, and mine was confused with a long-term drain for major surgeries. Apparently the drain would have been removed if I had stayed another day, but I was feeling better and discharged earlier than expected, so it wasn’t.

Luckily, I was still able to get in to see him and have it removed the next day. (Having a piece of rubber tubing pulled out from inside you feels weird.) This was also the first chance I’d had to talk to him post-surgery, and I discovered that the surgery had lasted longer than expected. He almost had to abandon the laparoscopic approach and revert to a traditional incision due to heavy scarring on the gallbladder from those previous attacks. He was skilled enough to make it work in the end, fortunately, since a large incision would have required a much longer recovery.

Recovery wasn’t completely over, as I still had twinges of pain from the surgery sites, bouts of lightheadedness, and digestive problems from all the antibiotics. It was just a matter of suffering through them though, and by the second week home I was feeling well enough to head back to work.

And now the incision scars and drain site are pretty much healed up. And forming dimples on my belly… Overall, the experience went fairly smoothly thanks to the hospital staff. But I still hope I won’t be back there anytime soon…