Saturday, September 25, 2004
These last couple days I have eaten WAAAY too much sodium. It has been a busy week: one of my pet guinea pigs is performing in a play at the university where I teach (long story, but she's filling in for the part of Groucho the kitten, in Act 1 Scene 1 of "You Can't Take It With You.") So Friday was: teach class, run to the Quilt Show for my volunteer shift, realize I hadn't eaten lunch and wasn't going to get dinner till late at night, so I bought food at the concession stand at the quilt show. Needless to say, concession stands in public venues don't have low-sodium foods; they all tend toward the frankfurter-frito pie-popcorn end of things. So I had a chili dog. Then after the show, I ran home, we dropped Persephone off at the theatre, and went to hear the symphony, for which we had tickets. Then we drove back to the theatre, picked Persephone up, brought her home, and finally had supper. Today, I had time for a real lunch, but not the energy, after the two days of doing stuff all day, for a good homemade dinner, so after volunteering at the quilt show - and possibly stirring up a little business for my medical ID bracelets :-) -- we dropped Purr (her nickname) off at the theatre, and had fried shrimp for supper at a Vietnamese place in the poor-Hispanic-and-black area of Austin. Good shrimp, came with french fries and shrimp-fried-rice. I feel reasonably certain that the rice alone contained more than 2000 mg of sodium.
This fiscal year I'll be on the state retirement system's insurance plan; unfortunately, its prescription benefit is not quite as good as the city health plan, so I'll be paying more for most of my prescriptions. For starters, there's a $50 deductible per year per script. Ick. I keep thinking about the mail order part of the plan, where one can get 3 months for the price of two - but the last time I tried that, I constantly had to worry about stuff getting left out in the Texas summer heat and humidity. I'll have to see if this plan would be willing to ship via Post Office rather than UPS, so I could have it delivered to my PO Box, where it would stay indoors till I picked it up, rather than out on my back porch, subject to weather, passers-by, and who knows what-all. Sigh, another thing to remember to check on.
I get the new crown, to replace the one that fell off a rear molar a few weeks ago, on Monday. I guess I'm lucky; as long as I don't need dental work that requires general anesthesia, there's nothing in all these medications that interferes with dental work. Local anesthesia is fine, and should I perchance need painkillers and/or antibiotics, CHF and its medications are not incompatible with the opiod painkillers like Hydrocodone, nor with antibiotics. There are some heart conditions where dental work would be a lot more tricky. As long as I can still take acetaminophen (e.g., Tylenol) for mild pain, and hydrocodone or oxycodone for more serious pain, it doesn't bother me at all that I can't take any of the aspirin/__profen painkillers.
Anyway, after the last few days - and tomorrow will be just as bad, since there's Quilt Show, a matinee at the theatre, and, if it's not pouring rain, the community band I play in will be playing a concert in the park in the evening, so I'm sure we'll be catching whatever the heck food we can -- I think next week will be a mostly fruit salad sort of week. I'll just go buy a whole bunch of late peaches, early apples, early pears, a few bananas, and so forth, and have those for lunch every day. Whee!
This fiscal year I'll be on the state retirement system's insurance plan; unfortunately, its prescription benefit is not quite as good as the city health plan, so I'll be paying more for most of my prescriptions. For starters, there's a $50 deductible per year per script. Ick. I keep thinking about the mail order part of the plan, where one can get 3 months for the price of two - but the last time I tried that, I constantly had to worry about stuff getting left out in the Texas summer heat and humidity. I'll have to see if this plan would be willing to ship via Post Office rather than UPS, so I could have it delivered to my PO Box, where it would stay indoors till I picked it up, rather than out on my back porch, subject to weather, passers-by, and who knows what-all. Sigh, another thing to remember to check on.
I get the new crown, to replace the one that fell off a rear molar a few weeks ago, on Monday. I guess I'm lucky; as long as I don't need dental work that requires general anesthesia, there's nothing in all these medications that interferes with dental work. Local anesthesia is fine, and should I perchance need painkillers and/or antibiotics, CHF and its medications are not incompatible with the opiod painkillers like Hydrocodone, nor with antibiotics. There are some heart conditions where dental work would be a lot more tricky. As long as I can still take acetaminophen (e.g., Tylenol) for mild pain, and hydrocodone or oxycodone for more serious pain, it doesn't bother me at all that I can't take any of the aspirin/__profen painkillers.
Anyway, after the last few days - and tomorrow will be just as bad, since there's Quilt Show, a matinee at the theatre, and, if it's not pouring rain, the community band I play in will be playing a concert in the park in the evening, so I'm sure we'll be catching whatever the heck food we can -- I think next week will be a mostly fruit salad sort of week. I'll just go buy a whole bunch of late peaches, early apples, early pears, a few bananas, and so forth, and have those for lunch every day. Whee!
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Whoo hoo! My ejection fraction is up to 25%!! Still not healthy, but a significant improvement over 15-20%!!!
