Tag: health

In which I’m still alive

On By Luther M. SilerIn WorkLeave a comment

I managed to make it back to work today for the first time since, well, last Thursday, and the first two adults to lay eyes on me both told me to take my ass back home again. I failed to take that advice; one of the most confounding things about this recent bout of being sick is that it’s consistently over by noon each day, only to resurge again the next morning, and I figured that since I made it to work without throwing up I could probably make it through the day.

Correct, as it turns out, and I know you all finished that last paragraph thinking “of course he didn’t,” because that’s how these posts almost always go. But no! I not only made it through the day, it was a pretty decent day, all told. I will likely do a Math Teacher Statistics Nerd post about my NWEA scores as soon as the last couple show up for me tomorrow; I have tested all but four of my students, and as none of the four have been to school at any point in the last two weeks I strongly suspect they’re not going to be in tomorrow, which is the last Friday of the semester and the end of the testing window. I want to wait until I have all the numbers I’m going to get before I start geeking out about them, but the early version is this: the good numbers appear to have held or in some cases actually gotten better, with my first and second hour doing particularly well.

… and I’ve spent twenty minutes staring at the screen and idly websurfing, so I guess I’ve said what I have to say for tonight? We’ll see if I make it through tomorrow. I’d like yesterday to have been my last sick day of 2021 but who the hell knows.

I think I’m pregnant

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

Anybody know any good reason why someone without a uterus would be experiencing consistent morning sickness? Because I kinda doubt this is a baby.

In which I am real, real dumb and make dumb decisions like a dumb guy

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

It is known: I am a giant fat guy. I’m five feet ten inches tall and somewhat– I’m honestly not sure how much– north of 300 pounds. Every so often I get tired of being a giant fat guy and try to do something about it, with varying degrees of success, and generally a few months after trying whatever that was I end up fatter than I was when I started, which, frankly, is the main reason I haven’t tried to be less fat in a while.

But, Jesus, this quarantine is too fucking much. I’m barely leaving the house, because disease, and I’m getting zero exercise. I have never been much of a snacker, believe it or not; my issue is that I’ve never been a regular exerciser and I eat a lot at meals, but other than empty calories from pop I’ve not been a guy to eat a lot of sweets or snacks between meals.

I cannot run, and I will never be able to. My knees and legs are all fucked up, and even if I wanted to take up running it would be a terrible idea. I really enjoy swimming, but that would require a gym membership, which is, well, impossible right now, and the last time I tried the only place I could get into didn’t end up working out very well.

So … a bike? My wife and son have bikes. I could ride on a bike with my wife and my son! That would be a thing, right? Pay no attention to the fact that I haven’t been on a bike since I was, like, ten— I learned how to ride, mostly because my brother wanted to and I couldn’t yet and as the older brother I couldn’t allow him to know how to do something I didn’t know how to do– and I’m pretty sure once I knew how to ride on a bike I stopped doing it and that was the end of that. They say you can’t forget how; I don’t believe them.

Turns out that bikes that guys my size can ride can be really fucking expensive, and I fell down a hell of a rabbit hole today trying to order one. An anecdote, if you don’t mind: I drive a Kia Soul. I very much like my Kia Soul, which does everything I ask of it and is missing exactly zero features that I would like for a car I’m driving to have. However, if you read reviews of the Kia Soul from Car People, it will not do well, because car people are Car People and they frankly have vastly higher standards than I do for their cars.

Compounding this is that it turns out that bikes are a rather popular purchase right now, because it turns out I’m not the only person who is noticing that they are rather more gelatinous than they were in mid-March, so they’re sold out everywhere. And when you look at non-Amazon reviews of bikes I can both afford and find, they tend to be from Bike People, and I would like the Bike People to just tell me if the bike is a Kia or not so that I can move on with my life. I called an actual bike shop and talked to a dude for a bit, and he was super helpful but he also said that all of their lower-end bikes were sold and that the one he’d try to steer me towards given my circumstances was going to be a $1200 bike.

Which, no. I just spent just south of $400 on that giant red thing up there, because it’s getting good enough reviews from non-bike people that I think it’ll be okay. (The price aspect is interesting. All of the reviews that mentioned the price mentioned prices considerably lower than I can actually find this or any similar bike for anywhere.).

But, yeah. The Bike People? Jesus. All of the YouTube reviews of it from Bike People are basically “yes, this is technically a bicycle, but only if you replace these seventeen components of it immediately, and then take it apart and dip it in fairy dust and put it back together, then perhaps you could ride it a mile or two if circumstances required it,” and I’m like dude I’m probably going to abandon this idea in a month anyway I’m not spending $1200 on a lark.

Just tell me if it’s a Kia.

I will admit that I also ordered a new seat for it, on the spot, because … well, yeah, that all makes sense, and I want the seat to be as comfortable as possible, and it was $35 so fuck it. The seat will be here on Saturday. The bike … well …

Two different bikes gave me that nonsense upon being put in my shopping cart. I assume it’ll be closer to now than later; if it hasn’t shipped in a week I’ll just cancel it and move on with my life. I know Amazon is kind of slammed with coronavirus stuff right now, but if it’s in stock I’m pretty sure it’ll be here before fucking October.

I look forward to the odyssey it will require to get a bike helmet that will fit my enormous head. I can’t buy hats in stores, y’all. This will be fun.

5:46 PM, Friday, May 15: 1,439,231 confirmed cases and 87,184 Americans dead.

Good morning!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

I am awake and dressed and at work and all of my body parts are functioning normally and pain-free.  I therefore expect to fall off of a ladder later today.  I do not intend to climb a ladder but I will find a way to fall off one anyway.

Here is a picture of a bird I rescued from the store yesterday.  His name is Bird because I am not very creative.

Ow holy god shit ow OW in which I don’t OW go to the OW hospital OW but maybe OW I should? Ow.

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting5 Comments

Jaws_Wired_Shut.pngI swear this just happened: I was getting my son ready for bed– read him a story and all– and was sort of wrestling and tickling and playing with him and he entirely accidentally elbowed me in the jaw and I swear to God he hit it just right and dislocated the fucking thing.  And like half a second later I just reached up with my hand and somehow, like, popped it back into place?  And there was a few seconds of absolutely tremendous horrifying pain and maybe another readjustment or two and now my whole face just feels swollen and weird and okay I can talk and I just ate something and I’m not dying but my face is not supposed to feel like this.  

Is that even a possible thing?  That my kid might have knocked my jaw out of place with an elbow and that I just put it back a half-second later without knowing what I was doing or even thinking about it?  Because really ow I didn’t like that very much but I feel like maybe I fixed it?

Also: ow.

Another thing I just realized

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, WorkLeave a comment

5104389f26c12.image_.jpgMy kid’s school is cancelled tomorrow– not because of the weather, which is supposed to be absolutely outstanding, but because nearly 40% of the students in some grade levels and a not-inconsiderable number of teachers and subs have been sick lately.  The email from the principal named no less than four different diseases that had been running rampant in the building lately, and apparently the janitorial staff will be boiling the building tomorrow.

It’s probably good that this happened, because the email also made reference to the “four-day weekend” that the kids were about to have, which made both my wife and I realize that he actually does have Monday off, which neither of us had really realized because we don’t have any idea how the hell to check a school calendar.

So here’s the cool part: I started the Current Occupation in June, right?  And it’s mid-February now, as insane as that might feel.  During all that time I have not missed a single day of work due to illness.  I’ve come home and died a couple of times, and had some less-than-fantastic days, but I haven’t really been sick in months.  And that’s after fifteen years of missing, usually, around a day a month every single year I was teaching.  I was rarely if ever able to carry sick days across from one year to the next and had to dip into the sick bank twice.  And not one illness worth any serious consideration since June, despite constant contact with the public throughout that time.

Add that to the pile of reasons I don’t miss teaching, I guess.

Let’s do this again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Television1 Comment

hip-replacement-implantsThis is going to be another one of those posts where my mother and my aunt call me the next day to make sure I haven’t died since the last time I wrote anything.  It happens about once a week, maybe.  I don’t know what the hell the deal is, whether it’s the change in the weather or maybe I tweaked something while unloading the sofa truck this morning (I can recall one particular insanely heavy power sofa where  I felt like I was hitting my knees pretty hard on way down the ramp) or what, but every attempt to stand up from a seated position today resulted in crippling fucking pain in my right hip and right leg.  Like, sitting for a minute meant two minutes of standing before I was able to walk.  Godfuckingawful.  The weird thing is that so long as I’m still there’s no pain at all; I kind of want to take a thousand pain pills before I go to bed tonight but right now as I’m sitting on the couch typing this I’m fine.  I’m going to have to bite my tongue to keep from screaming when I stand up in a bit, mind you, but right now I’m fine.

It would probably help if I wasn’t as heavy as I am.  Then again, my knees have been screwed up my entire life– comparing my footprints to other people’s in the snow has always been funny, because mine are the ones at a much wider angle than anyone else’s– and sooner or later the fact is the fuckers are getting replaced.  I just wish that was a surgery that could be done electively rather than in fifteen years when my patellas have ground to dust and my joints are in splinters.

But, hey.  Something to look forward to.

I talked about this briefly last night, but at this point there’s no longer any doubt: I think I’m over The Walking Dead as a franchise.  We’ve pretty much entirely bailed on Fear the Walking Dead, having not watched a single episode of the second season, and I watched the Season 7 of the main show premiere last night, and I think it probably should have kicked my ass.  That show’s sent my heartrate through the roof on any number of occasions and not a single thing that happened in that episode did anything for me at all.  The comic book hasn’t been interesting in months either.  I’ll definitely finish out the current storyline just in case it gets better but I may have to be done after that.

I may write a longer post about this tomorrow or during my weekend sometime, but: I liked the Fox remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show quite a bit.  I kind of feel like making that a longer post, though, so more on it later.

Fat Man III: The DeFatManification

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

So all last year I worked at a job where I was too fucking lazy to bring my lunch to work 95% of the time and so I spent a shitload of time eating fast food every week.  Then I got sick in September or October or whatever and I’ve basically been sitting on my ass at home for the last five months.

I have lost substantial amounts of weight twice in my life.  In grad school I got down from 240 to 200 pounds through a combination of diet and exercise.  The exercise?  Swimming.  I love to fucking swim.  I don’t even care that it’s exercise.  So I will do it.  Daily, if necessary.

A couple of years ago I dropped from 260 to 220 through, almost exclusively, diet.  Why no exercise?  No pool.

I weighed three hundred and four fucking pounds when I got on the scale this morning.

swimming-pool-lap-lanes-26847247.jpgI have been laboring under the mistaken notion that South Bend lacked an adequate lap pool.  There are two that I am aware of in town: one is at the YMCA and another is at a local neighborhood rec center called the Kroc Center.  Both have, to put it mildly, hours for lap swimming ranging from inconvenient to “why the fuck are you even bothering?”

Last Thursday I discovered the existence of a heretofore unknown third pool at a facility that has been here for the entire time I have lived in South Bend but which was previously somehow hidden from me.

I am deeply angry that this place has been out there being all perfect for my needs and this is the first that I’ve heard about it.

Their lap pool is open the entire time the facility is open and, at least for my hours of activity, the facility may as well be 24 hour.  On Friday I took a tour of the gym.  This morning, after a meeting with my doctor (believe it or not, this place waives the enrollment fee and drastically drops the monthly rate if you can get your doctor to claim there’s a medical reason you need exercise.  I’m very very fat!  I need exercise!) I signed up.  And I went swimming.  I made it 10 laps in a 25-meter pool; at my most fit I could do a mile without stopping.  I then spent ten minutes in a hot tub and went home.

I’m done with this bullshit now.  I’m so fat, at this point, that buttoning my pants can get me out of breath, because I have stupidly short arms and the way I have to shunt my gut out of the way to deal with my pants actually compresses my lungs.  There is a chair in my house that I occasionally avoid sitting in because getting out of it again can be so obnoxious.  I have other stories, some more embarrassing; I think you get the idea.

I’m done with this bullshit now.  I turn 40 in a few months.  I can either get control of my shit again or I can be dead by 45.  Those are my fucking choices.

Enough.