My left knee hurts today. Hurts to walk, hurts to climb stairs, hurts to go down stairs. Puts me in a foul mood. Makes me think about how old I'm getting. Wouldn't it be ironic, that after 20+ years of being an overweight, I lose most of my excess pounds. Only to suffer the physical effects of chronically overstressing my joints and everything?
A side note, so that that makes more sense: I have lost over 35 pounds now, I'm averaging about 14 pounds a month loss. That's a good thing. I've had to step down into some of my "skinny" jeans. I could go down another size, but those pants are put away somewhere. I'll have to look in the black pit of storage that is my garage.
So I'm thinking of age, and what happens when you get older. I have a routine, and it goes with some of my issues. Every night when I get home from work, I shower (obviously!). Then I go to my bedstand, and take the water holder out of my CPAP machine, and take it out to the kitchen to fill it with water. The CPAP is my machine that supplies me with air through a mask while I sleep at a set pressure, that way I do not snore, or suffer the effects of my sleep apnea.
I then sit down on the edge of my bed, and lotion up my feet. Then I rub the excess on my elbows, and palms, they get dry too. I get out the Vicks Vapor Rub then. And I don't want to hear how it's just a wives tale, it helps me. I put it on my toenails. Yes, toenails. I have that yellow looking flaky fungus under my nails, well most of them anyways. And my doctor told me all about the 'real' medicines to treat it. How they were really bad for your liver, how they were ridiculously expensive, and that insurance companies are loather to cover it, AND that lots of times the fungus just comes back anyways. So try Vicks he says. Use it every night on the nails, put on clean sox, and in a few months you'll see improvement. Keep going, and the fungus will go away. Apparently it does come back eventually, but, just more Vicks then. After more than two months of using it, my toenails are looking decidedly better. I've trimmed away as much of the yucky nail as I can, and new nails are growing in. I figure if I keep it up, I'll have normal looking feet in another two or three months. Yay!
That's step two, if you were keeping track. Or three, if you count the shower. Shower, Cream feet, Vicks toenails, then the clean sox. Then, I put skin cream on the back of my neck, it's some kind of zit cream actually, to prevent, well, zits. On the back of my neck, from the straps of my CPAP mask. Crappy that sometimes one solution, will cause another problem. But that's the breaks.
After that dries, I put on the CPAP mask, and put a clean washcloth under the straps, that helps with the skin too I've found. Then I lay down and turn on the machine.
It takes me about ten minutes. But I do it every night. And it gets me down.
It's gotten to the point where I'm so used to sleeping with that darn machine on my head, giving me the pressurized air, that I find it very difficult to nap or sleep without it. I end up waking up gasping, like all the air is out of the room. When the power goes out at the house during the night, I'm screwed. I might as well get up and do something at that point. No meaningful sleep will happen.
All this is sounding like a quasi-medical "What's wrong with me?" site blog or something. And I guess I apologize.
Looking at the nightly baggage I've saddled myself with, for the sake of better health, makes me pine for my younger days. I slept wherever I wanted, no worries about creams, lotions, machines. I snored, and didn't realize that I had sleep apnea. I was tired all the time......I had trouble staying awake on my commute to work......ok, I guess it's not such a bad thing.
Still, I'm getting old, and these things are a daily reminder of that. Oh yea, and this fucking knee right about now. I'll be getting up from the chair in a minute, so I'll curse ahead of time: "Bloody Hell!"
Cheers
No comments:
Post a Comment