I can’t believe it’s already October!
Once the staph infection was gone, I went back to my primary care doctor for a physical. He said I was the healthiest he’d seen me in ages and that we should go ahead and do those vaccinations he’d been holding off on for a long while. So I got a flu shot and a TDAP. I immediately started feeling weak and dizzy, but I HATE shots, so I didn’t say much. I told the lady doing my blood draw that I felt weird and she let me sit for a while first and eventually I was good to go. Three days went by and while my flu shot side (the nurse labeled them) stayed small and red, the TDAP side swelled and swelled and was very hot. I had a fever the first couple days, then it left and a stiff neck set in. I called my doctor’s office a couple times but my doctor was out of the office & there was a holiday weekend involved, so I finally saw the doctor about a week later. He said I’d had a really bad reaction to the vaccination and put me on another round of steroids. (Even now, a month later, I can still feel a marble sized lump under my skin on that site.)
Since I’m mostly doing all right lately, I’ve started a new food tracking program. I’m using LoseIt.com to track my food and exercise (I used to use SparkPeople, but it felt so competitive and just like too much to do). I’ve discovered a few things the past couple weeks (I tracked for a week without changing anything first, just to see what that looked like.): 1) After entering my age/weight/activity level and letting the program run its calculations, I found out that I apparently don’t eat enough, so my body’s been in starvation mode and b) once I started eating as many calories as I’m supposed to have, I started losing weight. So far just a week of eating more (and making sure that that “more” was a healthy more, not a candy bar or soda more) and I’m down 1.7 pounds. No extra exercise (although it counts weird things like housecleaning and music making as exercise) involved. We’re going on vacation this next week, so eating well will be trickier, but I’ll also be moving around more, so that’ll even some things up. Still, I’ll be trying checking out menus/nutritional values and trying to keep as close to on-track as one can while on vacation.
How’s the RA? It’s coming and going. When I’m being good and resting like I ought to it mostly stays pretty quiet. When I’m running around like a crazy person (the last couple weeks: friends came to dinner, we went out to dinner, my kids birthday party, book fair at school, field trip for MDO, PTA movie night, playing a duet at church, family dinner night out), then it creeps up on me and unleashes its wrath: hot swollen ankles, knees, and hands; a painful back, shoulders, and elbows. I’m hoping that this upcoming vacation week allows me to slow down a little and catch my breath and rest my limbs. 🙂
The Thousand Teeth 