Syncopation

I only remember when it was because my brother had been given a copy of the book of Labyrinth, and I'd been given something... forgettable, and - to my mind - infinitely inferior and unfairly girly.  I suspect it was Boxing Day.  We were bundled into the car with little explanation and yet - surprisingly - my mother was driving.  My father's tolerance for other people driving, especially a car with him in it, has never been what a body might describe as capacious.  This prompted questions that were shut down abruptly, so I sulked back into Anne of Green Gables, or Little Women, or whatever it was I'd been gifted.

I have to assume that this made it late December 1986 or 87.  I was definitely adolescent, and inclined to question my parents on pretty much everything anyway.  I don't have a clear memory of when it became apparent that we were heading to hospital; it kind of jump-cuts to my dad in the hospital bed, bare-chested, strapped to a bunch of machines that went beep.

As an aspirant doctor, I was intrigued.  As a person with an annoying book and a low boredom threshold, I was doubly so.  I appear to have refused to get worried about my dad.  I left that to afterwards.  It's been a pattern I've maintained and established for most of my life - deal with the thing in front of you, then freak out when it's safe to do so.  So I asked many questions and watched everyone's expressions, and learned about ideal electrocardiograph patterns and cardiac dysrhythmia, and how to make the best of the terrifying frustration of abruptly-drawn hospital curtains, and medical staff body language. Also that there's no way to persuade my brother out of a book he's got until he's actually read it.  I have a similar disposition, as it goes, so I can't blame him...

Happily, my father was discharged a day later (I think), and came home (where he still is) with some stern advice from fellow-doctors (I imagine that's particularly difficult to take!) about diet and exercise.

Research indicates that "Type A" personalities (competitive, time-driven, impatient, pro-active workaholics possessed of covert free-floating hostility) are more prone to cardiac incidents (I suspect that part of this is being prone to pushing through physical symptoms as signs of weakness...) than the more chilled dudes occupying the Type B category.  All of this is over-simplistic, but does appear to have a reasonable amount of basis in the results.  The key thing here, though, with regard to my unnecessary 12-hour-shift-working, impatient, explosively-tempered father is that Type A personalities are way less likely to re-infarct than their less competitive brethren. i.e. if someone sends two people home from a cardiac incident: one Type A and one Type B, with the same advice (exercise more, cut down on fatty foods, eat more oat bran (this was the 80s)), the Type B presumably says "eh, I start all that tomorrow; I'll just chill for now." The Type A, driven little bugger, is likely to go "I will be the best at not getting another heart attack!" and duly goes on to lose the weight, do the exercise, and eat oat bran like a boss.  Behold, that - oddly enough - works and Type As, surviving the first one, are less likely to die prematurely of a heart attack than Type Bs in a similar position.

Why this combined Fay Family History/ classic psychology text summary?

My dad was only a couple of years older than I am now at the time. This factoid impacts on the resolution made later in this post. We share many phenotypical expressions of our genes (more than you might imagine, at first glance) and a fair number of personality traits, including - probably most significantly - stubbornness...

None of the chronic conditions I've lived with all my life - to the best of my knowledge - are degenerative.  Manage them well and asthma, allergies, etc. will just bimble along without scaring you too much.  Oh except when they won't:

Apparently, I can only really look forward to the chronic discomfort of Hypermobility Syndrome (HMS) getting worse as I age, especially after the menopause.  This... was a bit of a shock, and made an already-annoying Thursday just that bit more fun.  And it only properly struck me some time later, so today's exercise was accompanied by a crushing sense of "what the hell is the point if it's all just going to get worse anyway?!"  Yay motivation!

But I plodded on through the physio moves (not well, but I did) and onto the mat exercises.  I carefully did the leg raises and didn't push them into Bad Pain.  I moved onto the press-ups and thought "You know what? Sod it.  I'm not that high on the HMS scale as it is and I'm going to be the best at being a muscle-bound person compensating for HMS that there is." Like many other things, being entirely pain-free and comfortable is something that will belong in memory and I will celebrate the relatively good days when they come and treat myself kindly (but not over-indulgently) on the bad days. Because a life lived in fear of pain - of anything, come to it - is pretty spectacularly rubbish.  (Obviously I didn't articulate this all in the middle of press-ups, but the "sod it" bit definitely came across...)

I've lived that life before, because that was the only model I was given and - you know what? - it sucked. I am occasionally extremely bitter about the waste of my life due to that inherited pigswill, but - looking back - you can see that I was always trying to break out of it (despite this, historically, leading to a good kicking by those holding the fear-reins), and to many people's eyes I'm sure that it's long looked like I did.

The post I had originally been going to write this morning about the "oh, hey, your condition will only worsen" news was far more maudlin.  Instead, I had a 4-hour "nap" (answering my body's actual need rather than "pushing through" needlessly), and then did my pre-planned exercise and ate well.  I feel ferociously better and am writing this so as to have a touchstone for that "well, if this is the best it's going to get, I'm darned well going to extend this for as long as possible" resolution.

Fit that on a motivational poster...

Blood, sweat, and tears

So. My knees still hurt. If I sit or stand still too long it’s like the last two years never happened and the poor, puffy things make squeaky noises. (Metaphorical - I can’t get my ears that close these days...)

It’s not all tragedy and the painful consequences of pushing myself too hard too early. I forgot to mention some other bits of progress:

Sooner than I would have anticipated, my heart-rate at top exertion, if the gym bikes are to be believed, is 10 bpm slower. Since this matches symptoms (chest feels less crushed, doesn’t hurt, none of that unilateral jaw ache I associate with a scary level of blood pressure), I’m choosing to trust this assertion.

(It’s now in the 170s rather than 180s. Yes, I know that’s still problematically high.)

My muscles feel... well, actually, they feel quite achey, truth  be told, but also... Look, I don’t want to say that they’re bigger, because I’m not convinced that four weeks will see that much difference, but they do feel more present, somehow. And, of course, I appear to be trusting them more, which is nice.

My waistline appears to be no different whatsoever. This is disappointing but, again, being nigh-on 39, only having done this for four weeks, and, having made little change to my diet in terms of fat and carbs, I don’t think I can expect anything too spectacular in visual terms yet.  Mind you, when I tense them, the wall of abs feels more dense.  Under the spare Fay, that is.

Sensible suggestions for reducing abdominal fat and statistically improving my lifespan odds (apparently) would be gratefully received!  If I see no change in the next month, I’ll talk to a nutritionist.  You know - a proper sciencey one, not a Gillian McKeith-style opinionated random.

Another bit of family history for you: pretty much all my antecedents are Celtic/ Nordic.  My blood family hail from South Wales, Central and Northern Scotland, Ireland (that bit’s all a bit vague), the West Midlands/ North Wales, and Denmark.  Why’s this important?  Well, I’ve already been exploring what it means to be me, in this body, and understanding my genetic inheritances (limits and advantages) could prove useful. Anyway, while my brother looks like a strong mix of the dark Scot and Black Welsh (brown hair, brown eyes, tans at the snap of a finger), I take most strongly after the Northern Scottish/ Danish side, with enough of the Midlands/ North Welsh sprinkled in to keep it interesting (after all, recessive hair and eye colouring has to come from both parents...).  I have blonde hair (though not the white-blonde of my early youth... mind there’s enough silver springing up these days...!), blue-green-grey eyes, and couldn’t tan at gunpoint.

My mother’s cousin was invalided out of the army while serving in India - I’ve seen a small, black-and-white headshot of a blonde man with my chin and cheekbones; have imagined him, hair bleached white, gasping and scarlet, unable to sweat off the heat, stretchered to the sea.

Sharing this interesting genetic weakness (I also picked up the asthma - dad’s side (skipped a generation), eczema - mum’s side, extra-bendy joints - both; mind you, I skipped the short-sightedness and got the curly hair, mimicry, persistently looking-younger-than-your-age, and stubbornness, so it’s not all bad news) makes for funtimes in the gym.  Now I’m getting to a point where I can exert myself more on the cardio apparatus, I’m overheating.  In fact, I seem to feel generally warmer (a blessing while the heating was broken!) the rest of the time.  This feels like a nice return to “who I used to be” - i.e. someone who was always feeling too warm, as opposed to the person who has spent the last few years shivering and trying to find comfort in the fact that she overheats less in summer.  I am starting to become slightly damp (my equivalent of dripping sweat) at the gym after cardio especially, which is something I’ve had to train myself in the past not to automatically treat with alarm (the only experience I’d had of perspiration was during fever).

I carry a towel in the gym because we’re told to, but I use mine - when I do - to soak surreptitiously with cold water in order to provide myself with fake sweat on my face and to rub away the strange, stinging stickiness.

So, short version: experiencing body changes (and returns) in some ways and not in others, and have successfully muntered my knees with overdoing stuff (also my shoulders, but we haven’t discussed that yet).

Confessions #1

I am a MASSIVE nerd. I think we suspected this already, but come on: who else do you know would decide to chart their menstrual cycle in a spreadsheet and then apply an algorithm to give predictions of the better days to exercise over the course of the weeks in order to draw a graph of this.

An uncle-flipping* GRAPH.

I'm monitoring a lot of things on this project; even I feel that this might be getting a little weird. I was monitoring protein intake, but gave that up really quickly because, well, it was a bit dull, to tell the truth, and the answer to my previous conundrum (am I eating too much protein because I can't eat pulses, nuts, eggs, and fish?) appeared to be: "probably not" (there seems to be little but rough consensus on absolute figures and a huge range of what "right" is, and the potential side effects of too much - anywhere from "nothing" to "meh" to "heart disease" to "OMG crumbling bones!"), apart from beef days, which I already knew.

However, the revelation that my waist-to-hip ratio leaves more to be desired than you might think (though this depends on: time of day measured, muscle tension, and which ratio scales of "you're doomed!" you believe) has me thinking that, despite earlier protestations, maybe I should be measuring calorie intake.

I really don't want to.

1. DULL.
2. Admitting that (again, depending which Doom Scale you believe) I'm closer to "overweight" than I'm comfortable with believing.
3. Painful and difficult.
4. Calorie-counting is what people on a diet do, and I'm not on a diet.

Am I?

And if I was, so what?  Hmm...

My mother was always on some diet or other and miserable about it.  She constantly felt uncomfortable about her weight and some days it seemed she felt like her very skin didn't fit right - she didn't even like her hair (until after it started to grow back after the chemo and we begged her to leave it alone and let it curl naturally).  I only have a few photos of her.  Among other things, my memories are of a slightly overweight, slightly-shorter-than-me woman with a wicked sense of humour, a beautiful voice, and a lot of regrets.  Presumably, at some level, I associate calorie-counting dieting with a fundamental lack of liking for yourself.  Oddly enough, at other levels, I also associate it with a fundamental respect for and desire for a healthy amount of agency for yourself.  I guess it depends on who's doing the dieting, how, and why.  Maybe it's fine for everyone but me. (Seriously?!)

I wonder, of course, if me striving to overcome the screwed-up joints (a clear legacy from a man with a double-jointed digit or two and a woman whose joints constantly pained her, sometimes to a crippling degree), to gain muscle definition, and compensate for my low-movement lifestyle is a symptom of a degree of dissatisfaction with who I am.  I don't think so.  It doesn't feel so much like trying to change myself into something else as uncovering a self I've neglected for a while, whipping the dust-sheet off a still-serviceable piece of old furniture**.

Or I'm protesting too much.

Anyway, for the moment I'm not going to count calories, if for no other reason than that my heart just sinks at the notion, and right now - trying to take something positive from the fact that I'm bleeding too heavily to exercise (like the discovery that I've already got to the point where I miss actually exercising when I can't, and distraction in the form of the creation of a menstrual exercise algorithm, for goodness' sake!) - I can do with all the motivation I can get.  I am, however, going to cut down even further on refined sugar***, and see where that gets me... :)

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* Not swearing is pretty hard, but I'm going to give it a go for this blog, in case certain folk**** are actually reading this.  Hello!

** I'm not that posh - it was just a mental image

*** Oddly, that does sound rather like a diet... {facepalm}

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**** Putative delicate readers who, for some reason, I'm happy to allow to read talk of my menses... curious...