Monday, August 22, 2005
Beaten Up from the Inside
It’s been a big week and a big weekend. The baby has had a very full social schedule, which means I’ve been seeing a lot of people too, including my great-uncle at his 98th birthday party and a whole mess of good folks from work who threw a lovely shindig for the baby’s benefit - at which he behaved with admirable propriety, soiling himself only once. My sister-in-law visited for about 52 hours; my mom visits for about 18 hours starting today. We drove down to Belmont on Sunday to see some friends, and then spent 4 productive hours at Ikea. That accounts for most of my hours, and yet the house is reasonably clean, the garbage has been gathered and set out for pickup, and I finished the 900-page novel I have been reading. There are a whole lot of things I didn’t get done, but they’ll have to wait. We did pretty well, over all.
As I sit here typing this, I can’t help but feel a nagging sensation in my legs. Let me share a whole goddamn longwinded essay about it. As if you could possibly stop me, eh?
He told me, with his trademark grin illuminating the room, that I was doing really well - with everything I had control over. My blood pressure and heart rate were excellent; my skin seemed healthy; my lungs were clear and my muscles and nerves were in good shape for a man of my advanced years. But that didn’t matter when it came to my predispositions. I was genetically susceptible to some nasty stuff, and my yoga and shellfish-spurning and various self-abnetagory efforts to build myself a healthy future couldn’t forestall fate. If my essential molecular nature is to get pregressively less able to handle my sugar intake, I should expect to slip toward the diabetes with which my dad and his dad both grew so familiar. My blood test told the tale - glucose values creeping up, year after year. A future of injecting insulin grows more foreseeable each time. Such is life, and that which we endure to sustain it.
But that was still a yet-to-be, hardly worth consideration in the face of that-which-is: not the incipient diabetes, but the present expression of hyperlipidity. While my sugar is rising, my cholesterol has risen. After years of fighting to control it with diet and exercise, recent testing proves my battle to have been unavailing: I have dangerously high cholesterol levels across the board, and my triglycerides and other supplementary markers offer no evidence of mitigating circumstances. I need me some anti-lipidizers, and the time is now.
When he wrote me the scrip for drugs to fight this condition, he mentioned that they might result in some muscular soreness. This was reiterated by my lovely and attentive pharmacist. Muscular soreness - I’ve been there, done that. I figured that I knew what I was in for.
The pills are small white discs - too tiny to bother a big man like me, I persuaded myself as I popped the first one just before bedtime. An hour later as I lay in the dark, I felt a strange pressure under my ribcage. It was my liver. That was another of the predicted potential side effects. I’d never felt my liver before. It felt weird, and not exactly in a good way. It looked like I was going to notice that I was taking drugs after all.
The next morning I woke up feeling bad. My neck was stiff; I could barely move it. My shoulders and back ached as if I’d been in a car wreck. I staggered out of bed, tried to stretch out a little, gave up, went to work anyway. As I rode the bus I felt my quads seize up on me, an internal rigidity settling in across the tops of my thighs. At my desk at work, my forearms fought me as I tried to type - the cramping restricted my circulation and my fingers swole up. That night I felt handicapped as I clomped around the house, and my bedtime pill seemed anything but benign as it smirked unblinkingly at me from my palm. I took it anyway and had trouble getting comfortable enough in bed to fall asleep, or even to lie down and relax. This was a heavy little pill.
I awoke on the morrow feeling like ground beef. Nothing was moving and my liver felt like a rock. Damn, I thought, I must be hella healthy with all this drug in me. I’d better eat some eggs and make it worth the pain. Because otherwise, I reasoned, this would really suck.
I staggered through another couple of days of discomfort so intense that I found myself guarding and protecting myself from simple gestures like loading a cd into the computer or picking up my book bag. It all just hurt. I don’t think that I like to complain, but when Dr Andy asked me whether I was having side effects from the lovastatin when we visited his family for a delightful afternoon the following Sunday, I didn’t sugarcoat things. I bitched those pills right out. He nodded and grinned (again) as he chopped the thick slices of his latest delivery from his bacon-of-the-month club, admitting that he’d had a similar issue while on the same drugs, and that a mutual friend had gone off the meds because of it.
“It’s the guys who work out,” he surmised. “My sedentary patients don’t complain about their muscles, but if you exercise, expecially if you push yourself, it really seems to knock you out.” He stirred handfuls of grated cheese into a bowl of pasta shells and started separating some egg yolks. “Try cutting the pills in half. You’ll go to a cardiologist in a month and he can see if a smaller dose works. It should alleviate your symptoms somewhat.” He dumped the raw egg yolks into the bacon and pasta and cheese, gleefully blending them into a redolent carbonara. “Meantime,” he continued, “you can eat as much of this as you like, and Heidi made special brownies with two kinds of chocolate melted right into the butter. Afterwards you can get in the hot tub and see if we can boil some of that soreness out of you.”
We finished the champage and he opened a bottle of boutique sauvengion blanc, luminescent in the goblets and reeking of lychee and grapefruit. I can’t actually eat grapefruit while I’m on the lovastatin; it cancels out the drug, prevents it from working. However, now that I’ve cut back to half a tiny pill each night, on his recommendation, my aching muscles are much relieved. I hope the half-dose is working as it’s supposed to, lowering my cholesterol and reducing the likelihood that I’m turning my cardiac veins into grease-traps. Butter, bacon and eggs trump a grapefruit any day.
and for those of you who want a peek at the baby, here you go, dude. This ought to hold you. Bonus trivia fact: that tie-dye he’s wearing was one I bought for him in 1987 in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert, long before I was even married, much less a dad. I’ve kept it in my sock drawer all this time and it’s still pretty trippy. The good stuff doesn’t fade, I guess. Have a delightful monday, and I’ll catch you later on. Oh yeah, the photo in the kitchen: Kel’s making banana brownies. Yes, they’re delicious. No, there are no leftovers.
