the trick is to keep breathing

I am sitting in the waiting room of Lab Corp right now waiting for my blood draw (with bonus peeing test). I haven't eaten breakfast. I haven't had coffee. These are both cardinal sins in SevLand. It has been an expensive and depressing week for health in SevLand. (edit: I was interrupted for the test and am now happily seated at my desk with coffee post-breakfast.)

Yesterday I took Marzy in for his echocardiogram checkup. His heart murmur has gotten no better; while it's still better than it was at his very first visit (when he wasn't on any drugs or anything), it's worse than his last checkup. The obstruction in his heart is getting worse and the walls of his heart are thickening (from overwork), and while they were examining him they did see one fully stopped beat, which means he is at the maximum dose of atenolol he can be on. The thickening and the obstruction are so bad that they're starting to worry about heart failure and blood clots -- although he is still asymptomatic at home, which is still a good sign amidst all the bad news.

They've put him on another drug, one that will help prevent blood clots. There's a small chance that this new drug will act synergistically with his current dose to improve the murmur - it isn't a proven thing with the drug, but they've seen it happen in a few cases, so it is worth trying. It's an additional $10-14/month I guess (more expensive for humans but apparently I get a break because cats?) and he has to go back in 6 months for another echo.

I was pretty upset yesterday. I cried in the car on the way to giant eagle to get his new drugs, and then accidentally a diet coke from the store while I was waiting and cleaned myself up in the bathroom. My poor little baby and his little broken heart. He is so lucky that I found him and kept him, because i am a crazy cat lady who will pay $$$ to take care of him, and probably no one would have even found it until it was too late. Asshole. I love my cats more than I have loved anything ever and I hate it.

Plus I've got all these medical bills coming in (X-rays haven't shown up yet, but just refilled my inhaler, I look, $120) and physical therapy coming up and I may not be doing a whole lot of anything come September because dollars.

Bodies. Why.

First of all: This week I ran 12.76 miles. I actually ran about 13.5, total, because I did a couple laps of jogging while calibrating my Garmin FR60 plus calibration was off for my longest run, but 12.76 is the official number and that's what I'll report for now.

On Friday I had what I think is the worst run I have had all year. The sun was out and I was out of lab early; that's enough to make a girl forget she's carrying around a friendly disability for which COLD and EXERCISE are her two main triggers. Sun! In Akron! No lab! No wonder I went crazy. It is still February, and it was nowhere near warm enough to run, for two reasons:

1. The trail I wanted to run alternated between 3-inch-deep mud and sheet ice.


2. At about 3.3 miles I had a whopper of an asthma attack. This is probably because the first mile and a half of the run was me trying frantically to keep my balance on ICE and MUD and SLUSH before I gave up and went to road; my heart rate was way too high and once it spikes it doesn't come down. The rest of the run was as agonizing as you can possibly think.

I got back to my car - somehow - and cried for about 5 minutes because it felt like I was breathing knives, not air. Good times. I'm not even going to share this run here, although you can find it by clicking around my Garmin site.

I ended up pulling 4.85 miles out of it, though. The tracker says 4.6mi but I had calibrated the footpod entirely wrong prior to the run. DID YOU KNOW? The difference between the inner and outer lane on a track is pretty substantial. I knew there was a difference - obviously; it's math - but I did not realize the difference was so significant. It is. I thought it was a couple meters or so -- try 50. LOL.

Today I went back and recalibrated the footpod to the high school track - the INNER lane - jogged, did it again, repeated, until I was SURE the calibration was as correct as the track was. Then I somehow pulled this run out of my ass:


3.3 miles at a <9:50 pace with my heart rate hovering around 165 and never over 170? And my lungs not feeling like death afterwards? I almost am afraid I calibrated the footpod incorrectly, but it was a freaking track and I repeated it. I am such an engineer. I WANT MY DATA TO MATCH LOLZ. Turns out - after some research on my part - treadmills aren't that accurate. Which makes me feel a lot better about all the times last year I felt like I was going faster or slower for like no particular reason.

So, successful training week overall. Maybe I didn't get my long run where I wanted it to be, but I, uh, reconfirmed some of my weaknesses to myself (cold; running outdoors; shitty terrain) and I kept my total miles close to where they should be. I'll do a longer run this week and make up for it. Tuesday's tempo run was good, too, so I'm progressing overall. Just made a mistake this week. Oh well.

The things I really want to say I will try to sum up as follows:

• “Losing weight” and “being skinny” are not actually always the same thing or even related…


• …and neither one really is directly guaranteed to be related to “how you look”…


• … and none of the above necessarily have anything to do with “being healthy”…


• …which in turn is something related to, but also different than, how “strong” or “fit” you might be.

And also:

• Some people like to challenge their bodies; others don’t. Different bodies accept physical challenge in different ways, and react to it differently. You are just as good as you need to be.


• Some exercises are more effective than others. Some aren’t worth your time. Some things aren’t going to help you reach your goals, because you’ve made correlations among combinations of the above things that may or may not be true. Or really matter.


• And people can be totally attractive, smoking hot, dead sexy, insert your phrase of choice here, at any point on any of the above scales!


• And finding your balance of all of the above factors – figuring out not only which are important but which things you can affect yourself and which are not worth your time worrying about – is a difficult but important process.

There’s more of a rant that goes here but it became a very self-centered tl;dr on my own health problems and, well, this version works for now.

Conclusion: I creepershark everyone.