Or...your Thursday Downer Wednesday.
Depending on which scale we stand on, we've lost between 20 and 30 pounds. Clothes are loser and the photographic evidence is convincing. We can easily see our appendix scar in the mirror. Even our stupid sister says we look great. We really don't understand why. We've stopped going to the gym, of course. We have lifted at home and walked a ton. Our eating habits are better, certainly better than five years ago when we kicked off most mornings with a bagel and cream cheese. No breakfast now, often a salad or even just some fruit for lunch. We've switched to decaf at night. Interestingly, night munchies don't seem to be harming us. So things are going well on that front.
On the, (what do you want to call it, medication front?) things are not going so well. We take five different (used to be six) medications for two different ailments and we don't think they work anymore. One of those little bastards is causing our triglycerides to rise into the red zone, 600 +. For the record, 200 is considered high. Our number was 1000+ when they put a stent in our artery in 2015.
Three of those medications are/were anti-depressants. There, we said it. We've said it before this year and now we've said it again. Is it really all that shocking that someone who publishes a couple novels, a thousand blogposts and dozens of op/eds a year is manic-depressive or bipolar? Seriously long time readers of this blog can't see the signs? Who wants to go back and look at the election week posts? Or that damn winter of 2018?
One of those pills is a general mood regulator. Another keeps us from getting grouchy and the other reinforces the first two and helps us get to sleep. Each pill is exerting side effects on the other and our general cardio health. We have a fourth we can take 'as needed' and it ought to be illegal. The difference between this pill and any other run of the mill street drug is...? Because it is, right? Yeah, sure. We could stuff a family in a freezer, pop a couple of those babies, and be perfectly alright with it.
We didn't like what one of the pills was doing to us. We think it made us more distant, less emotive, harder to talk to, less interested in what's going on. Our doctor wanted to prescribe something else, but that entails coming off the old pill and then going on the new one. It's a process and it's a pain. Coming off anti-depressants can be almost exactly like coming off illegal drugs. Look up 'brain zaps', people. We know, we've quite cold-turkey before. Look, it ain't the full Ewan MacGregor in Trainspotting. But it ain't pleasant. On a whim we shaved our head during one cold-turkey episode. Things just look different. Anyway, we've stopped taking that pill and refused to take another. The doctor was pissed.
We've gotten more cynical and bitter. We've stopped listening to French, what's the point? We've stopped playing guitar. Also what's the point? As mentioned yesterday we've published three novels this year. There, we did it. Now we're pushing to get The Great Nuclear War of 1975 wrapped up so we can get back to World War 1990: The Final Storm. Anyone one else notice that the more we finish books the more we need to finish books? We're not at what's the point, but we are worried.
This year we drank a little more than we normally drink and smoked more cigars than we meant to. We need to get the cigar thing worked out. Either we like a cigar on the weekend and need to stop getting hung up about it or we need to give 'em up. We think we'd much rather just have a cigar once a month or something. We used to smoke 50 + a year. We're not back there, yet. Let's keep it that way. We don't think we even smoked a cigar till late March this year. Look, we're 47 years old with high blood pressure, a rapid heartbeat and a massive genetic triglyceride problem. Ha, ha, pick you poison.
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