Saturday, August 31, 2019

Final Fantasy This Morning: August 31, 2019


Yes, this is another post about where I've been and what I've been up to lately.

I'm reasonably sure I've done one of these under it's own title recently, but I've been a little busy with IRL stuff, and I suppose it's about time I said a few things about it. I'll make an effort to not go into too many details, primarily for my own privacy's sake.

After a relatively busy June and at least one post about trying to keep up with that pace since then, I've had a slower posting rate than I'd hoped for in July and August. That's because starting the middle of July, I've been getting a little more serious about looking out for my health again, finally making use of the insurance I've been paying for since the Affordable Care Act went into effect. I'm sure if you've been following my blog in general or my YouTube channel for very long, you've probably noticed quite a few times when I've joked about or made references to my weight issues. The official diagnosis there is that yeah, it's just as bad as I've been making it out to be, if not worse. I'm well into the morbid obesity range of the BMI. I'm not going to give any specific numbers here, because they're really not relevant to the points I'm trying to make, and they've actually been improving lately, which is a good thing.

Another good thing in all of this is that through the process of doing all this, I've learned that a lot of the related issues I either thought I was experiencing or was worried that I might be are not as sever as I had originally thought. This is good because it means that quite a lot of them can be solved or at least better managed by bringing my weight down, which is something I'm working on and having a little success with. Some of these things include that I'm only just pre-diabetic, which is something that I've heard might actually go away if I manage to get enough of the weight off.

Add to that the fact that my legs aren't as badly fucked as I had been thinking they were for a few years now. This is not to say that they aren't fucked at all, of course. They are. My doctor says I've got bone spurs and arthritis in my ankles. Making sure I've got shoes and/or boots with good ankle support can help with that, as can, again, taking some of this weight off. The bright spot in this is that the hip I thought was messed up doesn't appear to be. That doesn't mean it isn't. It still does bother me, but not as much as it did when I started this, partly because I've lost five or six pounds since then. I've still gotta keep in mind that I've got a lot of body fat in that area and a family history of hip and knee problems, so it might be worth it to have it checked again in a couple years, especially if I make this whole weight loss thing work again.

A couple days prior to this writing, I went to see a lung specialist. The results there were pretty much along the same lines as they were with the general doctor in that I'm not as messed up as I had feared I might be, and as of this writing, a substantial portion of what is wrong can probably be remedied by “simply” taking some of the weight off. I'm using the quotation marks there because if making that happen was really as easy a thing as some folks might have me believe, odds are good that I would never have wound up in this situation to begin with.

The biggest suprise there was the result of the chest x-ray they gave me. Considering my weight issues and that for most of the time I've been living in my current apartment, I was essentailly living in major second-hand smoke, the lung guy says the x-ray looks normal. That said, I've been started on an inhaler on as-needed basis. It helps some, but again, it's one of those things that all comes back to the whole weight thing, and I'm hoping I can get that back to a place where I can get off the inhaler, because, well, I'm not what you'd call the biggest fan of medication ever.

That said, there are a few other tests coming up that might help determine my chances of that, and how much success I'll have at what rate. We'll get to those, of course, because they haven't happened yet.

So now that I'm a little more than a page into this, I suppose I'd better get to what all this means with relation to the Text Plays I've got going on. It will be safe to say this applies to the other blogs and video stuff I do as well. For now, and probably through the end of the year, at least, things will likely continue at the same snail's pace they have been for the last couple years, anyway. This is because I've got tests to take care of and lifestyle changes and medications to adjust to. All of these things take time, unfortunately, and the time it's going to take will be from what I might have otherwise spent on gaming and blogging.

It should be said that I'll still be doing this, even if it is at the same reduced rate I've been at for awhile now. These videos and blog posts I make are among the things I most enjoy doing, and the idea here is that keeping at them will help me remember just why it is I'm trying to get my health sorted.

How long is all that going to take? Hard to say, really. It's taken twenty-plus years for me to get into this mess, and while I'd like to think I can get back out of it more quickly than that, I also know it won't be a quick or easy process. As with everything else I do, there will be updates to follow, if only for my own good.

As always, until then, have fun, stay safe, keep gaming, and DFTBA!

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