I feel like my tires have been rotated, my oil changed, and my chassis overhauled. In other words, I have had my physical. I arrived on the right day and at the right time. Yay me!
The first stop is always at the dreaded scale and I was surprised (and pleased) to see that I had lost about 10 lbs. I'm not sure how I did that, but it must be connected with all that exercise in France and Italy (and my body must not have paid attention to all the gelato).
Second surprise was that my blood pressure agreed with what BloodSource got when I donated blood a couple of weeks ago: 100/60. I expressed shock and astonishment. My blood pressure is never that low--and I hadn't been taking my blood pressure medication.
Because of my protests, the nurse decided to also check the pressure in my other arm and that was much more what I expected. I don't remember the numbers, but it was too high. I don't understand how you can have such a discrepancy in the same body in different arms.
The doctor finally came in and was pleased to see that I had gone for my mammogram yesterday. We had a long talk about what I'm doing and not doing. I'm developing a real liking of this doctor, who has been my doctor for several years, but I haven't seen her that often because of my avoidance of appointments. And she's so low key and soft spoken that you want to do what she suggests.
My one big concern is that I've developed numbness in 2 fingers over the past several months, but her tests didn't raise any immediate alarms...yet. I passed all of her tests with flying colors. She says she wants to see if it could possibly be related to ulnar nerve compression, which could happen with people who use a keyboard frequently (duh!) So she's ordered a nerve compression study. There is also a possibility this is diabetes related, but she says that with a return to taking my meds, this could possibly go away. This is a great relief, since I expected her to come in waving a saw and threatening to chop off my arm.
She re-took my blood pressure in both arms and also got the same discrepancy, so she ordered an EKG which showed a small, non worrisome inconsistency, so she's set up a stress test. (The "E" word was not mentioned, nor was the "W" word -- exercise and weight.)
So I have a whole bunch of health-related follow-ups to do, which include re-taking the classes on diabetes, the nerve conduction study, the stress test, followup labs to see how my new regimen is working (or not), and an appointment with my gynecologist. I ended the morning with a flu shot and left the building feeling much more relieved than I thought I would.
I'm not exacty the picture of glowing health, but I'm not falling apart either, and that's nice to know.
As of today, only Freddie is still taking a bottle. Overnight, Higgins and Eliza just stopped taking it. They hadn't been taking to the ground up puppy chow I'd mixed with formula, so I went and got some "Step 2," which looks just like formula, but which is actually a cereal type thing. They seem to like this. In fact, it so satisfies them that Higgins leaned up against my "Mama Teddy Bear" and then just kind of slid down into this position.
I'm so glad that we have Mama Bear back again. I just love taking pictures like this.
They have reached an age where they sleep hard and wake up bored, so I'm letting them out in the family room more. Like all puppies before them, their favorite place to be is under the playpen
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