Wednesday, October 28, 2020

quick health-related note

I'm always curious, when I come back from these walks, to see how my health has (or hasn't) improved.  So before going to work today, I swung by the doctor's office, having not been there since February—back when the pandemic was in its early stages, and we were all paranoid about what to do and how to act (which is why I avoided the doc's office).  As with previous walks, my numbers turned out to be a mixture of the delightful and the disappointing—mostly the latter.  My blood pressure turned out to be on the high side, as did my HbA1c (a very high 9.4%).  This is probably because I had taken most of my meds early in the year, then spent several months not taking anything, then started taking the last of my pills again during the final week or so of my walk.  Belatedly restarting my medicine wasn't a recipe for medical-stats success, as it turned out.  No shit, right?

On the bright side, my short-term glucose reading was 115, which is the lowest ever recorded for me.  I take this to mean that the HbA1c, which is a result showing a three-month average of your blood sugar, indicates that I was doing badly before my walk, while the short-term glucose reading shows that I'm currently on the path to having low blood sugar (keeping in mind that the short-term reading can fluctuate hourly throughout the day).  But compared to May 10, 2016—when my short-term was 285—I'd say a 115 reading is pretty damn good.  The other good news is that, after some trepidation, I stepped on my bathroom scale and discovered that I now weigh 116 kg.  You may recall that my pre-walk weight was 128.5 kg, so I'm ecstatic to discover I've lost 12.5 kilos (27.6 lbs.):  that's the most weight I've ever lost on one of these walk projects.  Of course, it's all for nothing if I do nothing to keep the weight off.  We'll see how that goes.

So as I said, it's a mixed bag this time around.  The doc has put me on the same regimen of meds as before, but he wants to see me again in a month to see whether my BP has gone down after consuming the prescription daily.  So I'll be back in the doc's office on November 28... which is only two days after Thanksgiving, right when I'll be stuffing myself like the turkey I am.  Shit.



3 comments:

Daniel said...

Congrats on the major weight loss! Must feel fantastic! I've gained about 8kg since the start of the pandemic.

Charles said...

Good luck with the health improvements!

After not having a bathroom scale for the longest time (our old one broke a while back and we never got a new one), we recently got a new-fangled scale that not only tells you how much you weigh, but supposedly also tells you your fat and muscle ratios, etc., through electrical conductivity or something like that. I'm not sure how accurate these readings are, but they should at least be good for showing change over time. We started recording our weight, fat, and muscle ratios today, and I plan on stepping my morning exercise regime up to the next level next week, after I've established a baseline.

So, here's to health improvements all around!

Kevin Kim said...

Thanks, gentlemen. Good luck to us all when it comes to our health.