Health – Page 2 – Eugene Fischer

March 25, 2009

Medicating, Sleeping, and Writing

Crohn’s patients, I have come to learn, frequently experience what are known as “flare ups”: sudden spikes in the severity of their symptoms, often requiring agressive medicinal intervention to combat. I had a flare up yesterday, and it had me–during my more lucid moments–reflecting again that “flare up” is a far less evocative phrase for the experience than I think it deserves. I would prefer something like “perpetual stomach stomp,” or, perhaps, “gutsplosion.” (How great a world would this be if students across the nation had to do PubMed database searches for gutsplosion references to write their papers?)

Anyway. I spent nearly all of yesterday in a drug induced stupor, sleeping when I could and downing pain meds and reading when I couldn’t. After about 20 hours of this things began to improve slightly, and I decided to get out my computer and see if it would be possible to get any work done. Despite the end of the month deadline, working on the story I’m writing for the Genomics Forum competition, for which I am still figuring out the characters, seemed too hard. So I opened up the file for another story I’ve been arduously revising for the past month.

Words started falling out of me like grains from a split sack of rice.

I have no explanation for this. Up until yesterday, revising this story had been like pulling teeth. But last night I could suddenly see through the haze of the story as I had written it once clearly through to the end of the story as it should be written. I think I will be able to finish the revision today.

No deep thoughts here. Other than perhaps that it is surprising how far ending on a bright note can go toward changing one’s perceptions of a miserable experience.

March 19, 2009

Fighting Central Obesity with Lose It

Check out the “signs and symptoms ” section of the Wikipedia article on Cushing’s syndrome. I am experiencing most of these; not because I actually have Cushing’s, but because I have Crohn’s disease, which is currently being treated with prednisone, which ups my cortisol levels–functionally giving me an artificial case of Cushing’s. One of the symptoms on that list is central body obesity: weight gain that affects the trunk and head but not the limbs. After I started on prednisone I very quickly gained 30 lbs. and was suddenly at risk of needing to buy a whole new closet full of clothes. That, plus the acne, plus the moon face, meant that I had traded chronic pain for a host of body image issues. I think, on net, that’s a good trade, but still is less than ideal. So, despite my doctor rolling his eyes and saying, “On prednisone? Good luck with that,” I decided to try going on a weight loss regimen with the hopes of at least stabilizing my weight before all of my pants stopped fitting. Since the symptoms from my Crohn’s are still at a level that makes exercise difficult, I chose to focus on dietary weight control. To that end I downloaded an app for my iPhone called Lose It to help me track my calorie intake.

That was a little over four weeks ago. I’ve lost 9.5 lbs.

Lose It is more than just a calorie tracker. It calculates your resting metabolic rate and assigns you a daily calorie budget to meet your weight loss goal. Every day you put in the food you eat and, if you so desire, the exercise you undertake, and it keeps statistics about your budget management on a daily and weekly basis. What makes it really effective is that its interface for tracking diet is connected to an online food database that makes it largely unnecessary to know the caloric content of what you are eating beforehand; you can find the the meal you just ate, or a reasonable approximation thereof, from within the program itself. The database has specific meals from many national restaurant chains, most national grocery brands, and any individual ingredient you are likely to use. You can input custom recipes and foodstuffs, and the app remembers them so you need only select it the next time. I’m not an eater of staggering variety, so after a month of using Lose It I very rarely have to search for foods anymore; most of what I eat is there to be selected from my list of previous meals. I’m also not a person of great willpower, but the subtle feedback of my green calorie bar turning red when I go over-budget for day seems to be enough to keep me in line. I’m averaging about one over-budget day a week, making me consistently under-budget on a week-by-week basis. And, as I mentioned, it’s working. I’m losing weight.

Lose It (iTunes App Store link) is a great. It even has nutrition tracking functions, which I haven’t used because I’m more interested in vanity than health, but I’m sure they’re excellent. It’s a free download, so if you are an iPhone user there’s no reason not to check it out.

March 5, 2009

Zelazny’s Toothache

In Roger Zelazny’s Hugo award winning story “Home is the Hangman” there is a line that, in one sentence, captures what has been the primary theme of my life for the last seven months as I have been scrabbling my way out of the pit of Crohn’s disease. “Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.”

I don’t know if everyone’s brain works this way; I can imagine raging against discomforting and unavoidable distractions of the senses in a way that drives productivity rather than retarding it. But that isn’t what happens for me. I am subject to Zelazny’s Toothache. Today the weather in San Antonio could not be more pleasant, and I awoke with an energy and eagerness for my various writing projects that usually prefigures a satisfyingly productive day, one of the days where, instead of fighting for every word, the top of my head will unfold like the fronds of an anemone and easily pluck images from the currents of my fictional world. But then, with no warning (and there is never any warning, or any observable pattern), I feel the fist begin to tighten deep in my abdomen and the tendrils of productivity slam back inside my skull. My entire focus shifts to my physical being, and I head home and crawl into bed and take pills and seek out escapism and do anything else to further the one truly important goal: finding a vector of comfort to cling to.

But if I can’t force my focus onto the areas in which I want to be productive, I can at least experiment with being productive about the things on which I’m focused. Which is the point of this particular post. Just keeping my fingers moving on the keyboard as I wait for the storm to pass.

I suspect I will be writing more about Crohn’s in the future–hopefully with a far more retrospective slant. For now, here’s a link to a comic about Crohn’s disease that Tom Humberstone did for 24-hour Comic Day in 2007. His experience is different in some ways to mine, but page 19 is dead-on.