Yeah. Working nights can mess with your schedule. I didn’t have the luxury of my wife shifting hers so we basically made-do. I used the hall bath to brush my teeth and dress for bed so I didn’t have to wake her with the lights and I know I woke up all the time in the AM.
It took me months to recover after a couple years of ‘evening’ shift.
By now, you likely heard that Bruce Willis has retired from acting because he’s been diagnosed with aphasia. There’s no information I can find on what caused it, whether from a stroke or head trauma.
What’s coming out more is how a lot of people could see there was something just off with him and they were finding ways to work around it. This article from the Los Angeles Times has a lot of those ways: concerns about memory loss, rewriting scripts to give him less lines and/or making them shorter so it wouldn’t be a lengthy piece he’d have to recite, not really understanding why he was on set, and having it in his contract that he’d work no more than two days, max of eight hours each day, but productions were often encouraged to have him finish in half that, or he’d just get done in that amount of time.
Some was done to be kind. “How do we not make Bruce look bad?” Or statements like he was fine or even better than before. If I’m reading the article right, there may have been some self-interest by some of the people around him to keep him working. Twenty-two films in the last four years, many being low-budget films that could use a boost by a name-brand actor like him.
The Razzie Awards rescinded the one they gave Bruce this year after creating a special category just for him. Kevin Smith is reevaluating the experience he had with Bruce while making Cop Out back in 2010. It will be interesting to see if JoBlo Originals does a follow-up to their “WTF Happened to BRUCE WILLIS?” video.
This is something I have no personal frame of reference for. Not being able to comprehend what you are seeing or hearing because the translation within your brain of audio-visual into meaning isn’t working, and the reverse of you know what you want to say but you’re unable to do it.
Willis will forever be remembered for his “yippee-ki-yay” line.
For his sake I do hope it can be reversed. It must not be fun 
I needed another set of reading glasses. Decided to get the next step up in magnification. Doesn’t change the focus significantly, but it’s not enough to read really small print. Trying to read through a magnifying glass is weird, both with and without the reading glasses. Closing one eye seems to make it work better.
I’m definitely getting old.
I started needing bifocals/progressives/second set of glasses almost 20 years ago. Ended up with two sets because progressives don’t work well for computer work. Been OK since, and using my distance glasses with my phone/laptop hasn’t been much of a problem.
Until the past couple months. Now I realize I need to go back to progressives so I can read my watch and other smaller/up close devices.
Sight’s also dropping out, along with other things.
Still I am mobile and healthy, and that’s still cause for celebration.
I need to go get my blood pressure taken. I’ve been feeling like I’m going to pass out sometimes. I’ve lost enough weight and I’ve been active enough that maybe it’s time to wean myself off of the blood pressure meds.
I don’t have health insurance right now, so I can’t go to the doctor. Next month I should have coverage.
Last week at the dentist my BP was 114/60, quite a bit lower than the not-terrible 122/76 in August when last I donated blood. And that’s after half a pot of coffee, which beverage I am now quite convinced is the only thing keeping my heart beating.
Irrationally excited to go to the optometrist this week and get a new prescription. I very much need reading/computer glasses.
I don’t think I mentioned that I changed one of my medications and it has made a ton of difference in basically everything.
I switched my diabetes medication to something called Forxiga (dapagloflozin). It’s one tiny pill instead of 2 huge ones. They say that one of the side effects is weight loss, but I don’t know. Yes, I lost 15 pounds, but I think that’s weight that I’d put on with the other drug. Now, I’m back down to what I remember my ‘regular’ weight was before. My blood pressure and pulse are back in the normal range (125/78) and I don’t hear my heart beating in my ears when I’m trying to get to sleep.
Something weird happened the last time I went to donate blood and I’m not convinced that it has anything to do with the new medication, but it happened around the same time.
I was refused because my iron was low. That happens to me once in a while. I’m a regular donor and my family has a history of iron deficiency. I was due to have a blood test from my doctor, so I surreptitiously added a check to the requisition to have my feratin checked. A couple of days later, she called me and said that I had to see her right away. For men, the normal range is 24 to 336 micrograms/liter. That’s quite a range. Mine was 8. She told me to get the over-the-counter iron supplement and take them once/day. I’ve started feeling like I have some more energy lately, and I can’t wait to stop taking these little green pills. Some say they’re hard on your stomach, though I’ve never had any problem. What bugs me is that I can smell what the pill tastes like all the time, like it’s coming out of my pores. It isn’t awful, almost a chocolatey smell. It still bugs me. Now that I’m moved and almost done the treatment, I should go give blood again to see what they say.
During the last year, Willis was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. The symptoms of communication problems led to the previous diagnosis of aphrasia.
JoBlo Originals did make a follow-up: “Thank You, Bruce Willis”.
Fireworks when you’re a kid: loud, colorful, fun.
Fireworks when you’re an adult: very often a source of not being able to get a good night’s sleep.
Every morning at 5am for the last 3 days.
I guess someone didn’t get to set theirs off due to rain or something (Canada Day is July 1st)?
Still, it was pissing down this morning when they went off.
I have the day off tomorrow, so I might just set an alarm and get out there before they do with a camera and an air horn.
Part of getting old is that illnesses can hit you harder than they did before. Choosing what to take for them makes more of a difference than we knew.
Cold medicines don’t seem to do much for me. I always chalked that up to the fact that you never get the exact same cold because your body develops immunities each time. I’d just buy a different brand and hope whatever the formula of medicines in it would be different enough to handle the current bug.
The cause of the medicines not working well can be from how much phenylephrine is in them. Though concerns about how well it worked can be traced back to 1994, the FDA ruled last month the decongestant works about the same as a placebo when taken orally. By going through the stomach first, only 40% makes its way into the bloodstream.
Cold medicines used to have pseudoephedrine as a decongestant, which allows for about 100% to reach the bloodstream, but that became limited in 2006 because it caused insomnia and could be used to make meth. There’s a story on NotAlwaysRight.com about a person looking for a particular medicine and let slip “the recipe says”. (The link for the site goes to the main page, not that story)
CVS started pulling medicines from their shelves when phenylephrine is the only active ingredient. Products with more than one active ingredient will still be sold even if they have phenylephrine. I don’t know what other stores are doing. Some brands will label the product as “PE” if it has it.
I had put the empty box of what I bought last time in a spot as a reminder to buy another kind before I need it this winter.
Acetaminophen is listed as the active ingredient for pain relief and fever reduction. That’s Tylenol. Next is Dextromethorphan HBr for coughs. The nighttime pill has Doxylamine succinate for an antihistamine, but the daytime pill has Phenylephrine HCI for decongestant. I guess that means PE is the only active ingredient in this one for that part and I should look at a different one when I restock. And remember to bring my glasses into the store so I can read the small print. 
I keep a pair of reading glasses in the car and have another, smaller pair in my EDC just in case. If that fails, I have an embiggening program on my phone.
Stupid eyes.
That reminds me that I have 2 eye appointments over the next 2 days. Tomorrow, I get the drops that giganticize your pupils and make it hard to see the rest of the day. Wednesday is just a regular checkup.
Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned to the doctor looking over my bloodwork an ongoing problem that I’ve been dealing with for 40 years. It isn’t really a huge problem and a Pepto a day keeps it under control. Now, I have a colonoscopy to arrange.
Saturday I went to the doctor.
Feeling of gout and a pain in my lower back, just above the pelvic bone. It had me worried, and my google searches was all about kidney diseases etc etc. Self-diagnosis does not work. AI will never replace a real doctor with experience.
Doc reassured me that it was not kidney-related, so I’m glad for that. Took some blood for testing, so we shall see. Prescribed me a pill for the gout.
Doc suspects it may be some gland starting not to do its job properly… expected due to my age.
Luckily I’ve started to make some lifestyle changes - taking less sugar now, avoiding all sorts of fake sugar crap, no coffee, eating more healthier, cutting down on processed foods etc…
Of course the occasional “cheat day” may come when I would like some chips/burger etc, see nothing wrong with cheating once or twice in a month.
I’m glad we’re still blessed to have fresh fruit and veg at the shops still.
Oh, and drinking more water now. How many people are dehydrated, and they don’t know it?
The FDA has started the process of getting feedback about removing it from medicines. In May when the comment period ends, they will go onto the next step.
As soon as I stopped buying that crap and getting the real stuff my medicine actually started working. Between that and stopping getting vaccines, by doctor order due to cancer, I don’t get as sick for as long now.
Bit of a follow-up :
So the diagnosis was high cholesterol, way high. I did not had any money for a follow-up visit, so I decided to try out natural remedies.
First was cayenne pepper. While it helped a bit, my BP still remained high (between140 and 150)
After a week of struggling I decided to use google and a bit of common sense.
First hit was to increase my walking distance. At that time I walked, but average was 22000 steps a week, or 3000 steps a day, and it was not always a consistent figure.
So I decided (based on the findings via Google) to challenge myself and up my walking to 6000 steps a day.
It was also mentioned that walking trigger the release of certain ensymes which triggers your liver to process the bad cholesterol.
Last Sunday I started, and nearly hit my target. What I did was to walk for 5 minutes, take a rest, walk for 5 minutes etc etc. That evening BP measurements indicated a slightly lower reading.
So I decided to keep it up, and wallked on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. And it is not that hard. Just take a break for 10 minutes at work, walk around the block and continue working. Just three or four times around the block is more than enough for me to hit my target of 6000 steps.
And it definitely worked. BP is now down to 120/80 (but still go up to 140/90 in the mornings when I get up).
So all in all I’m glad for that, it is a good start, and I’m definitely going to keep it up.
I’m planning to do another cholesterol test after payday, just to get a baseline, and then again sometime in December or January, just to make sure cholesterol is also coming down.
btw the distance I’m walking daily is more than 4kms (2.4miles). As time goes by and I’m getting acclimatized to this, I’m going to push for 6kms (3.7miles) a day.
My old roommate Nathan did about 3000 steps on an active day. I kept telling him to walk more and eat less chocolate, but he wouldn’t listen.
I get about 2000 steps each day just doing my morning chores. During the winter I become more of a slug and only get about 5-6K steps per day. During spring/summer when I have projects I get closer to the 10-12K range.
My problem is that I eat too much and don’t eat enough veggies.
Same. And I tend to bring my lunch back to my desk and eat while I’m working, whether or not I’m in the office. I really should be going out for walk instead.
