First off, to those few brave souls who donated a few shekels to my Help Keep Doc Alive & Online fund a while back, much-much thanks. It all helps. At the moment, I'm almost two thousand clams in debt to the hospital and my local GP and thus am still considering dumping my expensive $120/mo online service and just using the local library a few times a week, but we'll see. I'd still make the occasional post, but nothing like those monster video essays I'm famous notorious for. In case you missed them, recent essays include one on the great TV show NCIS, one on the Asiana airliner crash, the disinterment of Flight 800, the amazing answer to the crash of Flight 447, and a shorter one on golf movies.
The good news is that whatever ill effects I've been feeling since around last Xmas appear to be nothing more than ultra-high blood pressure (something like 195 over 155, aka Stroke City) and something about an "elevated red blood cell count", but I never pay any attention to the details. It's just "gimme the pills" and I'm outta there.
I did, however, make one real glaring error in my last post on the subject when, puzzling over the recent diagnosis of ultra-high blood pressure, I noted that I hadn't recently changed anything in my dietary routine.
That is, if you call your lunches and dinners going from 5% frozen TV dinners to 95% frozen TV dinners over the course of a year "not changing anything".
I honestly (because I had ultra-high blood pressure at the time is my best excuse) wasn't thinking clearly and had only dashed back a year in my mind as I typed the words. In truth, until a year ago, I've never been into TV dinners much, usually eating either sandwiches (homemade, deli, Subway) or canned goods for lunch and dinner. It was only after the operation, when moving around became such a chore, than I fell into the warm bosom of easy pop-in, pop-out, meals.
Worse, I then discovered how delicious some of them are. The Marie Callender's Salisbury Steak is totally scrumptious. That set me down the whole dark path of going through every Marie Callender's and Stofer's on the shelf, plus the lesser brands, only to end up one day at a notable moment in my life. I had turned down the canned goods aisle by habit, glanced over the beef stew and chili and spaghetti and... and then just kept walking. It was the first time in my life I'd ever done that. All I had eyes for was the frozen section.
Such are the depths of the addicted.
Well, these days, all tuned into the Daily Value (DV) figure on the back of the package, I have heart palpitations just reading the labels of the things I used to gobble down by the bucketful. With admonishments of "DON'T EAT ANYTHING WITH A DV OVER 20%!!!" blaring in my head, most of the TV dinners and canned meats out there are somewhere around the (cough!) 50% mark. And that's what I'd been piling down for both lunch and dinner for almost a year.
And that's before grabbing the salt shaker and giving everything a good blast. In my whole adult life, I've salted very few things (eggs, potatoes), but once you're in the tropics, aka Sweat City, you just naturally start adding salt to your diet to make up for what you drip onto the ground while walking out to the car.
As a couple of commenters noted in the thread, some people are much more susceptible to sodium kicking up blood pressure than others, and it appears I'm of that group. I can only say "appears", though, as I've been on blood pressure medicine since that day so I can't really measure how the sudden lack of salt in my diet affects it.
I'd also note that both Bird Dog and Dr. Bliss have recently linked to the latest findings by the CDC that salt isn't as harmful as has previously been the notion, although I have reservations about the overall "IT'S OKAY, EVERYBODY, EAT ALL THE SALT YOU WANT! YIPPEE!" tone of the articles. Since human beings are involved, we always have to be on the lookout for that classic human foible of jumping from one extreme to the other, and just because something isn't as bad as previously thought doesn't mean it suddenly goes into the Eat All You Want! column.
I have a few more notes below the fold, but that's the gist. Again, my deepest thanks to those who have tossed a little something into my Help Keep Doc From Gnawing Off His Right Foot fund. Any help with these nasty medical bills would be very much appreciated.
NCIS fans, be sure to tune in tomorrow for an intriguing update!
The fascinating thing about salt is that some of the saltiest things we eat (potato chips, croutons, pretzels) have the lowest DV value of all. A medium-sized bag of Lay's potato chips is a paltry 6%. I mentioned to someone that I was now eating salads for dinner a couple of times a week and they warned me about the salad dressing containing 'hidden' dangers. This, however, while a common dietary warning, isn't what this is all about. Sodium-wise, it's only 3%.
The reason potato chips taste so salty is because it's right there on the surface. I once read on the back of a medium-sized bag of chips that there was more salt in a bowl of ice cream than in the whole damn bag.
As for blood pressure monitors, both the doc at the hospital and my local GP specifically said to buy an Omron by name and buy the one that goes around the upper arm, not the wrist. I hunted around Amazon for a bit and found this excellent deal. I brought it into the doc's and the nurse and I compared it to the higher-priced model the office used and it was almost the same.
Lastly, since I've 'rediscovered'' Subway Sandwiches over the past month, I've been slowly going through their whole menu, and I maintain that the best item on the menu (or not) is this. Yum!
