Hi. Always good to hear from you whenever you get around to it.
Maybe you will eventually get used to the noise from the CPAP machine and be able to sleep with it. Are you going to need it for the rest of your life or do they think they can "cure" your sleep apnea somehow?
If I had to use one of those machines, I think the thing that would bother me the most would be having to wear all that stuff on my face at night. For me that would be worse than the noise. I used to live near a freeway in California and there was constant noise from the traffic and I slept through it. If it stopped it probably would have woke me up. Now I seem to be developing some tinnitus -- when I'm in a quiet place I hear a low hum that sounds kind of like there's a fan or something running in the next room. It doesn't really bother me now but I hope it doesn't get any louder. My new primary care physician (actually a nurse practitioner) doesn't seem too concerned about it, but she did overreact to my swollen and pinkish-purple feet and a black spot on my little toe, and sent me to the emergency room even though I've had this for probably several years now (except for the black spot, which I had recently noticed)...
So the emergency room doctor didn't seem terribly concerned. They did do an ultrasound and found no clots. Previous ultrasounds had revealed small clots around my knee, and my other doctor (the one I really liked but I lost him when I went on medicare) had said that wasn't really dangerous since I didn't have big ones in my femoral artery. Those are the kind that can break off and get in your lungs and that's bad news. He put me on eliquis which we get from Canada because it would cost more than half my husband's take home pay if we got it here. It recently went generic so it should get cheaper now. And it seems to be working -- no more clots. Anyway, to make a long story even longer, it turned out that the black spot on my toe is a blood blister. That's what I'd thought it was in the first place because I walk around the house barefoot all the time and stub my toes on the furniture. My husband says I should wear shoes (or at least slippers) in the house but I'm more likely to trip and fall that way because I can't feel the irregularities in the floor with shoes on. I can feel it with my bare toes so I figure that stubbed toes and splinters are the lesser of the evils. I'm getting pretty good at picking splinters out of my feet, even though I have to struggle to reach them. Obviously, our floor is in really bad shape. It ought to be the next project after the windows, which are finally done and quite nice too, but we'd have to move all the furniture and I just don't see how we could do it without moving out.
So I've got high blood pressure and high cholesterol so far, but no diabetes and no sleep apnea... yet. The risks of being really really fat, and "wise," as the emergency room doctor called it. He means old
I liked him which was fortunate because when you go to the ER you never know what you're going to get. Most of them are nice though, at least in my experience, which is something because they're under a lot of stress and you'd think they wouldn't always be at their best. Maybe they get used to it.
I actually like my new primary care doctor even though she does overreact. She didn't say one word about losing weight. I refuse to get on the scale at the doctor's office because I don't want it to be an issue. I'll never go on another diet as long as I live because it only makes it worse in the long run, but I did tell them how much I weigh at the ER because they told me they need to know for dosing medication. None of the ones I'm currently taking seem to have much to do with weight though. I'm on 5 of them now -- 2 for bipolar (I call them "crazy pills"), one for high BP, one for cholesterol, and one for clots. Fortunately, I'm not getting any bad side effects or interractions.
If your German friend had chest pains and didn't go to the ER then it probably wasn't a heart attack or he'd be dead by now.
There's always a lot of "crazy crap" (misinformation) going around, especially on the internet. Haven't heard the one about the solar storm. Remember all that fuss about Y2K? You were probably pretty young. There was probably more danger from people panicking than from computers actually going down. My husband believed that and he reasoned that if anything happened with regard to panic, it would happen in the big cities like Anchorage so we went to Fairbanks for a few days. In the middle of the winter. 45 below. Vacation from Hell. Another long story and this post is long enough already. After we barely got back in one piece, I told him that the next time we want to get out of Anchorage in the middle of the winter, we are going to fly south like sensible Alaskans do, not drive north like *****s
We didn't try to do PT with Puff. He was getting so old and decrepit that it probably would have just caused him more pain and done more harm than good. But Broly is still young by comparison, so it might do him some good, but how do you get him to cooperate? Never tried serrapeptase with Puff, and we couldn't even find anyone who would ship silkworms up here, not even the eggs.
We've had some cold snaps here recently -- temperatures below 0. Now it has "warmed" back up to mid 20s. January is usually our coldest month, and then sometimes we get a "false spring" in February, but if we do, then we're likely to get a big snow dump in April or even May. You just never know about Alaskan weather.
Your hamster sounds like the cats we used to have. They used to wake us up in the middle of the night playing "hide and go tag," so when we got home from work and school we'd play with them and try to tire them out so they'd sleep through the night, but it usually didn't work. Cats are nocturnal after all.
Wow -- major TLDR. If you've read this far, congratulations. Until next time...