Tag: health

I miss the pandemic, for real

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, or even posted about it before, but I really do miss the pandemic.  This thought usually crosses my mind whenever I’m in a scenario that wouldn’t have existed during the pandemic, like being stuck in traffic on my commute to the office, or in this most recent episode, whenever an illness permeates its way into my house and waylays fucking everyone, leading to several miserable days for all.

A stomach bug of some sort, was picked up by both #2 and I concurrently, most likely at a birthday party that only we went to on Monday; Tuesday was the customary incubation day for said bug, and by Wednesday in the AM hours, shit hit the fan and we were both victims of near-identical symptoms, all of them unpleasant.  It should also be noted that Wednesday was #1’s birthday, which meant I literally spent the entirety of my own child’s birthday in bed and basically incapable of functioning.

Thankfully, #1 was not ill on her birthday, but what I feared most came to fruition the night prior, which led to this avalanche of thoughts and emotions manifesting into a salt-filled, nihilistic sounding post about how I thought the world was a vastly superior place when a killer pandemic was ravaging through it.  But Thursday was apparently the incubation day for #1, and by the AM hours, shit hits the fan, and then it’s me, of course, at like 70% myself, as the one staying up until 4:30 in the morning catching her vomiting every single half hour while the bug takes its turn with her.

Shit like this, would never have occurred during the pandemic.  The common cold didn’t happen at all, during the pandemic.  It was one of the most glorious years in human existence, 2020 was, where there wasn’t even a single day over the span of a 365-day span except for one exception which I won’t delve into, where anyone in my house was sick.  No questionable mornings where anyone woke up with a tinge in the sinuses, and requiring some preventative care, no sniffles after going out somewhere, not a single cold, much less the flu, any sinus infections or stomach bugs like the one ravaging my house right now.

No god damn sicknesses whatsoever, and it was marvelous.  But in retrospect, there’s no way that would have been allowed to continue, because that would have basically killed the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and can’t possibly have healthy populations when there’s profits to be made for white folks.

But in addition to the sheer lack of sicknesses rewarded to the intelligent who exorcised caution, it was a world where nobody had to commute into offices, remote work was the norm and championed and applauded at the adaptability and fluidity of the workforce, and not politicized and weaponized as it’s been today.

And speaking of politics, it’s the then-administration’s sheer idiocy behind pandemic response that basically united a country to boot out the orange clown from his first dictatorship, and for a brief moment in time, it genuinely felt like the United States were back to becoming America again instead of being shitty ‘Murica.

Naturally, no good thing is truly ever allowed to last, and when the dust settles, Americans always falls back into their self-destructive patterns, and here we are back to dictatorship #2, which has somehow managed to feel even more terrifying than the first one.

At this point, I genuinely wouldn’t mind if some fucking savages at a Chinese wet market started trying to eat some moar bats or some possums or some other feral wild animal, and try to get COVID-29 started up to try and correct the world all over again.  I know many probably think that the parties involved in the original COVID-19 bat-eating scenario are a bunch of hindsight murderers, but frankly I see them as quite the contrary, and wouldn’t mind if that shit fired itself up again, if it would bring us back to the utopia that 2020 really turned out to be in retrospect.

I’m tired of commuting to the office, I’m sick of stupid fucks who go out while sick with no regard for the people around them, and I’m sick to fucking death of those people passing those illnesses onto my families and allowing them into my home.  I know COVID-19 took a lot of people out, but I’m having a real hard time, especially as time goes on, at thinking their negatives actually outweigh all the positives that emerged from the time.

My daughters will extend my life by almost three years

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Okay: recent study suggests dads with daughters have tendency to live longer, with each daughter adding on average 74 weeks of lifespan

When this story was fed to me, I couldn’t help but smirk as I often do whenever I read anything related to girldads or being a girldad.  The notion that by virtue of them being daughters instead of sons, my two girls will be responsible for keeping my ass alive for 148 weeks longer than my life expectancy should suggest, nearly three entire years, is amusing to me.  Even more so, that it’s pointed out that sons, add no extra life to their dads, comparatively.

The thing is, the story could have ended with that, and kept it vague, yet still sweet, but in this day and age, where everyone is expected to show their work, when they dive a little deeper, it’s mostly attributed to the notion that when said girls become women, they’re way more apt to nag their dads about health and preventative care, which is the primary reason why they tend to live longer.

I mean it makes sense, since harping on their dad to go see doctors and get checkups and critical milestone tests probably is more useful in the long game versus daring dad to see how long they can go without farting, how fast they can go in the rental car, or can they take a spinning power bomb off the top of the couch.  But it does take some of the sticker sentimentality away from the general headline, but not enough to where I can’t make a brog post about it.

What’s interesting to me though, is that I wonder how much truth this will hold in my particular case.  A lot of the longevity is attributed to what seems like a bunch of out-of-shape dads who view their children as a sudden reason to get into better health and pick up better habits, which would naturally be beneficial to their life expectancy.

I’m no Zac Efron, but I’ve always been consistent and routinely with exercise, and mythical wife has already gotten a handle on egging me to go to the doctor at least for annuals, so the things that my daughters would’ve been expected to drive me to do in order to give me 148 weeks more of living, I’m already doing.  Of course, I want to be around when they graduate schools, maybe get married, or any other life’s milestones.  Maybe there’s another level of physical improvement to reach, probably when they’re not little brats who are sometimes shits about their food, and I end up eating a ton of shitty leftovers on account of not wanting to waste food.

Conversely, there’s always the easy joke about how my kids, regardless of their gender, are solely responsible for taking years off of my life on account of the sheer amounts of stress they put me through with their childish insubordination, stubbornness and constant power struggles.  Maybe that’s something that the study doesn’t account for is that daughters might each give me 74 weeks of extra life at the tail end of my life, but they’re sure as fuck siphoning a lot more of it on the front end.

Either way, let’s choose to ignore all the background noise of this study, and choose to believe that my two little girls are going to be the reason why I live three years longer than I really should be, solely by existing. ❤️

Can it be a HIPAA violation to be judgmental pricks?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like many people (should), I take my health seriously.  I exercise regularly, I’m (mostly) mindful of what I eat, I try to get a consistent amount of sleep each night, I drink lots of water, and I avoid sick people whenever I can, my own family notwithstanding.

However with kids, that last part becomes nigh impossible, especially when we get into the cold and flu season, and despite the fact that I’m not a fan of coughing and sneezing right into my face, they’re my kids, and it goes without saying a lot of times, exposure to airborne illness is unavoidable.

I woke up the other day with a tickle in my throat, and my head feeling like a bowling ball.  It stung when I swallowed, which was consistent from the night before where I began to suspect that I might be coming down with something.  During this time of the year, and especially when my kids are sick, I rinse out my sinuses multiple times a day, which is something I swear by and something I attribute my general ability to avoid getting sick to, but with as much coughing and sneezing I’ve had done in my face, even rinsing 3-4 times a day has its limitations.

My general modus operandi when it comes to the onset of sickness, is to go to urgent care and start medications as soon as I can.  Getting in front of sicknesses has worked wonders in the past, and it’s what I do in order to minimize sick time and more importantly, be up and healthy so that I can care for my kids.

It’s what I did this past weekend, and after my initial vitals were taken, where everything was normal like my blood pressure, temperature, pulse, etc, even I began to wonder if I had jumped the gun too early.  Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who was thinking this, because the NP who had seen me, I could feel the judgment coming from her that I was in pretty good shape to be coming into urgent care, and probably triggering her internal flags that I was probably some medication-seeking junkie or something.

She told me that Mucinex DM would be sufficient at dealing with what I thought was going to be the illness coming, and that over-the-counter drugs should counteract my symptoms.  But probably because I had paid my co-pay and I suspect this clinic has some arrangement with whatever manufacturer produces Prednisolone, they gave me a script for that to deal with the cough, that was just only happening occasionally to me, but #1 sounds like a nightmare, and that’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen to me.

As I was leaving my appointment, I was handed my discharge papers, and I noticed that on the front of it was stapled this little addition that I hadn’t gotten before: Antibiotics Aren’t Always the Answer, which was basically this condescending little FAQ that seemed directed to people like me who had the audacity to come to a place called urgent care, for symptoms remotely nowhere near urgent.

Here’s the thing though, if there were a place I could go to get immediate medical consult, and not have to wait 4-6 fucking weeks, I would go there.  But because there is not, I go to a place where I can get immediate consult, even if it’s called urgent care and my symptoms are not urgent.  Such is the nature of American healthcare, where we’ve been pigeonholed into such limited options.

But I interpreted this note on my papers as the NP’s way of trying to give me a gentle reminder that my issues weren’t severe and that she probably thinks I’m a person chasing prescription medication.  And honestly, I don’t really appreciate it.

She doesn’t know my circumstances.  A lot of people I know don’t understand my circumstances.

I am the primary caregiver for my kids.  I’m the one person who can’t afford to be shelved due to bullshit sicknesses because the world can’t mask up or stay home when they’re not feeling well.  Sure, there are others who can fill in when it’s necessary, but if it’s under my control to optimize my recovery time and get in front of things to stop them from escalating to an addling illness, I’m going to fucking do them.

Nobody else wakes up at 6:40 every single day of the week to make sure breakfast is made and lunches are prepared for school.  Nobody else gets up in the middle of the night when one my kids has a nightmare and needs comfort.  I’m the one who goes to the school for the kids’ activities and I’m the one who takes the kids out to the park or for Friday ice cream, or most anything that requires physical presence.

Needless to say, I wasn’t pleased with the passive aggressive insinuation that I was seeking medical attention unnecessarily.  I paid my co-pay, and I had every right to be there.  Furthermore, at the time I went, I was the only person waiting on any sort of consultation, it’s not like it was a packed clinic full of ailing people that I was cockblocking from getting critical treatment.  If they didn’t feel I needed to be there, they would be more than welcome to let me know this, refund my copay and send me off, with me eating the cost in time.

I do what I do in order to be in as tip-top condition as I can, all the time, in order to be the best dad that I can be for my kids, because the last thing I want is to be the dad that’s always sick, seldom capable, and never present.  Even if it means hitting up urgent care at the first sign of sickness, I’m not going to wait until any shit to get full blown before I pull the trigger and have to wait for medications to kick in, when I can act first and be the one doing any kicking to any ailments.  I’m going to do this every single time, and hopefully with less judgment in the future.

Dad Brog (#119): Sometimes I’d rather not know

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For quite some time, I’ve usually been that type of guy that just never goes to the doctor, unless something is actively wrong.  Never did any annual checkups, physicals or anything other than eye exams or going to urgent care for what always seems like prednisone whenever I go.  I often used to say this stemmed from not wanting to miss out on work on account of the long stretch when I was freelancing and contracting, and when I wasn’t working then I wasn’t earning, but the truth is that even when I had landed full-time work with actual benefits, I still didn’t go then either, even if I were paying for it.

Then I got married, and that didn’t really change, except for the fact that I now had a wife that encouraged me to go, but I still made excuses and dragged my feet and resisted going, because I just didn’t really want to.  I felt fine, I exercised regularly, and I didn’t eat like a shithead too much, so I never felt like it was worth going since I felt fine, strong and healthy.

But then I had children, and I crossed into 40, so I finally relented and made the effort to at the very least, have an annual, just to make sure things were copacetic.  And last year, it was about what I had suspected, I was pretty much fine, with no real concerns.  I had little reason to think it was going to be any different this year, but if that were the case then I wouldn’t be writing this post now, would I?

The TL;DR is that it turns out that I’ve put on a not-insubstantial amount of weight, and my blood pressure is kind of high.  The thing is that despite the weight gain, my clothes all fit the same, save for some tightness in the chests of my shirts, but my pants all still fit, I still use the same rung on my belts, and I don’t really feel any different than I did physically a year ago, or longer.

But I don’t want to be the asshole who gets all “uuhhhhhh muscle weighs more than fat brah” and humble brag that I’ve been hitting the weights, and that my weight gain is solely based on the fact that I’ve been going to the gym with consistency over the last two years, versus the nearly two-year stretch in which I dropped a lot of muscle mass because of COVID affecting my ability to hit a gym.  Of course, I did hit my share of lazy stretches where my household eats a bunch of fast food or dines out/takes out more than we really should, but I do like to believe that some of my weight gain really is having put on some muscle mass back on over the last year.

The bigger thing though, is the blood pressure reading, that was high enough to where the tech and my doctor wanted to point it out as being high.  My knee-jerk reaction was to ask just how much correlation there is between BP and stress, to which the answer was a high one, and I feel like I already know why I’m having elevated blood pressure.

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