Tag: Health

America Collection/General interest
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The Secret Weapon for Preventing Falls

by Fran Johns

AN OCCASIONAL UNAUTHORIZED UNSUPPORTED (BUT HEARTFELT) HEALTH TIP

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Look better . . . fall less . . . what’s not to love about good posture?

I had the great good fortune, a few eons ago, to study modern dance in college with a woman named Eleanor Struppa. “Struppa,” as she was universally addressed, had herself danced with the famed Martha Graham. You could spot her in any crowd — she’d be the person standing, or more often moving, with such fluid grace and effortlessly perfect posture that she commanded a space of her own.

Struppa’s students did not slouch. This was because we might be walking droopy-shouldered along some hall or pathway when a hand from behind would quietly grab a small chunk of hair on the top of our head and, as it was tugged upward, a voice would sing out, “A string! A string! Imagine a string is pulling you upward . . .” End of slouch.

The string trick alone doesn’t do it; there’s a lot of chin-tucking, muscle-strengthening, spine-aligning and proper exercise involved. Good genes are a bonus. 

Bone loss, physical afflictions and gravity have their way with the aging body, but concentrating on balance and posture can help us all stay upright. And here’s the pay-off: staying upright is the best way not to break bones.

In addition to a ridiculous obsession with posture, I am even more ridiculously obsessed with balance. I have a collection of balance exercises in my head that come into play in any given spare three minutes. You can sneak in a balance exercise anywhere, as long as you ignore the curious glances from everybody else in the wait lines. Extra points for executing rock-the-boats in a moving elevator —  near the railing, please, just in case. Fellow residents in my senior living building are all by now used to this. More than a few join in (though seldom in the elevator.)

So far, it’s working. The last bone I broke was about 50 years ago, playing doubles tennis with my then-70-something-year-old father. That time, I made a graceful leap at the net and wound up with a broken foot. I was in a walking cast for the next six weeks. What I remember best about that time was repeatedly having to tell the story, only to hear the listener ask, “Well, how’s your father?” He was, of course, just fine. His posture was impeccable until his death, at 90.

My posture has now outlived his by a couple of years, thanks in large measure to the lilting voice in my head:

“A string! A string! Imagine a string is pulling you upward!”

This post also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye. C’mon over any time, it’s free

America Collection/General interest
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How to Get a New Toe in Twenty Minutes

by Fran Johns

THE WONDERS OF MODERN SURGERY, REPORTED IN REAL TIME

(TODAY’S DIVERSION FROM OTHER WORLD NEWS)

You’ve got to love modern medicine.

I arrive at the Kaiser Musculoskeletal Medicine Department a few minutes early for my 9:30 appointment. After all the ominous worst-case scenario documents are signed and promises made (in writing) not to sue if they happen, enter the surgeon. She confirms which of my knobbly toes it is that we plan to un-knobble a little, whips out a magic marker and writes herself a note: “Yes!” . . . with arrow just in case.

Re-enter the assistant.

The assistant has more to do than the surgeon it seems to me. She was responsible for getting my signatures on all the right pages, and now she’s busy making my foot look ready for the barbecue pit.

Enter the surgeon again, suiting up in blue paper and whipping blue paper over and under the scene of the action. After that she starts erasing her messages to self and playing around with Q-tips, while the assistant is discussing cataract surgery she (the assistant) has scheduled for tomorrow. “Eww,” says my toe surgeon, “shot in the eye! That sounds awful!” I’m hoping we don’t start mixing up eyes and toes here, but having had cataract surgery myself I join in with the assistant to assure the toe surgeon that cataracts are no big deal. Just to be clear, my own eyes are closed by now; I did not choose to watch. But couldn’t resist holding my phone up to record what was underway.

The surgeon has gone for the X-acto knife. Is there a desk drawer in America without an X-acto knife? Surely not. But I’ve been watching the assistant pour Betadyne over my foot and everything else around including the instrument tray, so I’m assuming this isn’t just any old X-acto knife. My guess is that the X-acto people have a surgery division which churns out knives for toes exactly the same as the ones for crafting that are in every desk drawer, but the ones for toes cost some 500 times more. God only knows how much the ones for hearts cost.

Approximately 10 minutes later, the deed is done, the surgeon has congratulated us all and departed, the assistant pulls a sock over my bulkily bandaged foot, finishes up with a stylish new boot and voilà! I am into a Lyft and back home for coffee at 10.

Next week: resumption of the 3 or 4 mile daily walk, all ten toes in synch.

America Collection/General interest
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I’m Exhausted! Can We Talk?

by Fran Johns

SCARY SYMPTOMS WE SHOULD ADDRESS BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

I’m telling you, it was BAD.

I could hardly stay up long enough to make coffee. Got a little better, thought I’d go to the grocery store — less than a mile walk with my customary grocery bag/backpack, something I do several times a week. Halfway home, I had to call a Lyft.

Maybe you’ve had similar struggles, and you understand? Even if you’re not a Certified Old Person as I am — costant fatigue, nagging anxiety not unlike a headache that’s about to crash land just behind your temples? 


After a couple of total-exhaustion days, I figured maybe it was a blood pressure issue. I have a fancy BP machine stashed in a cabinet that was bought long ago for some obscure reason. So I took my blood pressure throughout the day. 130/70. Maybe a little low? I don’t pay a lot of attention to these things as a rule.


Suddenly, however, it shot up! It was 160-something over 80-something! Now I’m really worried. After getting these sorts of readings, or worse, throughout an hour or so, I’m hearing alarm bells.


By then it was nearly 8 p.m., but I was sure I might go into cardiac arrest or something at any moment.

So I called the Kaiser advice nurse. I love the Kaiser advice nurse. He or she will always listen patiently to my complaints and either offer guidance or send me straight to the ER as the case may require.


We talked at length about my medical history and my symptoms. I described the exhaustion, my life in general over the past few days, my increasing concern over what seemed to me some sudden wild BP swings. As usual, I liked the advice nurse a lot and felt she was carefully internalizing my information and analyzing the situation.

After a few moments of reflection, she made a diagnostic recommendation.


“Have you tried turning off the news?” she said.


Imagine.


I’m better now.






America Collection/General interest
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Smoker’s Lungs are Forever

by Fran Johns

LOOKING BACK AT AN ADDICTION THAT STARTED DURING WORLD WAR II

Photo by KAIBING FAN on Unsplash

I was 13 the year my older sister left for her senior year of college, just before World War II came to an end. Unfortunately for my lungs she forgot about a carton of Lucky Strikes on the closet shelf. By the time I was halfway through those ten packs I was hooked.

In my defense — or by way of explanation — chain-smokers were more common than non-smokers in the 1940s, and in small-town America the sight of young kids smoking on school steps would have raised few eyebrows, if any. (The eyebrows of my parents would have been another matter altogether, but my sisters and I were sneaky enough to conceal these habits for years.)

The above is why my own eyebrows went up over this beginning line of a Quora story that just crossed my screen:

“If you’re a daily or heavy smoker it takes about 7 years for your lungs to clear themselves.” That sent me straight over to the website of my friends at the Cleveland Clinic where they said “if you can stop smoking for several years, your risk of cancer and other health conditions reduces or even returns to the same level as someone who doesn’t smoke.” 

This is not to say everything will just be hunky-dory from then on. Read on for what the Cleveland Clinic says, or check with the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association . . . we know a lot more about nicotine today than in the days when cigarettes were glamorous and chic and omnipresent.

But I can’t help looking back on those days, and telling the story of my poor, once-innocent lungs.

Well into the 1960s, when I was balancing ashtrays while feeding my first two infants, smoking was generally accepted — okay, nobody said it was good for you, but you weren’t labeled a Bad Mom. Gradually, in the 1960s, smoking lost its cool. (Related factoid: for years, bad colds had simply forced me to switch from Marlboros to Kools.) By 1971, when ads were banned and smoke-free areas began to edge smokers out of the way, the reality of nicotine’s multiple harms to the body also began to break through and into the public consciousness.

In 1964, pregnant with my last child, I was so sick that for the first time in my addictive history I could not even manage a smoke. After she arrived I had a moment of clarity: I knew it would be impossible to quit, but since I had temporarily suspended the habit maybe I could manage not to restart. Sixty years later I am still managing not to restart.

You can do this math: I am now sailing into my 90s, still of sound mind and walking three or four miles on most days — so I’m living proof that a history of chain smoking doesn’t always shorten one’s lifespan. Here, though, are a few details within which the devil nicotine may lurk:

Macular degeneration? Maybe I wouldn’t be getting that periodic shot in the eye had I not accumulated 17 long-ago years of chain smoking.

This raspy voice finally curtailing the public speaking I’ve done in behalf of several causes for decades? Vocal therapists have helpfully offered exercises that take 20 minutes three times a day — when I can’t find five extra minutes to finish a blog post. I should never have dropped out of the church choir.

How about that breast cancer I had back at age 72? Virtually every day another link between smoking and cancer is established.

Or unexpected issues with altitude? Without my nicotine-infused history I might still be tackling historic enclosed spiral staircases or visiting Machu Picchu. As is, my daughter brings along a can of oxygen when she meets my plane in Bozeman, MT.

But the cruelest blow of all is when, puffed with pride over a history of sixty years cigarette-free, I wind up a routine exam with the ENT doc to the sound of his muttering voice from behind the X-ray screen:

“Mm-hmmm. Smoker’s lungs.”

General interest/Optimism Collection
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After Earth Day, Dirt Day!

by Fran Johns

Plant, dig, create — getting grimy can do you good

Photo by Karen Maes on Unsplash

Freedom! Dirt lovers are uprooted and exonerated.

A recent New York Times story confirms that dirt is good. (The real kind, not the political or social media kind.) Dirt even contains microbes beneficial to our mental & physical health. Who knew?

Actually, I did. Mud pies were always my beloveds. You can express yourself in mud: Pressed-leaf creations, happy faces or sad. If you’re angry you can just splat it back down with great force. Digging restores the soul, and occasionally creates gardens.

I taught my kids to wash up before meals, but otherwise to love Mother Earth. Even a little on the inside floors if I’m being honest. Didn’t Native Americans build immunities by ingesting bits of bad stuff? Don’t you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die? (Take your time.)

Please accept this seal of approval: Go ahead. Get grimy.

End-of-Life/General interest
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The Glory of Modern Dentistry

by Fran Johns

Or – How in the world am I going to pay for all this gadgetry?

Photo by Quang Tri NGUYEN on Unsplash

Dentists, my oral surgeon told me almost as an aside — he’s sticking needles in my jaws, and I’m supposed to feel sympathy? — have the highest suicide rate of any profession. I reflected on this, having nothing better to do at the moment.

After Googling around when I got home I learned that MDs are at greatest risk, but the DDS folks are close behind. This is not research, it’s only Googling, but here we are.

Back to my oral surgeon. I am spending a lot of time with oral surgeons, and oral everything elses, having reached the advanced age at which all that expensive stuff — crowns, implants, you name it — done 25 years ago wants to be redone. Regardless of how loudly I argue that I don’t need another 25 years — could they patch me up for five or six, maybe? — I find myself captive to the stratospheric talents (and costs) of today’s dentistry.

Rather pricey view from (one of) my dentist’s offices (Author photo)

Please do not get me wrong. I am immensely grateful to the entire profession, and the way they have kept me smiling through the years without looking like a toothless goofball. Eating is nice, too. So dentists and I are longtime besties.

But now I’m worried about their depression levels.

I do not want to get into the suicide business, which is a sad and serious issue never to be written about lightly. So I am only worrying about what might make them so sad.

Money? How can that be? Admittedly all that fancy equipment must cost a fortune — and many of my dentists are in an historic, heavily gilded downtown building on which I feel I pay upkeep. But as they all have other patients besides yours truly, and what I’m spending on this averages out to the choice between two weeks in Paris or fix that tooth — well, nobody’s talking minimum wage here.

It must be staring down throats all day. Have you considered how repulsive the view into your throat really is? I thought not. Or it could be the fear that, at any moment, an enraged patient might chomp down and amputate your gloved finger? That would definitely increase workplace anxiety.

Self portrait with (happily only temporarily) purple jaws (Author photo)

In the end, however, I have decided to quit worrying about my dentists’ health and wellbeing. They, after all, are not the ones with purple jaws and occasionally absent teeth. Plus, I’m assuming they can afford therapy, given the bills I am paying.

Now, about that bank I’m planning to rob . . .

America Collection/General interest
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The Joy of Supplements

by Fran Johns

Today’s random health report

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

Dietary doomsday may be upon us. For instance, how’s the eicosapentaenoic acid?

And should we be REALLY worried about it?

There’s food — as in breakfast, lunch, dinner, nosh — and there’s Supplement. I grew up on meat & potatoes plus a few vegetables, old-fashioned stuff you cook and eat. But the world seems to be geared to popping pills for daily needs, so I supplement with the best of them today.

One of my children told me to take turmeric with curcumin, so I started swallowing those yellowish pills a few years ago. I have no idea why; sometimes I think they give me desert-sand breath.

Then there’s fish oil. Does everybody take daily fish oil? I sort of think so. That’s where you get the eicosapentaenoic acid. It’s a “fatty acid,” which doesn’t sound particularly yummy when you think about it. Plus, I used to take pride in never having dropped acid.

I am more than a little suspicious of it all. Big Pharma, I think, did a mind control thing on my primary care doctor, the one who said I really should take extra iron, and calcium with vitamin D, and if I’m not mistaken she threw in the fish oil. There is no fish oil capsule smaller than a quail’s egg. After I while, I got a new doctor.

Mostly, I am fascinated with CoQ10. Seriously, now. Had you ever heard of CoQ10 before it began starring in every other commercial on MSNBC?

CoQ10 — I’ve been researching this, no easy task — is an enzyme. More specifically it is “Coenzyme Q, also known as ubiquinone . . .” Most healthy people have plenty of it, but maybe — maybe — scarfing a little more might help with one’s blood pressure or metabolism or headache. Apparently, nobody much knows. Just reading about it gives me a headache.

In the small print of the CoQ10 packages are warnings about diarrhea, nausea and heartburn, little things like that. As to whether taking this happy little supplement can actually do any good, phrases like “the evidence is conflicting,” or “it’s uncertain that adding CoQ10 will have any effect” proliferate.

Maybe we should go back to kale and blueberries.

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