I sleep very well on Monday night into Tuesday morning. I'm out the door before 6am for an eighty minute walk. I think a bit about doing some running, but my legs are a bit sore from the last four days of cycling so I hold off. After a shower I work on the APA paper and later run errands. Late in the afternoon I see the eye doctor and seeing that my reading glasses are eight years old, the prescription changes by 0.25 points for a new set that will be ready next week. The 0.25 change is hardly noticeable, but why not?
I start Wednesday with the alarm being slammed off and me staying in bed for an extra 45 minutes. I get up and check the news and eat breakfast and have second thoughts about skipping a morning workout. So I dress warmly near 8am and get out for a 75 minute walk. As I'm walking I know that I have to start running a bit very soon. Regardless the walking is brisk and is in the cardio heartrate zone as usual. After a shower I get things together and go back up to USA to visit the oral pathologist for a biopsy. This one goes smoothly and there is no pain afterwards compared to just a bit of pain from the June 2021 biopsy. As I'm riding the motorcycle near USC I enjoy watching the young USC students going about their lives and I miss being around young people. Back at home I rest for a bit and let an hour pass (as directed by the pathologists) before removing the bandage. Then I go lift weights, do some caulking around the backdoor, and fix a pair of shoes that fell apart but are repairable. It's already been a productive day and I make a few more edits to the APA paper and send it back for discussion as I still believe that we are on the wrong track. And the rest of the day passes away with trivial things and television.
Thursday morning is at 39F - very cold. I end up working on some paperwork and other things until after 8 am to go cycling. I get down to the old yacht club and back to home, with an extension thrown in, for a good ride. After a shower I prepare for a 2pm Zoom meeting to work on the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force website and also prepare documents for the nonprofits to stay in compliance with the laws. And the late afternoon and evening is relatively slow watching the golf torunament from Los Angeles.
Friday starts with a cold walk before 6 am. Here's another walk where I think I am ready to start running, but I don't. I've penciled in Monday for the first running steps since the big accident. After a shower I get up to CSULA on the motorcycle and hang out for a while. The senior design schedules have changed and there is nobody who needs or wants my help today, so by 11m I am heading back for home. On the way home I buy a bottle of wine and drop it in the parking lot - creating a mess of wine and glass. There's nothing to do but go back into the sore and buy another bottle of wine and let the people know that there's a mess in the parking lot, it is my fault, I apologize, and I will d better next time. At home I lift weights to work on shulder, chest, and arm strength and range of motion after the accident. ANd then I have a slow day.
I start Friday at 5:25 am and I work on the Long Beach Human Trafficking Task Force website. Specifically they wanted a calendar of events and after an hour or so I have a nice calendar with appropriate colors and clickable to advance or go back to various months of events. And then I take the mountain bicycle out to the old yacht club and add extra miles on. Today there are many runners and other people out and there are a few close calls where people ae not paying attenton or doing stupid things. Back at home I pull out the ladder and hedge trimmers and trim the neighbor's hedges back from my Internet cable. I ought to start sending them a bill for each time that I have to do this. I get in a nice warmng shower, pick up supplies at the grocery store, and then do some paint touchup of the backporch footstep and the side of the house where, I think, the air conditioning people scraped the stucco a bit. Nonetheless both areas look nice again and the footstep will probably need a second coat of paint and touch-up since it gets a lot of use. And after some various nonproift web paperwork and registration work, I sit back and watch the golf tournament from Los Angeles. In the afternoon I bake a frozen pizza and add corn to it - the Cambodian way - which I did not get to eat on this last trip to Cambodia.
On Sunday morning I hem and haw and decide to go walking and then change my mind and decide to ride short on the mountain bicycle and change my mind again and decide, as originally planned, to ride long on the road bicycle. It's cold out but I warm upquickly and get cranking along nicely. Soon I'm up past the El Monte airport and up to the flooded dam (which is my turn around point). I crank along back towards home up one gear and end up at 75 kilometers. But now I'm tired and I'm more or less a vegetable for the rest of the day.
Here's the second Monday in a row where I've ridden 75 kilometers on Sunday and then had trouble sleeping on Sunday night into Monday morning. What's going on here? Monday is President's day. Not important when one is retired. But today is the designated day where I am going to start running again after the big accident. At 6:35am I drive to Liberty park since they have a semi-rubberized track to run on. I start with a mile walk and then I alternate 1/4 distance running with 3/4 distance walking. I continue this for 80 minutes. This is more than enough for the first run attempt and I'll see how sore my legs are in the next few days. I also note that between cycling and walking (and now running), that I've had one rest day for the legs since January 11th (and that rest day was when I had food poisoning). After getting cleaned up I run errands for myself and my retired schoolteacher across the street and return home. Today I turn all of the electricity to the house off and install a new light switch hoping that will solve my lighting problem. It does! I remember installing the old light switch many many years ago. So hopefully I will get many many more years out of this light switch. After this tasks I buy some cycling supplies online and also download my tax preparation software and get started on seeing how much I still we for last year. I relax for a lot of the day and eat pasta to reload the energy supplies for a Tuesday bicycle ride. Late in the afternoon I turn on the television and my DirecTV receiver is having a problem. I re-boot it and reset it a number of times and finally call DirecTV for help. They say that the receiver is six years old and I should probably get a new one. So DirecTV will show up on Wednesday afternon with a new receiver.
My blood pressure is high on Tuesday morning - probably from eating too much pasta yesterday. I'm out the door for cycling near 7am since today is a bit warmer morning than recently. I just ride the mountain bicycle to the old yacht club and back to home but I feel good and strong throughout. When I get home I mow the lawn and drop fertilizer on the lawn in anticipation of rain later this week. After a shower I pick up some supplies at the grocery store and then take care of paperwork and websites. And I browse around some free streaming services with my FireStick (hooked up to the television) to see what news and programs I can watch without DirecTV.
My blood pressure is again a bit high on Wednesday since Ive been eating porrly. But I get out the door before 6am for an eighty minute brisk walk as I keep my heartrate in the cardo zone for mote than seventy minutes. After a nice warming shower, since today was cold and very windy, I check out the news and then ride the motorcycle up to USC. The USC oral pathologists give me the news that I have "a well-differentiated carcinoma, papillary variant (ICD-10#C04.9)" and they refer me to a UCLA and a Cedars Sinai oncologlist. The doctors tell me that this is a very rare carcinoma which typically has very good outcomes. I ride the motrocycle home and pick up my new reading glasses and a bottle of wine on the way home. At ten minutes past noon the DirecTV technician comes out and checks out my dish, downlink converters, and receiver and gives me a new receivere and remote that solves ll of my problems. I watch the DirecTV channels for a bit and continue drinking wine as I wash the hardwood floors, wait for a callback from the oncologist, and listen to EDM/dance music as I go about my day. What else can I do? Despite the disappointing diagnosis I am not depressed or sad - this is beatable.
The next few days are so supposed to be days of continuous rain - good we need the rain. But Thursday starts with a slow drizzle and after I've read the news and markets, I get out walking. As I walk the rain gets harder and though I'm carrying an umbrella, I don't use it. I stop in at the grocery store for supplies and then walk home in a heavier rain. After a warming shower I put together a skeleton website for tonight's meeting where the teammates have never dealt with a JSON format response file from an API. After a healthy lunch I wash the bathroom and kitchen floors and just tidy a lot of things up. I've been drinking heavily since 10am this morning, but I'm still making progress on cleaning up the house. (Hey - one gets a cancer diagnosis and one is allowed to drink as heavily as they want for the first day or so.) Late in the afternoon I get a bill for the radiology report (i.e., reading the biopsy test results) and I don't want to pay it so I send a letter back to the radiology lab (as well as to Medicare) saying "I'm sending this off to my Medicare insurer, my dental insurer, and my MediGap insurer and they will take care of it". I'll just keep sending this letter off over and over until somebody besides me pays it. And finally we have the 7pm Zoom meeting.
Both Friday and Saturday we have very heavy rains in Long Beach. There has been hail in the nearby areas, but I only see heavy and then continuous rains. Of course this messes up any concept of cycling or running. On Friday I lift weights (with the lightweights and high reps still) as I try to rehabilitate torn muscles and ligaments in the shoulders and ribs. And I make a phone call to my web hosting company and though the advice seems very standard, I agree to try it in the next day or so. I'm awake at 5:30 am on Saturday after a good night of sleep and I start to work on the web hosting company's advice related to new MySQL databases. And after I've fully waken up and properly implemented their advice, the new MySQL databases work. I'm so excited because I've gone round and round with my web hosting company for a while on this issue. After the MySQL database works, I walk in the rain to the post office, the grocery story, and the pharmacy. And then lift weights for a second day in a row to rehab the shoulder and rib muscles. After a well-deserved warm shower, I prepare vegetables for a later lunch and lay out a dashboard (that hits the MySQL database in the backend) before I run out of steam. Both Friday and Saturday activities have been hampered by uor much needed rain, but I've concentrated on projects that I've procrastinated on and made great progress.
On Sunday the pavement is still wet but I have to ride. So I take the mountain bicycle down to the old yacht club and back to home. The entire ocean bike trail is pretty much covered in sand from the recent rains, so I didn't expect to be having an off-road ride, but that's what I have. There isn't much going on today. Before sleep on Sunday night I check the weather and see that there will be a break from the rain on Monday morning. Thus I aim to get out running.
I have incredible sleep on Sunday night including good, vivid dreams - except the dream where somebody steals my car from my driveway. Nonetheless I'm out of bed at 5:35 am and at Liberty park to start running at 6:22am. I continue with the repeates of run for one quarter distance and walk for three quarters distance as I pound around the semi-rubberized track. This is all part of the rehabilitation process and getting back into running. I feel good after eighty minutes and drive home to warm up with a shower. By 10:30am the rain is starting to fall lightly so I've timed the workout perfectly. I'm finally able to get hold of one of the two preferred oncologists and have a tentative appointment scheduled though they hope to call me back in a few days with a sooner appointment. I work on websites and some typical end of month activities and just stay warm after todays cold and a bit damp run. On Monday afternoon I get assigned to a CSULA senior design team that has lost its way, its primary advisor has taken a full time job and doesn't have the time, and its secondary advisor is missing in action. So I make contact with the team and give them a "positive rah-rah" email, and we'll be meeting on Friday afternoon to get their project moving into a fun and productive direction.
I sleep horribly on Monday night into Tuesday morning but still get out of bed at 5:30am and get out the door to go walking near 6:20 am for eighty minutes. I have a good walk and keep the tempo in the cardio range. At home I get cleaned up and start my day. I get to the post office to mail off medical documents, get to CVS pharmacy to buy band aids and a big bottle of wine, and visit my primary care physician. I apologize to him that my blood pressure is high because 1) I have run out of blood pressure medications, 2) I've been eating bad food, and 3) I just received news of an oral carcinoma diagnosis. My primary care physician undertands me and I try to redeem myself by showing him my calendar of serious bicycle rides over calendar year 2023. We both agree to deal with the carcinoma first and then we'll figure things out from there (with, of course, a re-supply of blood pressure medicine). Before I leave, I tell the doctor, as he already knows, that "I played ice hockey for twenty years and nothing can hurt me and that he should hit me for allowing my blood pressure to get high". My doctor complies and kinda bumps shoulders with me and says, "Let that be a warning". I like this doctor! I stop in at Togos to pick up a later lunch and pick up up my (finally) renewewed blood pressure medication. From there I go home and deal with a ton of questions on APIs and websites and seamless imtegrations. And later in the afternoon I watch some Netflix and start to get excited about the first Formula One race of the year from Bahrain this coming Sunday. And I'm excited about a lack of upcoming rain for my chances to ride a bicycle.