Love a la Mode, by Stephanie Kate Strohm

Posted on January 24, 2019 by Thistle

Henry and Rosie meet on a plane to Paris, where they’re both new students of a specialty culinary high school. They fall in love-at-first-sight, of course, as you’d expect, but you know things can’t be that easy.

This was a cute YA love story but only if I turned off the part of my brain that noticed all the disturbing messages it was sending. Sure, if you like a boy, go out with him even when he treats you like crap for months. Sure, it’s okay to form exclusive friend groups and leave others out if your group is made up of the not-normally-cool people. Etc. I did like a lot of the book, but messages like those kept popping up and they got treated as if they were fine, which made the experience mixed for me. It’s just like when I watched Forever My Girl last year, and I wanted the female love interest to never let the jerk who jilted her back into her life. At this point of my life, empowerment means more to me than romance, I guess. Having three teenagers who love to read – and who enjoy romance in books – I’m a little wary of what these sorts of books are telling them. It’s hard to turn that part of my brain off these days.

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Wellness Wednesday – Antibiotics, Probiotics, and Health

Posted on January 23, 2019 by Thistle

Once upon a time, I was a healthy person at a healthy weight who had fairly average eating habits and above-average exercise habits. Unfortunately, I then had dental surgery that went wrong and couldn’t be set right immediately. The setting-right then kept getting put off because I was too sick to undergo the procedure. I’ve been over this story often so I’ll keep it short: the dental surgery caused an ongoing infection trapped inside my teeth, which caused a lot of problems (for the next decade) from constant illness to bipolar symptoms to sudden jumps/drops in weight. I’m not here to discuss all that today. I already have all that laid out on my Wellness: Before page. Today I’d like to discuss antibiotics.

Because you see, when I was getting sick every three weeks, the doctors treated the symptoms, not the cause. It sure looked like I was getting sinus infection after strep throat after bronchitis after sinus infection etc. So every few weeks, I’d undergo another round of antibiotics, and about every six months, I’d get a round of steroid pills. The upshot was that 1) I developed sensitivity to penicillin products, and 2) my internal bacterial system was utterly destroyed. And this was of course back in the time when probiotics weren’t really a thing.

I’ve begun to realize over the last few years just how important my internal ecosystem probably was to my health as a kid and young adult, before it was obliterated. I’ve read the studies of how important gut bacteria is for your health, and how the bacteria inside you can affect everything from your susceptibility to certain diseases to your weight. They’ve literally done fecal bacteria transplants from healthy individuals to sick folk who have been unable to get better any other way, and those folks recovered within days from longterm digestive illness. (See this fascinating TED Talk.) The same kinds of transplants have been used to cause weight loss/gain in rats, and might one day be used the same way in humans. Y’all, this is crazy science. Imagine the implications. I’ve imagined them. I’ve watched my entire inner ecosystem get flushed down the toilet to be replaced by something entirely new. Example:

A pharmacist friend once explained to me that everyone has a unique bacterial cocktail that lives in their throat. He had the bacteria that causes strep throat live naturally inside him, in low levels (not enough to cause an infection), and when he and his wife first dated, she got strep throat for the first time just by being exposed to his bacterial ecosystem through kissing. I, too, had strep in my throat-cocktail. So does my mother, my siblings, and my oldest son. Strep infections were common in our household (I used to get it every year) but they were very mild for us because of what our bodies were used to. Morrigan had strep throat twice by the time he was 18 months old. This is just how it goes. However, after a few years of heavy antibiotics, I no longer have strep in my throat-cocktail. I haven’t gotten the disease in almost two decades, and I’d guess that if I got it now, it would involve high fevers and terrible symptoms rather than just feeling like a mild annoying cold as it used to. My throat-ecosystem is entirely changed. Wanna guess what the rest of my body has gone through? Yeah.

Enter probiotics. Only, don’t enter them yet, because they didn’t really become a thing until well after I was on regular antibiotics, and even longer after that, they were regarded as pop-science-BS. I never thought about taking them until my doctor started my recent four-week-long penicillin-based treatment. Then I started taking them, and my body started responding. I started losing weight quicker than I have in years. My distorted sense of smell improved (more on the link above). The probiotics caused their own problems (hives!)** and I have no idea which strains were helpful and which harmful, but I’ve seen over the last month just how powerful probiotics affect health. And it just got me thinking – what if I’d taken them way back twenty years ago when I was taking all those ecosystem-killing meds? How might it have changed my life over that time? Maybe not at all, maybe a whole lot.

Either way, as I said on Sunday, I’m back to fixing up my own health alone again, and this is the first place I’m starting. I’m reading books and articles in science/medical journals. I’m researching. I’m learning about natural sources of probiotics, and prebiotics (I didn’t even know that was a thing), and how to promote growth of proper bacteria in your gut through food instead of supplements. I’ve already learned a TON and I hope to find a lot more material. (Suggestions?) With any luck, I can get my internal ecosystem back in order to help a whole lot of different parts of my health. Hey, maybe I’ll even figure out how to sleep properly again!

**This may not be true, as it turns out. Since determining that it was the probiotics causing hives, other complicating factors have come up, like getting hives for the last week when I wasn’t on any medications at all. Except my new sleeping pill, which in clinical trials shows infrequent allergic reactions like hives after several weeks of use. Lucky me! Or maybe it’s not that. Maybe it’s not the probiotics. Maybe it’s not anything. Maybe it was just some combination of medications, or maybe my body is just so inflamed from a month of antibiotics that it has no idea what’s happening and I’m getting lots of stupid-response. Either way, I’m cutting out ALL medications and supplements for a few weeks and then we’ll try, slowly, to introduce probiotics things and see what happens.

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Callback: Return of the Native

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Thistle

Back in 2010, I read Return of the Native for the first time. A few comments about that. First, it was my first read of Hardy since Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 2006. I’d been scared to read more by him since he’s very pastoral and I didn’t enjoy those parts of Tess. Second, it was the first audiobook I loved and the book that caused me to fall in love with audiobooks generally. Third, my review remains my favorite ever written. It was so much fun to write! I didn’t get terribly serious in it, and now re-listening to the book after 8.5 years, I wanted to take a slightly deeper look at Return of the Native. For a funner, less-serious, and spoiler-free review, see the link above.

There are six main characters in this book. Three are in the Yeobright family: Mrs. Yeobright, her son Clym, and her niece Thomasin. Then there are three others tangled up with this family: Damon Wildeve (Thomasin’s eventual husband), Eustasia Vye (Clym’s eventual wife), and Diggory Venn (the noble character who also acts as deus ex machina for the story). Each of these characters represent an archetype, and most have a tragic flaw or two as well. Pride, selfishness, stubbornness, idealism, laziness, and impulsiveness are contrasted against innocence, love, self-sacrifice, respect, duty, and realism. Most of the cast end up dead or disabled. Only those who have primarily good qualities end up happy.

As I was reading this time, I found myself looking in particular at the two young women, Thomasin and Eustasia. The former is innocent and passive, the other is reckless and self-serving. As in my last reading, I wanted to feel sorry for Eustasia because she had so few choices, but it was difficult to feel pity when she used people and cast them aside so easily. She wanted everything in the world, but she wanted it handed to her and would not even think of lifting a finger to get it, even when she has the opportunity. The only thing she worked at was trying to manipulate others to her will, and that had me considering just how similar she was to Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Thomasin, too, was a contrast to Eustasia as Amelia was to Becky in VF. Amelia is the innocent, humble, quiet one; Becky is the manipulative, self-serving one. But in VF, both Amelia and Becky are anti-heroes, and Thackeray skewers them both mercilessly. In this book, Hardy is far more subtle. He extolls the misfortunes of Eustasia’s life that led her to be the person she is, while simultaneously making it just about impossible to pity her, and he pretty much leaves Thomasin alone. In fact, his treatment of Diggory Venn (the most Mary Sue character I’ve ever read) seems to indicate that Hardy (unlike Thackeray) approved of meekness, self-sacrifice, and duty-above-everything-else as a way of life.

Another thing I noticed quite a bit was the rural idealism. Hardy was fascinated by rural life and spent a lot of time idealizing it in all his books. He is not unlike Clym that way, after Clym comes home from Paris and decides that simple, rural, (idealized) life is far better than any other way of living. Even after Clym becomes disabled and is no longer able to go through with his plans to create a school that caters to rural communities, he copes by taking to manual farm labor. Nothing wrong with that, except that in doing so, he leaves his family without money and puts his marriage into a state of extreme distress. He’s stubborn and holds onto ideals even as the reality of those ideals doesn’t match up with his beliefs. It makes me wonder if there are any parallels to Hardy’s life there, or if Hardy was able to maintain his idealism in reality as well as novels.

I enjoyed revisiting Return of the Native, though I admit that on second read, it was easier to see some of the devices and heavy-handedness of the story. (I mean, come on, how many times will Diggory Venn show up at the exact right moment to rescue someone or alter the course of the story?) It was still a lovely book, though, and of course the audio read by Alan Rickman is superb.

Posted in 2019, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Sunday Coffee – Nose Update

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Thistle

I saw the ENT this week about this whole loss/distortion of smell issue. For those who haven’t known me long, here’s a very brief recap of the last year on my nose. Just skip the next paragraph if you already know what’s happening.

Jan 2018: Got a cold, nose got stuffy, lost my sense of smell, thought that was normal. Stayed sick til April when someone finally admitted I needed antibiotics. Got better. Sense of smell didn’t return. June: Smell suddenly returned but everything smelled like plaster and certain foods had completely altered tastes to the point where I couldn’t eat them. July through October: Smell changed three times, first to yeast/undercooked bread in July, then to sewage in late September, then to rotten onions in mid-October. Nov: Dr ordered an MRI; it was normal. Dec: Dr put me on a four-week round of antibiotics for presumed entrenched sinus infection and referred me to the ENT.

Since my doctor put me on the antibiotic, life has been a bit rough. I’m mildly allergic to this particular antibiotic and the doctor knows, but he said it’s the best for sinus infections, and suggested a few things (like probiotics) to help counter the reactions. Unfortunately, I’ve still dealt with a lot of unpleasant side effects, most recently a persistent under-the-skin red rash across my entire face. The probiotics did help…until they started giving me hives and I had to switch to a different one with fewer strains and which only caused hives sometimes. But really, the entire experience has been quite unpleasant, as you might expect during a four-week-course of a medicine you’re mildly allergic to.

However, I thought the antibiotic was making a difference. After about a week taking it, I began to smell three things instead of one! Rotten onions, tamales, and patchouli. I also started to smell the real scents underneath those. Major improvement! Then I got off the hive-probiotic and my sense of smell went back to rotten-onions-only. Two weeks later, I accidentally took the wrong probiotic (immediate hives!) and for a day I went back to the three scents. I hadn’t realized the diversification was due to that specific probiotic, and the implications are interesting.

But absolutely inexplicable, as it turns out. The ENT did a scope of my nose (pleasant…) and ruled out sinus infection, polyps in the olfactory region, and abnormalities anywhere in my nose. She re-examined my brain MRI and confirmed it was normal. The good news is that I could stop taking the antibiotic. Hallelujah. The bad news is that she’s stumped. She said a virus could have damaged the olfactory nerves in my nose, and smelling anything at all would indicate the nerves waking up. “Unpleasant for you, but all you can do is wait and hope,” she said. She also admitted that her theory doesn’t hold up with the changes in smell over time, especially with the probiotics like that. She suggested – I’m dead serious – that I get some strong-smelling items and sniff them several times a day while remembering what they’re supposed to smell like, then come see her in a month to see if that worked. WTF.

In other words, I’m basically f*cked. I’m back to square one, on my own, figuring out what the hell is going on in my body without a doctor’s help. I drowned my body in antibiotics for no reason and severely upset my internal balance. Now, days after taking no medicines/probiotics at all, I’ve started getting hives every night and the facial rash –> is even more painful and itchy – most likely I’m going to need a round of steroids to clear out all the inflammation. That’s the only thing that’s helped my body with hives before. On the brighter side, at least now I have a small clue on the nose front: probiotics improved the situation. They did something, more than doctors or medicine have done. Obviously I can’t take something that’s going to give me hives, but what I can do is a lot of research and work in resetting my own internal bacteria balance.

It’s probably something I needed to do a long time ago anyway. More on this later this week, but I only began having problems with weight and health after the botched tooth surgery in 1998 that led to a hidden infection, which in turn led to constant illnesses in my throat and spending several YEARS on antibiotics. My internal ecosystem is as f*cked as I am. And as soon as I deal with the current hive/rash issue, I’m going to put my system back to as healthy as I possibly can. Hopefully I can heal whatever’s causing this nose problem in the process. I’ve spent most of my adult life figuring out my own medical problems because the doctors never could, and I guess I’ll just keep on doing that. But GAH it’s frustrating.

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Protected: Someone Like Me, by MR Carey

Posted on January 18, 2019 by Thistle

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Wellness Wednesday – Building My Happy Place

Posted on January 16, 2019 by Thistle

One of my goals this year is to meditate more often. I’d begun to get into the habit back in the fall of 2017, but fell away from it before I’d gotten far enough in for it to be a real habit. I’ve followed through a number of times this January, each for a ten-minute stretch. I use Insight Timer, an app recommended to me by my friend Becca (Lost in Books), set to an ambient “Raindrops” sound. The app is free without ads and there is no talking throughout the meditation unless you ask for it, and you can set it to complete silence as well. I like the Raindrops setting because it sounds more like a river running over rocks with wind blowing through trees. It reminds me of the summers I spent out at the Frio River growing up. There’s a little series of musical notes that plays periodically which doesn’t sound like wind chimes, but reminds me of them as well.

In the past when I’ve meditated, I’ve tried to empty my mind and focus on my breath. However, last week I asked myself something that I haven’t asked in awhile: Where is my “happy place?” Where would be my ideal setting, the place where I would feel most serene. I haven’t asked myself this for a long time, because the answer has been rooted in the past. As I said back in December, though, I’ve begun to let that past go. It seemed an appropriate time to revisit the question.

To my surprise, a place immediately blossomed in my mind when I began my meditation session. I was in a screened-in porch surrounded by trees – live oaks and mesquite trees and bald cypresses, many hung with ball moss and Spanish moss. The wind was blowing. In the distance, I could hear a river running over rocks, though I couldn’t see it. The porch had wood floors covered by a large homemade oval braided rug. I sat on a comfy armchair, legs curled underneath me, a round table to one side with a book, a journal, a notebook, and a pen on it. I was in my pajamas, held a cup of coffee, and had a cat purring on the chair beside me. The temperature was warm without being hot, and there was a breeze tinkling through wind chimes. It was either sunrise or sunset – didn’t matter which – and I watched the sky transition while I drank my coffee.

The image was so startlingly clear that I could sketch it if I had any measure of artistic talent, and it was a whole sensory experience. I could feel the breeze and the steam off my coffee and the cat’s purring. I could smell the river and trees and the dewy ground outside. I could taste the coffee. I could hear water and rustling leaves and wind chimes. Even my pajamas were specific – a ribbed tank top with loose soft shorts that I could feel as if I were currently wearing them. And while it’s true that I’ve always wanted a screened-in porch like my grandmother’s (complete with oval braided rug), this particular porch was nothing like my grandmother’s. It was wholly my own. It felt right.

Back in 2015 when I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and began the KonMari process, I skipped the “before you begin” section of visualizing what you want your life to be. Situationally and mentally, I was not in a place where I could answer that question. Now, thanks to letting go, I’m starting to get into a good place to ask. Of course, I live with other people, and my idea of an ideal life will not be the same as the four others here, who will all have different ideas. But I have my own spaces in this house, and one day hope to have a place that is purely “a room of my own,” as Ms Woolf says. Now that I’ve begun to create that happy place in my mind, I have a lot more direction in reality. I’ve started on that path that I’ve found so elusive for much of the last five years.

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Song of Blood and Stone, by L. Penelope

Posted on January 14, 2019 by Thistle

The barrier between a magic land and a non-magic land is breaking. War threatens. Out in a remote cabin on the non-magical side, Jasminda is unaware of the impending danger. Her entire family has passed away before her, and she struggles to keep her home in the face of her country’s prejudice, as she is half-magical from a mixed-race family. Jack is trying to escape from the magical army he infiltrated as a spy, and stumbles upon Jasminda while gravely injured. She tries to heal him and help him on his mission, but as always missions aren’t clear-cut and may do more damage than good in the process.

This is the book I should have started 2019 with! This was fantastic!! Everything about it was good – the writing, the conflicts, the characters, the pace, the integrated world-building, the folktales that began every chapter. I’m not sure how I stumbled upon this book but I will now sing its praises to everyone. I cannot wait for the next volume in the series. Things I particularly loved:

– There are a lot of “twists” that are obviously coming, but the characters aren’t surprised by them and often figure out what’s going on pretty quickly. Twists and revelations are often in books, but it’s rare to see characters figure them out almost immediately rather than having to stumble along in ignorance forever and be intensely surprised when they’re revealed.

– None of the characters were wholly good or evil. Everyone had reasons behind what they did, whether those actions were good or bad.

– Multiple political viewpoints were addressed, with valid reasonings (if not always compassionate reasonings) behind each of them. People didn’t always act rationally, and sometimes they found strength and compassion through growth while others found only greater hatefulness and spite.

– Deeply-rooted personal and societal prejudices were not easily overcome, and in some cases not overcome at all. Folks who held nothing against people different from them still easily used derogatory slang, not thinking their words hurt or meant anything bad. Folks who discovered that their long-held belief systems were based on a lie didn’t change, but created new belief systems to accommodate their old thoughts. Nothing systematic can be overcome even at the advent of miracles, and this book doesn’t pretend otherwise.

– (mild spoiler) Jasminda isn’t a “chosen one.” She ends up the center of things by pure circumstance and family heritage, and in the end, her magic is weak and unable to help much in the ultimate conflict/crisis. Other, stronger magical folk have to step forward, and Jasminda has only her personal strength, determination, and grit to rely on. In a book that pits the magical against the non-magical, it was wonderful to see a woman with magic rely on her non-magic strengths to succeed.

I loved so much more than these but I don’t want to create a novel here in this post. I do want to note one small thing regarding the book’s label. I’ve seen a lot of people mark the book as young adult on Goodreads, but this is not YA. Jasminda may be nineteen, but there are a lot of adult topics and adult scenes written out. This comes with a potential trigger warning as well –  there is attempted rape in this novel. However, if these things aren’t problems for you, I highly recommend getting ahold of Song of Blood and Stone.

Posted in 2019, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Sunday Coffee – A Bizarre Experience

Posted on January 13, 2019 by Thistle

Y’all probably remember me saying on multiple occasions that when I read a book too fast, I feel really sick afterwards. I don’t suppose I’ve ever really elaborated on what “sick” means, because it’s not just a blah feeling. I feel literally sick, with symptoms similar to a head cold (swollen throat, stuffy nose, headache, sinus swelling, etc). This is a very mild version of something I experienced often in adolescence and my early twenties. I’ll give three examples of the worst times:

Early high school, the day before a swim meet, I played Super Mario all afternoon at a cousins’ house. My family didn’t have video games at home, so this was unfamiliar. I spent so many hours doing it that I began to get sick. That night, I dreamed of the video game in black and white all night (I only ever dream b&w when I’m ill) and the next morning I had the stomach flu and had to miss my swim meet. No one else in the family was sick or got sick afterwards, and the symptoms disappeared as soon as the video game kept racing through my head.

Sophomore year in high school, a friend gave me a cassette of U2’s Zooropa to listen to and copy. I listened to it on my walkman to see if I liked it, then used my dad’s reel-to-reel cassette recorder to transfer onto a blank tape. It was an old machine with only normal speed, so I listened to the album a second time as it recorded. Then I had to listen a third time to make sure it copied correctly. The album was vivid in both lyrics and music, and about halfway through the third listen, my ears and throat began to hurt. I got a fever, and my dad took me to Urgent Care. I’d developed ear infections in both ears and strep throat. I hadn’t been exposed to anyone with either.

When I was pregnant with Morrigan, Jason and I needed to replace our old computer. We did a lot of research to try to get the best product for our needs and for cost-effectiveness. I knew nothing about computers and hardware at the time, so my research lasted roughly 15 hours straight. I’d gone too far and I knew it too late. I had a fever and aches all over and spent the next day in bed with some kind of sinus infection/cold that disappeared as soon as all the specs and images from my research stopped racing through my mind.

Over the years, I’ve learned (mostly) to stop before whatever sensory information I’m taking in becomes too much and makes me physically ill. The read-certain-books-too-quickly-or-too-long is one time when I tend to fail at that. I don’t binge-watch TV or spend too much time on one activity or another. Even during events like Readathon (after making myself VERY sick the first time), I’ll break up the time with non-book activities and switching media often. Despite people telling me that those illnesses were purely coincidence and happenstance, the physical consequences of taking in too much information in a short time period, or spending far too long with a single focus, have been consistent for me since adolescence. I usually know my limits and try to respect them.

However, I’ve never, ever met another human being who also experiences this. I’ve never even heard of anyone experiencing it. Until this week. While reading Aspergirls – which I admit, I abandoned 75% of the way through after it began pushing the “vitamins are better than medicine for mental illness” myth – the author related a story. While she was visiting historic sites in Boston, she took in too much in one day. She says:

I had taken in too many things for my brain to process. I had unnecessary images and sounds in my head that needed releasing. As I tried to sleep, these pictures played in my mind like a kaleidoscope, each one appearing and then morphing into the next. … While it was happening, my temperature shot up to a fever. My body was frantically working to “rid” itself of this invasion as if it were a virus.

I admit it: I cried. Actually, reading that was extremely distressing and I’ve yet to pinpoint exactly why. But in spite of my distress, there was also a sense of reassurance that my experiences aren’t just imagined or coincidence or “in my head.” Someone else in the world has a body that reacts the same way as mine to too-much-stimuli. It wasn’t something I ever thought I’d find, and it was really strange to suddenly stumble on those experiences in someone else after decades of feeling isolated in this respect.

Posted in Book Talk, Wellness | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

City of Broken Magic, by Mirah Bolender (audio)

Posted on January 11, 2019 by Thistle

Once long ago, a weapon was created to use against magic. Inevitably, it backfired, and infestations of hungry monsters spread across kingdoms, popping up anywhere they could take root. Only Sweepers are qualified to destroy these infestations, and the job is dangerous. In the city of Amicae, there are few Sweepers – just Clae and his apprentice of three months, Laura – because in Amicae, people believe government propaganda that claims their city is immune to infestations. Unfortunately, when no one pays attention and no one believes, a city can become a breeding ground for massive infestation.

This was my first book of 2019, and I have very mixed feelings about it. Let me get the negatives out of the way first. One is just a small thing and has to do with the book cover and description. The cover contains the line, “If it’s magic, which wire do you cut?” which implies there will be something related to disarming bombs, but there are no wires or disarming bombs or anything of the sort in this book. It’s misleading, and the book description (back of book, Goodreads) is also misleading. Plus, the book description contains a major spoiler for something that happens in the last 50 pages of the book. So avoid the official book description if you dislike spoilers!

The other negative was a bigger issue for me. There was a whole lot of expository world-building almost up to the end of the book. Sometimes the action would stop for a paragraph or two of exposition to describe some part of the world (like the money system), and sometimes it took the form of explaining history and backstory and magic to people who didn’t know (an apprentice, a foreigner, a reporter, someone who didn’t know what Sweepers actually did, etc). The explanatory sections kept cutting into the story and the transitions between action and stop-action-to-explain were sometimes awkward. World-building is hard when it comes to entirely made up locations with their own magic systems, governments, history, cultures, food, religion, and so on, but a lot of world-building can be built into the story more naturally, and some of it can simply be cut. The reader doesn’t need to know the denomination of all the coins or the varying kinds of religions in the city when neither have any bearing on the characters or story. You expect some of this kind of exposition in the beginning of a fantasy novel, but by page 350? It got tiresome.

The thing is, the story itself was phenomenal. I loved the magic system. I loved learning about infestations. The action was awesome and the pace – excluding exposition – was perfect to keep me racing through without feeling rushed. The opening chapter is one of the best I’ve ever read. (I really can’t express how much I loved it – read a sample!!) I loved the characters and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next book will bring for them. I really want to know what’s going to happen to a specific character (who shall remained unnamed lest there be potential spoilers). All those things were so great that this book would have been an early contender for best-of-the-year if not for that one big negative. That’s what made the book such a mixed experience – all this good stuff that got thinned out by the one persistent irritation. It might not be something that even bothers another reader, but it certainly affected me. I’m definitely planning to read the next book in the series, and I have my fingers crossed that with a sequel, less world-building (thus less expository time-outs) will be required!

Performance: I half-read, half-listened to this book. I had a physical copy out from the library and the audio from Audible (read by Natalie Naudus). Naudus did a great job with the reading, but her pace was at that in-between stage where it was too fast for me to listen to my normal 1.5x speed, but too slow for the 1.25x speed. I kept it on the lower speed, not wanting to miss details, but then ended up stopping and picking up the book instead. The physical book helped me with vocabulary I’d heard but hadn’t seen spelled out, and it was great to have in waiting rooms during multiple appointments for my kids while they were on winter break. Then I’d switch over to the audio for exercise and housework and other activities. I’ve never gone back and forth like this from print to audio. I’ve switched from one to the other before, but never constantly shifting. It was an interesting experience. I’m glad I have the audio copy because I’m definitely going to want to listen to this one a second time.

Posted in 2019, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Wellness Wednesday – The Double-edged Wine Sword

Posted on January 9, 2019 by Thistle

Let me tell y’all a little story. 2009-Manda was at her highest weight ever, and she went in to get blood tests done. Her blood tests were generally bad, but the number we’ll focus on here is HDL, or good cholesterol. Her HDL was very low, at 34 (HDL is supposed to be greater than 39). This was expected, since 2009-Manda was about 100 lbs overweight.

Fast forward to February 2012. Feb-2012-Manda had lost about 70 lbs and was only a couple pounds away from being officially overweight instead of obese. She went in for blood tests, which were generally good – except for her HDL, which was at 34. That’s right. Despite the doctors saying that HDL should go up a point for every six pounds you lose, Feb-2012-Manda had an identical HDL level to 2009-Manda.

(2009, Feb-2012, Dec-2012)

And it gets worse. Fast forward to Dec-2012-Manda, now having lost almost 100 lbs and only a couple pounds shy of a healthy weight. Where is her HDL? 28. Another 30 lbs lost meant a drop of 6 points. Isn’t it meant to go the other way??

(2014)

Now we get to the good news. In December 2014, 2014-Manda (who is the same weight as Dec-2012-Manda) takes another blood test. Suddenly, her HDL has jumped up to 49! Hallelujah! 2015-Manda does even better with 58, despite regaining 40 lbs. 2016- and 2017-Manda stay up high as well, despite regaining 70 lbs from her lowest weight down in the 2014 time period. This new heavier Manda is only 30 lbs down from 2009-Manda, but her HDL looks phenomenal. Why??

I’ll tell you why. Wine. Back in December 2014, when my HDL suddenly jumped to ideal numbers, my doctor asked me if I’d started drinking wine. I was surprised. Indeed, I had started drinking wine. Before 2013, I didn’t drink alcohol at all. I just didn’t like the taste. But a couple times in 2013, I tried out a few wines I liked, and in the fall of 2014, I started attending wine tastings and drinking more regularly. My doctor told me that regularly drinking moderate amounts of red wine often causes an increase in HDL, particularly in women. Who knew? (Well, scientists knew, but I didn’t.)

Personally, I suspected at the time that the increase had more to do with eating a more paleo diet. Not the paleo part itself, but the cutting out of all processed foods and sugar. I didn’t eat a lot of processed foods or sugar to begin with, but the cutting out of all could definitely affect my blood tests, I thought. Only, I didn’t continue with paleo after that fall for unrelated reasons, and yet my HDL stayed high despite regain. Until April 2018.

April-2018-Manda went in for blood tests after cutting out most sugar for about five months. She’d also cut out alcohol for a little over a month before these tests. She was astonished when her HDL dropped to 42. Not too low, but certainly a lot less than she’d been maintaining, and nearly 15 points below where she’d been six months earlier. She was uneasy, but decided to continue to keep away from alcohol because she was actually losing weight since she quit drinking it. But then the catastrophic summer happened, and wine reentered the picture, as well as lots of processed food and eating out and stress. When Oct-2018-Manda took blood tests, she was less than two weeks out from a very indulgent cruise and expected her numbers to be atrocious. Turns out, they were all better than in April – in fact they were the best they’d been in several years – and her HDL popped back into the 50s.

(2018-Manda & 2019-Manda, 7 of 9 lbs dropped between tests)

Which leads us to Jan-2019-Manda, who had blood tests done only 12 weeks after her last. During the gap, she’d had no alcohol and a loss of almost 10 lbs. But what happened? All her numbers got worse, and her HDL dropped to frickin’ 36. That’s right, folks. It seems that in order to actually lose weight, I must cut out alcohol, but if I cut out alcohol, my HDL drops to way-too-low. I’m more than a little irritated that these two things are mutually exclusive.

But you know what? HDL be damned. When I’m drinking, even a tiny amount, I don’t lose weight, I start getting depressed, and I just don’t feel good. Plus, I’m now on a sleep medicine that has a bad interaction with alcohol, so it’s just not going to happen. My doctors are going to fret over these new low HDL numbers, and I’m going to have to point out that at my lowest pre-alcohol weight, my HDL dropped to 28. Apparently my body is just like this. It’s frustrating, but beyond sabotaging the rest of my health, I have no idea how to make that any better.

ETA: I found my post (on another blog) about my December 2012 HDL results. My reaction: “The reason this is so frustrating and confusing is that I am doing everything that they tell people to do to raise HDL cholesterol. I’m losing weight, I exercise a lot, I don’t eat a lot of processed foods or trans fats, and I eat tons of tuna, nuts, olive oil, avocados, nut butters, fruits, veggies, and all the other things they tell you to eat (except salmon, which I don’t like at all). And yet, my HDL continues to go down!” Sounds familiar, Dec-2012-Manda. I sympathize.

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