Week 275 Update

This week was better for me on the weight control front. I hit my target number of 193.0 pounds on my weigh-in this morning. I also remained inside my target range all week long for my daily weigh-ins.

For my points I was in the range of 46.5 and 38.0, and I averaged 42.07 points-per-day. I haven't established my new target for points yet for my new target weight range. It looks like it will be something higher than 42 points, because I dropped weight this week while eating just over that.

I have been getting my water in on most days, and even on the days I fell short, I have been drinking other fluids that keep my hydrated.

I only walked once this week. I just didn't take it as a priority as the week past by, and it didn't get done. The days came to an end and I hadn't walked. I hope that I can do better this week. Dotti and I may even get a hike in.

Two weeks ago I went into the urgent care center because I could see that my left eye was showing signs of early conjunctivitis, and I wanted to get treatment so that it didn't run away before getting some drops going for it. I spoke with the doctor and he said that he would prescribe a medication that he had "100% success" with. That sounded like a jinx if I ever heard one. The medication turned out to be Tobramycin 0.3% Solution.

I used the drops all week and what happened was that by that Friday morning, my left eye looked good, just like my right eye, after having earlier gone through a major increase in redness all along the bottom on Sunday and Monday. Then that evening, the eye flared up on the left side, where it hadn't been very red before. I went back on Sunday to the clinic, because I finally ran out of drops and they obviously weren't doing the trick anyway. The eye didn't look too bad at this point, but it wasn't normal either.

It was a different doctor's weekend to work at the clinic and this one talked through the problem with me a bit. He said that conjunctivitis can come from bacteria, viruses, allergic reactions, or chemical contamination of the eye. They normally start treatment with antibiotics because they are easy to apply and often are effective. He said that often one type of antibiotic will not work even if it is bacteria causing the problem. (And of course if it is a viral infection, antibiotics are useless against it.) So, he prescribed a double whammy. He gave me a new type of antibiotic and included a steroid in it to "treat the redness" especially. The actual medication was named Neomycin and Polymyxin B Sulfates and Dexamethasone Ophthalmic Suspension, and that is mouthful to say.

I had told the doctor that I had an appointment on Tuesday with my regular physician, but I didn’t want to wait until then to have this treated, just in case it flared up in a big way on Monday. So, off we went to the pharmacy to try the new medication.

On Tuesday I kept my appointment with my doctor, to follow up on my chronic back problem. I had him take a quick look at the eye, which was looking very good, and told him what had happened. He said if it flares back up again after I finished with these drops, I needed to go see an ophthalmologist, because it might be Iritis. I did an immediate flashback to when I was 19 and I got iritis in both of my eyes. I was on cortisone eye drops and had to take prednisone for months. That was not what I wanted to hear. Fortunately only one eye is acting up this time, and it may not be iritis at all. When iritis hits both eyes it almost always is a sign of a secondary illness. Even with one eye that can be the case, but with both I was told year ago that it was nearly certainly so.

In the meantime, these drops have worked wonders, and my two eyes are indistinguishable from each other for their level of redness, and my back is not any worse; though it is also not any better.

On Monday, we took a little two hour ride on a sternwheeler ship. (Since my current job allows for non-standard working hours, it makes it nice for doing things during the week when the crowds are lower.) This one was a real sternwheeler, and was driven by the paddlewheel in the back, not by hidden props, like many of these kinds of boats. (As I recall the Tom Sawyer, that we took in St. Louis for the second DWLZ conference had a decorative paddlewheel at the rear but was actually driven by hidden props below.)

During the trip we struck up a friendly conversation with a mother and her son, who were visiting the area. Dotti spent a lot of our "voyage" visiting with the mother, and I visited with the son. The son is a pilot and was completely taken in by the scenery of our wonderful area. He was talking about moving here, and bringing his fiancé out to fall in love with the Pacific Northwest too. I did warn him that he was seeing it at its best, in the sunny and dry part of the year. We get a lot of rainy days in the winter. It didn't seem to matter to him. He is an outdoors kind of guy he said, and you won't find many places better than right here for anyone who likes the great outdoors.

The mother volunteered to take a picture of Dotti and I together and this is the result. When she found out that we had been married for 30 years, she was shocked. She said that after watching us for a while, she thought that we were newly weds. Well, she was right. We are newly weds, because it seems like only yesterday when we were married, and the honeymoon isn't even close to being over yet!

Dotti will be putting up a "photo album" of our little boat trip later in the photo section of DWLZ. It was a beautiful day for pictures, with blue skies and plenty of sunshine.

Other than mundane work stuff, there was one other highlight this week. Dotti and I watched The Phantom of the Opera movie (2004). It was a great experience for both of us. It isn't often that I watch a movie and afterwards feel like it was time very well spent. In fact, usually it is the exact opposite of that. Plot wise, it may not have been the best rendition possible of the great novel, but the music was very much to our liking. Some of it was downright fantastic! Obviously we will be watching that again.

5 years, 100 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3"/239.5/193.0/180±2/BMI:24.12/WK-275