Suburban Guerrilla

So I have multiple incisions from the surgery, and because I’m a big believer now in myofascial therapy, I’ve been kind of working the areas around the wounds to keep everything moving freely.

Last night, I pushed down gently on one of the incisions and felt this little “pop” — you know, like bubble wrap? Then I pushed on another one and got another pop. Anyone ever experience anything like this? Not complaining, mind you – just curious.

Anyway, had my last visit with the surgeon yesterday. He was surprised that I really did have shingles, and that the antivirals got rid of it. “But you didn’t have a rash,” he said, turning to explain to the resident he was training.

“I did have a rash. I just had that one blister,” I reminded him. “When my kids were little and both had chicken pox (ed. note: shingles are a later incarnation of chicken pox), the one whose rash covered him from head to toe had no other symptoms. The one who only had three or four blisters was the one who was as sick as a dog.”

“Hmmph,” he said. You could almost see the “old wives tale” thought balloon above his head.

Anyway, so I’m feeling close to normal again. No severe pain and even got to sleep on my right side for the first time last night. My sleep’s a little screwed up, so I have to get back to a saner routine, and I’m still a little tired. But I’m planning to go back to the gym next week.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

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Is your cat making you crazy?

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It’s bad for a lot of reasons (bone health is another) but this is a pretty good reason to switch to water:

Diet soda may seem to be a healthier alternative to calorie-laden regular soda, but a new study shows that people who regularly drink diet soft drinks may be putting their hearts at risk.

Those who drank diet soda on a daily basis were at an increased risk of experiencing stroke, heart attack and death due to these conditions, according to the study.

“Our results suggest a potential association between daily diet soft drink consumption and vascular outcomes,” study researcher Hannah Gardener, an epidemiologist at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, said in a statement.
[...]

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It’s so cool when they can adapt technology to uses like this!

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So I asked one of my friends last night what she knew about shingles, and just as we were getting off the phone, she added, “Sambucol is good for shingles, by the way. It boosts your immune system.” (Sambucol is the elderberry extract I’m always plugging for respiratory illness.)

A little bell went off. See, I couldn’t figure out why the pain got so much worse after being okay for the first two weeks after surgery – it hit me that I’d been taking Sambucol for an impending cold that whole time. The pain got much worse after I stopped taking it.

So I started taking it again last night. I slept through the night for the first time in a week, and more important, the pain is much better today. There’s still pain, but it’s not as intense. It’s bearable. Very, very interesting.

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Nice that they’re catching up with the rest of us!

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Jan. 10th:

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Yes, I did watch the movie this weekend and as my friend pointed out, it was strangely gratifying to watch Gwyneth Paltrow die. But it did make me think about the avian flu, which just two years ago, completed most of the necessary mutation stages just short of a full-blown pandemic. Looks like we might have crossed into the final stage, if these two Chinese victims really had nothing to do with birds:

BEIJING — A man died in southern China on Sunday from the H5N1 bird flu virus, the Health Ministry reported. It was China’s second such death in less than a month.

The latest victim, an unidentified 39-year-old, fell ill on Jan. 6 and was admitted to a hospital in Guizhou Province the same day, the Health Ministry said in a statement reported by Xinhua, the official news agency.

A 39-year-old bus driver in Shenzhen, a city in Guangdong Province near Hong Kong, died of the disease on Dec. 31.

Both deaths were notable because neither victim reported any contact with birds in the month preceding his illness. The virus is known to spread through contact with infected birds, eggs or bird feces, but experts said a pandemic could occur were it to mutate into a form that was more easily spread.

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Yes, they seem to work, but all the more reason why we can’t let anyone actually use them!

Rave-goers and visitors to Amsterdam before December 2008 may be intimately familiar with magic mushrooms, but there’s little scientific knowledge on what happens to the brain while tripping.

Now it appears that more research is warranted. A growing number of studies suggested that perhaps the mushrooms’ key ingredient could work magic for certain mental disorders.

New research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds light on why one of the mushrooms’ hallucinogenic chemical compounds, psilocybin, may hold promise for the treatment of depression. Scientists explored the effect of psilocybin on the brain, documenting the neural basis behind the altered state of consciousness that people have reported after using magic mushrooms.

“We have found that these drugs turn off the parts of the brain that integrate sensations – seeing, hearing, feeling – with thinking,” said David Nutt, co-author of the study and researcher at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom.

[...] Psilocybin is illegal in the United States and considered a Schedule 1 drug, along with heroin and LSD. Schedule 1 drugs “have a high potential for abuse and serve no legitimate medical purpose in the United States,” according to the Department of Justice.

But in the early stages of research on psilocybin, there’s been a bunch of good news for its medicinal potential: psilocybin has shown to be helpful for terminally ill cancer patients dealing with anxiety, and preliminary studies on depression are also promising.

Nutt’s study is also preliminary and small, with only 30 participants. His group used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look at how the brain responds to psilocybin, from normal waking consciousness to a psychedelic state.

The study found that the more psilocybin shuts off the brain, the greater the feeling of being in an altered state of consciousness, he said. It’s not the same as dreaming, because you’re fully conscious and aware, he said.
[...]

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My guess is that it has a lot more to do with kids sitting on their asses playing video games:

WASHINGTON, DC, January 17, 2012 — While the percentage of obese children in the United States tripled between the early 1970s and the late 2000s, a new study suggests that—at least for middle school students—weight gain has nothing to do with the candy, soda, chips, and other junk food they can purchase at school.

“We were really surprised by that result and, in fact, we held back from publishing our study for roughly two years because we kept looking for a connection that just wasn’t there,” said Jennifer Van Hook, a Professor of Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University and lead author of the study, which appears in the January issue of Sociology of Education.

The study relies on data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999, which follows a nationally representative sample of students from the fall of kindergarten through the spring of eighth grade (the 1998-1999 through 2006-2007 schools years). Van Hook and her coauthor Claire E. Altman, a sociology and demography doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University, used a subsample of 19,450 children who attended school in the same county in both fifth and eighth grades (the 2003-2004 and the 2006-2007 school years).

The authors found that 59.2 percent of fifth graders and 86.3 percent of eighth graders in their study attended schools that sold junk food. But, while there was a significant increase in the percentage of students who attended schools that sold junk food between fifth and eighth grades, there was no rise in the percentage of students who were overweight or obese. In fact, despite the increased availability of junk food, the percentage of students who were overweight or obese actually decreased from fifth grade to eighth grade, from 39.1 percent to 35.4 percent.

“There has been a great deal of focus in the media on how schools make a lot of money from the sale of junk food to students, and on how schools have the ability to help reduce childhood obesity,” Van Hook said. “In that light, we expected to find a definitive connection between the sale of junk food in middle schools and weight gain among children between fifth and eighth grades. But, our study suggests that—when it comes to weight issues—we need to be looking far beyond schools and, more specifically, junk food sales in schools, to make a difference.”

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Things we did not know about the clitoris!

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What it does (and doesn’t do) to your lungs.

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Oops.

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Very useful:

The Science of Self-Compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff from Emiliana Simon-Thomas on Vimeo.

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Yes, absolutely. We’ve made it very difficult to detach from our electronic umbilical cords.

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