Weekly Round Up: Cool Bloggers Edition

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This week I'm going to skip food talk in favor of telling you about the latest Cool Blogger's Thing, I found a buddy for my bike trail adventure, I had a miss on the reading front, and I'm sure there will be some puppy talk and maybe some deep life thoughts.

Speaking of Cool Bloggers, yesterday was my turn to join in on the countdown to Engie's 20th Blogging Anniversary!  Join the party here!

A Public Service Announcement

You've heard of the Cool Bloggers Book Club

You've heard of the Cool Bloggers Treadmill Workout

You've heard of the Cool Bloggers Walking Club 

You've heard of the Cool Bloggers Summer Salad Challenge

Now let me introduce you to the Cool Bloggers Colonoscopy Club!!!  And also let me assure you that it was pure coincidence that Engie and I both had our first colonoscopies last Monday.  We didn't know it until afterwards, and when we were emailing about my guest post last weekend, I deeply regret telling her that "Monday is going to be a busy day" without going into the specifics...it's always the things that I don't say that lead to the most regrets.

But srsly tho...colon cancer is something that's on my radar because my grandmother died from it, but also something that I'm not too worried about since she was diagnosed in her 80s.  When my doctor told me that the recommended screening age had been lowered from 50 to 45, my first instinct was to wait until I was 50 since I didn't feel that it was likely to make much of a difference.  Then I realized that the whole "I don't like my job but I have great insurance and I'm planning to quit next year" thing meant...if I did the screening now that was one less day of my life that I would have to work!  I knew it wasn't worth splitting the hair between doing it at 49 vs waiting until I was 50.  I decided to get 'er done.

Normally I'm not competitive, but when my husband got his colonoscopy a few years ago, he was very proud that the doctor's report noted "the preparation of the bowel was excellent".  I wanted the same comment on my chart!  Between you and me, I was nervous that I would mess up the preparation and worried that I would be hungry, grumpy, and miserable.  Spoiler: I didn't mess it up and I wasn't particularly hungry or uncomfortable after the prep, but you just never know what you're getting into with these things.

The process started back in April with a virtual doctor's visit.  I wanted to do the procedure at the facility that was closest to my house, so that's why I had to wait until July.  The instructions were pretty simple: eat a low fiber diet for two days, eat nothing/do prep for a day, and then game day.

As things got closer to time, I found that I wanted something more specific than "low fiber".  Google took me here, and I made my game plan.  As near I can remember my diet was:

Friday

Breakfast: Big ol' cup of coffee with half and half, two pieces of buttered toast and two eggs seasoned with onion powder and salt.

Lunch: PBJ with a lot of PB and J.

Dinner: two sandwiches.  One with two fried eggs and the other was a grilled cheese.

After dinner: tonic water with lime, aka gin and tonic without gin.  It's my favorite non-alcoholic summer beverage.

Saturday

Breakfast: Big ol' cup of coffee with half and half, a three-egg cheese omelette and buttered toast.  I shared some of the omelette with Doggo.

Lunch: PBJ with a lot of PB and J.

That afternoon Hubs and I went for a long bike ride, which resulted in us both being hungry as bears.  We stopped at McDonald's on the way home and I got a large vanilla shake.

Dinner: I was still hungry after the shake, so I had a cheese quesadilla.  

After dinner: more tonic & lime.

Sunday

Breakfast: small cup of black coffee

The rest of the day: the occasional tonic and lime, two bottles of Clenpiq, and gallons of water.

The prep that I took was Clenpiq.  When they called in the prescription, my insurance denied it.  I talked to the doctor's office about other options, and they told me that basically everything out there does the same thing.  One of the options is taking over the counter laxatives and Gatorade and I figured that would be the cheapest/simplest way to go.  But then the doc's office called back and said that the pharmacy had keyed in the prescription for two kits instead of one, so that was why it was denied.  That made it cheaper to get the prescription instead of buying a bunch of laxatives, so I went with Plan A.  A few days later I got a funny letter from my insurance company with the original denial, which said something like "there is no FDA approved protocol for taking that quantity of Clenpiq".

The other thing about the prep is that you're supposed to take the first dose the night before and the second dose five hours before the procedure.  That would have meant getting up at 2:45 AM, so I asked the doc about that.  They said it was no problem to take both bottles the day before as long as I spaced out the doses.  I took bottle #1 in the afternoon, and bottle #2 later in the evening.  If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken the second bottle a bit earlier so that I could have been out of the bathroom by bedtime and gotten more sleep, but that's a note for next time.  I sleep decently well, and by the end I had no doubt that I would get the "excellent preparation" note.

The procedure was a non-event.  I checked into the hospital and before I knew it I was waking up in the recovery room.  The only discomfort I had was that they pump you full of air and what goes in has to come out but it was in no hurry to depart.  The other side effect is that the anesthesia left me pretty loopy and I was still feeling groggy the next day.

Was it worth it?  Yep.  I had a decent sized polyp that was "precancerous benign" - and that's exactly the way that I like my polyps.  The bad news is that I will need screenings every 3 years instead of every 10 years so I will have looooots more colonoscopies in my future than I was planning on, and the good news is that I'm pretty sure that getting a colonoscopy is much easier than getting treatment for colon cancer, so I'm happy with the trade off.

Also I got my "excellent preparation" note so booyah.

So PSA, if a colonoscopy is on your to-do list - be a Cool Blogger and do it!

Workouts

I've been slowly working my way up a 100 mile long bike and hike trail.  I've been biking 5-7 miles out and back, and then picking it up where I left off each week.  I'd had to take a few weeks off, and originally I wasn't planning on adding biking to my pre-colonoscopy weekend, but that Saturday the weather was gorgeous, and the Hubs had a yen to get out there.  So did I since I knew I wouldn't be going anywhere on Sunday.  

The next segment was the northernmost section of the trail, so it was more of a "wow" than the other segments that I've done so far.  It ended up being 14 miles total, which is on the long side for me and very long for the Hubs since lately his fitness has been focused on hiking and not biking.  It was a good time, and next up we'll pick up the trail where I started last month and work our way south.

When I met Kim back in May, she gave me a few rocks, and I decided that the north end of the biking path was the perfect place to "release" one of them back into the wild.  I hope that the whale found a good home.  I have two other rocks that I will either set them free on my August travels, or I'll save them for the mid point and south end of the trail.  Stay tuned.

 

In other fitness news, of course I didn't work out the day of my colonoscopy, and the next morning and the day after I felt tired so...I didn't work out!  Back in my running days I always felt pressure to get all of my planned runs in, and the best thing about my post-running fitness life is the freedom to skip workouts.

Back in my running days?  Guess what, I'm still doing the 2 mile run-walks that I told you about last time, which is a recent thing that I picked up after getting bored with the treadmill.  It hasn't been a problem to increase the running distance by a minute each time, and my last endeavor was 3 x 7 minutes running with a minute walk break in between.  Again, I have no plans with this other than moving my body and seeing how it goes.

Watching

Nothing to report.

Reading

I finished Margo's Got Money Troubles and continued to love it to the end.

My next book was another "hot book that everyone's reading that I heard about on the Sarah's Bookshelves podcast" but it was a miss.  Real Americans started out strong and then went downhill.  I adored the first third of the book that was about Lily, a young Asian American making her way in New York in the early 2000's, was less interested in the middle third of the book about her son in the 2020s, and then the book completely lost me in the final third.  Ya can't win 'em all.

From there I went back to the Linda Castillo Amish murder mysteries for a palate cleanser - After the Storm, which of course I am loving.  I should finish it this week and then I've got Big Plans:

• The next round of CBBC starts this week!  I am having the hardest time keeping the title straight.  I keep calling it "I Cover the Castle" or "I Conquer the Castle" - there is an old movie called I Cover the Waterfront and who knows where I got "conquer" from, but the correct title is I Capture the Castle.  EDIT: I'm having such a hard time with the title that I messed it up AGAIN and had to come back and correct it after Engie pointed it out in the comments...
  
• I've been meaning to read 11/22/63 for years and since it was a hit for Jenny I feel like it's time to finally do it.  

It's also worth noting that I ended up going on a book buying spree.  I'm a huge fan of getting books from the library, but I struck out with Libby.  After the Storm wasn't available on Kindle, and the hold list for 11/22/63 - a book that came out in 2011 - is ridiculously long and has been every time that I've looked at getting it before.  I coulda gone to the library and gotten the physical books...and I did not.  I forked out my hard earned cash and bought those suckers and started reading.

Office Upgrade

We were mostly keeping Doggo in our back room/kitchen area with supervised visits to the rest of the house.  Hubs and I used to trade off being downstairs with her during the work day.

A few weeks ago Doggo figured out how to open the kitchen doors, so she's upgraded herself to having full run of the house.  Much to my delight, she spends the day with me in my office.  We're working through some roommate disputes, such as that sometimes I have meetings where I can't have interruptions for barking, and she occasionally likes to chew the carpet and attack my plush foot rest, and when these situations arise she loses her office privileges.  But overall she's very professional and very lovey during the day, and it's just a fact that work is better when you can drop to the floor and snuggle with your pup.

Deep Life Thoughts

SHU's post on life and death thoughts really resonated with me.  A huge part of the reason why I want to stop working sooner rather than later is that I'm healthy now, and while genetically the odds are good that I have a lot of healthy, quality years ahead of me, nothing is guaranteed.

She speculated on what she would change if she only had three months, a year, or five years left.  For myself, there is a very clear #1 on the list for all of those time frames.  I'd snap the lid on my work laptop down so hard and walk right out the door of my office and never go back in that room.  For now I'm staying the course until my planned exit from the workforce next year but man oh man I am sure thinking about it...

 

Peace Out!