June 5: In Stow at Judy’s for my rehab.
June 4: Another rough night of sleep. This has to be one of my biggest issues right now. I just cannot get comfortable lying on my back half propped up trying to sleep each night. I end up tossing and turning, pushing myself downwards, then pulling myself upwards, pillow under the legs, pillow out from under the legs. It’s just non-stop frustrating. Now I have been able, for very short periods of time, been able to do a pseudo-fetal position with a pillow propped under my chest. But it’s really so hard to attain just the “right” position such that my chest does not hurt that I spend like ten minutes going through this long procedure of adjusting my pillows. Most times I cannot find that sweet spot. On a couple occasions I did, and I managed to snag an hour or two of sleep in that position.
Plus, I’m on my arse so much during the day that my low back is just smoked. So when I do lay down to sleep, my low back just doesn’t want any part of it. I’ve been trying to get up every hour or two during the day to stretch my low back out. I mean I’m sitting for many many hours each day working on the computer, and then just sitting and reading, so it adds up to way too much time. By the time I get to night, and going to bed, my low back is just pure mush.
So today was one full day off the pain meds. Now as I said, the morning is the worst, and I really try to let my body wake up and kind of recover a bit from the rigor mortis I incur at night on the couch. And it’s been working. The first half hour I’m moaning and groaning to myself from the stiff and sore chest. Then I really loosen up and kind of feel better. That’s the thing that has enabled me to take the rest of the day on without the pain meds.
Did a dog walk with my sister and her boyfriend Mike today. Now Judy’s back is really bad, so she’s actually more couch-bound that I am at this point. She was hurting way too much to walk with us. I walked my pop’s little dog Pepper, while Kim and Mike each walked one of their two dogs. We went at my “old guy’s” pacing for 1:20 hours, and I have to admit that again, I felt a bit tired from the effort. NOT cashed, but just tired enough that sitting down felt pretty welcomed. I continue to be amazed at what this whole open-heart has done to me. I mean I had the endurance of a ground sloth for goodness sake. But then when I look at where I was, and where I am now, I do see some progress, real progress. It’s slow, but it’s there.
Later in the day Judy and I went to my house where Kim and Mike are staying with pop, and Kim and I made a chinese stir fry. Ok, so we’ll all, Judy, me, Kim, Mike, trying to really work on a much healthier diet, this due to my current situation. So we took one of my favorite recipes, a Moo Goo Gai Pan, and kind of tweaked it to be much less in sodium. We used low sodium soy, and low sodium oyster sauce, and then we only went with half the amount of each of these in the sauce. We substituted water for the other half. So if the recipe called for two TBS of soy, we went with one TBS of soy and one TBS of water. Same for the oyster sauce. Well, in my opinion the sauce…sucked! I mean to me it was just tasteless. My pop proceeded to pour on 2 TBS of soy, I mean right out of the gate! Mike Kim and I put on a TBS each of oyster, and Judy said it was fine and put nothing more on. Kim said it was a bit bland. Mike was ok with it, and I thought it was just terrible. And it was. It was WAY too bland. I complained and bemoaned for ten minutes.
Really made me thing about trying to revamp some of my really home-run recipes into more healthy recipes. This is going to be much tougher than I thought, and a ton of thinking is going to have to go into this “new era” in eating. Maybe I’m just going to have to do some of these recipes as “special events” recipes and leave them as is, but just eat them much less than we have in the past. Don’t know at this point. Got to start to look at more recipes that are heart healthy. Problem is that my magazine subscriptions include Bon Appetite & Food and Wine. I just love to work on recipes from these mags. BUT many of the recipes use a lot of the no-no’s for cooking healthy: lot’s of butter, fats and salts. Ouch!
Had my first glass of alcohol since my cardiac event back on May 11th. Treated myself to 3 small teacups of red wine last night and it was really nice to have some wine with my family at the diner table. Well, helping with dinner and dishes really put that final beat-down on me. I was pretty tired at the end of the evening, and hitting that hay at 9:30 PM on a Saturday night was my destiny.