Getting There

Weighed in at the doctor’s office this morning at 334.4 pounds, down 14.3 pounds from my weigh-in on November 13. Even better, BP was 106/60 and resting heart rate was 58.

Got two shots of Dr. Wonder’s Miracle Knee Lube (TM) and made plans for a full checkup in a couple of months. The plan is to get a followup ultrasound in the next couple of weeks of the humongous DVT they found in my left leg back in April. If it’s gone, I’ll stop taking Eliquis for 30 days and they’ll do a thrombopoiesis study (basically a very detailed coagulation panel) and if it shows nothing out of sorts, I can quit Eliquis altogether.

The goal is to be at or near 300 pounds by April, which is totally doable, and getting off the BP meds as well. Judging from how my knees ache from the workouts I give them in the pool and standing all day in the classroom four days a week, I can plan on taking Voltaren for the foreseeable future.

It takes a couple of days for cortisone shots to kick in, and today’s pool workout tested my pain threshold to the limits. I ran 100 laps in 82 minutes, then swam laps with fins and a snorkel for another half hour.

If nobody has ever told you, breathing through a snorkel is hard. Wednesday I could only manage two laps at a time before ripping it off and gasping like a landed fish for a couple of minutes between sets of two laps. I wound up doing 20 laps total.

Thursday I did three laps at a time, with two minutes of rest in between. Did 30 laps then.

Today I did 10 sets of 4 laps, with 60-second rest breaks in between. It doesn’t give me the caloric burn like running in the pool does, but Kee Riced All My Tea do my lungs feel it. I’ll probably start adding more snorkel swims to my regular routine in the future. They’re already getting easier, which tells me my lungs are rising to the challenge.

2024 will start with me weighing close to 65 pounds lighter than I was a year ago, and in far better shape. In the past year, I have released a bestselling memoir On Scene, my first urban fantasy novel Kindred, eight bestselling short stories, and appeared in half a dozen other bestselling anthologies.

With the release of Azazel in late spring, and hopefully End of Tour by Christmas, 2024 is shaping up the be an even better year for writing.

Y’all have a Happy New Year!