Babies, experiments, and running

And I'm still bored. Although there are stirrings of projects happening in my house. Oh yeah, and babies. Let's start with babies.

I got to hang out in the newborn nursery this week in clinical. Not a lot happens there, but when it does happen it all involves babies, so I'm cool with that. I got to feed babies, and swaddle babies, and do physical exams on babies, and take baby vital signs, etc. I also saw a baby with a huge conehead because she just wouldn't fit when on her way out the usual way, so they had to do a c-section and pull her back up and out. Fun, huh? There was another baby that looked like she was at a tanning salon because she got to lie underneath special lights that help reduce jaundice with a cute little face mask on. Oh, and there was a baby who was withdrawing from methadone because her mom is in the methadone treatment program. I felt really bad for this little girl, but she seemed like she's doing okay with it. Overall, babies are adorable and I love playing with them.

Okay, on to projects. Jess and I both want to lose weight. Not a ton of weight, but about 10 stubborn pounds that won't go away. Also, I seem to have developed some problems with glucose regulation. Evidence of this includes nearly passing out in clinical and while shadowing Dr. Meyers (I was fine after eating some food and I'm nearly positive that it was hypoglycemia and not blood-pressure related.) Further evidence is that fact that every time I go to the gym, unless I eat a LOT (way more than is reasonable for the kind of workouts I'm doing) immediately after getting home, I end up falling asleep for about 2 hours and then spend the res of the irritable and fatigued. This is annoying and inconvenient and I want to make it stop. So, with this in mind, we are going to change the way our house eats. Jordan is always excited for experiments and is willing to change how he eats to in order to study us :)

The plan is to switch to a low glycemic index diet. If you don't know about the glycemic index, read this. Basically, it means foods that provide a stable level of glucose in the blood instead of lots of peaks and valleys. Starting on February 1st we're going to take all the stuff in the house that does not qualify as low GI and stick them in a cupboard out of sight and then try to eat only low GI foods for the rest of the month and see what happens. I've also bought a glucose meter on eBay so me can get some real quantitative measures of how well this is working. I'm hoping it'll arrive sometime this week so we can all get a baseline reading of how we're doing and then see how it changes. Jess is having a fabulous time in the kitchen experimenting with low sugar and low GI recipes and so far they taste pretty good. The baseline rules are pretty simple: No foods with sugar (or high fructose corn syrup, or honey, or other sweeteners like that) in the ingredients list, and no white starches (basically no refined flour, white rice, or potatoes). This is going to be a very interesting experiment and I'm hoping it will have a good effect on both my mood and my energy level, since both have been pretty low lately.

Oh, and have I mentioned that Jordan eBayed an EEG machine? We're going to measure our brain waves. It's going to be awesome. You may be tempted to ask why, but the only answer you will get is that we think it's cool. Yeah, we're dorks.

I updated on my other blog about the Couch to 5K running plan I'm doing a while ago, but I think I'm just going to update more about it here, because I'm lazy and this isn't really cycling related at all. I've finished the first week and the first day of week 2. So far things are going well, and the workouts are getting progressively easier. The weird part is how my knee is reacting to all this new stress. I expected swelling, aching, soreness, all the usual stuff when I ask it to do something new. Instead, I'm getting this strange kind of soreness where the entire area around where the screws are feels like a gigantic bruise. It feels like someone hit that spot with a hammer, but there's no external sign of bruising except for some minor swelling. The actual joint is also mildly swollen, and a little bit achy, but not nearly as bad as I thought it would get. My theory about the bruised feeling is that I'm putting stress on the spot where the bits of bone are connected and the screws enter in a completely new way and so I'm temporarily weakening that connection and my body will respond by laying down more bone. But, in the meantime, that area is inflamed, and there is likely some internal bleeding from around the screw entry points since bone is a very vascular tissue. Which is unfortunate, since there is no way to reduce the pain and speed up the healing time except rest, and possibly alternating ice and heat. If I take NSAIDs for the inflammation that will actually slow my recovery so I'm not going to do that. And if I stop running, my body will lose the stimulus to lay down more bone and strengthen that area. So, I run slowly and carefully, take days off when I feel like I need to, and try to not put any more pressure on that connection than necessary (for example, avoid bending my knee more than 90 degress, something that my coach told me to do ages ago, which really helped, and I sort of forgot to keep doing). On the plus side, my kneecap has not done any wobbling out of place so far and I haven't had any problems with my leg collapsing under me yet. Fingers crossed that things will continue to go well.