Day 46: Clean Bill O' Health

I had my six-week followup appointment with Dr. Cheng today, and he gave me the all clear. His exact words were that the improvement in strength in my right foot was "encouraging." I have another appointment in six more weeks, but I am free to cancel it if I have no complications. This is great news given the initial forecast was on the cloudy side. Dr. Cheng is a nice guy, but I hope I never see him again.

An interesting side effect of my surgery is that, for the first time, I've hit my out-of-pocket maximum on my insurance. Funny, I always assumed it would be Rhonda.

Now that I am back at work, it's increasingly more difficult to stay in shape. Work, coupled with hot weather, makes it so if I don't go for a walk first thing in the morning, I won't feel like doing it later. Plus, my stamina is increased so it takes a lot longer to squeeze in a walk, or I need to break it up. Luckily, I have been compensating for that by keeping busy around the house, and helping Rhonda move classrooms.

I'm working on a couple of other things. I'm on week two of the One Hundred Pushups challenge. I would be on week three if not for last week's fiasco severely derailing my life. I'm also planning to sign up for a distance walk/run in September. Possibly this one.

I'm having some mixed results in my quest to lose weight and take strain off my discs. The bad news is I've gained about 4.5 pounds since the surgery. The good news is my body fat percentage is down. My Tanita scale can be a bit flaky, but what it is telling me, on average, is that I was around 200 pounds with 30% body fat (stop laughing) before the surgery. Now I am weighing in around 204.5 pounds, but at 27.5% body fat. I've lost almost four pounds of fat, so if you do the math, I've gained 8.5 pounds of muscle.

And that's without dietary changes. In fact, with all the recent drama, I've eaten a lot of McNuggets this month. As I slowly get into more of a routine, including getting to the grocery store with a list, we should both start eating better.

So aside from a lengthy recovery for the nerves in my right foot and some high cholesterol, things are looking up for me healthwise probably for the first time since I put down the controller and started playing baseball in middle school. It appears my thirties are all about repairing the mistakes, health-related and financial, that I made in my teens and twenties. Here goes nothing.