Let’s start with a little word association game. What words (or images) pop into your head when I say “chilblains?”
Category Archives: Health
Someone like you
I started writing this post back in December of 2011. By “started writing,” I mean there was a title (inspired by Adele’s eponymous song) and a bunch of white space.
So, December 2011. I was five months postpartum. I’d been seeing a counselor, which was helping, but I was still well-stuck in the snares of postpartum depression.
Adele’s hit song, “Someone Like You,” was released in 2011, and from the beginning, it was a tear-jerker for me (apparently I’m not the only one, see this interesting WSJ piece on the use of appoggiatura in music). In the months after G’s birth, it became deeply personal. And I don’t mean I got a little bit teary, I mean sobbing, to the point that when it came on in the car, I probably should have pulled over.
For me, the words weren’t about finding another lover, but about finding myself again, and not the sad, depressed, wanting to go back in time self. I couldn’t go back to my pre-C-section, child-free self, I had to figure out how to move forward. Slowly and surely, with help from a lot of people (and with a few bumps, like the winter of 2012), that has happened.
For me, 2014 felt like a real turning point.
Matthew and I acknowledged the many ways that my depression had affected our relationship (in addition to the normal affects of having a child), and we sought help. We had already started working with John Gottman’s book Seven Principals for Making Marriage Work, and we found a local therapist who had trained in Gottman’s methods. Turns out that staying married, especially staying happily married, takes work, ya’ll.
Individually, I completed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course and integrated mindfulness practice into my daily life. This, too, is work. It’s not a cure-all, and it requires real commitment, but I’ve seen real changes.
Back to the title of this post — in late October, I was driving home from the final MBSR course. I often enjoyed driving in silence after class, but at some point that night, I turned on the radio. When I was within two blocks of home, “Someone Like You” came on, and it felt like a sign. I parked and the tears flowed. But it felt different this time, mostly happy tears.
Sitting there, I felt like I had finally found the “someone like me” that I’d been searching for — someone scarred, but stronger. Someone who wasn’t wishing for a different, long-gone life. Someone living in the present.
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Kitchen exhaust fan
Last week I mentioned the kitchen exhaust fan project. In our previous apartment, we had a working, old-school, built-in exhaust fan in the kitchen. While probably not quite as effective as a true hood, it was situated right by the [gas] range/oven, and was certainly better than nothing when it came to improving air quality.
While I highly prefer gas ranges to electric, they do have some downsides when it comes to indoor air quality (good paper here). This might not be a big deal for people who rarely set foot in the kitchen, but we cook and bake A LOT. After two-plus years of living here with no exhaust fan in the kitchen, we decided we really needed to do something.
The kitchen in our current building HAD a built-in exhaust fan, but it was painted shut when we moved in, and not situated all that well with respect to the stove. We toyed around with the idea of opening it to see if it worked, but never got around to it.
Back in November, after some particularly fume-y baking sessions, we broached the subject of adding an externally vented exhaust fan with our landlord, J. He preferred an internal vent hood (which filters the air before recirculating it, but doesn’t remove it), but agreed to look into external venting. We offered to share part of the cost of the project of getting it vented externally, but he never took us up on that.
In the end, we settled on an over-the-range microwave (J wanted to put in a microwave; we had previously been using our own) with an exhaust fan that could either be internally or externally vented, with plans to hook up the external venting.
Step 1: More power for the kitchen. For the past two-and-a-half years, we’ve lived with everything in our kitchen (other than the lights) being on one circuit: refrigerator, dishwasher, and all the outlets (that power microwave, toaster oven, and toaster). The result of this arrangement was that we couldn’t use two high-power draw appliances simultaneously, or we’d trip the breaker. For example, if the dishwasher was running, we couldn’t use the microwave. Or if I was heating something in the microwave, I couldn’t toast a piece of bread.
If we’d discovered this before we moved in, we would have made our tenancy conditional on it being fixed, but no. We didn’t discover it until we moved in, and, at that point, J didn’t seem terribly interested in upgrading things. I didn’t feel like pushing the issue because within two weeks of our move-in, the refrigerator died. After J replaced that, I wanted to lay low for awhile, so as not to be that tenant.
While somewhat annoying, we’d adapted to the kitchen power situation fairly quickly, with a strict “one appliance at a time” policy. Given J’s earlier response, I was rather surprised when, at the beginning of this project, he brought up that the first step would be getting more power to the kitchen. I don’t know that the exhaust fan draws all that much power, and thereby wasn’t sure why we suddenly needed to change things now, but I wasn’t going to argue. Most of the work happened when we were out of town at Christmas, with a bit of additional work later.
Step 2: Acquire and install the microwave. The model J selected was back ordered, but the delay gave him time to do the wiring. The microwave arrived in mid-January. J bumped up the over-the-range cabinets to make room for the microwave underneath. The space the microwave now occupies used to be bare, light-colored wall, so this darkens things up a bit, but that’s a trade-off we can live with.
Step 3: Duct work for external venting. This required that we lose a little bit of actual cabinet storage space, as well as the above-cabinet space that we’d been using to store some larger kitchen items. Storage space in the kitchen is a premium, but this was worth the trade.
J removed the old exhaust fan and used that space as the outlet for the duct work for the new fan. As you can see, the project isn’t quite finished, but we have a functional externally vented, over-the-range hood, which is huge!
Having power to actually run multiple kitchen appliances at the same time is also huge. It took me a couple of weeks to adjust to the idea that I could, in fact, toast toast a piece of bread and heat something in the microwave at the same time. After a month to adjust, it sometimes feels a little odd, like I’m doing something forbidden when I use the microwave while the dishwasher is running.
We haven’t really put the exhaust fan to the test yet. Of course, many of the pollutants it will remove are of the colorless, odorless variety, but there should be some improvements we notice. I don’t know if it was real, or just in my head, but there have definitely been some times when I’ve spent a lot of time in the kitchen with the oven on and seemed to notice some effects on my lungs and breathing. Now that it’s done, I only wish we’d done it sooner!
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Aerial fun
Fortunately, these past few weeks haven’t been all sick and no play. We wrapped up our 6-week silks intro class toward the end of January. Trying something new, and active, together was a great experience.
Matthew made it all the way to the top on the night of our last class.
From here, we could have moved on to the Silks 1 class. Many people choose to repeat the Silks Intro & Strength Building. We opted to continue building our strength and practicing what we learned in the intro class by going to the open aerial sessions (essentially an open gym to practice on your own). Unfortunately, “open” does NOT equal free, but we bought a punch card, which brings down the cost a bit.
We skipped a week between our final class and our first open aerial. At first, I felt like I’d lost a lot in those two weeks, but then I warmed up and got in the swing of things.
Matthew pulled off this move at open aerials. He was the only male in our intro class, and I think all of the females envied the muscle-building benefits of testosterone. Unfair advantage!
We’ve been taking advantage of playground equipment to sneak in extra upper body work, and we just bought a pull-up bar so we can continue some strength building at home.
Aerials are a lot of fun, and you get a great work-out (you build strength quickly when lifting your own body weight!) without the monotony of a traditional gym (something I don’t really mind, but Matthew hates).
The open aerial punch card will take us up to the start of gardening season, when Matthew’s time will be a lot more limited. I’m not sure what we’ll do after that. We’d both like to continue, but, in addition to making the time, it’s not a cheap hobby. Eventually, we’d like to be in a place where we can have our own small rigging (a rigging is what the aerial apparatus — whether silk, lyra, rope, or trapeze — hangs from), so we can practice without the gym fees, and at times that are most convenient for us.
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Hoping for health
Oof! These past few weeks have been reminiscent of three years ago. G was a baby and in a childcare center, and he was sick ALL the time (his exhausted, sleep-deprived parents didn’t fare much better). That was followed by two winters of relatively good health (which is the norm for us) — first, the year G was home with me, and then last year, when he was with a small, home-based caregiver. Nothing like jumping back into the germ pool that is lots of little kids together in one place!
First we had the flu virus that [likely] led to the secondary pneumonia infection. Matthew and I had milder versions of the influenza-ish virus — no pneumonia, but it did linger in our sinuses for a bit. Time, rest, and regular neti-ing seems to have finally done the trick for us.
We no sooner recovered from that than G was hit with a 24-hour stomach bug.* I’ll spare you the details. We ramped up hand washing, and I did more loads of laundry in two days than I usually do in a month! Matthew and I had vague, “don’t feel great, but not really sick” symptoms during those 24-48 hours — headache, low appetite, and intermittent, low-level nausea.
To add to the fun, on Friday, when G was with my MIL, she called and said she was concerned that he might have a UTI. Ugh, not what I wanted to hear! Based on the symptoms, we went ahead and made an appointment with the doctor.
UPDATED: Just realized I forgot to finish this . . . . The UTI scare turned out to be a false alarm. Instead of antibiotics, we left with a diagnosis of irritated skin at the tip of his penis and a “prescription” for daily warm baths, sans soap. We made the most of the doctor appointment by confirming that his lungs were, indeed, clear of pneumonia (he was much more cooperative this time!).
We thought we were out of the woods, and, where January had been “the month of sick,” I [prematurely] declared February the month of health. We made it three days into the month, and then it was Matthew’s turn for the full-blown version of G’s stomach bug (or maybe it was a different one, who knows??? There are so many fun options from which to choose!).
Now that M and G have both had a stomach bug, I feel like there’s a dark cloud over my head. I’ve felt a bit “off,” but it may just be the power of suggestion. I won’t make any more declarations about us being healthy, but I’m sure hoping for a better month!
*It’s a pet peeve of mine when people talk about the “stomach flu.” It’s a common phrase, but there is no such thing. There are a variety of organisms (viruses, bacteria, and parasites) that can cause gastrointestinal issues, with various symptoms and durations, but these have nothing to do with influenza. The general term for these illnesses is gastroenteritis, which just means inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract (that inflammation leads to the characteristic symptoms, which may include nausea, cramping, vomiting, and/or diarrhea). These “stomach bugs” are usually transmitted by eating contaminated food (people often blame the last thing they ate before they got sick, but in reality, many of these bugs have long incubation times), or by the fecal-oral route. On the other hand, influenza is a respiratory virus (think nasty cold, with body aches and fever). End rant.
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