Thanks!

"You have -- the plague."

Theater

Congratulations on your new lease on life from a fellow Firesign Theatre fan!

It's weird, isn't it? Many of my friends didn't make it to 50. Hell, my best friend (living in Giessen, btw) dropped down dead at 37 one day with a sudden heart attack, so this can happen at any age. It is a terrible cliche, but it really seems like the nicest guys went first sometimes.

At least that means I'll be around forever.

Glad you made it!

An extra add on to your warnings......WOMEN you must be assertive. Your docs many times will blow you off as someone who is protected until menopause and then they just blow you off sometimes. I have sky high cholesterol, it runs in my family with cancer and strokes. Still no meds for me and I have to ask to have the blood work checked. I am finally getting some info on my own by using one of those Lifeline screenings that come around. Once I have my info I will go back to the doctor loaded with what I need. I was an ICU nurse, I know this is not good. Women, take care of yourselves and know that you are different and how you are because they don't often tell you.

SO glad you are OK and lucky!

Ever since she got done with her chemo, she has suffered intensely from Restless Legs Syndrome. It was taken seriously in the States for many years before it was recognized as an ailment in Germany, and her doctors refused to even listen to her complaint, and wouldn't prescribe any kind of treatment, saying she was just imagining it all. Meanwhile, she would be up half the night because it was torture to lie still. Luckily, her family has no history of heart trouble, but ALL the women in her family have had cancer, and she was no exception. All of them have beat it, though, so her prospects are good.

My husband has had this for years and now that he is suffering from seizures they have gotten worse. There is some kind of connection, not that this means she will get seizures but that the neurologist thinks that people with seizure disorder are more likely to have this. Remember the DU wars over whether this was a real syndrome or not? LOL. I have had them on occasion. The stretches really really help as does Benadryl. That is about all I know about them but both of those things help my husband and have helped me on those rare occasions.

Almost all research, even to this day after we thought we had taken care of this issue, is done on men or at least I read that several months ago. Women really need to be aggressive with their medical care. There are some wonderful docs out there who are compassionate and listen but there are some real stinkers out there.

I was told I was just being hysterical, both of my children were then full time in school, when I went in with a set of complaints. 2 doctors later, an appointment with a Rheumatologist, and I had my diagnoses of Rheumatoid Arthritis. Now I KNEW already that was what it was, I was a good nurse and it had been rampant on both sides of my family so I was pretty darned sure. Hysterical, isn't that hysterical?

I wish your wife well and continued success health wise for both of you. Getting old is not for the weak of heart....I turned 60 and it is happening even though I never thought I would outlive both my parents and most of my grandparents death ages. I am almost there!

She says the yoga classes are great, but only once a week. If this gets intense, I hope she doesn't ask me to move to Poona!

but these are specific that you do when it happens. I just get out of bed, turn to the wall and stretch out those muscles right then and they pretty much stop. I think it has to be done when it is happening. Wish I knew more.

So very glad you beat the Reaper .

I'm so incredibly glad you beat the Reaper!

You have been an incredibly good addition to my life, and I'm grateful beyond words.....well, almost.

Otherwise, I would never have met Robair, Anne and all the other good people .......well, you know.



Long life and joyful days for you!

And the rest of the new gang. If I ever get around to it (figure a year with my workload), you will also get to meet Nils Quinn, Bella Johnson, Dewayne Willis, Lynne Fortin, and the evil (but wordy) Samuel Tifton. I'll explain later!

I can readily understand what you're up to...

All kidding aside, I wonder what miss B. Q. Preski of Pine Barren NJ would have done in your shoes for industry!

In case these are TV references, don't forget, I don't American TV in my neck of the woods, so you'll have to start explaining from scratch.

"Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers"

Now, if you'd only been able to lay some money down on yourself, you'd be rich.

-- Mal

But animal fats are not totally declared innocent if your body manufactures too much cholesterol, as mine does. When my wife followed the nutritional advice given ten years ago, my cholesterol went WAY down, and stayed there. The only time I had a big problem since was when I was told to go off baby aspirin as a blood thinner for ten days. That put me in the hospital with my only real heart attack, and my cardiologist went ballistic at not being consulted before I went off the aspirin. Here in Europe, my wife already does most of the cooking, and we get our food mostly from the 3 times a week open air farmers market that is held in the center of town. They have been doing that here for the last 800 years or so. The typical German diet contains LOTS of animal fat, which the article seems to play down as the lesser culprit. We eat mostly fish now, done over lightly in olive oil and poached in a water-based vegetable broth, often with fresh ginger and garlic. Those sausages may not be as bad for us as reputed to be, but I can't imagine they're harmless, especially as highly processed as they are.

But no worries, if the cholesterol won't get me, the mercury in the fish or the heavy metals in the vegetables will!

I happily bit into a delicious-looking pastry, expecting to be met with nice bits of fruit.

Well, there was some sort of vile sausauge-y, meat-y and unbelievably strong-tasting cheese stuffs in there. I don't eat red meat and could not spit that out of my mouth fast enough. So I believe you about the high animal fat in the German diet! And all those German immigrants (some of them my relatives) brought their meat-and-potatoes preference to this country. Sometimes I think we would have been so much better off in our culinary evolution in the USA if the primary and biggest waves of immigrants had been from Italy instead of the UK and Germany!

Sounds like you are eating well there, though!

Just don't eat like a German! My wife, at 5'10" and 130 pounds shook the typical German diet long ago, and looks the part.

Me, I gotta cut out all this the traveling (maybe in 30 years or so, we're only 62) and the free stuff tossed in my face. My wife's cuisine tastes better than 90% of the stuff I get on the road anyway.

I'm so glad that you did listen to those doctors and are here, today, to tell it! And how wonderful that you're smart enough to stick with a healthy diet.

My man was told he needed "heart" work years ago, but his work insurance just doesn't cover enough of that up-thru-the-leg stuff and he's never followed thru with his doctor's advice. I cannot get him to stop with his "grease diet"; he insists on eating meat, butter, and everything else that's probably killing him. I had finally gotten him to stop with the huge bowl of ice cream he insisted on having every night before bed, but while I was away from home for an extended time last year, he eventually called to tell me that he'd relapsed (claiming it was my fault, cause he missed me) and now he's hopelessly gorging on that crap every night, again. I'll not argue with him over any of this, he claims he'd rather be dead than have to eat the way I do, but god, I'll sure will miss him when he's gone (a line I often use at supper time).

Congratulations on taking good care of yourself and beating the big one! (I intend to read your post aloud this evening, so thank you for sharing.)

According to the professor who put in my stents, most people (and mostly men) who have problems as severe as mine don't get it checked out until it's too late. A mixture of misplaced pride, machoism, workaholism, probably escapism, too (what I don't know can't worry me). Workaholism and the mistaken confidence that he "had plenty of time" killed my friend in Paris last month. He was a highly intelligent, well-educated sophisticated guy, but in the end it didn't save him from dying before 60.

I don't claim to be the world's anti-macho role model, but I certainly see nothing boosting my ego by refusing to see a doctor if I think there's something seriously wrong, and I have a wife with the same model-like figure she had at 26 to remind me not to let myself become a blimp. At 62, we're starting to have the same aches and pains that eventually plague us all with age, but she has beaten cancer, and I have (so far) beaten this heart thing. She loves vacations in the mountains, but after three of her friends had beast cancer, beat it, then went on skiing vacations, came home and had a recurrence of their breast cancer that killed them, one after another, within 10 weeks of returning from the mountains, she refuses to take another vacation at high altitudes. I guess I can forego the ice cream, the butter and the breakfast sausages.

True confession here--my cardiologist was so impressed with my improved blood counts after I stuck to the diet, he said that on vacation, I could have a lobster in drawn butter and a big cheese omelet once or twice if I wanted, as long as I went back on the diet for the rest of the year. A cheese omelet NEVER tastes so good as when it is a special annual event!