General Blather – Page 6

Whimper Whimper

August 12, 2010 BobbieLeave a comment

I met with the surgeon today.

Apparently, adenocarcinoma sucks and what sucks about it is its metastatic rate (it gets big and ugly fast) and its recursion rate (it comes back, even if you get the whole tumor; you have to make sure you have “clean margins”* and even that is no guarantee). What sucks particular in Kumi’s case is that the tumor is right on, and around, her sphincter. I realize that may be too much information for you, but as the surgeon put it: there is a very good chance that she is going to be incontinent for life if he has to snip both nerves that control the sphincter.

The normal surgical method to ensure clean margins is to excise a gratuitous amount of tissue around the tumor — so if it were on her back, for example, he’d cut out a good half-inch all the way around, and just sew it up. But because it’s on her sphincter, he can’t do that. And if he is trying to get as close as possible to the edge of the tumor, it means the chances of getting good clean margins goes way down.

Further adding to the equation is that “rest of her life” — statistically, dogs with adenocarcinoma have an average of 8 months post-surgery. Without surgery she has a “few weeks to a few months”. There is no more accurate way to look at it, because of the nature of the cancer. And with the recursion rate post-surgery, and her age (she’s 9yrs 9mos, the average Malamute lives to 9-11 years), it wasn’t a good sign that the usually optimistic surgeon was telling me about all the tough decisions he’s had to make with his pets. (Veterinary surgeons are among the most optimistic people in the world — they have to be, because of all of the complications that surgery brings). He kept bringing up “quality of life” and “there’s no good way to go” and “I tell my wife that one of these days we’ll be lucky and have one of our pets go peacefully in their sleep”.

*Clean margins – they excise the tumor and send it to the lab. The idea is as they slice it, all of the exterior edges should have noncancerous cells.

Whimper

August 10, 2010 Bobbie6 Comments

I was in New York last week, where I took full advantage of my hotel’s gym, but I’m not going to talk about that right now.

I was going to talk about the travel aspect of New York, having decided that I travel more than I enroll for events, but I’m not going to talk about that right now.

I have a sinus infection courtesy of the Newark-Seattle Continental flight I took, and that will very likely kill my ability to do the triathlon this Sunday, but I’m not going to talk about that right now.

I have a dog. Actually, I have two, but I have a dog named Kumi that I raised from a puppy. She has spent the last five years being raised solely by me, and being a very good girl. I have taught her new tricks in the last few years (Stay — while waving a cookie in the face) and subjected her to a second dog (dubious choice but that’s done) and she’s been the only constant thing in my life in the last five years. She is nearly ten years old.

I found out yesterday she has cancer. What looked like a small lump on her rear (and appeared quite suddenly) is a tumor, and little bits of it are out to a pathology lab for testing. Bloodwork was done as well and that is out for testing. She can have one of two kinds of cancer: one that’s annoying, will require surgery, and probably some lifelong(?) discomfort in her hind end.

The other means, as the vet put it, “we have to talk about solutions for her comfort”.

I know that talk, and I know she’s hedging, because I used to work in a vet clinic. The first day I worked there I watched an old man have to put his lab down, and the last day I worked there I watched a little boy bring in his dead bunny. It was 18 months of bad smells, pain, and lessons in emotional restraint. She is required to look on the bright side, but as soon as she took the biopsy and it bled, she said, “Well that’s not good”.

Kumi, aside from the aforementioned lump, looks like she always has. She’s lost a little weight, and she’s a little slower than she used to be, but she’s nearly 10 and that is expected. She still wags her tail, still runs around like mad given the opportunity, still eats all of her food and will happily help you with yours.

I don’t want to think about what “solutions for her comfort” means even though I know what they are. It means how long do you want to see your puppy alive and to what expense of their pain threshold or their ability to get around and remain continent. It means that it’s very likely that at some point, I am going to have to be the decider.

I really, really don’t want to be.

Fancy Gym Fail

July 24, 2010July 24, 2010 BobbieLeave a comment

Dear Columbia Fitness,

I am so not happy with you.

Right now, I pay something on the order of $56 (after tax) per month to use your Sammamish branch. It’s nice, it has a decent set of equipment, and the people are awesome. It does, however, lack a pool, and if I am to be training for tris I need a pool.

I have until now been driving to Mercer Island to use their pool (at $5.25/pop, plus $0.25 for the lockers, plus roughly $4 in gas roundtrip) and the Spreadsheet tells me that if I pay for your fancy Pine Lake Club membership (which includes use of a pool) that I can break even at a mere two swims a week.

I talked with your people via email, got pool schedules, and arrived at 5pm today to fork over an additional $60/month and have you watch my kid and swim.

Not only were your membership people too busy (which surprises me, I don’t really need a membership person, because I’m already a member I should just be able to have the front desk person upgrade me, right?) but the kids club was closed. This surprised me, because kids club is supposed to be open on Fridays until 8. It says so on the website.

The unhelpful person behind the counter pointed out that on Fridays they close if they don’t have a reservation. Well, your site indicates this phenomena on Sundays, but not on Fridays.

I left your club, and left an email for the membership person I had been talking to, expressing my discontent.

Then I decided to call, spoke to her, and am to arrive tomorrow at 9am to swim and upgrade membership, assured that someone will be there to watch the boychild. Then it occurred to me: kids club opens at 8, so why don’t I just show up at 8 and swim and then sign? I mean, I never got an answer to whether or not a front desk flunky can upgrade my membership for me, right?

So I called. And got ahold of the same unhelpful (if not, vacuous) person as before. Yes, I can totally talk to anyone and even call to upgrade my membership. I said great, can we do that now? No, no I can’t do that because I need to wait until 9am tomorrow: when the membership person is in.

Am I crazy for thinking this is stupid? That Joe Clueless should have been able to figure out that by asking if I could get this out of the way, and by asking if I could come swim at 8am, that I was asking if I could get to talk to ANYONE that would get the damn thing upgraded? Only one of the four lanes is open at 9am and I have no idea how busy it will be or what I will have to deal with. And I’m not altogether confident things will go smoothly.

The axiom of gym memberships is that you’re happy to take money and assume people won’t show up. I want to give you money and show up, you don’t seem to want to let me.

Cl

July 20, 2010 BobbieLeave a comment

Chlorine is put in pools to sanitize it — it bonds to the gunk you leave behind (you do know you leave behind gunk, right?) and turns the gunk into organic “Chloramines“, which sounds so much nicer than gunk. Those organic compounds then ostensibly get filtered out so we can all go enjoy the pool.

Chlorinated pool water tastes awful, by the way.

I checked out the Mercer Island pool this morning (at 6:30 AM, yo!) and did some laps; as I suspected I am woefully out of swim shape. While I actually can be faster (with my lap time I could get a half mile done in 16 minutes!) I don’t have the endurance (that would be 16 minutes plus another 16 worth of breaks!) and I have but four weeks (oh, slightly less now) to get that in gear.

I will note that the Mercer Island pool has just enough chlorine to sanitize and not so much that it makes your eyes horribly red; and unlike the LA Fitness in Bellevue it does appear as though they clean it occasionally. The locker rooms leave much to be desired — body consciousness is not a privilege you have there — but they are serviceable. There are actually seven (7) signs in the locker room reinforcing basic hygiene (wash your hands, wash your kids butt after diaper changes and before putting them in the pool, and – I kid not – do not let a kid with diarrhea swim).

Biking is still my favorite.

Inanity, or Insanity?

July 17, 2010 BobbieLeave a comment

Insanity is defined as doing something over and over the same way and same time and expecting a different outcome.

I run, my left knee and foot hurt. I stop, I walk. I run again, my left knee and foot hurt. I wait a couple of days, I run, my left knee and foot hurt.

I have toyed with the idea of new shoes, going back to physical therapy, walking the end of the tri, etc. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do. I can’t not do events of some sort, because it is what keeps me (barely) honest when it comes to regular exercise.

It’s a pretty problem.

Tunes

June 10, 2010 BobbieLeave a comment

We are absolutely and completely not allowed to have mp3 players or any other kind of tune-age on the ride. This is fine, because for my actual get-on-the-bike rides I have not had tunes. I have, however, had tunes in the gym.

Tunes are not optional in the gym.

My gym is loud: the music is drowned out by all of the inane chatter. I was getting ready this morning (I had two beers last night, ergo, gym this morning) and outside the ladies’ locker room it sounded like a cocktail party was in full swing. Tunes are a defensive movement.

Fortunately, I have an iPod shuffle, a friend named Kevin, and a thing for old 80’s tunes. The shuffle was purchased with eleventymillion Thank You points (Thank You, Expedia!), Kevin provided enough music from his personal collection to literally require me to procure an external hard drive, and the iTunes store is chock-a-block full of that 1980’s goodness.

You have to be very careful when picking out your 80’s songs, though.

Here are good examples of workout 80’s songs:

The GoGo’s, “Our Lips are Sealed”
Aha, “Take on Me”
Kajagoogoo, “Too Shy Shy”
Julian Lennon, “Too Late for Goodbyes”
Violent Femmes, “Blister in the Sun”
Nails, “88 Lines about 44 Women”
Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Relax”

Here are some bad songs to have in your shuffle, when you’re trying to maintain 115 rpm:

Morrissey, “Every Day is Like Sunday”
Berlin, “Take my Breath Away”
Bad English, “When I See You Smile”
Anything by Air Supply
Almost anything by Journey
Almost anything by Naked Eyes

More often than not, I find myself reaching over and clicking |> madly in an attempt to get to something a little bit zippier. Fortunately, I have quite a lot of 90’s Grunge. Tell me you can’t do 115 rpm to Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

Ladies of Leisure

June 3, 2010 BobbieLeave a comment

I have to take a moment to digress from the Elephant In The Room — that I just bought a new bike with a completely different set-up 2.5 weeks from the actual 2-day ride — to discuss my gym.

I’ve changed gyms recently — I formerly lurked at the LA Fitness in Bellevue, but then between driving home, then to the school, acquiring my son, and driving back to Bellevue, and then driving home again, I was contributing needlessly to the oil crisis (and my budget) and therefore switched gyms at a $10 premium to the one by my house. That’s fine, I have the excel worksheet to prove I’m actually saving money.

I live in what I would call a “bubble”. This “bubble”, called Sammamish, is a neighborhood of privilege and McMansions, of 5-year-olds with cellphones and 16-year-olds with new cars. I know this because I grew up here in what is now the only 1970’s rambler that exists in Sammamish, when it was not Sammamish but was “Unincorporated King County”. In those days, the joke was that if you had an emergency you called Domino’s Pizza, because they’d get there faster than the King County sheriff. (And it was true.)

I do not fit in the bubble — or at least not from my point of view — but I live here for two reasons: 1. it’s the house I grew up in and I have configured it exactly the way I like it and it’s far enough from my neighbors that I can do what I like how I like when I like without worrying about what they will think; and 2. It is in an excellent school district, which is not something you monkey around with when you have a kiddo.

At any rate, I was at the gym this morning, applying makeup to face (this is a very necessary part of the morning regimen because if I don’t I scare people) and was noting the following:

1. One lady arrived at the gym, put all of her stuff in front of the nicest shower, and then went to work out. That is to say, she blocked the shower from use by anyone else for an hour. As I was applying makeup she came in and proceeded to go about her business as though this was perfectly okay, despite pointed looks from the rest of us. (This is all the more important when we note that there are only TWO showers in the ladies locker room).

2. Another lady was pitching her “Staging/Decorating” business. In the locker room. At full volume. She was very very carefully explaining to another lady that she didn’t do any organization, really, she just rearranged the furniture a client already has in order to optimize the functional space and/or make it ready for sale. She’s very good at it, and she charges $100 an hour. Figure it takes her 4-5 hours to do a standard house (that’s her figuring) but you know she doesn’t go through paperwork and all of that, that’s more of an Organizer (her friend does that) and they’re going to go into business together (but still keep their separate licenses) etc. etc. etc. And she has her card right there. So handy. During the course of the discussion, though, it was very apparent that her conversational partner could neither get a word in edgewise nor convince her that she understood the first time.

3. It is immediately evident which ladies work and which do not. Those of us who work are there to work out, get showered/changed/made up and are OUT the door. And it’s great that some ladies do not work and have that luxury, truly: just please do not block thoroughfares with your conversations. Move to the side. It’s a gym, ladies, Starbucks is a block away.

I wonder if they notice anyone or anything around them, I really do.

Giddyap

May 31, 2010 BobbieLeave a comment

You don’t change horses in midstream…unless the horse dies. Then you can either sit atop a stinky horse or get a new shiny horse to remove you from the stink and hopefully find you a good saloon… I digress…

I was riding the ol’ Cannondale along the Sammamish River trail Friday morning when I stopped about ten miles in. I had been doing awesome, pacing in the rain at 15mph (hey, for me that is good!) and not minding (well, not much) the puddle of water in my clippy shoes (note to self, get shoe covers). I got water, took off, heard a “wsh-chunk!”, and then a “scrape scrape scrape scrape”.

“Scrape scrape scrape scrape” is not what you want to hear on your bike, in the rain, 10 miles from your car, on a relatively deserted path. “Scrape scrape scrape scrape” kinda sucks. An untrained investigation showed that my rear wheel was out of true, it was scraping against the brake. With no prospect of rescue I rode the thing with a scraping brake in 10mph headwinds in the rain (not uphill but you get the idea) back. My pace slowed to 11mph.

At the earliest opportunity I deposited it with much angst at Mr. Crampy’s.

I am awaiting guidance via phone from Kyle “Mr. Crampy” of Mr. Crampy’s Multisport in Redmond. He called and left note that my bike, my lovely fourth-hand Cannondale, has died. It has died of a dead spoke, a need of wheels, messed up shifters, and the only good thing on it is its frame. I am going to need to purchase a new bike, because it is not safe.

When a man who does Ironmans each year for FUN and is ex-special forces is telling you not to do something because it is not safe, you listen.

I’m a bit nervous though: my old bike was a road bike with mountain bike tires (because skinny tires scare fat girls like me) and there’s this whole budget thing. Also, I have only ONE more long ride in training before the Big Day, and that is this Saturday. Ergo, I need to purchase, fit, and ride this bad boy within the next week.

It’s not as though I had a lot of other things on my plate — my brother got married this weekend, bought that new car, shifting jobs, school and PTA is wrapping up, and all of the myriad of normal life-things that waft in and out of my responsibility cloud. I’m actually quite glad I finally took the bike to someone who alerted me to all of this: I went to the local bike shop (we will not print their name, but they are VERY close to my house) and TOLD them I’d be on this thing for 2 days straight and they charged me 20 bucks and said good enough.

I won’t be going back there. I’m going to ride into the very orange sunset with something from Mr. Crampy’s.

Weighty Issues

May 20, 2010 BobbieLeave a comment

Getting a body fat scale may not have been a morale-engendering idea.

I will not publicly post my body fat percentage, but I even ran it by my doctor and my personal trainer and both flatly refuse to believe it. Both of these ladies are no-nonsense, non BS types (hm… now who do they remind me of?) so I’m going to assume that for some reason, it’s not working correctly.

I have lost body fat according to it. But 1% off of a bajillion percent is a small bps change, you know?

I was chatting with a coworker the other day (he finished an Olympic in 2:22, which is pretty damned good) and he teased me about how he wasn’t quite at the level such that he could “charge” for events. Well, technically I’m not charging, I’m raising money for cancer research, and I doubt that I could finish an Olympic in 2:22. I’m half tempted to see how the Danskin turns out and then sign up for the Black Diamond Olympic, because then I’d have a challenge (only on the swim and run side — somehow, biking 24 miles is just so not really challenging anymore).

I have guilt. I have guilt that I’m somehow projecting athleticism or fitness that is not verified by my scale (or my figure, no matter what you say Jeff). I work out just enough to train for what I’ve signed on for, and to be able to eat whatever/whenever/however. The only reason I don’t weigh 120 pounds and am not rocking a size two is that I enjoy food and am not so good at the pushing the plate away thing. I do not match the visual standard of someone who does the things I have signed on to do (or even have done — If I told you I have run 3 half-marathons, and a triathlon, in the last two years, you would call bullsh!t on me). It is discomforting.

But as Sophia Loren said, everything you see I owe to pasta. And I loooooooooove to carboload.

PS — by Saturday I will have spent 112 miles on a bike this week. I chafe. That is all.