CONSIDER YOURSELF A NERD

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

"You need to eat more meat."
Never thought a dietitian would tell someone that, huh?

So my albumin (measure of protein in the blood) was low after I had that horrible case of the flu at the end of February, but that's to be expected after an illness--your body uses up the protein trying to recover. No problem.

As of my blood draw in April, my protein was still lower than normal. Anne recommended I try protein bars and make sure I'm eating lots of sources of protein (kidney patients tend to lose protein in their urine if they're making any... some places see this as a symptom, not a side effect, and put you on a low protein diet. I don't see that that's doing the patient any favours). No problem--nobody more carnivorous than me.

It was STILL low when they drew my blood this month. Anne told me that ALL the PD patients' protein had "tanked" this month. I find this suspicious--either the lab is fucking something up somewhere, which is definitely not unheard of, or we all have some kind of stealth infection that's somehow sapping our protein, which doesn't seem that far-fetched either given all the press about hospital infections.

So she gave me the name of a protein pill or liquid you can take to try to get the levels back up, which still puts me off somewhat as "cheating." I really need to get my head around the concept that sometimes when you have a chronic illness you can't get things back into the normal range through "normal" means.

Current Mood: perplexed
Current Music: Knock Three Times (on the ceiling if you want me) dammit

House-Wide Cleanup
Today is the annual city-wide cleanup, during which you can arrange for heavy item pickup or just haul stuff yourself down to Athletic Park and dump it. We already took one load and found out they take computer monitors so Charles is going back with three (he thought we had four, but we couldn't find the other) defunct monitors. We thought about hauling the HP computer out as well, but we never did investigate to find out why it stopped working and how terminal it is, so we'll try to do that one of these days; though after however many years we can probably live without whatever data is on it.

Anyway, we hauled a bunch of crap out of the garage and basement, neither of which was particularly clean when we bought the house. (Thanks, Hammonds' daughters... though one lives out of state and apparently they're from two marriages and don't get along, etc.) Among the stuff was a bunch of hay that some birds stuffed into the garage rafters. There's a nest up there, but apparently about half of their nesting material just fell into the main loft. We hauled out all the old paint and other chemicals that were left for us, some old styrofoam ceiling tiles, a bunch of our own old paperwork (we overheated the shredder twice dealing with old bills and statements; guess we need to buy a less cheap one next time) and general crap. There was a cardboard box of old dishes that were kind of interesting--the tan Corelle pattern that was apparently hugely popular in the 70's and some rather pretty hobnail saucers, but even after a soaking in bleach I wouldn't trust a dish that had lived in that cellar for God knows how long. (The big wooden cabinet was lined with newspapers from 1968 so probably a lot of that stuff dates from around then. I'm not sure how long ago Tom died. The cellar appears to have been his mancave, as the small side room with the potato-bin-looking thing had a coax cable running up into a wall.)

Now we just have some stuff to put on Ebay and maybe Freecycle. Anybody want a Chauvet foam machine or a hod of medium-yellow wall tile? Or an Ablounge Sport?

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Spider Pig--Hans Zimmer

Easy Street
Tim Curry is love. Kind of a strange little number, though. Also, push-button light switch!

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Easy Street--Tim Curry, Bernadette Peters, and Carol Burnett