June 9: In Stow at Judy’s for my rehab.
June 8: Sleep quality just incrementally better last night, but the big picture is that it’s still not that wonderful. Now I did wake up yet again without the crushing chest pain, so I’m wondering if that’s now trending to the right to where it really is dissipating. So I didn't sit on the couch and silently moan in pain this morning like I had the first two weeks post-surgery. Now I am still stiff and hunched over in the morning as I exit the bedroom, this due to the chest suturing being so tight. It’s kind of like they’re pulling my shoulders forward. This feeling goes away as the morning wears on, probably because my shoulder and chest muscles loosen up such that I can move them without feeling like those sutures are about to pull apart.
Did a bit of grocery shopping with Judy in the morning, with us doing the “Driving Mr. Daisy” thing, her up front driving and me in the back seat. Then I went out for my walk, which was about 1:20 hours. I have noted that my appetite is really getting better, and I’m eating more meals per day than I have been for about a month. My loss of upper and lower body muscle tissue is still unfortunately kind of atrophying. Doing my best to keep the nutrition high, but this almost total lack of physical exertion is taking it’s toll on my body. I do believe that my body kind of fed off of my muscles for the first couple weeks (one week pre-surgery, and two weeks post-surgery) because I just didn’t have much of an appetite. But now, with my only being able to walk at a recreational pace, this is really not helping my skeletal muscles. I think I’d down to my high school weight at this point!
So as I said, I find myself eating more now, but I think at this point all it’s doing is minimizing the rapid loss of muscle that I experienced earlier. I think I’m eating like 6 times a day right now. Can’t wait until I can really bump up the activity level so I can really get the feed-bag on!
As I mentioned in earlier blogs, we’re now trying to eat healthier, and one of the toughest aspect of this is limiting our salt intake. Now it’s way more than eliminating the salt shaker at the table. Nope, what I’ve found, and it’s totally new to me, is after examining food labels, there is just so much salt in canned, bottled, and packaged foods that the RDA recommendation of 33K or so milligrams of sodium per day can be easily exceeded by 2 or 3 times. Just today we were in Giant Eagle where we saw a special with their home-made sushi. So we picked up a small package for a noon-time treat. Well, I went to get something else and when I came back Judy pointed out to me how much sodium each little tidbit contained. I mean it was like several hundred milligrams per piece. So we reluctantly put the sushi back! Man, you need a calculator just to figure out a healthy, low sodium meal!
The rest of the day was my just sitting around here writing and resting. Boy, it’s boring as hell some days!