teequillin.com

It’s been a busy time around here.  Since I’m playing catch-up from my last post, I’ll give you the Readers Digest version of the past couple of months.

After being diagnosed with extremely high cholesterol, low testosterone and vitamin B12 levels, the doctor put me on a regimen of medications in the hopes of bringing everything back under control and bring me back from the brink of a heart attack.  I was okay with this decision.  The hardest part of the medications was the fact that Bekah gets to give me a shot every two weeks with a needle the size of the one in Gatlinburg.

So, I took the medications for nearly two months and invoked a radical change of my diet.  First of all, I cut out sugar completely.  This is a huge thing for me.  That means no sweet tea.  I’m a southern man.  Technically speaking, I think this is actually in violation of the Geneva Convention.  Second, I cut out all red meat.  See the first point.  Then, I cut out all enriched white flour and switched totally to 100% whole grain.  Everything.  This part wasn’t that bad.

This diet, along with the testosterone shots has proved to be quite a great thing.  The most important thing is that I went down two pants sizes.  I didn’t lose any actual weight, it just all suddenly turned to muscle.  I have more energy than I think I’ve ever had.  In short, it’s been incredible.

I even brought my cholesterol down nearly 600 points in two months.  My doc was shocked.  She’d never seen such a drastic turn around so quickly.

Here’s the bad news:  Just about the time I started getting all this energy and feeling great, I developed water on my knee.  This is incredibly painful and I don’t recommend it.  After tracking down my medical records from my knee surgery in Texas, I finally got an appointment with an orthopedist and got it looked at.  I was put in a leg immobilizer and on crutches – again, just at the time when I’ve got all this newfound energy.

I had a series of X-rays and MRIs all of which showed absolutely nothing wrong with my knee except the fluid.  In other words, there was no apparent trauma that cause the fluid buildup.  Strange.  So, the doctor drained it.  This is quite possibly the most excruciating thing I’ve ever been through.  Ever.  Then again, I’ve never given birth to a child.

He sent the fluid off to the lab in the hopes of finding out something there, but the labs came back clean.  No infection, no gout, no arthritis (which is good news, but didn’t explain my problem).  After draining it, the swelling went down a bit, but the flexibility had not yet come back and I could not put weight on it.  The next week I went back and he gave me a cortizone shot (again, very painful to have a needle stuck into your knee) and over the past 10 days, I’ve slowly worked myself down from two crutches to one, from one crutch down to my cane, and finally I’ve started leaving the cane at home and am flying solo again.  I go back in today for a “final” checkup on the knee and hopefully to be fitted for a proper knee brace.  I’ve been using the generic “OTC” knee braces forever.  They work okay, but I can never find one large enough to fit around my calf muscles.  They usually wind up cutting off my circulation throughout the day.

Every day since the cortizone shot has been better than the one before it.  I’m still not running any marathons, but at least I’m walking without any help.  I’m still cringing when I go up or down a set of stairs.

Ian’s speech keeps getting better and better.  We are still on the books for an autism screening in May at Vanderbilt.  He is making great strides.  He loves his speech teachers (both at the Bellwood School and at MTSU)!  Morgan made the honor roll and was named a Good Citizen at her school last month.  We couldn’t be happier with either of our kids!  Halloween pictures can be found in the Facebook gallery.  Ian made a pretty convincing Woody from Toy Story.

In other news, my office (which I share with John Mauldin) is being moved to a larger one across campus.  Get this:  I’m actually going to have an office in the theatre building!  This move should be happening in the next week or so.