After a week of retirement, I've made several lifestyle changes. The days have felt like seven Fridays or Saturdays: I get up, take the dog for a walk, go swimming on most days, have breakfast, do a bit of programming work, read a book, eat lunch, have a nap, work a bit more, watch some old television series ('Sherlock', 'Teachers'), take the dog for a walk then go to bed. Obviously that's not exactly how any of my days plays out, but it's more or less the framework.
The nap is probably a result of the swimming and/or the intense heat, even though I turn on the air conditioner at about 10 am and don't turn it off until 8 pm - but we sleep with another air conditioner working in the bedroom. Obviously this is all going to change in a month or so.
I've mentioned here and there the mysterious stomach pains1 from which I've been suffering over the past year. I have noticed that I never seem to get any pain on Fridays and Saturdays, but I never really analysed this until about two weeks ago. I also didn't get any pain on the days when I would travel, and this provided an important clue. When I used to work a full day (this doesn't include July as I would swim on a few workdays), I would start work at 7 am, have a cup of tea and biscuit at 8 am, repeat at 9 am and possibly 10 am. On weekends and travelling days, I drink far less tea and with greater intervals between each cup.
Over the past week, I have been limiting myself to one cup of tea in the morning (at about 10 am) and one in the afternoon and there have been no pains whatsoever. Yesterday I forgot myself and had one cup at 10 am and another at 11 am. The pain didn't wait for very long before making its presence felt, lasting until I went to sleep. This really was the proof of my hypothesis that it is the tea that is causing the pain (or more likely, the tea is causing something that causes the pain).
As it happens, I had a return appointment with the gastro-enterologist yesterday afternoon. After I showed him the results of the lower body CT that I did (everything is ok), I tentatively asked whether it was possible that drinking tea could cause the pain. Yes, he said: it's well known that tea and coffee weaken the lower esophageal sphincter (this is the valve that prevents stomach contents from coming back up into the esophagus). Well, it was news to me. Anyway, the result of this consultation was that the pain would disappear by my making lifestyle changes, and now is the appropriate time to do. How can I justify having a British passport if I don't drink tea all day?
It's not clear to me what I'll be drinking in the future: I'll probably have to go back to drinking tisanes. I made a cup of blackcurrant tisane a few days ago but it was very bitter and I didn't enjoy it at all. Maybe something citrus flavoured would be better.
With regard to swimming, I have already swum more times this year that I have in previous years and so obviously have swum more lengths. Including this morning, I have now swum 39 times with a total of 822 lengths - an average of 21.08 lengths/swim. Obviously at the beginning of the season I swam less then as I was getting into shape, for now every swim is 24 lengths plus. This is dependent somewhat on how many other people are in the pool at the same time; yesterday started off with plenty of room in the pool, but later on more people came in and I had to take evasive action a few times in order to avoid someone crashing into me. After I swam the regular 24 lengths, I got out and drank my juice. By the time I had finished the bottle, I saw that the vigourous swimmers had left, so I went back in and swam another four lengths with no difficulty.
Internal links
[1] 2109
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 748 | Blackberries (or are they blackcurrants?) | Health, Food science | |
| 967 | Turning a corner? | Health, Personal, CPAP | |
| 1982 | Video cameras | Video camera |
No comments:
Post a Comment