chibi-nerd

I've started taking psyllium fibre capsules, just 0.5g / day which the next morning translates into, ahem, a whole "bowl" full of... errm....brown bacteria. Which means you get about a 1000x return on the fibre in terms of bacteria. The energy to grow that bacteria has to come from food and therefore must be subtracted from the calories I absorb.

So what to report this week... last week I poisoned myself with potassium citrate. Not really, it was just 1 banana equivalent but I'd forgotten that it can make you feel really sick so I didn't meet my goals the week before last, but I did meet them this week. I was worried about my kidneys. Last month's blood test was a bit iffy. Anyhoo... let's see. Not much to report really. My "form" has slipped because of the poisoning incident but I did some good rides last week. Hopefully the graph will start to look spiffy again soon. Oh and I started recording my HRV with HRV4Training. Interesting to see it plummet after my COVID Vax (I knew I wasn't being a hypochondriac) and after I see my specialist (stressful apparently). Anyway, my HRV is very high for my age, more like a 27 year olds!!

That worked!! Thank you.

Well my doctor didn't think much of my theory but she did love my graph. LOL! She's a nerdy girl too. She wants me to keep recording it but the watch will recalibrate itself soon and the effect won't be so visible anymore, so instead I'm using a phone app to record my HRV. She was convinced by the jump in the red line that the puffer is doing me good, so at least we agree on that. And I've just realised that the name of my battle log is wrong!! It should be "It's only a matter of going." Can I change it??

So this might be a bit hard to follow but here goes.... I have been diagnosed with NTM-PD (a lung infection) caused by Mycobacterium Intracellulare, commonly found in soil. However, I have recently been diagnosed as also having Mycobacterium avium, commonly found in water, especially hot tubs and shower heads, having a party in my lungs. As well as causing infection M. avium can cause another lung disease called Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis or Hot Tub Lung, which is not an infection but an allergic reaction. It's much more serious than it sounds. The treatment for NTM-PD is brutal antibiotics and steroids are deprecated because they reduce one's immunity but the treatment for Hot Tub Lung is avoid the shower/hot tub and sometimes inhaled steroids! Now, my doctor is always telling me to lay off the steroid inhaler because inhaled steroid use correlates with NTM incidence. Because I've always associated my shortness of breath with the shower, I've unilaterally diagnosed myself with Hot Tub Lung on top of the M. intracellulare infection. So I doubled my inhaled steroid dose and guess what happened?? I feel amazing. And to prove that I am actually amazing and not just imagining it, I have made this graph of my Garmin Body Battery over the last 8 weeks. The body battery is based on heart rate variability, which correlates pretty well with physical stressors such as anxiety and disease. The red line is a 7 day rolling average. You can see the body battery plummet the day after I learnt about the M. avium (stress) . Then about 3 days later I decided to increase the inhaler and...whoosh! 3 days later my body battery zoomed up, and a delay in effect is exactly what you'd expect for steroids. And it stayed up!! Much higher, on average, than its ever been before. About a week later I went for an ebike ride and I felt amaazzzing and the watch was telling me the ride was much easier than previous efforts over the same route. I have never seen a case study of someone with infection from NTM A on top of hypersensitivity to NTM B. My doctor should write a case study.

Hmmm... I didn't post last week. Nothing much has changed. I have a new HRM strap. A polar H10 and it seems to be living up to its reputation as reliable and accurate. I've found new ways to geek out over wellness data in intervals by linking everything from garmin to intervals via google fit. And I can get my BP in the mix too. LOL! My BP is now consistently under 120/80 so there stupid doctor who said my BP was high because I don't exercise enough! And I paid for the HRV4Training app so I can measure my heart rate variability using just my finger on the phone camera and apparently my HRV is very good for my age. The mean is about 22ms and mine is 55ms, like the average 35 year old. 'Smazing what someone with a life threatening lung disease can manage... or maybe all the apps are wrong.

Turns out that it isn't possible to get the water tested, that's a fiction they invented for "House" episodes, so we are operating on guesswork. The plumber is coming tomorrow to discuss UV disinfection and I'm continuing to heat all water that comes near my face. The doctor says that's not sustainable, but if it means I can get a break from the antibiotics, that's gotta be a good thing and at least I have a plan of action. Achieved my fitness goals this week. I'm seem to need to do a workout every day to meet them now, or maybe the HRM is not working properly. I've doubled my inhaled steroid dose, which the doctor doesn't like, but it makes my lungs feel so good! You can see I've been doing a lot of workouts this year and at higher intensity than last year, so that's good, I think.

Another unhappy week. My results from December which I thought were taking a long time to culture were actually fairly quick but then they did species ID on what they grew. It turns out that I was infected with M intracellulare in May but now I have M avium . The former lurks in soil, the latter in water. I'm pretty sure I had both all along but the faster growing intracellulare was swamping the avium. I'm also pretty sure that the reason the avium won't die is that I am being repeatedly reinfected from our plumbing. So I am now behaving like the boy-in-the-bubble and boiling every bit of water that comes through my mouth or touches my face. For washing I have a 20l pot and sous vide which I use to heat the water to 70C and then let it cool to 43C. I need to get our water tested and then try and disinfect the plumbing, which is not going to be cheap. Sigh! Anyway, despite all that I did meet my fitness goals of 460 intensity minutes and 2 (actually 3) workouts with a training effect of >= 3.0. I want to go for a ride this morning but I didn't sleep well last night ....

Thank you. You read my posts so carefully! So sweet. I just came back from a 20km e-ride and I'm feeling very chuffed with myself. That's the longest e-ride I've done on purpose. The longest was a bit further, but only because I got lost! LOL!

So one of my december sputa came back +ve after all, but after 5 weeks or something, so still an improvement. Feeling tired today after a good workout yesterday and very quick ride on Friday. I was so fast strava actually realised I was on an e-bike! LOL! I feel like I'm getting fitter so maybe the ABs are working at long last. Now I'm worrying about peripheral neuropathy. Always something!! I've achieved my intensity minute goal for the last 3 weeks, so yay for that!

Thank you, yes. After I posted in October I discovered that not only were the sputa results positive but the they were smear positive, which is a bad as it can be. The prognosis is poor for people with smear positive sputa. Doctor thinks I may have been infected with a second species of mycobacterium. I'm trying to pretend that's not a possibility, and it was just contamination in the sample. Then October and November came back smear positive as well, so I was in a very bad place. But suddenly December seems to be clear!! Waiting for January results now. My CT scan wasn't wonderful either, just holding steady after 4 months of horrible ABs. But somehow I got myself into a better place before Christmas and I'm holding on...just. But you can see from the graph below I did keep up my exercise, dropped the ball around exam time then went to Japan and jumped back into exercise at Christmas time, so not too bad considering the circumstances. Thank you for asking.

Working hard to be rational about doctors. Have wasted less time obsessing than last week. Two sputa from September have come back positive. That's disappointing. Did 3 weights workouts and one ride and lots of incidental walking yesterday for a total of 600 IMs, but only one workout had a TE of greater than 3.0. You have to push yourself hard to get a 3.0!!

Had a good week this week. 2 ride, 1 walk, a weights circuit and lots of strenuous shopping. Got in three workouts with a TE of >3.0 so I must be getting fitter right? Still sticking to my diet but I'm beginning to wonder why. My HDL, I've just realised is actually dangerously high, my triglycerides are low and, according to Dr Google, that means I don't need to worry about my LDL which will be mostly big fluffy particles, but would I be able to convince an hysterical doctor about that? I've realised that I have a real psychological problem with Drs. I'm quite sure they are going to kill me and soon. They have already cut my life expectancy by decades with their guess work and ignorance so I obsessively dwell on what will happen next. There's some indication that I'm losing my sight now and will have to be referred to an ophthalmologist. Is that person going to pat me on my head, tell me I have "lady Wyndemere's eyeball" and it won't get worse as long as I exercise? And then 6 years later when I can hardly see I'll have to report them to AHPRA like I did with the idiot lung specialist? Yes, I l know I need help. But this is why I am hypervigilant. The cholesterol is a case in point. Rifampicin raises cholesterol so reliably that they use it in experiments on people to do just that but my LDL has stayed constant. Do idiot doctors understand that? And you can't prescribe statins with rifampicin because the rifampicin blocks the statin. Do idiot GPs know that? And if I didn't know that would I just take it and let them kill me? A similar thing happened to my mother. Two idiot doctors prescribed beta-blockers without checking with each other and my mother ended up in hospital with a broken cheek and a third doctor saying "tut tut" but did anyone fix the underlying problem with the double prescription? No! Has anyone counted the bodies of small white women the so-called lung specialist has killed? I don't think so. If I'm lucky he'll get a slap on the wrist from AHPRA and if he has any ethics at all, he'll count the bodies himself and tell himself not to dismiss small white women with coughs as "Lady Windermere's syndrome" from now on. It's not good enough!

Well, my weight went down after eating back about 250 calories yesterday. I think that has more to do with the amount of salt I didn't eat compared to the day before. It did stop me from frantically shovelling food into my mouth right before dinner time. In theory I eat 30% of my calories from protein, if I stick to my diet, but that's rare, but I probably get 20% on most days. I'm trying to get my LDL cholesterol down to shut up the GP and I really miss saturated fat (and cupcakes). I generally eat breakfast at around 10am, about 14 hours after dinner, which some people would call intermittent fasting, and that helps because it means I don't eat until I'm hungry. If I ate breakfast at a normal time I'd be starving by 10am and therefore would eat more. I've always been like that.

So, I think I'm already accounting for them by setting my calorie need calculator to "light activity" or something, so when I exercise I feel like I need more food, but if I want to lose weight I need to be hungry. I hate being hungry. I'm also trying to avoid getting really hungry and bingeing. So....I will take your advice and see what happens if I eat half and then sort of titrate my weight change against what proportion of burnt calories I eat back. Thanks! Makes sense.

So if I burn say, 337 calories, or 150 calories in a workout, according to my watch, should I eat about that many calories afterwards?

So only got to 436 IMs this week because I was sooo tired yesterday. That's OK. I tried hard to get a training effect > 3 for the four workouts I did and managed it for only 2. Oh well, 2 is still OK, according to garmin. It turns out that improving your cardio vascular fitness is hard work! Who knew? Now the doctor tells me my cholesterol is going up despite eating the cholesterol lowing supps/weetbix/margarine!! I'm blaming the rifampicin but it will be 6 weeks before I can see my lung specialist about it. Meanwhile I'm trying to avoid saturated fat and refined sugar/grains (mediterranean diet sort of), which is making me miserable and hungry.

Wah! Diet. That's the hardest part. Exercise is fun, but unless you're odd, diet isn't. I like figuring out what I should eat, don't like eating it so much.

So 509IMs this week (unless I inadvertently get more tomorrow). So reading off that graph above I've reduced my all-cause mortality by 40%. Yeah right. Anyhoo, met my IM goal but none of my workouts had a training effect of greater than 3, which means that none of them increased my aerobic fitness. Boo! I guess that's why the doctor grumbled when I said most of my exercise was resistance. Hmmm....sometimes the weight's workouts give a training effect > 3 and sometimes not, so weird. Maybe I should tack 5 mins of tabata onto the end of my workouts. Hmmm... I need a way of seeing my training effect while I'm working out!!

So my doctor took me by surprise on Friday and asked me how much exercise I do! And I didn't have a brilliant answer about intensity minutes and of course I had been slack last week and only had 120 minutes recorded on the watch. Hmph. Anyway, I ended up doing 282 IMs last week which was two weight workouts and a bit of incidental walking. I seem to be getting less and less incidental minutes, now that I'm getting fitter. Yay! So next time I see my doctor I'll make sure I've done heaps of exercise that week and have printouts from runalyze etc. I'd forgotten that the reason I was aiming to make my weekly goat 560IMs was this graph below, from this paper . Vigorous exercise reduces mortality in a dose dependent way, but the dose effect starts to fall off at around 40mins / day. 40 mins of vigorous exercise is 80Ims = 560IMs/ week. That's where I got that number from. However, that's more time than I care to dedicate to exercise, so I end up doing about 33 mins/ day (when I'm being dedicate) and that falls nicely in the part of the curve right before it starts tapering off.

Had another week with only about 160IMs but I'm getting my mojo back now. I'm getting up at a civilised time but still tired. I'm just terrible at turning off the telly, especially when I'm tired and need to the most!! Runalyze is complaining that my "stress balance" is bad. That just means I'm throwing myself back into exercise after being slack for 2 weeks. And according to Strava I am a local hero because I rode down spring gully road twice in the last 90 days. I didn't even know I was signed up to strava!! Today I just have to do an itty bitty workout...5mins of HIIT and a stretch,

Decided that this week had to be rest week so only did 2 workouts and 160 IMs, so I've satisfied the WHO's requirements for exercise and they were two good workouts with training effects of 3.1 and 3.2 so that's OK, I guess. Today I woke up terribly tired (and my watch agrees). I think that reading in bed, even Jane Austen printed on paper, is bad for sleep. No reading tonight! That's not going to do much for my plan to do a big weights workout today!

Do you use Anki? Excellent app for memorising vocab etc.

So after declaring that three big weights workouts in a week was totally doable, I fell on my face last week and only got 2 done. I was so very tired by the end of the week! So I've been catching up on sleep. I haven't done any exercise this week and feeling guilty but less tired. I think I'll focus on easy cardio type things and get that third weights workout done...maybe tomorrow. I'm continuing with powerbreathe exercises twice a day and now I have my husband doing them too. LOL!