Good and Bad

My orthopedist, after having tied me in knots in several directions, declared that the persistent pain in my right leg is caused neither by a degenerating hip joint nor the sciatical nerve.  We can chalk it up to fibromyalgia, and he encouraged me to get out there and run at whatever speed I can work up.

But, on another note, he told me to limit my coffee intake to two cups a day.  Folks, this just can't be done.  It is my only vice, for God's sake!  I grind my own beans and have a nice drip coffee maker recommended by Cooks Illustrated; I use organically shade-grown Mexican coffee.

I figured there had to be some kind of out, so I checked online and found a study by no less than the Mayo Clinic which found no correlation between caffeine intake and bone density loss, except in the case of women who smoke, drink a lot of caffeine, and imbibe alcohol.  That lets me off the hook, because only in much older women (older than who?) did the study find some loss of femur bone mass, but running will take care of that. 

In the spirit of compromise, however, I have decided not to sit at the computer with a non-stop supply of coffee. 

Armed with orthopedist's advice, I headed to the park today and did a brisk one kilometer walk and ran another one.  It was not my usual hour for the park, and the cast of characters was quite different.  Most notable were a couple who seemed to have hooked up at the park itself, since the man was trotting as slowly as he could while the woman walked.  He was telling her that he was a marathonist, and when he felt like a little extra exercise, he hung from a tree.  I am not kidding here. While the over-40 woman squealed with admiration at the tree act (God is great, he kept me quiet while I passed them...), the over-50 man continued to give a detailed account of his exercise feats.  I didn't hear them all, but nothing outdid the tree bit.  It was my assumption that the guy used his arms to do the hanging, but the mind runs rampant with alternative scenarios!

It has been a weird day even from the get-go.  I sat with my first cup of coffee about 5:30 a.m., taking my vitamin pill, my thyroid hormone replacement pill, and my folic acid when I dropped the thyroid pill.  Lusso, in a flash, ate it.  I pried his mouth open but could see nothing (it is a very small pill and a very big mouth filled with teeth the same color as the pill), but eventually I managed to rescue one very tiny piece.  A picture went through my mind of Lusso being wired to the gills and ricochetting off the walls.  After about an hour I called the vets' office and the one on emergency duty told me he would probably be okay since he is big and heavy now.  He does seem pretty active, however, so today is the day: he swims or I sink in the effort.  By dang, he is a water dog!