health |

“New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” ~Mark Twain

Okay, I’ve been a bit delayed in putting my resolutions down. Quite frankly I’ve been adding and subtracting them over the last few days. Tonight I had my first run on the year so it gave me a chance to really reflect and let them come out. I also had a chance today to watch my favorite movie “Field of Dreams”. My friends who have been in the video business dock me for life as a film critic for enjoying any movie with Kevin Costner, but the movie hits me personally on so many levels that it helped me. It is a movie about faith, believing, and following your passions. Seeing it again helped me finish my list of resolutions. During the movie they play a couple of Doobie Brother’s songs. They don’t play the one below, but it is a favorite and I thought would set a tone for me this year.

So here go my resolutions which of course fall into some neat piles of Health, Happiness and Wealth (they are the most common according to all the news I watched this year):

Health:

1. Get more sleep! I’ve been averaging 6 hours or less and just need to get more this year!

2. Continue to improve my cardiovascular and running. This year I ran 1126 miles and reduced my avg. miles from the pedestrian 10 minute pace down to 6 and half minutes per mile. I was really inspired by Dara Torres the Olympic swimmer who in her 40s was able to perform at a level she did in her teens.

3. Investigate the small personal health concerns that I have and make sure that I get the answers.

Happiness:

4. Spend more time with the children. I think the health issues this year were a small strain on them as well. For my daughter I want to find an activity that she and I can call our own. For my son, I want to spend more time on his social development. This is a hard one given that both teachers told us that we need to keep doing what we are doing, but I want our children to just know that their parents love them.

5. Rebuild my one to one relationship with my wife. With her cancer having consumed the second half of 2008, our 50-50 relationship really became a 90-10 relationship. It exhausted me and it changed my view of my wife as more of a patient than a partner in life. I want to make sure that we get some one on one time and rebuild the bonds that made our relationship special even before cancer moved into our lives.

6. Continue and expand on my parenting thoughts here in this blog. I don’t want this to seem like a “how you should do it piece” or a “what are the best tips for raising a kid” piece. I want this to be an insight for my children to someday see the dilemmas and decisions I made as they relate to them.

7. Start blogging about my other passions like photography, sports, etc.

8. Take more time for myself. Take those vacations!

Wealth:

9. Secure our future plans. Develop a more secure will and documentation of our assets.

10. Tighten up random unnecessary expenses – Magazine subscriptions, luxury items, extra coffee, etc.

11. Analyze and reconfigure personal debt as needed (Refinance, close accounts, etc.). Save $5-$10 per day.

Well that is it. Quite a bit and I must say, I’d be very very happy to accomplish all eleven. Writing it down does put it out there and hopefully it something I will look back to.

“Take Care of Your Body means Have a Nice Day”

And on the 15th day, we all sighed relief. This morning we went into the hospital and had the drains removed. They used Hurri-Caine spray to numb the area. The nurse told my wife to breath deeply and as she breathed out the nurse pulled the drains. First the right and then the troublesome left. They were 6 inches in length each inside her and resembled long flat extension cords with little holes that the blood entered. OIn the left side we saw that they were clogged and thus why we had leakage.

My wife said it truly is a relief. She already seems like a new woman. The laughing and giggling have started again. She is still feeling small soreness and discomfort, but when asked to gauge her pain from a 1-10 (high), she said it was a 1. This afternoon we took the first big step. I had her drive to our kid’s school and back to pick up our son. She did it like an old lday with some soreness, but it made me feel good that she was able to accomplish this on her own.

Ironically we ran into her surgeon at Starbucks on our way to the school. She was surprised to see us out of context and glad to hear we were driving again. “Just stay off the highways” she said. Those in our neighborhood including the Principal’s wife were surprised and happy to see my wife behind the wheel again. In fact, we are feeling guilty about all the meas we are still getting from our wonderful class parents. I found that the other family which lost their mother to cancer is also getting meals prepared by the other families in our school. How wonderfully blessed we are to be in such a wonderful community.

One of the funny things we all do is pick up the quirks of our parents and pass them on. As my father was a physician and worked for the Department of Public Health in San Francisco during the height of the AIDs epidemic he used to always write notes and messages to us in our lunch boxes, birthday cards, etc. They never said, “Have a Nice Day” or “We Love you”, or anything like that. They always said, “Take Care of Your body”. These notes continued onto college and even when ending a phone call. It was like the show “Hill St. Blues where the captain would say, “Hey…Let’s Be careful Out There”.

Dring my dad’s final months, we lived with him and I’m fortunate my children really got to know their grandfather. One of the things they picked up was his silly phrase. In honor of him we continue that phrase every morning. The other day as I kissed my daughter and she ran off to class, she yelled “Take care of your body Daddy!” A teacher heard the exchange and laughed. I could only shrug my shoulders and smile. The phrase was still embarrassing, yet so very important to our family.

As i mentioned, our life is one long race over hurdles and so linear that we just focus on the next task. The next task is to deal with the expanders and the discomfort that will come as the expander pushes on the chest muscle over the next 2-3 weeks.

Tomorrow she beigns to spread her wings.

Tag Archives: health

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