Skip to main content

Recovery: How It's Going

Best conversation yet:

Cashier: How did you get hurt?
Me: I fell off my bike.
Cashier: Are you going to ride a bike again?
Me: Nope.
Cashier: So you didn't lose your common sense.

That was Sunday. It's Friday, and strangers have stopped asking what happened to me since I'm a lot less black and blue now. I'm washing my own hair, putting on makeup and getting through a day at work without exhaustion. I don't do much at home besides cooking and dishes, and out-eating a teenage boy. Two eggs or a quarter pound of beef is a snack; either one used to be a meal. Rebuilding flesh and replenishing blood (I bled for a day when I fell) must take a lot of nutrients. I'm not wearing the extra calories--I've lost weight.

The braces are working. My front teeth are straighter than they've been since I was a kid, and I can chew a little bit, very carefully. Since the tooth that broke was narrower than an implant, I'll have to have my top teeth re-aligned to make room for an implant, and the bottom teeth re-aligned to match the top. It's going to take 18 months. Once I'm able to chew again in a few weeks, I'll celebrate with a Carl's Jr. low carb bacon cheeseburger.

Meantime, the braces are giving me a dry mouth at night. Drinking a lot of water right before bed doesn't help you get a good night's sleep. An Oramoist dry mouth patch worked well, but the texture and stickiness of it were disgusting. I've been using the old trick of rinsing with sesame oil before bed.

The wound on my ankle that the nurse didn't clean (my sock hid it) needs Neosporin and zinc oxide to heal. Coconut oil is great, but it only kills lipid-coated bacteria.

I've found the mental energy to focus on something beyond InStyle magazine. I'm reading the delightful book The Meat Fix, which Tom Naughton recently reviewed. There's a lot of bathroom humor (maybe it's not that far above a fashion magazine), but the author suffered from IBS. My own problems on a so-called "good diet" were farther north, but I can relate. I was in a lot more pain then than I've been with my accident. It isn't giving much away by saying the author solved his problems by dumping his vegan diet in general and soy in particular. (I was never vegan or vegetarian--I just stopped eating wheat and so many carbs, and poof! my stomach felt better.)

If there's a bright spot in this, I haven't been in much pain. The worst parts have been the tetanus shot, which made my arm hurt for days, and getting braces put on while my gums were still bruised. (Would you believe that braces and cuts inside your upper lip are a bad combination? Obvious, but I'd never thought about it before. Some wax for the brackets helped.) Maybe I have a high threshold of pain; maybe I somehow avoided hitting any nerves, so to speak; maybe it's something I eat or take.

Comments

tess said…
i'm glad things are better, but not being "finished" till 18 months have passed is a bummer....

i'm under the impression that a low-carb dieter actually experiences less pain than someone on LFHC, but i can't remember where i read it.
Lori Miller said…
At least it can be fixed. Long ago, I suppose they'd have just had to yank out both teeth.

I know I have a lot less (as in, zero) pain after workouts than I did when I was eating lots of carbs.

Popular posts from this blog

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here .  * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fermented bread and butter pickle recipe ft. L. Plantarum

After Dr. Davis said the other night that  L. plantarum  may reduce some of the effects of the herbicide glyphosate (which is everywhere), I'm re-running my recipe for fermented bread and butter pickles. Pickling cucumbers naturally have  L. plantarum  bacteria on them, and fermenting them with some brown sugar multiplies these bacteria. (Just don't use chlorinated water to wash them.) And if you're growing your own cucumbers, avoid spraying the fruits with  Bacillus thuringiensis , or Bt (leaves and vines are OK). It's unclear what effect a big dose of Bt would have on humans. Another benefit of DIY pickles: no emulsifiers like polysorbate 80, which is a common ingredient in pickles. If you have GI problems, it could be from emulsifiers. These sweet-and-sour pickles are the tastiest I've ever made. There's just a little added sugar (some of which the bacteria will consume) and turmeric that gives the pickles their bright color.  Special equipment Quar...

Cardio: A Waste of Valuable Dance Time

"I'd rather hold a girl in my arms than a football." -Joe DeCicco, friend and dancing fanatic Have you heard that it takes a woman 77 hours of exercise to lose a kilogram of fat? (For us Americans, that's half a pound.) That's according to a study cited by Dr. John Briffa .(1) The women who huffed and puffed three hours a week for a year ended up 4.4 pounds lighter than the sedentary women. That doesn't surprise me: my own weight loss involved a lot less exercise than what I'd been doing. I did no cardio workouts, just strength training . I had more time and energy for dancing, which is a stress reliever, helps keep me in shape, and it's a ton of fun. It's not expensive to dance (as long as you stay away from the studios). I've found excellent lessons at clubs where the teachers really care about the students getting it. Here in Denver, there are dancing clubs that are run by nonprofit organizations, where the prices are reasonable and...

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...