{"id":50613,"date":"2020-08-24T06:00:46","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T10:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=50613"},"modified":"2020-08-24T02:32:47","modified_gmt":"2020-08-24T06:32:47","slug":"ding-49","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=50613","title":{"rendered":"Ding 49!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, this is mildly terrifying. This will either be the last year of my life that I spend under 50, or the last year of my life. I’m not excited by either prospect.<\/p>\n

In the younger days of this site I had lots of stories about my personal life<\/a>. These days it feels like all of my personal anecdotes are health-related.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Man, I’m having a great day! My knees hurt less than usual, I nearly got a full night of sleep, my blood pressure is down from “life-threatening” to “a serious problem”, and I’m gaining weight slower than I was yesterday. I figure if I watch my meds and eat only salads, I can probably survive to the end of the week!”<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’m kidding, I’m kidding.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I never have days that good anymore.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For my birthday, I’m getting an office chair. The one I’m sitting on now is fairly new, we paid a decent amount for it, and it came from IKEA. So it should be good, right? I was expecting something strong, durable, and comfortable. Instead it feels like a $45 garbage chair from Walmart. It’s hard. It wobbles. It creaks incessantly at the slightest change in position, despite constant oiling.\u00a0This might be one of the worst office chairs I’ve ever owned, actually. <\/p>\n

Since I’m nearing 50, the obvious thing to do is get one of those hip gamer chairs that all the kids are using. I’m getting one supposedly custom-built to my proportions. The downside is that I have to wait another month on account of it being a custom-build. A whole month! That’s 1<\/sup>\/12<\/sub>th of the way between today and my 50th birthday! I might not even live that long!<\/p>\n

Wait, no. I refuse to die before I get to play Cyberpunk 2077.\u00a0After that? No promisesI’ve given up waiting for Half-Life 3, though.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Now I’d like to leave a message for my past self, just in case he gets that whole time travel thing worked out. Then again, I<\/strong> never figured it out so… whatever.<\/p>\n

Dear Shamus from 3 months ago:<\/p>\n

So you’ve discovered that you have hypertension. It’s scary, I know. I’m sure you’ll do great in the exercise and weight loss department. You’ve got a big move<\/a> coming up, and I can promise you that it’s going to kick your ass.<\/p>\n

Here’s the thing: You’re an idiot. You’ve decided to cut most of the salt from your diet, but you’ve got it in your head that reading labels is for weenies. You think that you can tell salty items from non-salty ones by tasting. This is tragically misguided.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what the deal is, but the salt content is barely related to how much salt you can taste<\/b>. Those garlic chips Heather used to get you? Yeah, you gave those up because they were “way too salty”. Check the label, genius. They have a teenie tiny bit of salt and the rest is all garlic powder. Yes, the flavor is overpowering, but it’s not nearly as salty as your taste buds are telling you.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, that lunchmeat? You know the stuff that must not have any salt because you can barely taste it? Read that<\/b> label. ONE slice of that is a whole day of salt. And you’re about to eat TWO of them in a sitting. Sometimes more than once a day! It’s possible your salt intake is about to go UP because you’re going to be thinking with your taste buds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just read the label and don’t spend the next three months sabotaging your own efforts to get your blood pressure under control.<\/p>\n

Good luck, kid. Try not to screw it up this time,<\/p>\n

Shamus<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If anyone is curious, the resulting foolishness looks like this:<\/p>\n

Man, if these numbers get any worse I'm going to have to stop tracking them!<\/div>
Man, if these numbers get any worse I'm going to have to stop tracking them!<\/div><\/p>\n

I’ve been taking my BP every morning since we discovered the problem back in June. The graph above is my systolic pressure.<\/p>\n

I started paying attention to package labels a couple days ago, so it’s not showing up on the chart yet. I should probably go to the doctor, but my hypertension paranoia is very close to my COVID-19 paranoia. I don’t want to sit in a waiting room with a bunch\u00a0 of sick people, I don’t want to wait for a month to get an appointment, I don’t want to call and make the appointment, and also I just don’t want toDon’t worry. If cutting the salt doesn’t help I’ll make the appointment.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The good news is I feel<\/b> fine. Despite all of the silly old-man complaining at the top of the post, I’m not actually hurting. I’m down 10 lbs since June and I’m exercising every day. Honestly if it wasn’t for these blood pressure numbers I’d be really happy with this giant sack of meat I use to chauffeur my brain around.<\/p>\n

No Diecast this week. I spent the weekend finishing up a video and doing some more programming.<\/p>\n

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to have some birthday cake and watch the Cyberpunk 2077 launch countdown timer for a bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, this is mildly terrifying. This will either be the last year of my life that I spend under 50, or the last year of my life. I’m not excited by either prospect. In the younger days of this site I had lots of stories about my personal life. These days it feels like all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[610],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landmarks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50613"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50629,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50613\/revisions\/50629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}