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Weight Control or How To Disappear


During a serious year-long illness one of the meds my doctor had taking was Prednisone. Prednisone is a steroid used to help the body heal but has some interesting side effects. The effects were even more interesting since he had me on a very high dosage.

I was not fully aware of a couple of the side effects until several months after being off the steroid. The most obvious change was my weight. I ballooned up from 168 pounds to 250 pounds. I was eating massive amounts of everything. It has taken me seven years to get down to193 pounds. The problem is the steroid component in a couple of the medications that I will have to take as long as I live.

During the "year of Prednisone" I was able to walk faster, work harder and talk circles around long winded corner evangelists. People started going the other way when they saw me. The problem is I was completely unaware of none of that, for me, strange behavior.

It all sunk in about two years later. I remember one brother-in-law asking me several times, "Man, what are you on?" I have managed to corner some of those people whose ears probably are still ringing and apologized.

Today I am back to my sort of recluse self as if I have much of a choice anyway. My illness was an incurable type of pneumonia that destroyed all but a tiny bit of my lungs. So I now live connected to a machine that makes oxygen for me to breathe. The stronger steroids have long faded from my system. I now get winded walking slowly down the back porch steps (five steps) and twelve feet to the bird bath. I'm more winded than when I had to run a mile in under 14 minutes in full combat gear for the annual Army PT test a lifetime ago.

2 comments:

Charlene said...

Yep. And then the drugs that destroy your liver! I would warn anyone who sees ads on TV saying take this pill and you'll no longer have this symptom and then very fast say all the bad things that "might" happen. Those mights do happen and if it's just a minor complaint, forget the drugs!

5/5/11 7:54 AM
Ed I said...

Well, I was out of options. It was do that or die. It almost did not work. Remaining option was take a drug that would cause cancer. Doc said at least they would have a better chance of curing that than what I had.

5/5/11 9:20 AM

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When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.~ John Lennon
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