Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: health

  • Recovery Time for a Retiree

    I went through hernia repair surgery on the second of January. A skilled surgeon, using a special robotic tool, made for minimally invasive surgery. So I have a 15 pound limit until Valentine’s day, and after about ten days I feel like getting back to work. The package says you should be able to go back to work a couple-three days after surgery. For any job I have held in the last 35 years, I could have gone back to work.

    But I’m not employed – I’m retired. And most of the work for a retiree doesn’t include other people to do the lifting and toting. I have a shower repair that is being put off until mid-February. No big thing – there’s a second shower upstairs, and with my new knee I handle the stairs well. I’d like to be working on the service station remodeling tasks – but the lifting limit makes it too easy to do something stupid. There’s a bunch of blowdown that needs cleaned up – but again, it would be all to easy to do something stupid. I need to re-level the sawmill, and mill more boards – but a 2×8 is probably about at the limit. Sam came by with the little goats – I offered to take a lead rope, and the answer was “They can exert a lot more that 15 pounds worth of effort. I realized the Talon had been parked too long and needed to charge up the battery – and, after I had the hood up, I realized lifting the hood was more than 15 pounds. I carry firewood onto the porch one piece at a time, instead of pulling a loaded cart up. Taking groceries in to the house takes so many trips that I bless the new knee.

    Finally, I looked at the snow free yard and realized I could grab a shovel and start cleaning up the winter’s supply of dog droppings. It isn’t a flashy task – but at least it’s something that I can do within the lifting limit. Old retired guys need to do a lot more lifting than old professors.

  • I Started The Year With Optional Surgery

    At 7:00 am, January 2, I was on my way for surgery to correct an inguinal hernia. I had the options of wait and watch or get it fixed. I couldn’t find any record of hernias healing themselves, and getting it fixed required one morning for surgery and six weeks without lifting more than 20 pounds – which a kindly nurse assured me was like a gallon of milk.

    I figured the surgery wouldn’t be easier if I aged and the hernia got bigger – the only real win for waiting and watching is if I were to die before I needed surgery. I made my bet on living – after Valentine’s day I’ll be back running the sawmill and working on remodeling the Service Station. The remodeling goes on hold until I can lift again – but January and February are months of short days. Surgery near the solstice has it’s own logic.

    They told me to show up in loose clothes – so I showed up in my fat man jeans – 36 waist with suspenders to keep ’em up instead of a belt snugged tight on the 34 denims. Roads were a bit dicey going in – not particularly slick, but ruts in the snow/slush. Still, a whole lot better going in than going home – the medical establishment has this belief that I’m better off with my wife driving for the first 24 hours after surgery, while the narcotics wear off. It’s possible that they’re right. Either way, I’m home and starting my restful recuperation. Hopefully, I have the year’s surgical visits completed.

    All told, I’m a great believer in the American medical experience. I admit that the final experience is likely to be disappointing – but so far the folks who wear the caduceus have been very good to me.

  • How unhealthy is loneliness?

    Are isolation and loneliness actually bad for our health? Do they increase the risk of dying?

    Short answer: Well, it isn’t good for you. How harmful probably depends on the extent and your age. Risk of dying? That’s a bit more complicated.

    This isn’t actually a new question, even if it is a topic of increasing interest lately. Since it isn’t a new question, there’s actually plenty of existing research to look at. There are a few major difficulties to keep in mind:

    • Experiments in this area are rare, primarily due to ethical concerns.
    • Loneliness is difficult to measure (it doesn’t have a number like blood pressure).
    • Determining if something is a cause is surprisingly difficult.

    One of the different categories studied is age. Loneliness in children has been studied separately than in adults.

    Children: We know isolation is extremely problematic in children. Large studies on this are limited, but there were some early ones done comparing children raised in orphanages to those in prisons, and some subsequent studies isolating baby monkeys. There have been some case studies done of individual children that have been raised in isolation as well. At any rate, it’s a bad thing. It certainly substantially impairs normal social development, and studies suggest cognitive damage as well.

    Adults: One very popular study used a biobank in the UK (Follow-up study was easier to find and more recent, so here’s that link). They found a slight excess risk of death (i.e. hazard factor) in the socially isolated, even when they accounted for other factors, such as age. This is somewhat complicated by the question of whether or not being socially isolated happens due to underlying health conditions.

    How severe are the effects of loneliness?

    While it’s a bit difficult to determine if it increases the likelihood of dying, the health effects are significant. The researcher’s term for loneliness is perceived social isolation (PSI). For adults it comes with a greater risk of depression, inflammation, and cardiovascular disorders. There certainly appears to be a link between loneliness and poor health, but precisely how/why is less clear.

    Given the current widespread social experiment taking place, the future should hold many more studies on the topic.

    Social experiment? There are some experiments one simply cannot do, for ethical reasons or practical limitations. The current situation of shutdowns, quarantines, and social distancing wouldn’t be practical to implement as an experiment on the scale we’re currently seeing it. But, as it is being implemented, we can certainly expect the data out of it to be studied. After all, it’s not the sort of experiment any scientist could dream of implementing- and, with so many states and countries doing things differently, there’s going to be lots of data to compare. It is, effectively an experiment, and if it is one with more variables and design flaws than a scientist would include, well, no scientist could have done it.