AO: Highlands
Q: Murdock ,
PAX: Stifler, number_1, Dogpound, Chavez, Powerball, Murdock, Glock
FNGs:
COUNT: 7
For those wondering where I’ve been for the past 2 years or so, here’s the deal. A few years ago I broke one ankle and then as soon as I felt good enough to come back out and lead a work out, I promptly broke the other ankle at that workout. Those two events alone resulted in about a year and a half of downtime. The result of that was that I became depressed and fat and completely out of shape. The result of that was the emotional inertia that I could not overcome where I kept telling myself I was too far gone and that I was too fat and too out of shape to even begin working out. I tried to break that cycle a few times on my own with my own gym but it’s just not the same thing having only yourself to push you to do something. I just don’t have the personality for that to work.

Fast forward a couple of years and my wife convinced me that since we’re going on our first legitimate island vacation in 25 years that maybe I want to try to get back into some kind of shape while I have some time left. So I went to her doctor and he was fantastic in terms of the annual physical and blood work and his ongoing involvement. We did the physical and the blood work came back and among other things I was vitamin D insufficient (not enough time outside) and my lipid panel was an absolute mess. He immediately put me on a statin and sent me to get a cardiac CT scan.

The irony of this is that many years ago a different doctor had told me that based on my family history of no cardiac events and the fact that my mother and my brother have very high cholesterol that it was likely I have familial hypercholesterolemia and that taking a statin was probably pointless. However, in the modern day when they can do things like protein tests with your blood samples they can tell you definitively whether or not that’s true. In my case it was not true. My bad lipid panel turned out to be a result of my bad eating habits and my bad exercise habits.

The sad thing is that I had let it go for over 10 years and the result is that I now have pretty bad case of coronary artery disease. If you want to know how bad it is my cardiac calcium score is 556. That puts me into the top 90th percentile of risk for my peer group for a cardiac event at some point in my life.

There’s nothing that can be done to reverse it because once it’s calcified it’s there permanently. What that result doesn’t tell me is whether or not I have any blockage from non-calcified plaque inside my arteries and veins so I’m probably going to have to go do a cardiac stress test to determine that. I’m hoping that the answer is that I don’t have significant blockage and judging by the fact that I can still do a workout without falling over and dying I’m praying that’s true.

I put this out there because it’s a cautionary tale of ignoring your health. Over the last 10 years many of you have seen me before my recent two or three years of inactivity and you’d remember that I was doing really well and that at one point I thought the most physically fit period of my life was in my 40s. The reality was that I was inadvertently ignoring a serious problem that has gone on for the last 10 or so years and is now irreversible.

If you are in your 40s I beg you to go to your doctor and get a physical that includes a lipid panel and if your cholesterol is high there is no reason to not do something about it. The goddamn statin that I’m on now for the rest of my life is literally supplied to me for FREE with zero deductible from the insurance company. I wish I had done this 10 or 12 years ago.