State of the Brain

I spent the last few days getting my pituitary MRI again, plus blood tests various and sundry. This morning I went trotting off to the endocrinologist for the review.

The good news is that the adenoma hasn't changed at all in the eighteen months they've been watching it. Both my endo and the neuroendocrinologist agree that I can safely drop down to having an MRI every other year. Yay for fewer MRI's and resultant less money spent taking pictures of my brain!

Also in good news, my weight is stable despite a summer of much less activity than my norm, due to the combination of travelling and trouble getting to the gym while the kids are home from school.

The less good news is that except for thyroid, which is stable, all my other numbers are showing the effects of the more sedentary life. Everything is still in a decent range, but cholesterol is up, HDL is down, insulin sensitivity is down, LDL is up.

Fortunately I get back into my normal schedule next week (The Y is shut down for annual cleaning this week), and there shouldn't be any difficulty with kicking my numbers back into place within the next few months. Next week I'll go back to yoga and pilates, once I've recovered from those sore muscles, the next week I'll put back the Turbokick, and then the weight work. I'm debating between going back to the weight class, which was what I was doing before, and going to the weight room to do my own workout. I tend to be more loyal to classes, so I'm more likely to actually get regular hard workouts if I take the class. On the other hand, the class does a lot of lunges and squats, which aren't always on when my knee is acting up, and is somewhat awkwardly placed time-wise, as it starts 15 minutes before the kids' swim lesson, and ends at exactly the same time.

All this is at an apropos time, since my major work of the week is revising my article on pituitaries for the Damn Interesting book. It's somewhat frustrating because Alan wants the article done in a significantly different way from the way it now is. Instead he wants it - exactly the way I initially wrote the dratted thing last year, before I was asked to do major revisions. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I didn't save my initial draft. Blarg.

Karate was all drill, all the time last night. We worked up a pretty good sweat, and Sensei was in an explaining mood, showing us bunkai from the early katas, and alternate ways the sequences of moves could go. Friday is kumite.