The proof is in the blood work

I did a little experiment this past month. There is something so appealing to testing a hypothesis that I find impossible to resist. After the initial scare of "I almost died" and it's close cousin "I have kidney disease" were over and I'd settled into treatment, there was apparently not enough excitement in my life.

Here's some background... My blood work has consistently been getting better and better and with standing orders for testing every two weeks, I could keep a very close eye on things. Last month when I saw my specialist she said I was doing well enough that I didn't need such careful monitoring and changed my lab orders to once a month instead of every two weeks. Plus, I didn't need to see her every month but every other month. Remember those essential oils I mentioned that I'd been taking? Well, they are really expensive - not all of them but the ones I needed, lucky me. And the more I researched the oils and supplements the more I wondered if just taking the company's recommended daily supplements - which included basically the same oils I was taking individually everyday - would work just as well. Not only was there potential cost benefits if they did, but the convenience of pre-packaged supplements was far more appealing than the mess associated with putting drops of oil in a tiny little gelcap twice a day.

So, last month instead of reordering the Clove oil I was out of, I ordered the supplements instead and decided to test the theory that they were just as beneficial as what I'd been doing.

A month later, my skin is clearer, my colon is cleaner and my energy levels are back up into the normal range. I'm super happy with the supplements and will continue taking them for sure because of the benefits to my overall health. But what about my specific health concern?

Yesterday was my monthly lab work. And this morning I saw my test results. Disappointingly, my steady decline in the proteinuria I've been enjoying was not there. Instead it was up - almost double - from the level it was last month.

I'm not sure how I feel about this...

On the one hand, I am now determined to start taking the individual oils again like before and see if my hypothesis is correct next month when I expect to see a better result than this month. The excitement of a provable theory exhilarates me. On the other hand, I'm kind of irritated that my idea to save money and get the same benefits from the essential oils through the supplements rather than individual oils is out the window. Now I either have to give up taking the daily supplements or be okay with spending even more money than I was before to do both. Talk about a backfire!

My brain is also trying to compute what else was different this month that could have contributed to the reverse in my trend. I've been eating healthier and basking daily in the joy of leafy green veggies that I can eat whenever I want again. I've ramped up my exercise with 4 days of regular yoga practice and just added lap swimming thanks to a brush-up-on-your-strokes-and-learn-how-to-kick-turn lesson from my daughter's swim teacher.

Because I started out taking a half dose of the supplements which is recommended at first, my thirty-day supply has lasted me longer. So I'm going to continue taking the supplements and start back on the daily protocol of individual oils as before for the next 30 days. And then we'll see what the lab work reveals next month.

Any bets on the results? And is anyone else as turned on by ACTUAL MEASURABLE DATA as I am?

If you want something done, do it yourself

I'm not sure if my overachiever tendencies stem from my OCD or if it's the other way around (what came first, the chicken or the egg?) Regardless of how I came to be the way I am, I've always agreed with the statement that if you want something done right you should do it yourself.

I work for a healthcare organization and this year they have launched multiple programs to get us, the employees, to live healthier. They gave us all pedometers as part of our yearly employee gift. They have multiple contests and incentives to track your fitness activities. And they haven't let up even though the year is more than half over which tells me they are really serious about getting us all healthier. We have a fitness center on site that hundreds of us pay monthly fees to use. I've heard other facilities within the organization have gotten permission to use part of those funds to pay for regular yoga instruction as a benefit to the fitness center users. And we all know how addicted I've become to yoga since I had to take a hiatus from running. So I started pushing for that to happen here. Months later I'm still getting the run around about how there's no budget for that and blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, I do yoga in my cubicle every time my back hurts and sometimes that spills over into the aisle. A couple of weeks ago two of my co workers started talking about how they want to do yoga at work and how come we can't have classes, etc. while I did a warrior series in the aisle and they marveled at how I could just do yoga wherever. The conversation came full circle to end with "Terra, why don't you teach us?"

Hmmm.  Why don't I?

Other than that very obvious reason that I'm not a certified yoga instructor aside, why couldn't I? I practice yoga twice a week minimum and on occasion have even led my group practice when there are newer yogis in attendance.

So, in very overachiever fashion, I booked an auditorium that would hold us all and taught my first class yesterday. Everyone loved it so much that they begged and pleaded for it to be a weekly happening. My boss said okay and now I'm looking online at ways to get certified to teach yoga.

What an amazing journey life is when you open yourself up to wherever your whims take you without limiting your possibilities. If I hadn't taken matters into my own hands we'd still be waiting around for other people to make regular yoga classes happen for us. Instead I've gotten a whole new group of people excited about yoga who talked all day about how sore they are and who can't wait for next week. I love life and am still so glad I didn't die!