Effing Exercise

You know the people in my family love a good alliteration. Effing Exercise may not be the most creative alliteration you've seen on this site, but it completely describes the prescription my doctor gave me yesterday.

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If you live in Mahoning or Trumbull county and you're looking for a good internist/family doctor, I wholeheartedly recommend Dr. Angela Roberts, who has recently joined the practice of Dr. Paul Rich, 5170 Belmont Avenue, 330.759.2511‎. Dr. Roberts is smart, compassionate and practical. She doesn't laugh at my crazy ideas and she makes me glad I made the call to her office. And she's accepting new patients. (She's a YSU grad. Oh, and a musician. We speak the same language.)
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When I took the g'babes to North Carolina for New Year's week to visit their great-grandmother, Ridley gave me her cold. It took me six weeks or so to get over that cold, and I still, five months later, have a nasty bronchial cough that just hangs on. Sometime in late winter or early spring, I began feeling a weight in my chest. Sometimes when I woke up in the morning, I could hear a rattling or wheezing when I breathed out. When I was in rehearsals or performances with the COChorus, I would sometimes run out of breath far earlier than in years past. Or when I went to grab a breath before a long phrase, I would fight the urge to cough.

I've always considered myself fairly healthy, except for my chronic headaches. So these lung symptoms didn't give me a warm feeling. Of course, my imagination was taking me to lung cancer or esophageal cancer. Whatever the worst case scenario was, that's where I was going with this weight on my chest.

Now that I'm not driving to Akron every day (yea!), I felt free to take the time to get the problem looked at. This morning I spent two hours with Dr. Roberts. She ran an EKG and took a chest x-ray. These were all good. My lungs were clear and my heart was great. Then she ordered a spirometry, a test normally given to determine if a patient has asthma.

I had to take a deep breath, then exhale quickly and fully through a tube that measured the exhalation. This was done three times, then I was treated with a medication to open the tubes. After sitting for ten minutes with my NYTimes crossword, I had to do the exhalation again.

Dr. Roberts came back into the examining room and said, "The good news is, you don't have asthma." I had no problem with my lungs.

"However," she continued, "the bad news is . . .

"your lungs are 69 years old."

Wait. I'm 59. In five weeks and five days I'll be 60. I'm often told I look much younger than my age. When the g'babes were little, people were surprised to hear I was their grandmother. So "your lungs are 69 years old"??!!!

Dr. Roberts looked into my eyes and said, "Jan, you're out of shape."

Well, sheeit. For the past two years and two months, I've spent two hours a day driving to and from Akron, eight hours a day in a job where I felt, oh, never mind, and an hour a day running errands at lunch. Running errands, not walking around the block. And now I'm paying for it.

My lungs are 69 years old.

We all want to exercise, right? We all want to be in good physical shape. Now my doctor has told me I must get into physical shape.

She said, "Don't start fast. Start slowly. Walk, don't run."

I nodded.

She asked, "Do you have a plan?"

"Yes," I responded. "Now that I'm working from home, I will walk around the block before starting work." She nodded.

She wants to see me again in three weeks.

I've got to get off my ass.

Aging sucks!