Now 3/4 through the year, so it’s time for another update.
The first thing to talk about is that I had an existential scare in June and July. Since September of last year, I started getting tonsil stones. I didn’t even know what they were before last year. Anyway, they were something of a quality of life nuisance for me (the smell was terrible!), but I figured they would just become a part of my new normal, just part of getting older and my body changing. Every few weeks, I would gag on my finger, a cotton-swabbed stick, or oral irrigator to try to get those nasty white pebbles to pop out of the crevices of my tonsils. Eventually they started forming more and more frequently, and by midyear this year, I couldn’t even get rid of horrible smell, no matter how many stones I forced out or how much I almost threw up from the process.
As I approached the midyear, I started noticing that my tonsils were different sizes. I was concerned, but I have a tendency to scare myself with Dr. Google and obsess over my health, so I wanted to ignore it and let it go away on its own, as 99% of my body issues tend to do. The tonsils stayed different sizes. In fact, the bigger one seemed unusually firm. Eventually, I broke and started searching for answers. Apparently different sized tonsils are a primary indicator of tonsil cancer.
I scheduled an appointment with an ENT (ear, nose, and throat) specialist. Going to that doctor’s office was the first time since the beginning of the pandemic that I entered a building that wasn’t my own house, so it was weird to remember that other places exist. Upon examining my tonsils, he immediately scheduled me for surgery, echoing the information I read online that they need to cut them out, biopsy them, and determine if I had a malignancy. He tried to reassure me that despite the urgency of surgery that it was highly unlikely that I had tonsil cancer.
Surgery came and went, and I spent the next weeks recovering. Apparently a tonsillectomy is one of the most miserable surgeries to recover from as an adult. Child tonsillectomies are relatively benign: the tonsils are physically smaller, children heal faster, and because their throats suffered less sore throats and other illnesses/injuries, there is less scar tissue in their tonsil area to slow down the recovery process. I have to admit that it was pretty miserable for me too. I couldn’t eat solid food for a while, and even swallowing my own saliva required mentally and physically preparing for the pain. I’d share the photo I took of the inside of my mouth the day after surgery, but it’s basically NSFL gore.
The ENT called me a week or so later with the results of the pathology report from the biopsied tissue: no malignancy. Phew. We talked in greater detail in my next physical visit for him to examine my recovery. Apparently a lot of tonsil stones came out of my tonsils when he clamped on them to cut them out. Perhaps the size difference between the tonsils was only because one of them had a huge cache of stones.
It’s been great since getting the tonsils out. Not only am I back to eating whatever I want again, but I haven’t had that tonsil stone smell at all since the surgery. That alone has made it worth it. I’d even say that so far, I’ve had a much lesser occurrence of canker sores and sore throats. No sore throats in fact, and the only canker sores I’ve had were while I was still recovering from the surgery.
One thing that has suffered from my surgery has been my diet. The thing that brought me the greatest relief during recovery was drinking a coffee milkshake. I still lost weight while my diet was out of whack, but my rate of loss was less than if I had continued to diet as expected.
That said, I’ve greatly surpassed my weight loss goals for the year. I’ve lost 35lbs in total since the beginning of the year. My BMI dropped 5 points, from solidly in the overweight category to firmly within the normal range. I’m the lowest weight I’ve been since training for a mountain climb 11 years ago, and that weight was also the weight I had when I graduated high school. Granted, I was more muscular then: back then I would run seven miles straight to warm up for weight lifting.
So now starts a new fitness journey. I’m no longer going to focus on weight loss. Now I’m shifting to muscle-building. Because muscle-building requires a caloric surplus, I will need to figure out how to do that without just getting fat again. If I keep a close eye on my weight, I think I will be able to manage it. My current exercise strategy also should protect my joints better than my previous attempts at muscle-building. I’m hoping in three months, I can report back here success in my efforts.
I’m not going to be running on the treadmill for the foreseeable future: cardio kills gains brah. Also, I will not be running in any half-marathon, likely ever again. I don’t know what this will mean for my anime watching goals. I’ve almost exclusively watched anime on the treadmill and now I’m removing that avenue.
I haven’t spent any significant amount of time watching anime, movies, or TV shows, playing videogames, writing on this blog, or following politics either. That cancer scare flipped my world upside down, and I don’t know that I’ve fully recovered from it from a mental point of view. Here’s hoping I have better news to report in my end-of-year post.