This is pretty much a good news-bad news day. Let's start off with the good news. Karen will most likely be retiring the first of June, and not next February. This has to do with the low interest rate some way or another, and we have an appointment to go over the figures with a counsellor on Monday... the counsellor is not associated with BC/Bs This puts us in the position of making some decisions sooner than we'd planned on making them... like, what are we going to do with the rest of our lives? Of course, I still have a few more years left before I can even think about retiring, but I really don't have to spend those years working at St. Francis hospital here in Topeka. Karen, of course, is excited. She does not enjoy her work like I do, and she wants to get away from the petty management at BC/BS. OK, now for the bad news: I had my fasting lipids done this morning, along with a CBC. The results were not pretty. To start off with, my SGPT is elevated. Normal values are 30-65, and mine is 73. My cholesterol is at 157, which is not bad, but both the LDL and the HDL are low, leaving me with a risk calculation od 4.8. 4.8 is bad. O'yeah, triglycerides are 331. That is way high, and way bad. Red blood cells - low. Bad. Hematocrit: low. Bad. Glucose: high. Bad. Bottom line: I seem to be borderline everything, and on the edge of some very bad things, such as another coronary (elevated SGPT might be an indicator of a recent coronary)... I was having chest pain last night, but I got up and ate some tums and they went away. My original thought was coronary when I first felt the pain. And I do have some pretty good collateralization. Borderline diabetic. Borderline liver disease? I dunno on this one. Borderline anaemic? Or over the border? This might account for my lack of desire to do anything, and wanting to sleep much more that I really think that I need. And just general fatigue. Anyway, I need to start doing much better on my diet, and I need to start *now*. I met Karen and Kim at Applebee's tonight, and I had the trout. Good, and pretty healthy, I think. I've never been much for eating salt, but I'm gonna cut that out completely, and I'm gonna start drinking lotsa water. The triglycerides are an indication of my fondness for sweets. I can give those up too. And I will. And I hate doing that. And mild exercise, at least for right now. Karen and I haven't been back to the Y yet, we'll probably go tomorrow. My knee pain is back with a vengeance, woke me up at 04:00 this morning and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that, it seems to come and go. I wisht that it'd go and stay gone. Today was pretty hellacious at work. We're one person short, and when the part-timer left at 13:00 we were immediately swamped. And no help, except finally someone came over to sort films and run patients back and forth. I just barely got out of there at 17:00. Anyways... I've got a lot to think about. I think that I'll go to bed and sleep on it.