Weekly Writing Intentions: Saturday, October 14, 2023,

Daily Diary: Day 1139:

Another week where I did a good job of meeting my exercise goals, continuing to get in at least one walk every day and two walks on five days, plus doing some sort of core building exercise every day but one. The result was the second week in a row where I got almost 2 hours of exercise a day. So, my intention is to keep doing this.

In addition, I did better than I have been doing in terms of writing, although not every day. Three of the days this past week, I got slightly more than 1200 words written (which was my tentative goal) and I was able to achieve that doing sprints and trying not to be derailed by details (looking up a minor character’s name from an earlier book, for example.) On the other hand, for a variety of reasons, the other days were very hit or miss, with two of them under 200 words.

Yesterday, between getting less than 5 hours sleep and not being able to have any caffeine because of some stress test I had this morning, I only got 122 words written, and that was mostly just adding to a scene I had written yesterday. Nevertheless, my average for the past week was still 734 words a day, the best I have achieved yet on this book.

Obviously, my intention for next week it to get more than 3 days hitting my 1200 words a day goal.

Since I didn’t feel alert enough to write fiction yesterday, I did my best to clear the decks and get anything I could get done ahead of time done for next week.

Also, since I spent most of this morning doing a cardiac stress test, and I am going to treat myself gently for the rest of the day, I am really counting on tomorrow as the beginning of my writing (and exercise) week.

For those of you who worry about such things, this was a chemical heart stress test, and the preliminary results were already online by the time I got home. As far as my reading of the results go, everything looks fine.

Trigger alert here, I found the whole thing fascinating so I am going to describe, but if this sort of thing isn’t your cup of tea, just skip!

I had to go without caffeine for 24 hours (yikes!) and then be fasting this morning (tests started around 8 am), but then they injected me with radioactive dye (the online description of test said that I should drink lots of liquid to make sure it went through my body quickly when I got home, but that I was not a danger to anyone!) Another Yikes. Anyway, then they took scans--one of those things where you have to lie still for what seems like hours. Then they injected me with stimulants, then let me eat—instructions was to bring fatty foods, so I indulged myself with whole piece of bread smothered with almond butter! Then they took more scans to see how my heart handled the stimulants and eating. Only side effect for me seems to be headache, and their suggestion was to drink something with caffeine when I got home, so that is what I doing right now. All was smoothly done, all the techs and nurses very kind, and I very relieved overall, looks like my heart is doing fine. Since my mother suffered from rheumatic heart disease all her life, even though I know this isn’t hereditary, several cousins have had congenital heart problems so I was glad to discover this isn’t a problem for me.

I suspect the mild and inconsistent symptoms and lab test results from a month ago were the result of how my chronic syndrome (don’t you love that word, so nebulous) is interacting with simple age.

Anyway, going to spend the rest of today getting my blood sugar back on track (fasting then eating more than usual did bump it up a bit) and drinking my tea. Maybe I will do some light reading, and I hope I will feel up to doing some of my chair Pilates and evening walk later. However, definitely a day to take things easy.

Oh, the eclipse was happening while I was in the clinic, but my husband was walking the dog and said it produced a really odd light, and when he looked on the sidewalk under trees that he could see the changing crescent filtered by the leaves. Did any of you get a chance to see it, with special glasses etc?