Grape hyacinth, healthcare
Apr. 10th, 2026 08:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickThere's a patch of grape hyacinth growing in the yard of one of my apartment buildings. I've let it go for a few years and it's... increasing its territory without permission, a Putin move, a Bibi move.
This wouldn't be a problem except that it is pretty thick and pretty aggressive and it's slick as hell when you mow it. It also kills off the grass where it invades by choking it out. The section of grape hyacinth is on a hill, because of course it is. That's fun when operating a mower. *sigh* I can't just live with it.
I am not willing to do that. Also it's a damn bulb and a prolific one, so one application of killer spray will not work. It'd have to be methyl-ethyl-badshit over and over and over before it worked.
Just pulling out the bulbs will not work because it spreads both by making seeds and also by making tiny little bulblets that fall out if you try to knock the dirt off the bulbs that you just uprooted. (You might want to use the dirt to refill the holes a bit so that you don't have ankle-breaker holes in your damn yard. This is a rookie mistake.) The tiny little bulblets fall off and grow into new grape hyacinth, you can't leave any of them behind.
The clumps have to be carefully dug up, entirely, like removing a cancer -- you cut around the margins, far enough out to have clean edges -- and then you remove the whole clumps.
Because I am not willing to throw away grape-hyacinth-infested dirt, I took the clumps home and screened them over 3/8" mesh hardware cloth to remove the big bulbs. And then I took that dirt + tiny bulbs and I am baking it in my oven at 400F for 30 minutes (it's on cookie sheets, layered an inch thick and literally steaming when it comes out of the oven) to kill the tiny bulbs. Die, tiny bulbs, die!
I will reuse this dirt to refill the yard holes.
I'm not done removing the grape hyacinth clumps (I did ten five gallon buckets of them) but I'm about halfway done. About halfway done with the oven-based soil remediation, too. It's not that intrusive, I set a timer on my phone, lots of time to do other stuff while that ticks along.
I also spent some time looking at the results of the blood work that my doctor person made me do this year. She wants me to go in and redo it. The office lady on the phone was kind of cagey about all this, which I hate.
Due to the office lady's annoying cagey behavior (like, just fucking tell me what the doc is worried about, y'know? Don't be all "The doctor has some concerns and would like you to redo the blood work", TELL ME THE FUCKING CONCERNS. Goddamn dumb-ass medical gate-keeping, I hate it. This is a barrier to care, medical people. Do you not see that this gate-keeping shit is a barrier to care?!?), I straightened out the damn medical portal (which I hate) and verified my email address that they REFUSE TO EMAIL ME RESULTS TO BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO GO ON THE STUPID FUCKING PORTAL SO WHY DO THEY EVEN NEED AN EMAIL ADDRESS??? ARGH. Infuriating. If you're not using the email, then why do you need it? My fucking god I hate two factor authentication but also I am not putting a fucking fingerprint or a facial ID or a screen lock on my phone, damn your eyes.
*breathe*
Rage Against The Machine
*try to be an adult*
And so having gotten through all that, looked at whatever the fuck the office lady was being all cagey about. Thanks, office lady, your weird fucking cagey shit is WAY MORE DISTURBING THAN JUST TELLING ME. You know I'm gonna go google that shit because I don't know fuck all what any of the abbreviations on blood work results actually mean.
My cholesterol is high but not high enough for me to agree to medication yet. My good cholesterol isn't great and my bad cholesterol is more than it should be and that is assuredly the "try to avoid fried foods" and "get more exercise" part of the conversation that she shared. Also I should eat fewer animal fats. (That'd be the heavy cream in my coffee every morning, I am sure, as well as butter and the cheese.) I can quit the cream. I don't LIKE quitting the cream, but I can do it. I can stop buying butter and cheese entirely. Again, not happy about that, but I can do it. I switched to nonfat greek yogurt already, it tastes like shit and I hate it. Might as well strip the last of the little joys out of my life in order to please the doctor I don't like.
Can't you just be a little more responsible about this? It's ok to have small pleasures sometimes, just don't drown your food in butter all the damn time.
I see you have not met me. I'm very much an all or nothing kind of girl. Yes, that can result in disordered eating. I'm aware.
The delightful portal says that a year ago (ish) I had the same blood work more or less done
This year: 217 cholesterol, 55 hdl, 148 ldl
Last year: 268 cholesterol, 65 hdl, 190 ldl
That there is an improvement, it is. To be fair, I do know why the hell the numbers were shit last year. I spent the weekend before the blood work making very poor food-based choices. Saturday I made french fries from two large russet potatoes, fried them in lard until they were crispy, whipped up some aioli, and then ate all the fries and all the aioli. Delicious. Sunday I made a pound cake and then I ate it. (Were these good choices? No. Did I do them anyway? I sure did.) That Monday, I went in to do blood work. So of course the numbers looked like shit. Oh, well.
Side note: I do not normally eat like that, I was having a lot of feelings and I ate them.
I should eat more olive oil and nuts. (I am not going to eat fatty fish no matter how good they are for me. Or nonfatty fish. I don't eat fish or anything that swims. Hard pass.) Olive oil is OK, nuts cannot be in the house or I eat all of them. (I do not... stop eating nuts very well. I manage this issue by not buying them often and when I do, I only buy them in the smallest possible amount because all the sizes of nut are "single serving" in my world and I might as well contain the damage.)
I should eat whole grains and beans. (I already do this.)
I am a tiny bit low on hemoglobin and hematocrit but also I don't eat much red meat, so... maybe that's it. (Like it's a hair below "normal" level.) I am not worried about this.
I think the thing my doc is concerned about is the TSH, which is 0.05 whatevers-per-whatsit, quite a bit lower than it ought to be. Normal is supposed to bottom out at around 0.5 so 0.05 whatevers-per-whatsit is, like, 10x less than "low normal". That seems like a lot.
According to Dr. Google, which we should never ever use except cagey noises from office lady at the doc office forced my hand, here, TSH is a measurement of thyroid stuff. Low TSH is probably indicative of a thyroid thing.
If it is a thyroid thing, most thyroid things are fixable. My cousin had a thyroid thing and they made her slightly radioactive for a bit to kill off the evil thyroid and now she takes aftermarket fake thyroid instead of making her own and it's fine. SHE got slightly bugged out eyes and super skinny with her thyroid thing. I do not have bugged out eyes and I am in no way super skinny. I don't have unexplained weight loss or explained weight loss or any kind of weight loss at all. *sigh* I could do with some weight loss, explained or otherwise.
Why can't I have the kind of thyroid issue that results in unexplained weight loss? Instead I'm cold all the fucking time, like ALL THE TIME, and my hands and arms go numb when they are not in positions where they should go numb, like "my foot's asleep" only not exactly, but movement does help so I do that) and I'm putting on weight and I feel like shit. (I chalked all of this up to "getting older", btw.) These symptoms do not match up with the internet's suggestions of what Low TSH should look like, so probably they're gonna need more tests after this round to find out what the hell is going on. *sigh*
Anyway, first I have to go back in and get the blood work redone to see if the lab fucked up or if there might actually be a problem. If there is a problem, probably I will have to engage in further doctoring. Ugh. Blood work mulligan will be mid-week, early in the morning, because that's when I can tolerate going in for blood work. And the fucking metal detector. ARGH.
I'll keep you posted, with additional whining, as things progress.
This wouldn't be a problem except that it is pretty thick and pretty aggressive and it's slick as hell when you mow it. It also kills off the grass where it invades by choking it out. The section of grape hyacinth is on a hill, because of course it is. That's fun when operating a mower. *sigh* I can't just live with it.
I am not willing to do that. Also it's a damn bulb and a prolific one, so one application of killer spray will not work. It'd have to be methyl-ethyl-badshit over and over and over before it worked.
Just pulling out the bulbs will not work because it spreads both by making seeds and also by making tiny little bulblets that fall out if you try to knock the dirt off the bulbs that you just uprooted. (You might want to use the dirt to refill the holes a bit so that you don't have ankle-breaker holes in your damn yard. This is a rookie mistake.) The tiny little bulblets fall off and grow into new grape hyacinth, you can't leave any of them behind.
The clumps have to be carefully dug up, entirely, like removing a cancer -- you cut around the margins, far enough out to have clean edges -- and then you remove the whole clumps.
Because I am not willing to throw away grape-hyacinth-infested dirt, I took the clumps home and screened them over 3/8" mesh hardware cloth to remove the big bulbs. And then I took that dirt + tiny bulbs and I am baking it in my oven at 400F for 30 minutes (it's on cookie sheets, layered an inch thick and literally steaming when it comes out of the oven) to kill the tiny bulbs. Die, tiny bulbs, die!
I will reuse this dirt to refill the yard holes.
I'm not done removing the grape hyacinth clumps (I did ten five gallon buckets of them) but I'm about halfway done. About halfway done with the oven-based soil remediation, too. It's not that intrusive, I set a timer on my phone, lots of time to do other stuff while that ticks along.
I also spent some time looking at the results of the blood work that my doctor person made me do this year. She wants me to go in and redo it. The office lady on the phone was kind of cagey about all this, which I hate.
Due to the office lady's annoying cagey behavior (like, just fucking tell me what the doc is worried about, y'know? Don't be all "The doctor has some concerns and would like you to redo the blood work", TELL ME THE FUCKING CONCERNS. Goddamn dumb-ass medical gate-keeping, I hate it. This is a barrier to care, medical people. Do you not see that this gate-keeping shit is a barrier to care?!?), I straightened out the damn medical portal (which I hate) and verified my email address that they REFUSE TO EMAIL ME RESULTS TO BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO GO ON THE STUPID FUCKING PORTAL SO WHY DO THEY EVEN NEED AN EMAIL ADDRESS??? ARGH. Infuriating. If you're not using the email, then why do you need it? My fucking god I hate two factor authentication but also I am not putting a fucking fingerprint or a facial ID or a screen lock on my phone, damn your eyes.
*breathe*
Rage Against The Machine
*try to be an adult*
And so having gotten through all that, looked at whatever the fuck the office lady was being all cagey about. Thanks, office lady, your weird fucking cagey shit is WAY MORE DISTURBING THAN JUST TELLING ME. You know I'm gonna go google that shit because I don't know fuck all what any of the abbreviations on blood work results actually mean.
My cholesterol is high but not high enough for me to agree to medication yet. My good cholesterol isn't great and my bad cholesterol is more than it should be and that is assuredly the "try to avoid fried foods" and "get more exercise" part of the conversation that she shared. Also I should eat fewer animal fats. (That'd be the heavy cream in my coffee every morning, I am sure, as well as butter and the cheese.) I can quit the cream. I don't LIKE quitting the cream, but I can do it. I can stop buying butter and cheese entirely. Again, not happy about that, but I can do it. I switched to nonfat greek yogurt already, it tastes like shit and I hate it. Might as well strip the last of the little joys out of my life in order to please the doctor I don't like.
Can't you just be a little more responsible about this? It's ok to have small pleasures sometimes, just don't drown your food in butter all the damn time.
I see you have not met me. I'm very much an all or nothing kind of girl. Yes, that can result in disordered eating. I'm aware.
The delightful portal says that a year ago (ish) I had the same blood work more or less done
This year: 217 cholesterol, 55 hdl, 148 ldl
Last year: 268 cholesterol, 65 hdl, 190 ldl
That there is an improvement, it is. To be fair, I do know why the hell the numbers were shit last year. I spent the weekend before the blood work making very poor food-based choices. Saturday I made french fries from two large russet potatoes, fried them in lard until they were crispy, whipped up some aioli, and then ate all the fries and all the aioli. Delicious. Sunday I made a pound cake and then I ate it. (Were these good choices? No. Did I do them anyway? I sure did.) That Monday, I went in to do blood work. So of course the numbers looked like shit. Oh, well.
Side note: I do not normally eat like that, I was having a lot of feelings and I ate them.
I should eat more olive oil and nuts. (I am not going to eat fatty fish no matter how good they are for me. Or nonfatty fish. I don't eat fish or anything that swims. Hard pass.) Olive oil is OK, nuts cannot be in the house or I eat all of them. (I do not... stop eating nuts very well. I manage this issue by not buying them often and when I do, I only buy them in the smallest possible amount because all the sizes of nut are "single serving" in my world and I might as well contain the damage.)
I should eat whole grains and beans. (I already do this.)
I am a tiny bit low on hemoglobin and hematocrit but also I don't eat much red meat, so... maybe that's it. (Like it's a hair below "normal" level.) I am not worried about this.
I think the thing my doc is concerned about is the TSH, which is 0.05 whatevers-per-whatsit, quite a bit lower than it ought to be. Normal is supposed to bottom out at around 0.5 so 0.05 whatevers-per-whatsit is, like, 10x less than "low normal". That seems like a lot.
According to Dr. Google, which we should never ever use except cagey noises from office lady at the doc office forced my hand, here, TSH is a measurement of thyroid stuff. Low TSH is probably indicative of a thyroid thing.
If it is a thyroid thing, most thyroid things are fixable. My cousin had a thyroid thing and they made her slightly radioactive for a bit to kill off the evil thyroid and now she takes aftermarket fake thyroid instead of making her own and it's fine. SHE got slightly bugged out eyes and super skinny with her thyroid thing. I do not have bugged out eyes and I am in no way super skinny. I don't have unexplained weight loss or explained weight loss or any kind of weight loss at all. *sigh* I could do with some weight loss, explained or otherwise.
Why can't I have the kind of thyroid issue that results in unexplained weight loss? Instead I'm cold all the fucking time, like ALL THE TIME, and my hands and arms go numb when they are not in positions where they should go numb, like "my foot's asleep" only not exactly, but movement does help so I do that) and I'm putting on weight and I feel like shit. (I chalked all of this up to "getting older", btw.) These symptoms do not match up with the internet's suggestions of what Low TSH should look like, so probably they're gonna need more tests after this round to find out what the hell is going on. *sigh*
Anyway, first I have to go back in and get the blood work redone to see if the lab fucked up or if there might actually be a problem. If there is a problem, probably I will have to engage in further doctoring. Ugh. Blood work mulligan will be mid-week, early in the morning, because that's when I can tolerate going in for blood work. And the fucking metal detector. ARGH.
I'll keep you posted, with additional whining, as things progress.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-10 04:20 pm (UTC)A good way, if you aren't already doing it, to reduce bad cholesterol and greatly increase colon health is to take psyllum husk. Donald, who had real cholesterol issues started on it and brought his levels down almost to normal (not quite, but close). Apparently that kind of fiber, along with fiber in the overall diet, helps reduce or eliminate the kinds of polyps that are dangerous in your colon. Who knew! Donald takes psyllum powder mixed 1TBS to a pint + of water twice a day. I don't like that kind of mess, it is sticky stuff, so I take plain capsules twice a day. Anyway, might make enough difference so you can keep your cream in your coffee!
Having had to diet some in my life, my experience is that cutting out very rich foods is super hard at first and then you start tasting different flavors in foods. I can remember cutting out butter on my potatoes and HATING it. Some weeks later I ate a plain baked potato and realized how sweet it was and how much flavor the butter had covered up. Some potatoes are more flavorful than others!