Horse Piddle

Last consultation with the Vascular Surgeon yesterday.

This time last year it looked like I  was going to lose a toe if not more. The circulation in my legs had about packed in.

The problem was that I had gone hypERthyroid which put my blood pressure through the roof. Add that to the fifty years of undiagnosed "prediabetes" and all the decades I had dutifully eaten my high carb low fat diet and I wasn't at all surprised that reality was finally catching up with me.

The guy I saw last year told me to walk *through* the pain in my calves and see if I couldn't reroute the blood circulation. Previously I had been stopping and waiting until the pain subsided before continuing.

This turned out to be spectacularly successful. Though I still slow down a bit from time to time and will never walk as fast as I used to, I was able to report I could walk five miles or so by last summer.

Of course taking carbimazole to shut down the thyroid had a big effect, I'm not afraid to take meds when they are necessary, only when they are provided as an antidote to a crap diet.

I told him I had been eating the exact opposite of what the dietician told me, which had effectively controlled my blood glucose, insulin levels and IR, doubled my HDL and reduced my trigs to 1/10 of what they were, and had been doing so for eleven years now.

"Ah, a Paleo diet?" he said. 

"Yes, and pretty much what my Gran used to eat, back in the days before there were "epidemics" of obesity and diabetes - except without all the pastry"

I've found not a few hospital doctors who are an order of magnitude more clueful than the average GP, almost certainly because they are more invested in results and less constrained by accounting clerks at the PCT. And of course as specialists they know more about less.

Way back in the early eighties when I finally got my gallstones diagnosed after five years of symptoms including a fair bit of agony, in retrospect the Consultant then had pretty much worked out "metabolic syndrome" for himself, long before Gerald Reaven, and had noted the increase and spread of many other diseases usually believed to be "genetic", ie. epigenetics.

He said that a typical gallstone patient used to be "fat, fair, forties, female, fertile" . . . and probably some more f's that I don't remember, but that they were not only becoming commoner but spreading to males and younger people especially.

No-one's perfect, of course in those days he blamed dietary fat when it's since become obvious that it is carbs, and the *lack* of fat. But he was in a position to notice reality when it differed from dogma.

All of the guys I met in the Cardiovascular department were clueful, but I don't think they expected me to recover without stents. I may still need their attention in the future, it remains to be seen, but so far they were as impressed with the improvement as I am.

Currently I'm only taking amlodipine for the BP and the carbimazole. Also I am supplementing the diet with vitamin D3 and fish oil. I may try krill oil and extra vitamin K2, see if I can't clear out more of the plaque.

To celebrate I took myself to the fish restaurant in Orford, where I ate Angels On Horseback - oysters wrapped in bacon and grilled, on toast and with salad (hence the sodding cucumber). After walking to the hospital and back from the side street where I usually park (a journey which made me hobble dreadfully this time last year) I walked from the restaurant to the fish shop the other end of town for a big fat bloater and some smoked cod's roe, in the process discovering a new butcher's shop which I will go back and try next time I'm in the vicinity. 

Then I took myself to the beach and had a bracing walk in the breeze. Just a couple of miles though, it was not warm despite the nuclear reactors.

The sun went in just before I set out, and I drove through some light rain with the temperature gauge in the car showing 3 C. In Orford they told me they'd had snow. Then the sun came out again before disappearing into the clouds, by which time it was significantly warmer. Also I saw the first wallflowers out.

Thanks for sharing this Chris - so pleased to read that things have improved so well.

It is only be sharing and talking about experiences that we can and do help others ... those that do want to do more to help themselves ... who read and research and discuss with their Doctors / Specialists.

I think you deserved that wonderful meal ' Angels On Horseback '

... I love wallflowers, haven't seen any in flower yet though. Perhaps I may when I go out later.

Have a good Friday

All the best Jan

Great post Chris. You certainly have been through the mangle over the last few years, but on the mend big time, he who dares wins eh. Yet again we have all seen and experienced what a whole food diet and modest exercise can achieve. I love Angels On Horseback, the first time I ever tried them was not a million miles from your place, a fantastic restaurant in Norwich. I will try almost any food once, but can never bring myself to eat raw oysters. I have never eaten eel, maybe too late anyway as eels are almost extinct in the UK now, according to the fishing papers I read. Just recently the last eel fisherman in the UK called it a day.

"Britain's last eel catcher will bring a 3,000 year old tradition to an end as he says he can’t find a successor or make the job pay"

Link http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/12107502/Eel-fisherman-quits-amid-plunging-eel-numbers.html

Anyway, thanks for all the work you put in here and on our blog. I am sure many of our readers find your posts interesting and informative.

Hi Chris,
You have had a difficult 'journey', how many more are crippled in the process.

I was on Amlodipine for years..a very tricky drug which caused me to have arthritis pain which switched off within 24 hours of stopping it and I had suffered pain for years.
I hope you didn't take it with statins? It is no longer prescribe with Simvastatin .
D.

Nice going mate

love the control you've taken despite the pressure to not

keep up the good work

Derek wrote:Hi Chris,
You have had a difficult 'journey', how many more are crippled in the process.

I was on Amlodipine for years..a very tricky drug which caused me to have arthritis pain which switched off within 24 hours of stopping it and I had suffered pain for years.
I hope you didn't take it with statins? It is no longer prescribe with Simvastatin .
D.

Yep I was on amlodipine when first prescribed simvastatin luckily I was not on the statin for long due to severe side effects, both drugs were on the market for years before the contraindication was discovered.

Originally I was on losartan and simvastatin for years. Then I was taken off the losartan (a cheap generic) and put on olmesartan - the most expensive ARB. Obviously this was some study I was entered into without being told or asked my permission. Then they decided to put me back on the losartan "for reasons of cost", ie. the study had finished.

Then I had a major falling out with the nurse and especially the receptionists, as did many other patients around the same time when the practice was "modernised" and stopped going altogether. Basically the receptionists were tasked with keeping patients away from the doctors at all costs and fobbing us off on nurses, and the nurses were tasked with patronising the patients, refusing tests and refusing to give the results of the tests they DID permit. A very far cry from how things used to be run, when we first moved here you could see a doctor within days and the nurses and even the receptionists were pleasant, friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. Now you are lucky to see a doctor within three weeks, and "mine" is often fully booked for a month, beyond which The Computer will not go.

Now the PCT has gone away and the Practice Manager has been replaced and I no longer hear so many complaints, I suspect they took treating patients with contempt one step too far and they could no longer ban ALL the patients who complained. I was put on amlodipine as it is the cheapest BP med, yes I was prescribed simvastatin but independently decided to stop taking it, along with the aspirin which has given me permanent tinnitus.

My mother was also on this and her BP was jumping up and down seemingly at random until they took her off and returned her to an ARB, generally regarded as the best drugs for diabetics. Mine is still consistently high but what the hell. I never expected to live forever.

Yes it's quite disgusting that all the improvements I have made have been DESPITE and not because of "medical professionals". Yet everything I have done which has worked is endorsed by doctors in other countries, and backed by research on PubMed that our GPs are simply not told about. And I am but one among millions.

Eddie, I'm with you on the raw oysters, and the jellied eels though I am partial to smoked eel, which costs an arm and a leg and comes from Holland now. There's a pub down the road called the Eel's Foot, which derives from the end of the long net they used to catch them. When I was little I used to see hordes of them in the Hampshire Avon and elsewhere. If that last eel catcher was the guy I'm thinking of he was over in the Fens. In recent years I've only seen them occasionally and then usually disappearing into a heron.

Be vewwy vewwy quiet but I have a wallflower in bud in the garden.

Had htn c.30 years and was on 3 meds for it some time ago.

Nothing worked for me arbs made me cough so I was on losartan which does the same job.

I had/have an hormone problem due Conn's syndrome now I just need the aldosterone antagonist eplerenone. My bp is often below 120/65 when I take it in an am now.
Its probably a bit late in the day now but having this adrenal tumour out could result in me coming off bp meds.

We are very fortunate I have a very good doctor and the practice is one of the best in the NW. If needs be we can usually see s nurse or have a GP appointment same day we ring up.

I know a practice where they only have three doctors when they had six and there are no doctors available to be recruited.
I wouldn't have wanted the job they are worked to death.
regards

D

Yes it's amazing how interactive the endocrine system is, when one part falls over it knocks on to many other parts. I knew hypOthyroid often caused high LDL, I hadn't twigged that it also works the other way, hypERthyroid causes low LDL. I knew someone who had I think a pituitary tumour which only fired off occasionally - that made it hard to work out what was occurring, I know her adrenals were affected by this.

I've been plagued by below average doctors with a few good ones in between (same with dentists but with more good ones). The asshat who failed to diagnose my gallstones for over five years, and finally as I didn't know at the time wrote that I was a homosexual and a heroin addict which had me in an isolation ward with suspected hepatitis before they found the stones I'd been telling them I had, was notorious for prescribing antacids to someone having a fatal heart attack. Also subsequently for dying "unexpectedly"! Not a few of the hospital consultants were disgusted with the entire practice and two of them started an alternative GP practice. I was lucky to get in before they closed their lists.

In retrospect it is obvious that long before PCTs and NICE made it mandatory they were triaging patients and deciding who didn't deserve treatment.

Here it went the opposite way, a once excellent practice was destroyed by Management. I wonder if they saved enough money to pay for their own salaries. It's the only place I can go, but at least we have a choice of three hospitals and only one of them is crap.