AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Saw the hernia doc again today. He did an exam and said he can feel some soft places in the inguineal areas, but there is no sign of an actual hernia, and I could probably go for the rest of my life - even lifting - without having a problem.

So, other than the occasional painful twinges, nothing to worry about.

Monday I went to the dentist and had a molar ground down and fitted with a temporary crown. I’m supposed to go back for the ceramic crown on the 20th.

At 4:30 in the afternoon - half an hour ago - I was eating a burrito (2-gram keto wrap) and the crown popped off. Of course, I bit a chunk out of it before I could stop. So I called the dentist’s office to see about an appointment for tomorrow.

I got their voicemail; it mentioned they’re open "Monday through Thursday, 8 to 5." Ooo-kaaay. I left a message with my name, phone number, and problem. I expected a call-back for a Monday appointment. But as usual, 5 o’clock went by with bupkis. I should know by now that almost nobody ever responds to voicemail.

I guess I’ll call back Monday.

Can you glue it back together?

It’s missing a small chunk on the top. I don’t know if I bit it off or if he ground through with the burr when he was shaping the top, but it’s missing a piece. I don’t have any practical way to stick the crown back on, and I’d hate to swallow it by accident.

I’m just going to stick to soft foods and try to do my chewing on the other side until I can get back to the dentist. [sigh]

I hate that shit. I’ve had mine pop off 3 times, usually taken care of fairly quick.

Interesting. Dentist who wants to put in a crown has assured me: "Oh, that temporary crown is good for months! Don’t worry about a thing…"

I was warned not to eat toffee or sticky candies. I guess a burrito was close enough.

The glue is white, and there are only a few spots of it inside the crown. Possibly the missing bits are stuck to the remains of the tooth, but I can’t tell by feel.

You back full throttle on the lifting or are there still post-op restrictions?

I’m cleared for lifting now, but it is just above freezing and I would have to schlep through the snow to get to where the equipment is, which has no heat.

I’ve lifted at over 100F for the last couple of summers, but I’m a wimp as far as being cold.

Normally I’d go to the gym and make do with their limited equipment, but my membership expired in December, and I’ll be changing insurance providers in February, and they’ll cover the gym membership. So I’m kind of stranded in limbo at the moment.

Meanwhile, I’m doing some bodyweight squats for range-of-motion and some high-rep work with a light dumbbell Mrs. Andy had around. Interestingly, my shoulders were fine on Nov 21 when the hernia let go. Six weeks later, they were crunchy and painful again. But it gets better every day, even with the wimpy five pound dumbbell. Apparently motion is a much larger part of things than actual weight.

The dentist’s office called back at 08:03 this morning. They wanted to know if I could make it in by 08:40 to have the crown re-attached. (no; not across the metro area in morning traffic)

I told her it had been off for three days now and it didn’t seem to be a problem; did it necessarily need to be re-done? She said no, but if it started to bother me, come to the office and they’d take care of it.

Another side effect from 7 weeks of "couch potato" mode:

Apparently my hamstrings got very tight. Those bodyweight squats were fine the first day; the second, and now third, I have a dull ache on the upper-inner area when getting out of a chair or the bed. Pretty much the same area that hurt for a while after doing an Iron Butt 1000 motorcycle ride.

I’m hazy about the anatomy of that area, so I don’t know if it’s muscles or tendons. I’m sure it’s from stretching while squatting; I’m mostly surprised that I didn’t get it when I started squatting last year. Or maybe I did, but it was drowned out from the knee pain. Which thankfully hasn’t come back.

I had slacked off the ball pumping in the last few months. Last week when the gastroenterologist tried to stuff his hand up my inguineal canal to feel for a hernia, he commented about "the skin is very tight." He was palpating my abdomen with his other hand at the same time, and for some reason I thought he was talking about that. But there’s plenty of skin there after the weight loss, so he was likely talking about my scrotum. It’s easy to get distracted when someone is shoving your scrotum and their hand up to into your abdomen; he was pushing hard enough to move me around on the table.

I checked when I got home and noted I had lost quite a bit of hang. I had sort of assumed the scrotum stretch was permanent, but apparently not. I hadn’t returned to the castrati look I had before, though. At least not yet. I resumed pumping over the weekend. Much less stretch than before, but I’m making more progress in a day than I did in a couple of months the first time around. Recovering the old stretch, I guess. Then I noticed a bump on the right side while lubing up. After palpating it a bit, I determined it was an ingrown hair. I shave, so I’ve had plenty of those, but for the last year I’ve been doing it several times a week, and this is the first ingrown hair I’ve had in that time.

The staph infection I got years ago left a nickle-sized scar on the right side of my scrotum. It was very thin, more like a membrane than a regular scar, and flexible. I could poke a finger into it, well inside my scrotum. Over time it had thickened up quite a bit from the stretching from pumping. Mrs. Andy observed that instead of being a big white spot, it was almost indistinguishable from the rest of the skin. I was pretty happy with that. I could still feel a soft spot, but it all looked pretty normal.

After a few months of not doing anything, apparently it has continued to change. The ingrown hair was close to that area, so I ran a finger around to find it. Hmm. I knew it was just about *there*… there’s a faintly soft spot, probably nobody would notice it except me. Not the "soft spot with definitely defined edges" it was a few months ago.

It got into the fifties today, so I went out to exercise. I only upped the weight and reps a bit, but no problems so far. Every now and then I could feel some tugging from the mesh, though. I imagine after a while I won’t even notice.

This was the first time I did overhead presses since the hernia, which was just short of two months ago. ("Time flies" and all that…) I only did three sets of five, but no shoulder problems. I thought about trying some snatches - that’s what finally tore the hernia - but decided to put that off until the next session.

Freezing rain moving in, and temperatures in the teens over the weekend; cold sucks. Heat sucks too, but cold sucks more.

I snagged a "tib bar" last year, but only got to use it a few times before the hernia. I used it today, with a couple of 10# iron plates. Most of my plates are plastic-coated, probably concrete or zinc inside, and too large to use on the tib bar. Even the small 10# plates hit the floor on the down motion, and even if I had more, they’d stick out further and have even less travel.

For now, I’m resting my heels on blocks to get some floor clearance. I need to eight cut the weight mount bar off and re-weld it at an upward angle, or cast some heavier plates. I have a bunch of range lead out in the shop; I’m sure I can find a cake pan to use as a mold.

For Christmas I bought myself one of those rotary barbell racks. The bars go in vertically, and it spins around like a Lazy Susan. It’s very nifty, except… a standard Olympic barbell is 7 feet long. The rotary drum is maybe 3 inches off the floor, and maybe 9 inches deep. So if you stand the bar on end and lift it up, you need an absolute minimum of 8 feet of headroom to get it in or out of the rack.

The ceiling is only 7’6" high. [sigh] Right now it’s just open rafters and I can get the bar in and out of the rack, but once I get the ceiling installed there won’t be any room. Dammit.

I had an idea and sketched a rotary rack of my own design, that would hold the bars from the top, hanging. Sort of like a rotary coat rack. But it was yet another project in the to-do list, and when I saw I could just buy a hold-it-from-the-bottom rack on sale cheap, I went with that instead.

Horizontal storage doesn’t fit my available space; there’s already "stuff" occupying most of the walls.

How’s your weight loss going now? Has it slowed at all? I remember when you started you felt you couldn’t walk for exercise. I know your knees are problematic but what about now?