What have you given up and what have you taken up this year?
Given Up: (bad for the soul)
Taken Up: (good for the heart)
For the second time this millennium, I'm stricken with pneumonia. Fortune smiles upon those living in Southern California (it's the dirt) and those treated with chemotherapy (six months of hair thinning, body bloating, tin food tasting, 12 hour/day puking hell).
Pneumonia smacks you like a clean window and you're the bird. Out of nowhere. Friday healthy. Saturday starts with chest tightening, throat wheezing, brown phlegm coughing (it's the blood). Sunday finds you tired, dizzy, but still not knowing. Hell, it could be a flu or bronchitis.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday blur into three days of fever, chills and remaining horizontal for twenty hours at a time. So this is the life of a dog. Reading is not an option and even watching mind numbing television is a chore for a mind so numb.
Thursday is the doctor. Stethoscope here, chest x-ray there and it's off to the la farmacia for three little charmers: 5 day antibiotic pak (but it's there for 10), 15 days of lung dissolver (2 pills, twice daily), and the 30 days of the inhaler (twice daily). Great, pop the pills, suck the inhaler, and all is well ... not.
Antibiotics - diarrhea inducing, stomach churning, nap insisting, strong enough to kill a horse white devils. Lung dissolver - when your coughs aren't productive enough already, these oblong beauties will force you to stay close to the sink and inspire "wakefulness" -- after three days spent in bed, spend the next two lying awake from dusk to dawn. Take with plenty of water cause our last little helper gives you dry mouth 24x7, forcing you to grab a the glass of water on your night stand every thirty minutes, inevitably. Just before you will your eyes and ears (from the humming humidifier) closed, there's one more reason to stay awake.
Now which, if not all three of our friends cause all food to taste so bland, I don't know. But pneumonia does that too. You're chewing something in your mouth, but if you don't look down at your plate, you won't know what.
Then, there are the hallucinations. Well, I'm not quite there yet, but some colors shift on me now and then and I'm starting to see patterns and shapes in the dark where none exist. But maybe that's more of a benefit than a side effect.
If the pneumonia doesn't kill you, the drugs surely will.
Did I tell you I'm feeling better?? 
Thinking of LASIK Eye Surgery? LASIK is a surgical procedure to reduce a person's relianace on glasses or contact lenses. The procedure permanently changes the shape of the cornea.
The "L" in LASIK stands for Laser so it is important that the clinic performing the surgery rountinely has preventative maintenance performed to monitor the laser's performance. Make sure your LASIK machine is well tuned.
Does LASIK work? According to all my friends, yes. They're amazed just hours after the procedure being able to see clearly again. But you'll have to do your own research.
Are you a LASIK candidate? Good luck.
You don't need a book to start Atkins. Just follow these two articles for the first two (or more) weeks during the induction phase and watch the pounds fall off. I'm now 10 days into it and have lost 12 pounds -- 233 to 221.