A Time & A Place For Everything

Ok, I am actually talking about the need for regularity and an almost regimented lifestyle, for me at least. =(

Anyways, good news at the polyclinic just now. I did not need to see the doctor and was instructed (by the queue number generating machine, no less) to head straight for the dressing room. I wish 'dressing room' here referred to the ones you find at boutiques 'cos I love to shop but no such luck today... 

Within 15 minutes (when usually the wait is usually more than an hour to just see a polyclinic doctor), my number beeped and I was relieved to see the nurse who attended to me before. She's nice and friendly and gentle. =P

"It looks good!" she said, almost sounding like she was complementing on something I was wearing or a dish that's presented well, as she peers into my graft wound, which yes, looked much better than it looked last Friday. There was a little bit of slough left and the redness was gone. I don't even know what a slough is honestly, and asked the nurse to spell it out for me (http://medical.merriam-webster.com/medical/slough). There is still some throbbing pain though, I told the nurse, albeit not as much painful as it was on Saturday evening.

"Have you been avoiding chicken?" she suddenly asked.

The question took me by surprise because Jacqueline was just telling me last week that I should be avoiding chicken but I thought it was some old wives' tale because she added the word 'traditionally', plus the fact that I was served chicken regularly at the hospital after my bypass. 

And I've been eating chicken almost every day.

The friendly nurse chuckled a bit when I told her that, and she added that I wasn't supposed to eat egg yolks too, and anything that's yellow.

Anything that's yellow?

????!!!!

Looking at my blank face, she assured me the last bit was a joke and asked me "My joke funny or not?".

"A bit lah." I said, in all honesty.

And she burst out laughing.

Hmmm...

Anyway, back to the topic of regularity - I have decided it is best to try my darndest to do everything ie. sleep, wake up, eat and work and do them at the same time, every single day, whenever I can.

I am actually sold on the belief that good health has a lot to do with regular sleeping and diet patterns, on the basis that the internal body clock governs the way your vital organs function.

Extracted from http://www.rense.com/general3/heed.htm

SUNDAY (HealthSCOUT) - If you ignore your body's natural clock by working and playing at any time of the day or night, you could set a time bomb for illness, injury and even death, sleep experts say.   "If you don't listen to your body, you will pay the price," says Dr. Harvey Moldofsky, director of the Centre for Sleep and Chronobiology at the University of Toronto.   And the price of ignoring your natural sleep patterns can range from aches and pains to heart disease to chronic fatigue syndrome. A regular bedtime can be as important to your health as stopping smoking or cutting back on saturated fat, says an article in the June 3 issue of New Scientist.   Your biological clock, nestled in the hypothalamus region of your brain, controls what time you eat and rest, the rhythmic surge of hormones, changes in body temperature, immune system activity and a host of other body functions.   Different people have different sleep patterns. Some are morning people while others are nocturnal creatures. Problems arise when you ignore your natural body rhythms to meet the demands of work or family, says the article.   "People who restrict their sleep or are engaged in shift work where sleep becomes fragmented and disturbed are at risk for cardiovascular disease. This has been shown in nurses who have been engaged in shift work over a long period of time. They show an increased risk for heart attacks," Moldofsky says.   Sleep debt can also contribute to depression, and lost sleep creates dangers at work and on the roads, he says.   "Sleep deprivation results in impairment in people's capabilities to operate in their usual, expected way, and they would not necessarily know that they are impaired," Moldofsky says.   "There are a lot of those people in the industrialized Western world who are restricting their sleep time, and consequently are impaired in their thinking and their ability to remain alert, and this could conceivably result in harm to themselves or others," Moldofsky says.

Wow... this for me, will be one hell of a change in lifestyle because I am practically used to working throughout the night, when I need to, and compensate by sleeping an average of 5 hours in the day.

You see, I am doing creative work and try as I might - I don't find the daytime conducive at all for this type of work I am doing. Only when night falls, and with it comes peace and quiet, will I find myself thinking more clearly, and able to focus on the work that needed to be done.

Besides, sometimes I need to meet my clients in town, and so have to do that in the day, and sometimes that can stretch from morning to evening, especially if I needed to run errands and do a little shopping. So, by the time I got back home, it's usually dinner if I did not eat outside, then rest for a while before I settle down to work on the project(s) that needed to be started on.

Oh well.. it's either my health or my professional life now.

Time to hit the papers and surf the Employment Section!

=)