Things That Have Been Happening

[poliphilo]

The day before yesterday we got about an inch of snow. It didn't hang around.

Yesterday we had sleety rain. In the morning I went for my yearly medical check-up. The nurse took my blood pressure and a couple of blood samples and we talked about my general state of health. I get the impression she thinks I'm in reasonably good shape. I've been taking aspirin once a day and she told me the doctor's advice is to drop it; she wasn't sure why. I walked to the medical centre and walked back- which is the most exercise I've had in a couple of months. In the evening I took down the Christmas tree.

The electricity had been flickering all afternoon. At around 10.30 we had a power cut, so I lit a candle and went to bed. The cuts continued through the night- and every time the power went off or came on again it triggered a couple of nearby house alarms. 

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

The pros and cons of taking aspirin are terribly complicated. I've taken it for some years and then there was a scare and I stopped for a bit. But then there was a programme on Radio 4 that looked at the risks in detail and after thinking about it, I started taking it again. But it depends on your other risk factors, like whether you have high blood pressure or not and so on and so forth.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I started taking it on the doctor's recommendation and I'm stopping again for the same reason. I'm aware of aspirin popping in and out of the news. One minute its a miracle cure, the next it carries unacceptable risks. Weren't they touting it the other day as a cure for altzheimer's- or am I thinking of something else?

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

It reduces inflammation, which is important in the development of heart disease, and, it seems, in the development of certain cancers too. However it also disrupts platelet activity and therefore reduces the ability of blood to clot, so use of aspirin may lead to bleeding under the skin, or more importantly, in the brain i.e. it may promote strokes.

Whether you need to take it or not I suppose depends on whether you are more likely to get cancer, heart disease, or a stroke, but I don't know how a GP might judge that for an individual patient.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ah, that explains why the nurse asked me if I had a history of heart disease in the family. I said I hadn't.