...And now 2009

So what happened this time?

Well, in January I stopped working out with my family and started on my own. Since I had lost so much weight I turned my focus to building muscle mass and strength as way to get rid of the rest of my fat. Also, I hadn't been working out since the beginning of November 2008, and felt I needed to go at my own pace.

Why? I had my gall bladder out November 13th and was in the hospital for 5 days. I had a gall stone stuck in the common bile duct and it was making my liver and pancreas swell up. The surgery put four cuts in my abdominal wall, so I couldn't do anything involving using those muscles for about 8 weeks.

I started a program based on the book The New Rules of Lifting by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove. I put on about 12 pounds of muscle in just a few months, and was very pleased with what I saw in the mirror as my body fat dropped.

At the same time I intensified my Yoga practice, adding a more advanced class; I began a home Yin Yoga practice as well.

But I also began to have sciatica. At first it was mainly muscular, and I was able to get some relief by stretching the piriformis muscle in the Yoga asana known as Pigeon (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana).

And then I wasn't. I began to get a fiery pain down the outside of my left leg, culminating in numbness of the outside of the foot. The pain was incredible, like being hooked up to an electric wire (I imagine, never having been actually hooked up to an electric wire).

As an aside, you know you are in trouble when the doctor looks at the MRI and exclaims "Wow, that thing is huge!" It looked like a thumb sticking out between my vertebrae.

The long and the short of it is that I have a herniated vertebral disk (S1-L5). I will be having a microdiskectomy surgery August 5 to remove the part of the disk that is mashing on the nerve, causing all the pain. So two surgeries in 10 months.