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The disappearance of my subcutaneous fat is a little shocking. It's not caused by a disease or some sort of ailment. It happens to most everybody during the aging process. The loss of one's subcutaneous fat is what makes the skin wrinkle. It's the baby fat that doesn't stick around after the urge to procreate goes away.
The fact that humans have subcutaneous fat is used as a reason to say that humans didn't evolve from monkeys. They don't have subcutaneous fat. The other animals that have subcutaneous fat are all sea creature. According to one disgraced biologist, humans are the equivalent of Aquaman. Sounds fine to me.
The loss of subcutaneous fat may be the reason old people are so vulnerable to heat prostration or extremes of cold weather. The subcutaneous fat is insulating for both cold and heat. Once it's gone, steps have to be taken to protect older people from the climactic variances. It's not such a bad way to die though. In both cases you lose consciousness before the final breath.
By this time of the day next Tuesday I'll only be blind in one eye, and not be able to see out of the other. My right eye will have a patch over it until I go back to the VA Hospital on Wednesday. That's when the surgeon will take the patch off my right eye and I'll find out what it's like to see clearly again, at least in one eye. The left eye will have to wait a while.
I don't know how well I'll be able to see again out of my right eye. As long as the artificial lens is clear my sight should at least be correctable. Presently, not so much. They don't make a prescription lens that helps because of the cataract. The procedure is not risk-free. There could be complications that make my eyesight worse. I hope that's not the case.
Getting the cataracts removed is such a big deal in regard to keeping my driver's license. Currently I'm good to my birthday in 2014. The last time I got them renewed was a blessing. I didn't actually pass the test, but the woman administering the eye test let me slide. Her family knows my family. That's the way it can be in a small town.
Writing about wrinkled skin, since I've been using probiotics and drinking milk and water kefir, my skin seems smoother. It could be the probiotics, but it could be getting the bad tooth pulled. I tolerated the pain in that tooth for at least two years. From the way my health has changed, any number of ailments I've experienced in the last couple of years could have been because of it.
The one aspect of life that has changed for the better because of my consuming kefir and taking the probiotics capsules has been my bowel movements. For all kinds of medical reasons, but mostly because of the prescription drugs I'm taking, I've had lots of trouble with constipation. The old adage about an old man getting more satisfaction from taking a good shit than having sex with a beautiful woman has proven true in my case.
Being constipated in my world means literally and figuratively that I'm full of shit. By that, I mean grumpy, ill-natured, and just hard to get along with in general, much less feeling like shit. Since I've started making and consuming my own kefir, however, my constipation has gone away, and I don't have a bit of diarrhea. I've never had a lotta trouble with diarrhea except in Mexico.
A woman on one of the e-mail discussion lists I'm subscribed to currently used a word I wasn't familiar with, but when I Googled it up and read this Wikipedia article it told me more than I ever wanted to know. It's a shitty subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprophagia
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