DrDeClutterBlog.com

All the hoopla can get to the best of us.

You know when we’re coming back up for air when we can laugh and create humor of a bad situation.

Do everything you can to take care of yourself and your family, wash your hands one more time, and then laugh!

See past articles on Swine Flu here, and here.

Longmont United Hospital, our local hospital, is having its annual “pharmaceutical take-back day” tomorrow from 8-2 pm just inside the main entrance, and it’s free.

Don’t flush your medications as they go into your water systems and we ALL get to share in the cocktail of pharma for years to come. YIKES! Think estrogen . . . seen any man-boobs lately? I rest my case!! Read more below.

Check with your local hospitals and see if they can take your unused and unwanted medications to dispose of properly.

TIPS ABOUT MEDICATION DISPOSAL

1. DO NOT Flush Them Down the Toilet or Pour Down the Sink

Why? Experts say it may have potential harmful effects on the environment and to us. Disposal via the toilet takes your drugs into the local sewage system. Modern water treatment plants are not fully designed to deal with medication disposal. The long-term health risks posed by consumption of even minute quantities of these medications in drinking water and the full extent of environmental damage remains unknown. 

Plus, these drugs can leach into the local water table, eventually coming out somewhere, like a nearby lake or stream, or even worse out onto your own property, where pets, livestock or wildlife could be at risk.

2. Don’t Throw Them Into the Trash

Safety experts say “no.” First, kids and pets can find them. Then, your trash will eventually make it to a local landfill, where your medications could still have the potential to leach out (see water above).

DO THIS: Many municipal or local trash services now have local household waste facilities where you can safely drop off your medications for incineration. Call your local trash service for options in your area.

3. Return Them to Your Pharmacy

Pharmacies are not required to take back your unused medications, but some will.

DO THIS: Check with your local pharmacies and drugstore chains as some do sponsor regular “clean out your medicine cabinet” drives where customers can return old, expired or unused medications, supplements and other over-the-counter products. Call your local drugstore or pharmacy for options in your area.

4. Return Them to Your Doctor

Not all physicians or doctor offices will take them. Some may not be fully prepared to safely handle the process.

DO THIS: Call ahead to see if your doctor can offer safer medication disposal methods. Plus, as in the beginning article above, check with your local hospital to find out if they have a “take back” day.

 5. Sell them.

Nooooooo! I’m just kidding! But, I know that crossed your mind, right?!

There are plenty of people who have 18+ gallon tubs of bottles filled with medications that “were just not the right one” before the doctor changed the script one more time. It’s very frustrating, not to mention costly, however clean out your tubs and dispose of properly. Let - it - go! See #’s 1-4 above.

A big thank you to one of my readers, Amber Johnson for sending me this great report -  “100 Healthy Hacks to Help You Through Cold & Flu Season.” Click and use it now!

Wow! It’s all here! Keep yourself safe and healthy with these great tips.  Thanks nurses!

 Where has your purse been today?

Where does your purse, tote or briefcase sit when not on your shoulder?

At work it’s on the floor; at home, it gets tossed on the kitchen counter; at the gym it’s back onto the floor or into a well-used locker, and at restaurants, it’s on the table or bench, chair seat, floor and sometimes lap. At the park it goes in the grass or on the sidewalk or dirt; at the beach in the sand or on rocks; in bathrooms it sits on the wash basin counter or bathroom floor; in the car it’s on the floor and in the bar they end up anywhere.

And, whether you switch purses often or just have a favorite one, toting a well-used handbag or “tote” can be hazardous to your health!

What is common to all these places where our purses and bags sit or lay in lumps is another whole world . . . of invisible germs. Lots and lots of germs.

TESTING: So, let’s swab your purse it to see what kind of germs are on it, shall we?

Upon swabbing the bottom and handles of your purse - samples placed in sterile vials and sent off to a lab for analysis -and after incubation and intense testing what we find is pretty disgusting!

A real study at Nelson Labs in Salt Lake City states:
 - “We had several of them that came back with fecal contamination.”
 - “I don’t think they ever realize what they are transferring onto the plate. That is basically like wiping feces on your plate and eating it,” said Rollins, microbiologist.
 - In one sampling, four of five handbags tested positive for salmonella, and that’s not the worst of it. Microbiologist Amy Karen says nearly all of the handbags tested were not only high in bacteria, but high in harmful kinds of bacteria. Pseudomonas can cause eye infections, staphylococcus aurous can cause serious skin infections and if ingested it can cause serious food illness and sickness, and salmonella and e-coli found on the handbags could make people very sick.

GET YOUR SHOES OFF THE TABLE!
Experts say you should think of your handbag the same way you would a pair of shoes.
If you think about putting a pair of shoes onto your countertops, that’s the same thing you’re doing when you put your handbag on The countertops - your handbag has gone where individuals before you have sneezed, coughed, spat, urinated, emptied bowels, etc!

The scientific word to cover all this would be, “Ew!”

This goes for men and women with briefcases and gym bags of any kind.

SOLUTION
1. Use hooks to hang up your purse where possible, like on bathroom stall doors, etc. and over back of chairs. Here’s a great gadget to help you keep your purse off the floor while sitting at the table. JoeyJunior table hook to hold your purse off the floor and off the table.
2. Never put your purse/briefcase on the table top where food has been (and not cleaned off), floor or other place where feet and feces will naturally have been.
3. Clean, wipe down, launder and clean out your purse regularly. 

The JoeyJunior table hook shown holding purses above keeps your purse off the floor, off the table and safely in your reach! Order here. Comes in 5 beautiful colors.

I have a cold. I wish we could see germs like they show on commercials so that we could side-step them and save ourselves days of leaking, sneezing, coughing, sweating, foggy brain and other such nastitees (not a word, but I like it.)

I’m in my dry coughing, nose leaking day. Nice to be past the scratchy sore throat day.

I took a very hot bath with 2 cups of apple cider vinegar - the recommended treatment to move toxins out of the lymph system and rebalance its acidity. As I sat in the tub I wondered if in Ireland lymph nodes are called nymph nodes?

Anyway, in order to take a bath, I had to clean the tub.

I’ve been taking showers for a long time and not baths, and there’s that dirty-ness around on the bottom of the tub from my feet. So, I sucked it up, literally, and scrubbed out my tub. Luckily, my clogged sinuses kept me from smelling the cleaning products. All good.

Ahhh, a clean tub. I’ve been wanting to do that for so long. In the past I’ve actually hired a cleaning person to clean my bathroom - just the bathroom - for $25! Just a small nice thing to do for oneself now and then.

So, my cold will move out in the next 2 days - a 5 dayer - that’s my plan anyway.

Oh, by the way, another way to head off a cold - which I’d forgotten to do since I’ve not had one in ages - is at the first sign of a cold, take 1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar in half a cup of water several times a day. Why? The same reason to take a bath in vinegar - the body becomes more alkaline during a cold and the vinegar will help to rebalance the body’s acid level.

 Learn more great ways to use apple cider vinegar to help you get back to health and other uses, natural is good!

My niece and nephew from Nebraska competed this past weekend at the State Games of America in Monument, CO. Thank goodness it was a cool 74 degrees all day. Sun shine and hardly a whisp of a cloud in the sky makes for sunburn central in this altitude.

I carry an umbrella if I have to sit the beating sun more than a minute! But, the kids found a perfect spot in the shade while waiting inbetween events.

Oh, and, yea! I’m very proud of “my” kids! Chase won first in shotput of the girls ages 13-14 GOLD MEDAL! And 16 year old Colton won a SILVER MEDAL in discus. Other races were run but they didn’t get into the top rankings.

How fun to enjoy summer with family and others enjoying healthy, motivated kids doing what they do best.

By the way, I won a few events in shot put and discus in high school too!

Summer is such a great time to get out and play, but also to learn about new activities. Kids can take a long time to find out if they like the variety of sports and activities available to them unless you help them jump in and risk trying something new and challenging.

The above two activities were just a few that kids could try for free at our local Rhythm on the River Festival this year. Rock or wall climbing from Avid4Adventure and kayaking aren’t activities all children will be able to try if parents don’t have the equipment, time or ability and interest to do it with them or for themselves. But here they can try it out and see if their interest flickers enough to seek it out later in life. Check your local events listings throughout the year to find out where you can take your children and share experiences that could truly change their lives.

Some families and neighborhoods buy their own climbing walls! Here’s one for the smallest of children to practice on.

CLOSE TO HOME cartoon by John McPherson.

“Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor,
upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.”
~ Aldous Huxley

When you’re setting weight loss or maintanence goals, you’ll attain them with less effort and longer stick-to-itiveness if you chunk the big picture down to daily, small and doable portions. This brings the ceiling down more often and ‘walking on your “new normal” and accomplished floors’ toward your next level of your big picture goal.

Research shows that setting small, short-term goals — that can be achieved and built upon — is more important than a number on a scale.

You can get on it, you can check it when and if you like, but don’t make yourself crazy looking at numbers on your scale. You’ll keep seeing “what isn’t” and getting discouraged. Do-the-doing of the small, daily tasks and goals that should and will “naturally” get you there from here. Then, dance on the ceiling! Ahhh, Lionel!

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Celebrate life and our/your Independence with life!

Get off your chair and exercise - in the most fun ways this year!

Happy 4th!

If you’re reading this Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 9:30 a.m., I’m in the Longmont United Hospital starting my colonoscopy. I’m sure I could write up something creative about getting organized for one; not getting stressed over it, etc., but, Dave Barry does such a better job – I’ll just let him tell you about it!

Dave Barry’s Colonoscopy Journal

I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenterologist, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy.

A few days later, in his office, Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis .

Then Andy explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner.

I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn’t really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, quote, ‘HE’S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BEHIND!’

I left Andy’s office with some written instructions, and a prescription for a product called ‘MoviPrep,’ which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven.

I will discuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America’s enemies.

I spent the next several days productively sitting around being nervous.

Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation.

In accordance with my instructions, I didn’t eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor.

Then, in the evening , I took the MoviPrep.  You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water.  (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons). Then you have to drink the whole jug.  This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind - like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.

The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, ‘a loose, watery bowel movement may result’.

This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground.

MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative.  I don’t want to be too graphic, here, but:  have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch?  This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle.  There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt.  You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently.  You eliminate everything.  And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.

After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep.

The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic.  I was very nervous.  Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage.  I was thinking, ‘What if I spurt on Andy?’  How do you apologize to a friend for something like that?  Flowers would not be enough.

At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said.  Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts; the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked.

Then a nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand.  Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Eddie was very good, and I was already lying down.  Eddie also told me that some people put vodka in their MoviPrep.

At first I was ticked off that I hadn’t thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode.  You would have no choice but to burn your house.

When everything was ready, Eddie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist  I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere.  I was seriously nervous at this point.

Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand.

There was music playing in the room, and I realized that the song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA.  I remarked to Andy that, of all the songs that could be playing during this particular procedure, ‘Dancing Queen’ had to be the least appropriate.

‘You want me to turn it up?’ said Andy, from somewhere behind me.

‘Ha ha,’ I said.  And then it was time; the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade.  If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like.

I have no idea!  Really!  I slept through it!  One moment, ABBA was yelling, ‘Dancing Queen, feel the beat of the tambourine,’ and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood.

Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt.  I felt excellent.  I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that It was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors.  I have never been prouder of an internal organ.

ABOUT THE WRITER
Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.

On the subject of Colonoscopies…

Colonoscopies are no joke and you’d better be trotting yourself into the doctor’s office for your check up after age 50 too!, but these comments during the exam were quite humorous. A physician claimed that the following are actual comments made by his patients (predominately male) while he was performing their colonoscopies:

1. ‘Take it easy, Doc.  You’re boldly going where no man has gone before!’

2. ‘Find Amelia Earhart yet?’

3. ‘Can you hear me NOW?’

4. ‘Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?’

5. ‘You know, in Arkansas, we’re now legally married.’

6. ‘Any sign of the trapped miners, Chief?’

7. ‘You put your left hand in, you take your left hand out…’

8. ‘Hey!  Now I know how a Muppet feels!’

9. ‘If your hand doesn’t fit, you must quit!’

10. ‘Hey Doc, let me know if you find my dignity.’

11. ‘You used to be an executive at Enron, didn’t you?’

And the best one of all.

12. ‘Could you write a note for my wife saying that my head is not up there?’