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I went to my first “Core Crunch” fitness class today at the gym. For the first 10 minutes or so I felt like I had voluntarily sent myself back to junior high gym class–dear god, what have I DONE–but I adapted.

At least the core crunch class is a) focused on a particular objective that I feel I can get behind, i.e. having a totally fucking hot stomach, rather than senseless games involving teamwork and balls, and b) taught by a member of the university track team off of whose body you could bounce quarters. At one point his shirt rode up and I got a look at HIS abs; I don’t know why he doesn’t just teach the class shirtless. It would be a great motivator.

Anyway, it wasn’t easy, which is good, but it wasn’t so hard that I felt like I was going to die for longer than maybe 10 second periods, which is also good. Parts of it were actually quite easy–mostly the lunges. Instructor Guy kept going, “Feel it! Man, that burns!” Probably he was exaggerating his own experience, since he is on the track team. But I didn’t really feel it much either–so either I’m doing them wrong (something to look into), or it’s just that it’s not nearly as bad as footwork drills for fencing. Some of the crunches and leg lifts, however, were almost killing me. So I know my weak points.

After the gym, I went to see my gynocologist, who basically confirmed that my GP is a paranoid idiot* and said that okay, she wouldn’t look me in the eye and say there was absolutely NO RISK being on Depo with a predisposition to blood clots, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye and say that about ANYTHING, and when she had a patient who had, like, a double embolism-type thingie around her HEART, they put HER on Depo with the blessing of her surgeons or whatever.

Anyway, the point is, it would be way fucking worse to get pregnant, and my gyno sees absolutely no reason I cannot continue on Depo, although she also gave me information about the progesterone IUD. She repeated several times that while the literature is scanty, pretty much everyone thinks that it’s the estrogen in hormonal birth control that is a risk factor for blood clots–something my GP had refused to acknowledge, because he is an idiot and apparently has an irrational desire to take everyone off their hormonal birth control regardless of the facts. But as my gyno noted, I am an adult and you have to weigh your costs and benefits.

My gyno also said that she really couldn’t say if the blood clot might have been precipitated by my weight loss, but that it was a possibility. She did not reject it out of hand like the GP.

I would get a new GP, except that I have not been having great luck picking doctors at random (except for my gyno, who I picked at random several years ago), and it’s so much damn work. The important thing is that now he cannot fuck up my birth control, although I guess I have to keep an eye on him and make sure he isn’t UNCHECKING the “sexually active” box on my chart again.**

You know, the healthcare system is really only comforting if you are willing to assume that all the doctors are smarter than you and always know what is best. If you can’t make these assumptions, it all falls apart. I have to get my blood drawn again on Wednesday, and if I can’t get to my phone when the nurse who is totally younger than me calls back, I will have to play phone tag again while dwelling on yet another totally content-free yet anxiety-inducing message. I’m glad I got vaccinated and all, but sometimes I can sort of see why a person might want to give it all up as a bad job.

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*This is the man who told me I should get off of Depo, and when I said, “But it doesn’t have estrogen in it,” HE said, “Well, they’re ALL HORMONES.” For serious.

**The nurse checked it when she took my history. This guy comes in, looks it over, says, “So you’re in a relationship.” I say, “What? No…” and look over to see him UNCHECKING THE “SEXUALLY ACTIVE” BOX. I told him he could just recheck it, because just because I’m not in a relationship doesn’t mean I’m not sexually active–which, dude, WTF, I should never ever HAVE to tell a doctor that. What the hell are they teaching them in doctor school?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 3:05 pm and is filed under exercise, medical drama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.