tegid’s BodyBlog

Sitting here trying to get food into me at 11.30PM, as I keeled over at 7PM with a tonic clonic seizure. Fell down on my right butt, I guess, judging by the current tenderness.
I was trying to do a CV workout at the time and had been running, out on the street for 20 minutes. The good thing is that I was wearing a heart rate monitor that kept recording throughout. I’ve transferred the details onto the PC and it shows that my heart rate drops very rapidly (30 seconds) into a seizure. I was in hospital for 4 hours.

I had great success with te Spytech/Westside Barbell system initially (Sept/Oct ‘06) but the results began to slow as time went on. I am not saying that the programme itself was responsible for this - I suspect that my continuing medical situation was to blame. There was a sudden, swift downshift in strength, size and weight (back in January) so I switched to the Mentzer approach but this also didn’t work. Both of these approaches involve high intensity exercises.

I decreased the medication that I was taking for epilepsy. I then hit the ‘reset’ button, going back to the beginning. I didn’t completely follow the MuscleNOW sysetem, that I have in the past, as I agree with comments from others suggesting that for the time being I needed to decrease the intensity of workouts. So I went back to doing 2 warm up sets and 2 working sets of every exercise, sticking to higher reps and lower weight, to decrease the intensity.

The diet thing was becoming a nightmare (I was losing weight and eating a very high protein diet). Blood tests showed that there was very high urea, low white cells and low testosterone in my blood. I changed my diet enormously at the same time as the programme changed. I increased complex carbs in my diet, I ate smaller, more frequent meals with less protein. My weight increased by 10lb in a matter of days… it’s now stabilized.

The energy loss that I was experiencing in Jan/Feb really was terrible. I was falling asleep 6 to 8 times during the daytime. One of the things I noticed with training is that with higher reps it felt like travel sickness - like the type of nausea I get if I try to read a book while a passenger in a car. This pointed to the fact that my endurance fitness had suffered tremendously. I really didn’t tolerate lactic acid very well, so I have tried to improve this slightly by including sets of 20 and 10 during the warmups to each exercise.

However, things are improving, energy-wise. I don’t keep falling asleep during the day - so I suspect that the combination of the replacement meds and new routine may be contributing to this.

The epilepsy probably centres on a lesion called a haemangioma, embedded into the left side of my brain. This means that I need to be careful with my blood system and blood pressure. The old ‘valsalva’ effect is something that I’ll avoid - particularly with leg exercises - 45 degree leg presses are definitely out!

Anyhow, I will be tested for body fat, weight, size etc on Saturday - after 4 weeks on the new programme. Once I’ve seen the results to this, I’ll post these on this thread and I will make alterations to the programme, where needed.

I seem to dart between two worlds: (1) The medical world where everything needs to be changed because if it’s not, there will be disaster.. (2) The Fitness world - where astonishing things go right and improve because people are optimistic and encourage others to look on the bright side of things. For 6 months the Fitness World has told me that things will get better. For 6 months the Medical World has told me that things will get worse.

So I have kicked the medical world into proverbial touch. When I did this they admitted that they’d given me the wrong medication for seven years. Do I spend the next chapter of my life blaming them for messing things up? Or do I get on with improving things, and encourage others to do the same - as demonstrated by the many people on this forum that I admire? (At this point, I’d mention BahamaMan, JoelR, BB1968, BOSMIAbulk Jusraisinkids and Gallaman as falling squarely into that category)

These guys have been telling me that to have an optimistic outlook - to believe in hope. So, with that in mind, I’m changing diet and the way I train.. in the hopes that I can look like Capetown (http://forum.bodybuilding.com/photo/showphoto.php?photo=81278&ppuser=138333 ) when I go into hospital for their various scans and stuff (yes - I’ll be going bald for these).

This means that when I get out of the pessimism hospital, I’ll need an optimistic mission to focus on immediately. I work part-time at a local gym. There’s a lady there who adores using the gym. She can’t see but that doesn’t stop her. I think I might revert to my old habits and help her train to be an instructor…

How did you convince the doctors that exercise was good for you? The ones in the UK here want me to sit on my butt/spend my life asleep, not moving in fear that I’ll have a seizure and hit my head on the ground if I ever dare start moving around (let alone start moving 400lb around..)

This week I switch epilepsy meds, as the current ones are wrong (took them 7 years to admit this). The current ones have only given me low white blood cells, zero appetite, low thyroxine and (best of all) low testosterone. So I’m hoping that the new ones will treat me better. Anyhow, get ready for a new set of side-effects (I’ve already bought in emergency supplies of toilet paper!) It means that I may spend my life more awake!

So to celebrate, I’m re-starting my training: 4 days a week with a pretty strict diet that will hopefully reduce the insulin highs/lows I’ve been getting, by using low GI carbs throughout. So far it’s oatmeal, oatmeal, oatmeal. Boring! Anybody know how to make this stuff palatable??