And not just the weather, which was vastly improved yesterday. We went out to a local farm shop in the morning, getting enough nice veggies to last us through the week. I won't mention the sausage rolls for lunch...
In the afternoon we tackled the grass. These days Sue does the front and the nearer part of the back, including the rather tricky stuff around the fish pond, using the little battery electric mower. I do the big back lawn and the side with the big key-start petrol mower, leaving most of the fiddly stuff around the edges for our gardener to do with his strimmer. I can't really do pull-starts since I broke my shoulder back in 2017 (oh for those innocent pre-myeloma days!) hence the need for electric start. This new mower doesn't have either a manual choke or the rubber bulb you have to squeeze a few times before starting and which can easily lead to flooding the engine. With this one you just turn the key, and off you go - as long as you've remembered to put some charge in the lithium battery first. Progress!
Mowing got me up to no fewer than six times my activity target for the day, which I'm sure is a record. I had an hour or so left before tea time, so decided on a little boules practice. And as I took the boules and a couple of circles down to the back lawn, I was hit totally out of nowhere by a small diarrhoea event. That's the second time it's happened in the last few weeks. I'll spare you the details, but I still got twenty minutes or so of practice in.
I took a couple of Loperamide capsules, and have had no recurrence. Also decided to stay off the nightly senna (and the other anti-constipation things) for a couple of days at least. This makes finding the right balance even more difficult than it was before. If I'm going to go one side or the other of ideal, I'd take moderate constipation over unpredictable diarrhoea any day.
I don't know why this change to my habits has arisen. As far as I know I haven't eaten anything suspect. The only thing I have done for the last few weeks has been to drop the usual senna on Saturday nights in order to be OK for boules on Sunday morning, compensating with double senna (at least) on Monday night. Maybe that has disrupted the system enough. Anyway, after my fall last weekend I'm thinking about moving my dex nights from Saturday and Sunday (pills in the respective mornings) to Monday and Tuesday, just in case the dex may have some effect on my balance. Probably not, but why take a chance? With boules on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (when I can), those are the only two days that are clear. and it should help to avoid any possible contribution of dex to the sudden-onset diarrhoea. Needless to say, the list of dex side-effects includes both constipation and diarrhoea...
I've just been looking up some background info on Loperamide. Didn't realise it was the active ingredient in Imodium. Live and learn!
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