Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Presently 58 at almost 10 am but we expect 67 degrees today which is nice on coast

According to the weather report it will be 67 today and 71 tomorrow. It's been a while since it was 71 here by the way. However, it's supposed to rain Saturday, Monday and Tuesday so that likely will bring the temperature down at least during the day. Yesterday it was fairly nice too I think it got up to 63 degrees yesterday.

My wife is starting to come back to more normal because her knee replacement is good enough for her to run on an underwater treadmill at her physical therapist so she was proud of being able to put on her bathing suit today to do this and have one of our housekeepers drive her there today. It's nice also because she is becoming more normal not having to take pain killers all the time to be able to sleep at night. Her operation was the 6th of November so we are about 6 weeks into it now. A Hip replacement is much easier than a knee replacement to recover from. She had her first joint replacement a knee in 2014 but they had her so medicated I couldn't take her seriously back then. Now they have figured things out much better but psychologically when you are on less pain meds it is harder to deal with. So, we both found this one harder than any of the other replacements this time. I just wanted her to finish 4 replacements of knees and hip joints before she turned 70 next summer because the older you get the harder it is to heal up from operations of any kind. 

Another interesting thing: I take 5-HTP which is a nutritional supplement when I feel depressed a few times a year. However, we found out that my daughter also uses it to get to sleep and stay asleep at night. My wife wanted to see if this would help her sleep which has been a problem mostly because of pain since her knee replacement and I had never heard of taking 5-HTP before bed so we both tried this last night. Though I still woke up after going to sleep around 10:30pm  from midnight to around 1 AM when I went to sleep I too slept through to 7 am which is unusual for me and my wife slept through the night too. So, what I think is that this method doesn't really help you to get to sleep but it does help you to stay asleep because it helps create serotonin in the brain which would comfort your brain and your thoughts and your dreams.

I think Jogger's high is also about the body producing Serotonin too for long distance runners so maybe 

5-HTP is similar to jogger's high when you are asleep? (at least for your brain)?

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