The Year Meme - 2015

[lareinemisere]

The end of the year is nearly upon us, and I have managed to find a few slivers of time today, in between bits of my 'the flat shall be (mostly) clean and tidy for the new year' frenzy to draft answers for 2015 to the 39 questions in the year meme.

Comments

[lareinemisere]

I'm currently about a stone over my maximum 'healthy' weight, according to last week's print-out from the clinic's height/weight/blood pressure machine. It's not obvious because I'm unusually bottom-heavy even by the standards of the classic British 'pear-shape' and tend to dress carefully for it (medical professionals have been known to express surprise bordering on disbelief at what the figures are telling them). Right now I'm three stone heavier than I was in my twenties, so I don't find it hard to believe that there are some health risks associated. Until I dropped a stone during 2014, I was bordering on what they consider obese.

They don't, as far as I know, take you off *all* chemical birth control if you're 'too heavy', but I'm on the old-school combined pill, the one which was routinely prescribed to teenagers when I was a teenager. IIRC, possible risks include blood clots, heart attacks and strokes, and those risks are higher depending on a variety of factors. I was told during my twenties that ten years on it was (at that time) considered the best practice 'limit', and I dare say no GP would prescribe it to someone of my age and weight these days, despite the lack of any other risk factors. Because I've been on it with no problems for twenty-mumble years and because I don't smoke and have OK blood pressure and no major family history of anything heart-related, the specialist clinic let me keep on with it, but they did ask this year about whether I'd prefer to move to a progesterone-only mini-pill or a longer-term method (I assumed they meant the implant).