From the Editor’s Desk: Mid-2026 Health Check-In ⭐

It’s been awhile since I last wrote about my health, and maybe I coasted for too long because now I have work to do. When it comes to basic health management, I tend to operate on autopilot, but this past year has been problematic. It was time to get a full set of bloodwork and a few overdue vaccinations and check-in with my doctor.

This is always complicated, but every time we come home from several months in Mexico City, we try to catch up on appointments and whatever else. Scheduling everything is difficult in best of times, but this stay has been particularly busy, with a trip to the Finger Lakes over Memorial Day, a trip to Nashville with the kids in mid-June, and then my wife going on a Mediterranean cruise with her college roommate. Where she is as I write this.

I was always going to check-in with my doctor, but thanks to the knee injury I mentioned in From the Editor’s Desk: All’s Well That Ends Well ⭐️ and another issue noted below, I was more interested than usual in making this happen. And I finally did have that appointment this past Tuesday.

The basics are fine: My blood work all came back great for the most part, my blood pressure is good, and so on. But there are a few issues.

🦵 ACL

I tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in my right knee while playing basketball in 1987, when I was 20 years old. It was horrifically painful, and I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time. But when I came back to the Boston area, I had it looked at and then had surgery to repair it in 1988. The recovery time was about a year, but by that point, I was back to normal, dunking basketballs and getting on with life.

Until, that is, I tore the ACL in my other knee about a year later, also while playing basketball, but without the pain. I put the surgery off a bit this time because I was disappointed to have to go through all that again, especially given how much I worked on recovery. But I finally did have that surgery sometime in 1990, after I had gotten married. I didn’t throw myself into the recovery with the same zeal that time, but my knees were fine and I went on to play in various adult basketball leagues all the way through 2017, when I was 50, and we moved to Pennsylvania.

Given how long the knees had held up, I didn’t think much about them. And we walk all the time when we’re in Mexico, it’s a key component of my health regimen, and that was fine until late 2025, when my wife injured her foot, later found to be fractured, and couldn’t walk as much. This was a problem because I rely on the walking to help keep my weight down, and I usually lose 10 or even 15 pounds during our longer stays there. But I did not benefit from that in late 2025.

By the end of last year, Stephanie’s foot healed, but I started noticing something off with my right knee. This was weird at first, and then concerning. And by the time we went back to Mexico in January, it was obvious that something was wrong. I was hoping it wasn’t my ACL, though it did seem internal to the knee so that was the most likely culprit. And though we started walking again, my knee would give out sometimes, so I finally got a brace. But I still ended up walking less and not as quickly as usual. And so by the time we came back in late May, I had once again not lost any weight. I’m pretty sure I actually gained some weight, actually.

Anyway, I went to the doctor, explained the story above, and she performed a quick pull on my knee, instantly bringing back memories of my times with Dr. Steiner, my surgeon for both ACL surgeries, who had started off with the same test. And with the same result: “Oh yeah,” she said immediately. “You tore the ACL.” I’m going back and forth with an Orthopedist, but will meet with them and figure out what’s next. Surgery at some point, I assume, hopefully this year. I will need to get a better brace in the meantime, but I can move around OK.

🪮 Psoriasis

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned the second issue, but I’ve had this weird scalp problem on and off for almost a year and it got dramatically worse while we were in Mexico this past Spring. I have always had oily skin, so when I noticed something that can only be described as dandruff last summer, so this was surprising. But there was a dry, almost scabby area on my hairline on the right side of my head. And if I scratched at it, which I did, it started snowing in front of my eyes. This was unprecedented.

I went to the doctor before we flew to Mexico in September and she prescribed an antifungal medication to take each day for the next month. This worked … until it didn’t. After a month or two of relief, it cropped up again. This time, I texted my doctor through the app, waiting until we were about to come pack to PA in November. She refilled the prescription, so I started taking it again.

I also got my hair cut in December and the woman who cut my hair recommended Tea Tree Special shampoo, which tingles and can help with this kind of issue. And this, too, seemed to help. We returned to Mexico in January, and at some point I just ordered some from Amazon Mexico.

The prescription and/or the shampoo helped for a bit, again. But then it just came back towards the end of the trip. Worse, it spread. I had this dry, flaky skin all over the scalp on the top of my head. So I was eager to get in front of this when we got home.

I had Googled this problem, of course, and one thing I was pretty sure of is that I did not have psoriasis, a skin condition that causes red rashes with scaly patches, most often on the back, knees, elbows, and scalp. But when my doctor looked at my head this time, she was definitive. “You definitely have psoriasis,” she said, pushing some of my hair aside. Terrific.

Psoriasis is not contagious, thankfully, but it can often be embarrassing for those who have it. In my case, I’m on camera every day during the week, so having a rash-like thing on my head isn’t great. But it’s not bad enough that I’m self-conscious about it. What bugs me is the why, and its cause is unclear, at least in my case. It can be caused by stress, infections, or skin injuries, or you might just be genetically predisposed. It can’t be cured per se, but it can be treated and usually quite effectively.

She asked to look at my back, which was clear. Then she started looking at my arms and legs. “Ah ha!” she said, holding me near my elbow. I twisted my arm to see what she was looking at, but all I could see was some dry skin on my elbow, which is common for me: When I work lying down on a bed, as I sometimes do, my elbows get dry and chafe a bit. I put lotion on them sometimes, but I don’t really think about it.

She wasn’t impressed by this excuse and kept looking. She found only one more instance of what she says is psoriasis: A small round red rough area area on my right lower leg that I would have assumed was just a scratch that was healing. I’m still not convinced it’s not that, honestly. But I had never noticed it, and it doesn’t itch or whatever.

In any event, my doctor gave me a dermatologist reference and prescribed a potent steroid-based gel and an oil that I have to put in my hair when I go to bed and then wash out in the morning. I got the gel later that day, but the oil was out of stock until the next day. I can only take the gel for two weeks and then need to hold off for at least a few weeks before using it. But by the next morning, it was almost like I had never had this problem. It’s not completely gone, but it was a quick turnaround after so many frustrating months. Hopefully that continues, but I’ll use both of these remedies for the proper times and see what happens.

🩸 Glucose

A few years ago, I used some continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) over a few months so I could measure how different foods spiked my blood sugar and develop an understanding of what I should and should not eat. I did this as part of a Keto/low-carb diet with the goal of lowering my blood sugar, which had crept up into pre-diabetes territory as I got older.

It worked wonders. In late 2023, my Hemoglobin A1C number fell below 5.7%, which is the top end of normal. (Pre-diabetes is 5.7% to 6.4%, and diabetes is 6.5& and up.) It kept doing down for a while, and I got comfortable with it. But by last year, it had started creeping up a bit again. This is probably mostly on me: When everything is fine, I stop thinking about the issue, and I haven’t been particularly careful with what I consume over the past couple of years. But this was also mostly fine when I was active. With the reduced walking, especially, in late 2025 and then early this year, it became less fine: I’m right on the edge of pre-diabetes again.

Well, I know what I can do to try and fix that, and I’d been meaning to try a CGM again since it’s been a while. A lot has changed since I first did this. Not so long ago, you needed a doctor’s prescription to get a CGM in the U.S., and because the health care is so terrible in this country, many health insurance companies, including mine, would not cover this treatment unless I already had diabetes. So I just found a way to buy the devices online and got busy.

Back then, a single CGM cost $120 in the U.S., though I also bought one in Mexico for $80 (U.S.) at some point. I knew that CGMs had become an over-the-counter thing since then, and so I checked Amazon to see what was available. I wasn’t surprised to have choices, but I was surprised by the prices: I could get a single CGM that lasts two weeks for about $45, or I could get two for $80. So I did the latter.

The package arrived early Thursday morning, so I unpacked it, checked out the documentation, and saw that it worked the same as before. So I punched one into my upper left arm on the rear and will monitor my blood sugar for at least the next month.

This presents a conundrum.

On the one hand, I do not want to see my blood sugar spike dramatically, as it can after eating or drinking the wrong things. But on the other hand, I also want to test different foods again because we all respond differently to things, even when there are some general similarities. Thursday, I played it safe at lunch: I fried two high-fat hamburgers in butter, added two small slices of American cheese, and ate them with mayonnaise. If you’re familiar with this kind of thing, you will not be surprised to discover that it didn’t spike my blood sugar at all. Not immediately. Not an hour or two later. Not ever.

In the Lingo app I’m using with the Abbott CGMs I bought, the main page has a graph that visually displays my glucose levels. The healthy range for this measure, between 70 and 140 mg/dl, is shaded to make it easy to see how you’re doing. And I’ve been in the lower half of that range all day. Checking it now, at 6:00 pm, it reads as 71 mg/dl.

One day will not cure me, and I have food to eat, including some food that will absolutely wreck havoc with my blood sugar. I will have to lay off the cocktails and white wine, and I will have to transition back into a truly low-carb diet. But I usually only eat twice each day, lunch and dinner, and that mini-fast between the night before and lunch helps too. I’ve done this before. I can do it again.

Aging is the best, said no one ever

I’m going to turn 60 years old this October, and I could not be less excited about that. Typically, I feel younger than I am, and I’m sure that kind of self-deception is common. But this past year has been tough physically, and I’m definitely starting to feel it. All I can do is what I know to be the right thing as much as possible. I’m not happy about it, but the issues I know about are manageable and seem solvable. So here goes nothing.