A public service announcement

Last Friday, I had an ominous message on my machine at home: "This is the doctor's office, please call as soon as possible." Well, since I WORK during the day I didn't pick up the message until after they were closed on Friday evening. Of course, I then spent all weekend with that message niggling (yes, that's a word) around in my brain.

When I got in the car to go to work this morning, I called the doctor's office (hands free - I'm not a scofflaw) knowing full well that I would be put on hold. Monday mornings, first thing, they always put you on hold. I understand that it's a particularly bad time to call  and I was  prepared for the wait. In fact, the wait allowed me to ruminate even more on what the urgency could possibly be. I placated myself by reasoning that if it were really serious, my doctor would have called me on the weekend. He's my uncle, after all!

Anyway, they just wanted to give me the results of my blood test. All was well except my Vitamin D levels (click this link to WebMD and a slideshow of the benefits of Vitamin D)  were a little on the low side. This despite the fact that I drink a lot of milk (fortified with Vitamin D), am not a  vegetarian, eat salmon at least once a week, have yogurt for breakfast almost every day, and love eggs.

Now, my doctor, has been harping to Bill about Vitamin D for quite some time.  And Bill thinks that Tom (our doctor) is really clever and relies on his expertise. Bill has been taking 2000 IUs  of Vitamin D3 supplements for quite a while. And now, I, too must start the regimen. I've been taking haphazardly, i.e. whenever Bill reminds me that it's probably a good idea. But, until  I heard it directly from Tom, I wasn't going to make it part of my routine. Tom is the doctor, Bill is not.

Part of the Vitamin D problem, and I hesitate to say 'problem' because you know how much I love Buffalo, but, part of the problem is that we live in Buffalo. I don't even want to look up the percentages, but we spend a lot of days with cloud cover. Today, we saw some blue sky but, as I mentioned above,  I WORK during the day, so I couldn't take advantage of it and get that jolt of Vitamin D.

So Bill and I will be warding off cancer and heart disease and weight gain together by popping mega doses of Vitamin D. And, I'll try to figure out how to spend more time in the sun.