Darkoshi

The company I work for offers free health screenings to employees every year or so. In the past, nurses from a local medical center would come onsite to do the screenings, which included blood draws for the lipid, iron, and glucose level tests.

This year, I missed out on the onsite screenings. But I got a voucher for a free screening at Walgreens (a pharmacy chain). So I did that today. Unlike the prior screenings, these tests were done via finger-pricks rather than blood draws, and the results were available right away, rather than a few weeks later.

During the years 2005 thru 2012, my numbers were in the following ranges (mg/dL):
Total Cholesterol: 121 - 133
Triglyceride: 29 - 64
HDL Cholesterol: 47 - 59
LDL: 62 - 72
VLDL: 6 - 13

The HDL + LDL + VLDL numbers equal the Total Cholesterol numbers.

I was first screened in 2002, and I skipped the next 2 years. For whatever reason, my LDL was quite a bit higher in 2002:
Total Cholesterol: 151
Triglyceride: 60
HDL: 49
LDL: 90
VLDL: 12


Today's results showed an even higher LDL value, 96. That caught my attention, as it is near the high range of optimal (<100). Then I noticed that today's results don't include VLDL. Then I noticed that today's numbers don't even add up (how could HDL + LDL > TC ??)... The sheet says:
Total Cholesterol: 121
HDL: 52
TRG: 45
LDL: 96

Hmmm.. 121 - 52 = 69. The nurse must have transposed 69 to 96 when she wrote the LDL number down. In fact, I remember looking at the machine that had analyzed my finger-prick blood sample, and seeing it display "N/A" under LDL. The nurse must have been doing arithmetic in her head.

Anyway, so this year's real LDL + VLDL number is likely 69, so rather than it being much worse than the other years, it is slightly better.

Then again, this page says:

There may be several reasons for an LDL cholesterol result of N/A. The LDL cholesterol is calculated as follows: LDL=(TC-HDL-TRG/5). If the triglyceride result is >400 mg/dL (>4.51 mmol/L), the calculated LDL cholesterol will not be accurate and the LDL result will be reported as N/A. If the TC, HDL or TRG results are outside the measuring range of the instrument, the LDL will also not be calculated and will be reported as N/A.

So maybe today's LDL number isn't reliable at all.

Hmmm... for all the prior years, VLDL = Triglyceride/5.
It appears that the VLDL and LDL numbers are always calculated, rather than measured. Only the Total Cholesterol, HDL, and Triglyceride levels are actually measured.

Today's test didn't measure my iron level. In the previous years, it ranged from 89 to 138, all within normal limits.

My blood pressure tends to be on the low side. Today it was 90/65. The highest one from prior years was 107/73.

I accidentally bumped my foot against the side of a mirror as I was hurrying to the kitchen, and ended up with a small gash in my toe, and blood dripping all over the kitchen floor. It seemed at first that it wasn't going to stop bleeding, even with me pressing against the cut with paper towels. But after about 20 minutes, it had slowed down enough for me to clean it and put a bandage on.

If such a small cut can bleed that much, I wonder how doctors deal with really big cuts... how they get those to stop bleeding. Just bigger bandages, I guess.

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I was thinking today about old bodies versus young ones... about an old person's cells versus a young person's cells. How are they different? They must be different, otherwise the old person wouldn't seem aged. No dry wrinkly flabbly skin, no gray hairs... but how are they different? Cells regenerate in old people too, don't they? Do certain cells just stop working, and don't regenerate new working versions anymore, when one gets old?

Some parts of aging might not be the cells, but the other stuff in one's body... accumulated toxins... plaque in the arteries...

And then I was thinking about how a forty-year old man and a forty-year old woman can have a baby, and the baby's body is brand new, not forty years old. Two old bodies producing a new, young body. How is that possible? What is so special about the egg and sperm cells, that they produce a new young body, as opposed to another old body? And if 2 old bodies can produce a new young body like that, why can't they regenerate their own bodies with young cells, to avoid all the unpleasant side-effects of aging?

And then I was thinking about that sheep they had cloned, and wondering how exactly they had done the cloning, because I don't remember the details.

And I was thinking about how women in the future who hadn't found any compatible male partners to have a family with, might decide to have a child-clone of themselves; no-one else's genes involved. Men would have a harder problem doing the same, as they would need to find some female willing to carry the clone-baby to term, and give birth to it, unless they come up with a way of developing babies in the future without the whole pregnancy part.