My Big Fat Weight Loss Campaign: Part 3—The New Weight-Loss Drug Merry-Go-Round

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

The media is full of stories about the new class of weight-loss drugs, of which the best-known are Ozempic and Wegovy. I’m not going to get into the other drugs currently on the market. That would take up a lot of time and this post isn’t about the industry.

What is the difference between Ozempic and Wegovy? There isn’t any difference. They are both a drug called semaglutide. They are both manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. However, they are approved by the FDA for different conditions. Ozempic is approved for Type 2 diabetes. Wegovy is approved in a higher dosage for overweight. Both drugs are in such high demand that they are difficult to get in the United States.

How does Semaglutide work? From Drugs.com: “Semaglutide works by mimicking the action of GLP-1, a naturally occurring hormone that helps to regulate blood glucose levels. By binding to and activating the GLP-1 receptor, it stimulates insulin secretion and lowers glucagon secretion when blood glucose levels are high. It also causes a slowing down in how fast the stomach empties.” The end result is that it dramatically reduces appetite.

What are the potential side effects? Low blood sugar levels, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and constipation are the most common side effects. There is also an increased risk of pancreatitis. And people with certain medical conditions shouldn’t take it. Do your research before starting one of these drugs.

My Experience of Taking Semaglutide:  The first step was that the nurse practitioner I was working with, Ashzra, prescribed Wegovy. My insurance turned it down because weight loss is not a condition covered by Medicare Part D. Then she sent me a prescription for Ozempic and gave me a Canadian pharmacy to contact. I did so, and without any further ado, I received my first Ozempic pen in the mail. I had to wait for more than a month to receive instruction from a physician on how to use it, so it sat in my refrigerator for all that time—it has to be kept cold.

I finally got a doctor to go over how to use it. So one Tuesday morning three weeks ago, I sat in my home office with the patient instructions Ashzra sent me. The instructions said to prep the pen and make sure no bubbles were in it, etc, which I did. Then the instruction said to turn the pen until the proper dosage appeared in the little window. I thought I’d start with .25mg, as I was worried about side effects.

I dutifully clicked the pen until a number appeared in the window. It was a 1. A second try yielded the same result. I pondered this for a while, and then pulled out the instruction sheet inside the prescription box. It turns out that my pen injects 1mg every time—you cannot select the dosage.

Okay. I swabbed my upper thigh with rubbing alcohol and regarded the needle protruding from the end of the pen. It is a short needle, and very fine. But I still needed to—willingly—shove this needle into my tender skin. I set up the pen and stabbed my thigh. I depressed the plunger, and it clicked back to its starting position. I held the pen against my skin for another six seconds, as instructed, to make sure the entire dosage was injected.

It didn’t hurt much, I will say that. There was a tiny red dot at the injection site, and I covered it with a little bandaid, just like at the doctor’s office.

By dinner time, I was feeling distinctly uninterested in food. The next morning, I fixed my usual breakfast, something I normally enjoy—one piece of avocado toast with fried eggs and hot sauce. I wasn’t just feeling uninterested, but nauseous. I ate about a fourth of it because I wasn’t sure whether this was how I was supposed to be feeling, but could go no further. Another couple of hours found me giving back not just breakfast but everything I had eaten after giving myself the injection. I also felt extremely fatigued.

The nausea and fatigue lessened a bit every day. The nausea went away entirely when I remembered how effective ginger is against nausea and other stomach troubles. Despite a total lack of interest in food, I forced myself to eat because I didn’t want to get malnourished. By the end of the week, I started enjoying eating again. I recognized that constipation was going to be an issue, and took stool softeners and dietary fiber to combat it.

After the second injection, I felt mildly nauseous but did not vomit. I wondered whether “reduced appetite” actually meant “revolted by food.” The fatigue got a little better, but I still felt pretty tired. The third injection left me feeling fairly normal, except for a reduced appetite. I have resumed enjoying food, but I can’t eat a lot of it. I think this is the desired state.

Semaglutide will reduce your appetite, but you still have to eat properly to lose weight. I am sticking to the Weight Watchers diet and gradually increasing my physical activity. I have not lost any weight over the past two weeks, but I am still hopeful. Weight loss is unpredictable and tends to happen when I least expect it.

The weight loss physician who instructed me about using the pen also tried to get a prescription for Weygovy approved, as she said there are some new guidelines.  After the second injection, I tried to find out from my clinic how to get the second semaglutide pen—should I go back to the person who prescribed the Ozempic? Should I coordinate with the weight-loss physician who was trying to get me Weygovy? Or…?

It was a bit of a clown show. Every time I tried to contact someone like Ashzra, someone else would answer my email who had not read the case notes and didn’t know what was going on. Even Ashzra didn’t answer my direct question about whom to coordinate with about getting another prescription. I finally drove to the clinic and asked to speak to a member of my doctor’s staff, explaining that I needed a new prescription and had been unable to get information from anyone I contacted via email. After a wait of perhaps half an hour, a nurse came out to talk to me. She had spent the time reading all the emails and understood the problem. I left the clinic with a prescription, emailed it to the Canadian pharmacy, and received a rapid acknowledgment.

By the way, my insurance for Medicare Part D refused the second prescription because weight loss is not a condition…etc. Being overweight creates other medical conditions that they WILL have to pay for, but if you expect the insurance industry to make sense, don’t. All they are concerned about is making profits. I worked for an insurance lobbyist for a while; I know what I’m talking about.

I hear many worse tales about our current medical system from others. Apparently, we lost a lot of medical personnel during the pandemic, and the strain on our system is showing. I completely understood putting Ashzra in place to shoulder some of the doctor’s load, and she is a very impressive person. But it seems that the load-spreaders are overwhelmed, too. If things get worse, we will lose more medical people who just can’t take the stress.

I can’t report any more reduced poundage, but here’s another token of progress: my belt. I am now on the last notch.

My Big, Fat Weight Loss Campaign: Part 4—Disappointment

Posted on by
2

Disappointment is inherent to the weight-loss process, but that’s not what I’m referring to. I am—so far—disappointed in Ozempic. I have been taking the drug for six weeks, and I have lost possibly two pounds, although some days, it’s nothing at all on the scale.

I already detailed my experience of the first four weeks/injections on this blog. I was unable to get the medication in time to take the fifth injection on my designated day, so the nurse practitioner advised taking a half dose to get started again, to try to avoid the nasty side effects I experienced before. She told me how to get a half-dose or quarter-dose out of my 1mg-only pen.

So I injected .5mg of Ozempic for the past two weeks. It did not curb my appetite as much, but i stuck to the Weight Watchers points program with little trouble. I also continued my exercise program. I felt more or less normal the entire time. But I lost no weight, despite not increasing my caloric intake.

It also turns out I am allergic to Ozempic. It gives me itchy rashes. I am less perturbed by the rashes than I am by the failure to lose more weight. But if it gives me itchy rashes and does not help me to lose weight, it makes it easy to lose the Ozempic. I plan to use the remainder of the pen I currently have. If I see progress (in the form of noticeably less poundage), I will continue. If not, I will gladly stop taking it and the truckloads of antihistimines I take to combat the itching. I can use the $450 a month on something else, I am sure.

By the way, it is really hard to find images for the topic of weight loss that I don’t find offensive. The lady I chose to grace this entry is far too thin, but I liked her expression. Most cartoons, photos, and art I have found depict grossly obese women stuffing their faces with fattening foods. If I did that, I’d have been dead long ago. There are very few positive images of large women out there, and the ones I did find were not appropriate to this particular theme. No surprise, I guess. In honor of honoring our bodies, be they ever so imperfect, here is Hilda, my favorite pin-up girl. Hilda always looks like she is having fun, and nothing stops her from being beautiful AND fat.

Star Trek, The Original Series: How Far We’ve Come Since We Boldly Went

Posted on by
Reply

Note: I am taking a break from “My Big Fat Weight Loss Campaign.” I hope to have positive progress soon, but right now I am stuck in the doldrum of dieting, despite Ozempic. Here’s something else to chew on.

I have been rewatching Star Trek: The Original Series (ST:TOS to fans), which is the first time I have viewed the series since its original airing in the 1960s. I just watched an episode called “Turnabout Intruder,” story by Gene Roddenberry and teleplay by Arthur H. Singer. It’s an episode I have no memory of. Apparently it was pre-empted by a presidential speech at the time it was supposed to air. It aired later, but I must have missed it.

Briefly, the story is that Kirk visits Camus II, responding to a distress call. Among the survivors are one of Kirk’s former girlfriends (right on brand here, but there’s a twist), Dr. Janice Lester, and a physician, Dr. Arthur Coleman. It quickly becomes apparent that Dr. Lester and Kirk did not part on friendly terms. Kirk was going off to be a starship captain. Lester also wanted to be a starship captain–but was not allowed to hold that position because of her gender. She was angry, and took it out on Kirk, who skedaddled off to the stars.

Hold on–it’s the year 225something, and WOMEN ARE NOT ALLOWED TO CAPTAIN STARSHIPS. It kind of made me sad that Roddenberry’s vision didn’t stretch to that.

Continuing with the story, Dr. Lester assaults Kirk and subjects him to an alien technology that switches their personalities or selves into the other’s body. So Kirk is now in Lester’s body and vice versa. Her claims that she is actually Kirk are dismissed as illness, but Spock does a mind-meld with her and knows the truth. Spock attempts to free “Lester,” but is caught.

Kirk (actually Lester) calls for a court-martial of Spock, with himself, Scotty and Bones as the judges. During the procedure, Kirk (in Dr. Lester’s body) is allowed to testify, and this is what Kirk says about Lester: “Most of all, she wanted to murder James Kirk, the man who once loved her. But her intense hatred of her own womanhood made life with her impossible.”

Really? Was it “her intense hatred of her own womanhood”? Or was she an ambitious person who was deeply thwarted, all because she lacked a penis?

During this show trial, Lester (in the person of Kirk) does some table pounding and red-faced shouting. Scotty and Bones meet outside the courtroom to confer. Scotty says. “I’ve seen the captain feverish, sick, drunk, delirious, terrified, overjoyed, boiling mad, but up to now, I have never seen him red-faced with hysteria.”

“Hysteria,” of course, is a dog-whistle for “like a woman.” I assume most people know that the word derives from a Latin word meaning “womb,” as the womb was believed to be the cause of it. Thus, men were considered incapable of hysteria.

At the end, Kirk and Lester are switched back by some unclear methodology. Janice Lester, back in her own body, collapses weeping in Kirk’s arms, and then in the arms of Dr. Armstrong, who has aided and abetted her all along. Armstrong takes charge of the sobbing woman and leads her away “to take care of her.”

Kirk puts the cap on it by noting, “Her life could have been as rich as any woman’s…if only…if only…”

I noticed he did not claim that her life could have been as rich as any man’s. And a woman’s life, it went without saying, is limited, and women should just accept these limitations and be happy with them.

Although I expected some misogyny/discrimination against women from TOS, this episode shocked me. As a woman born in 1950, it made me realize how far I have come in my own thinking that I could be shocked by this. There are now two generations of women who have grown up believing they are equal to men and deserve the same rights. I find this extremely encouraging.

My Big Fat Weight Loss Campaign: Part 2—The Plan

Posted on by
Reply
Art by Nerita De Jong.

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I needed outside help to successfully lose weight this time. I couldn’t put on my Nikes and run a few miles. I wasn’t even supposed to walk for exercise anymore, due to one knee being bone-on-bone and the other knee threatening to go the same way.

And yet, I have never lost weight through diet alone. Exercise is half of the equation. (God, I hate exercising.) I had no idea how to exercise without making the knee worse—or what kinds of exercises I needed to be doing to prepare for surgery. Obviously, I needed to get expert help.

Okay, another thing I have avoided in the past is paying for something I think I ought to be able to do myself for free. I avoided any sport that required an investment in memberships or expensive equipment, such as golf or skiing. I hated the idea of health club membership because I thought I ought to be able to exercise on my own by walking. But health clubs are where they have exercise equipment, so I needed to join one. I signed up with the health club down the street, which I had used (infrequently) in the past. Endearingly, it is a part of the local “Toadal Fitness” group of health clubs.

Physical therapy was also on my list, but PT only goes so far. I wanted to hire a personal trainer, someone who understood which areas I needed to focus on, and who could tell me how to use the equipment and create a workout routine for me. I mentioned this to my physical therapist, who recommended two trainers who work at my health club. The trainers had undergone training at my PT’s practice on how to work with people with injuries and constraints. So I trotted down to the club and was introduced to Zach. Zach showed me around and listened to me, asked a lot of questions, and we talked.

I don’t know what your idea of a personal trainer is, but Zach wasn’t mine. I guess I thought a trainer would be a lot younger than me, nauseatingly fit, and perky. Zach is starting to push past middle age. He’s fit enough, but not the muscle-bound person I was expecting, and he has his own issues relating to age and injury, so I feel comfortable talking to him about my multiple physical shortcomings. He’s got a sense of humor, which I enjoy. He also pushes me—not hard, but enough that I make progress every time we have a session.

What are we working on? For cardio, I do the recumbent bike. When I started, I could only do a quarter of a mile before my knees became too sore to continue. I decided I would just do what I could do when I could do it. I told myself all I had to do every day was go to the club and bicycle for a quarter of a mile. That seemed easy enough, and it got me to the club. Before long, I was doing a half a mile, then three-quarters, and so on. I am at two and a half miles now.

The program I am using on the recumbent bike is a racecourse, which I carefully selected because its steepest incline is only 3%, and the incline doesn’t last long, either. Right now, I am going for mileage, not endurance. I hate hills, don’t you?

Zach works with me on the machines and weights. We started with machines that work the thighs and hips and the muscles above and below the knees. I am one of God’s Clumsy Children, and some of those machines—especially the clamshells, the ones you exercise your thighs on—are lurking deathtraps, just waiting to break bones. Zach watches me anxiously as I slowly negotiate these complex contraptions—getting in and out is the hardest part. So far, I haven’t broken me or one of the machines. I am actually getting more graceful as I get used to them. Any day now, I might try using them without Zach to watch over me like a mother hen.

I meet Zach once a week at my health club. I haven’t said much about the club, but it’s friendly, and a large percentage of the clientele has gray or white hair. It feels neighborhood. It isn’t fancy, but it has all the stuff, including a saltwater pool.

Now, what about diet? I lost a fair amount of weight in the past using Weight Watchers. I found it an easy program to follow, but I did not enjoy the meetings. I was eating unprocessed, fresh foods. The people in my meeting seemed to find the time involved in preparing fresh food unacceptable. To be fair, many of them had kids at home to feed and deal with, and I certainly could empathize with that, but the discussions weren’t centered around any of my concerns.

These days, you can purchase the WW app for your phone and not go to any of the meetings if you prefer (I do). The app allows you to look up the point value for a huge range of foods and adjust quantities. It tracks your points daily and weekly and keeps a food diary. You can create your own recipes for quickly entering meals you eat frequently. You can track your weight and the app adjusts your available points as you lose. It has lots of other features that track water consumption and exercise, and you can also look up WW recipes, but I don’t use all of its capabilities.

I was working with my doctor’s nurse practitioner, Ashzra, on all this. Ashzra questioned the Weight Watchers approach. She said I should be consuming no more than 1500 calories a day. Did WW conform to that? So for a week I tracked WW points versus calories. I was honest about it—WW counts certain things as zero points, such as fruit and fish, that still have calories. I tracked ALL the calories I consumed during that week. It turned out that using all the WW points for a given day came in at or under 1500 calories. One day, it was 1700, but I had come under the 1500 mark enough times that I was unconcerned.

So, physical therapy—check. Health club, personal trainer, and exercise program—check. Diet—check. The one element remaining was medication. The news is brimming with stories about the new weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. The news is also full of how expensive these drugs are and how hard they are to get. 

Next installment: Part 3—The New Weight-Loss Medication Merry-Go-Round

My Big Fat Weight Loss Campaign: Part 1—How It Began

Posted on by
1
Image by Lazardo Art.

I gave up on losing weight a long time ago. I have all my life found the subject of my weight a huge embarrassment. I was not fat as a child, but I was plump, and bullies discovered early on that they could make me miserable by singing “Fatty Fatty Two-By-Four” on every occasion. My father harped on my weight all the time. He was thin as a blade without making any effort, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t—clearly, it was some sort of character flaw in me. Extra weight always seemed to me like an embarrassing sin—but a sin that EVERYONE could SEE. It felt shameful.

In the past, I had lost significant amounts of weight. My methodology was to starve and run a few miles a day. I really had to dedicate a huge amount of awareness, energy, time, and brain power to make this happen. After a while, I just didn’t have the energy to put into this one more time—I kind of quit the whole idea that I would ever be a normal weight. It was too easy to gain, and way too hard to lose. I just wanted to enjoy life. Also, I had reached a point where running was uncomfortable—pregnancy and nursing had inflated my boobs to proportions that did not appreciate being violently bounced around.


I wasn’t always overweight. I was slender in my late teens and 20s. I started gaining weight after the birth of my first child in my 30s, and gradually kept on gaining. At my heaviest, I was over 300 pounds. Mind you, I am 5’10 inches tall, not a shortie, but still way, way too much weight.

It annoyed me seriously that my diet was pretty healthy while I gained all this weight. After about age 35, I ate very little sugar, never had sugary drinks or many sweets. I didn’t eat fast food or junk food. I avoided processed food and focused on whole foods, mostly prepared at home. I noticed that other people ate more than me—I often couldn’t finish portions that others did. I rarely took seconds. I didn’t eat between meals. I ate lots of vegetables, lean meats, and recently, began baking my own einkorn bread (I am allergic to modern wheat), which is lower in refined carbs and higher in protein and dietary fiber than modern wheat. You wouldn’t think I would gain a lot of weight this way—but I did. The difficulty of losing weight, despite a healthy diet, merely made me want to ignore the whole problem even more vigorously. What’s the point, if nothing works?

I began having knee problems. My form of exercise was walking. I went from four miles to two miles to one mile. During the pandemic, it was mostly no miles, as I disliked leaving the house for a while. In the meantime, severe arthritis ate away at my knee, and unbeknownst to myself, my shoulder. 

My body finally gave me an ultimatum. My right knee became increasingly painful. Then at Christmas last year (2023), I was strolling to the front door with a glass of wine in my hand, intending to lock the door, as it had gotten dark. As I approached the door, a jolt of agony surged up my leg from my right knee and I collapsed. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to hurl my wine glass away from me as I fell, so I didn’t wind up being cut to shreds by glass shards. I landed hard, throwing my back into spasm.

My beautiful family rallied around. My son-in-law Mike cleaned up the glass and spilled wine. My husband Tom got me a muscle relaxer and pillows. My dear friend Meg and Tom sat with me for a half an hour until the medication kicked in and I was able to get off the floor. This was definitely a warning, and I fell again the next day—luckily for me on a carpeted floor, and I didn’t hurt myself this time. I began walking with a cane or hiking sticks, even around the house.

As it happened, I already had an appointment with an orthopedist for January 2. He looked at my X-rays and told me my knee was bone-on-bone. I needed knee replacement surgery. But I couldn’t have the surgery until I lost 50 pounds (at this point I was under 300 pounds, but 50 pounds is a lot to lose no matter how much you weigh). He also gave me a cortisone shot in the knee, which had amazing effects, enabling me to walk without a cane for the most part.

Later, after my shoulder also became agonizingly painful, I was informed I needed a complete reverse shoulder replacement. And I had to lose weight for that surgery as well.

So now I had no choice. I could no longer ignore the elephant in the room. I had to lose the weight. I also had to lose the shame I felt around the whole subject of weight—the shame that made me just ignore it. (I recognize the irrationality of my last statement. But this is how it was.) I was going to be dealing with a lot of people for quite some time about my accumulation of avoirdupois, and continuing to be embarrassed and ashamed just seemed stupid. I let shame get me to this space; I didn’t want shame to keep me here. 

At the same time, I had no idea how I could alter my already-healthy diet to trigger weight loss, and with a bum knee, how would I exercise? I knew if I didn’t exercise, I would never lose the weight by diet alone. Also, I needed to build up muscle to prepare for the surgery. How could I exercise? And what exercises should I be doing?

I didn’t have the faintest idea. I needed outside help. Next installment: getting help.

A word about body positivity: I am all for it. I did my best to feel positively about my body—beauty comes in all shapes, etc. Sadly, my body did not react positively to being so heavy. When you come right down to it, how you feel is more important than how you look.

Note: Since keeping track of weight loss is how success is measured in this arena, here’s the latest progress. You have no idea how excruciating it is for me to make this public:

2020: 315 lbs

2023: 285 lbs

As of 4/5/2024: 270 lbs

Note: I have no intention of posting “Before” or “After” photos here. Use your imagination.

Costa Rica: Days 20 & 21: Our Trip Comes to a Close

Posted on by
Reply
View of the jungle from the spice plantation viewing tower.

This morning when we made our way to the restaurant for breakfast, spider monkeys were everywhere–leaping overhead from bough to bough and chattering. At the restaurant, several of them were intent on snatching some food, but they were shooed away by staff.

Spider monkey looking for mischief.

We visited a spice plantation on day 20. It was about a half-hour drive from the hotel. They grow a number of different spices: vanilla, allspice, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, hibiscus, and more, as well as chocolate and coffee. The chocolate, we were informed, is pollinated by mosquitoes, so there is a reason for them after all. The spice plants were spread along winding, gravel paths among tropical flowers–very picturesque.

Hibiscus drying.
Torch ginger.

Then they took us to a building rather like a fire tower, reached by stairs. The view over the plantation was gorgeous from up there. We sat and tasted chocolate and three different flavors (vanilla, chocolate, and goldenberry, a local delicacy) of ice cream, complemented by “crumbly accoutrements,” as the menu said. Very satisfactory.

The tasting of local ice cream and crumbly accoutrements.

On our last day, we hired a guide to take us on a short hike through Manuel Antonio National Park, which is an enormous biological reserve. Needless, to say, we only saw a very small part of it. It turned out that the entrance was right across the street from the hotel–the same entrance we used to visit the butterfly sanctuary.

Our guide, David, was a young man whose primary training was in ziplines and such, but he wants additional certification to become a wildlife guide. He likes being in the forest best as he says it makes him feel peaceful. He also mentioned that he has had dengue fever three times, which is one of the things I was worried about until I saw our accommodations and realized that a kissing bug (the vector for dengue) would die from the air conditioning before it reached us. He confirmed that it was very painful (dengue is also called bone-break fever). He spoke good English, which–like most of our guides–he taught himself.

Ginger. Of course.

We saw a sloth high up in a tree, hanging upside-down in archetypal sloth fashion. We also saw a number of iguanas and basilisk lizards, and some spider monkeys. We also saw a column of army ants, no more than an inch wide, but stretching ahead and behind for unknown lengths as they disappeared into the leaf litter. They have no permanent nest, carrying their pupae on their backs as they travel, stopping only at night. We only saw them because they crossed the trail we were on. I was also delighted to spot a gorgeous morpho butterfly, flashing its bright blue, iridescent wings as it wafted through the trees. I had seen them in the sanctuaries, but this one was in the wild.

I apologize for not having more photos of the end of our trip. Technical problems, but I wanted to get this down and finished.

We decided to take a small commuter plane from Manuel Antonio to San Jose airport, where we would catch a flight to Panama City and from there to San Francisco, CA. The drive from Manuel Antonio to San Jose was five hours; the flight was 30 minutes. This was compl=elling enough to overcome my objection to small planes. We arrived at the Manuel Antonio airport, which now holds our record for being the smallest airport we have ever been in. It was basically a large room. The security consisted of a uniformed guy who looked at everyone as they came through the gate. They weighed us and our bags, then we were allowed to board a 12-passenger Cessna. It was a quick trip on a fine day, with very little turbulence.

Costa Rica spread out below us, mountainous and green. We saw a lot on this trip, but I couldn’t help thinking how much more the country has to offer. No army, investing in education and the environment instead. Costa Rica runs on 100% renewable energies–hydroelectric, wind, and thermal. Despite all the sunshine they get, there are few solar panels visible at houses because electricity is subsidized by the government and solar panels are 100% imported and thus expensive. They like Americans. They believe in their “Pura Vida,” and they act accordingly. It appears to be a government that acts on behalf of the people, and not corporations and oligarchs. I know they have their issues, but I really liked the country and the people. I was both sad to leave and yet eager to get home, which I suppose is the hallmark of a great trip.

Costa Rica: Day 18 & 19: doing nothing and another mangrove swamp

Posted on by
Reply

Day 18 didn’t work out as planned, so we hung around the hotel, which was interesting in itself. When I woke up, I joined Tom on our balcony, overlooking a broad swath of jungle spilling down a steep slope to the ocean. Tom reported he had just seen a flock of scarlet macaws. As I sat and gazed, I saw a toucan flying below—its enormous yellow beak was unmistakable. That was my first toucan sighting, and as we leave day after tomorrow, it may be my last.

We spent some time in the adult pool and bar. I don’t know what the attraction is of swimming up to a bar for a drink but it’s undeniable.

On Day 19, we had a mangrove swamp tour scheduled for the afternoon. We discovered that the tour included a dinner, which was not what we had in mind. But we went with the flow.

Our guide was named Tomàs. I think he had doubts about us at first—I don’t know why, but he just seemed a bit standoffish at first. After a bit, when we listened attentively to his history talk as we drove, he began to warm up. His family was from Jamaica, and he grew up on a farm on the Caribbean side. He speaks English, Spanish, and French (yes, we chatted briefly in French), and he wants to learn Hebrew because he thinks it is the most beautiful language he has ever heard and he loves Israeli people. If he does learn Hebrew (and why not? He taught himself French), he will have a lock on the Israeli tourist market here. (My thought, not his.)

Tomás explains mangroves to us.

There were no other tourists booked for this tour. We started out in a bayou full of small, Fiberglas boats similar to the one we were on. This is the first time I have seen serious poverty here—the shacks lining the waterway reminded me of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, only utterly without charm. I imagine that the swamp is not a popular location for housing, especially during the rainy season.

In the beginning of the tour, there were many mangroves. Many, many mangroves, if nothing else. Poor Tomás talked manfully about the differences between the mangrove species for a while, as there was nothing else to be seen. He pointed out that crocodiles didn’t live in this mangrove swamp because there were no sandbanks for them to haul out on—just tangled mangrove roots, impenetrable to crocs, providing no places to nest or lay their eggs. The channels seemed deeper than the ones in Tamarindo, and Tomás said there were lots of fish, some of them quite large.

Tomá is holding a tiger-faced crab. They live on the mangrove roots. The crab was carefully placed in the water near a root, which it swam to rapidly.

We finally did begin to see birds—blue herons, which are a bright blue and smaller than great blue herons, white ibis, yellow-crested herons, great blue herons. As we approached the mouth of the estuary, we saw pelicans roosting in the trees. We approached quite closely as the pelicans stared down at us. They were clearly judging us, and not for the better. One of them made a disapproving gurgling sound as we passed by.

Judgy pelicans.

There are sandbanks and crocodiles here, but we didn’t see any (crocs, that is. There were plenty of sandbanks). We did see a chachalaca, but it was too far away to photograph. We also saw a HUGE iguana, lying on a branch and basking in the sun.

This guy (or gal) was probably four feet long, nose to tail tip.

The exciting finds were a silky anteater, a ball of golden-brown fur in a mangrove tree, and a capuchin monkey, who went about his business quite close to us without seeming to care at all that we were there.

Capuchin monkey. we were fortunate in that we saw all three species in Costa Rica–howler, capuchin, and spider.

We were constantly astonished by the sharp eyes of the boat captain and Tomás, who could pick out a bird sitting like a statue within the tangled mangrove roots. There were times we didn’t see anything until it moved.

We headed back as the sun was setting and drive into Guero, a small town on a deep shipping harbor here. Tomás took us to a restaurant for some casado. I am a fan, but I wasn’t hungry. Tom did it justice, though. It was delicious, but my late lunch stuck with me. We had a gorgeous view of the sunset over the harbor.

Costa Rica, Days 16 & 17: the lost hours

Posted on by
Reply

I am going to draw a curtain of discretion over day 16. We spent the day pleasantly enough at our gorgeous hotel. It ended with a midnight doctor’s visit, a 6-inch hypodermic to my butt, a bag full of helpful anti-diarrheal drugs, and getting to bed at 3 am. However, I checked the side effects of the medication I was prescribed in Tamarindo, and the leading one (which Dr. Piloto never mentioned) was “severe, ongoing diarrhea.” The food and water here are safe!!! Pura Vida! (Pure Life. You hear it everywhere here, as a greeting, an exclamation, an affirmation of love of country. It is also imprinted on almost every bit of tourist tat available.)

Day 17 was an improvement, but I did not leave the premises. This is an amazingly beautiful hotel, but it is not for the disabled. The way from the reception area to our room involves many steep stairs made of cement coated with volcanic rock that will skin you alive if you fall. Interspersed among the staircases are ramps and bridges, some steep enough. I am using my hiking sticks, both for stability and to spare my bone-on-bone knee, and it is quite an athletic outing for me every time we go to the pool or restaurant. I have sussed the best way to the restaurant, the one that involves fewer staircases but more ramps. There are no other ways to get around. No shortcuts. No elevators.

Once you have conquered the stairs and ramps, our room is reached by a bridge overhung with some gorgeous, weird, carnivorous-looking flowers. In the evening, they open, and you can see tiny bees and wasps having a field day in them.

We have decided we like one of the two restaurants here best, TicoRico. It isn’t their fanciest restaurant, but the food is creative and yummy. However, it is apparently cursed.

We were highly amused by this, but then we are easily amused.

You’d expect wonderful fruit in a tropical country, but it is exceptionally good here. They grow seeded watermelon, which is so much more flavorful than the seedless junk from the supermarket. (I wish I knew how to get it at home. We have the wrong climate to grow it). The pineapple is exquisite, and even the papaya is OK, which is a huge concession from me.

We saw a scarlet macaw in the morning. It is a very large bird, and in flight, trails its tail behind it like a bird of paradise. At lunch, we were visited by Pancho, an iguana that comes into the restaurant to pick up dropped goodies.

Pancho the restaurant cleaner. My foot for scale.

We spent the day quietly, reading and writing. Tom went for a long walk in the afternoon and I went to the pool. Yesterday, the pool bar was full of young, local people, a group of friends. They were drunk and very happy. I had a long conversation in broken English and Spanish with a young lady named Fiorella—she is 21 and she wants to go to New York and Los Angeles and speak many languages and wear beautiful dresses and be glamorous. I wished her luck, sincerely. I hope she lives her dreams.

There are two pools here. One is for families, and is smaller. It has a nice water slide for the kiddos. It also has a pool bar for the adults. The larger pool, with a waterfall, hot tub and another pool bar, is adults-only. How smart is that?!

Today, the pool bar was full of elderly Americans, just like us. (The younger set was at the other pool with their happy, shrieking children.) Some of them had very interesting stories and had lived all over the world. It got dark as gorgeous clouds pulled in, looking as though they had been painted by Tiepolo with sunset gold and pink. We finished our drinks at the pool bar and went to dinner. The day came to an end without any doctors or unnecessary unpleasantness.

Costa Rica, Day 15: you haven’t lived until you are standing in a very public restroom in a foreign country, unclothed from the waist down, washing out your beshitted shorts

Posted on by
2
Sunset view from our room at Si, Como No hotel.

And I got to do it twice! We departed Tamarindo with a van and driver, named Johnny. The drive takes about five hours from Tamarindo to the Manuel Antonio area. About an hour later, I realized that my treacherous gut was betraying me again. Johnny stopped at a McDonald’s which had the advantage of being super clean and a bit private.

But it was too late. I tossed the underwear as irredeemable. There was a sink in the bathroom cubicle, so I texted Tom to bring me clean undies and shorts. I washed out my shorts. Then, with nothing covering me but a longish shirt, I went to the bathroom entrance and got the clean clothes from Tom. I laid out the wet shorts to dry in the back of the van and dug out the Imodium, hoping it would work fast.

We stopped to pick up Johnny’s wife, Juanita, at a large bus depot. I urgently sped into the huge, brightly lit, tiled women’s bathroom—and slipped on the slick tiles and fell. I need not tell you what a hard fall produced in my nether regions. I should have brought my walking sticks, but—you know—I was in a hurry.

A number of small, concerned Tico (Costa Rican) ladies helped haul me to my feet, and I limped off, muttering “Muchos gracias, muchos, muchos gracias.” Another pair of undies gone. I’m down three now, and I only brought enough for one week, thinking to launder as we went.

This time, there was no private sink. I ventured into the glaring light of the public bathroom with nothing on below the waist, and washed my shorts. I texted Tom, who appeared at the entrance—at this point, I was visible to the public at large—with my wet shorts from my earlier adventure and no underwear. I was just grateful to cover my ass and didn’t care if the shorts were wet. I congratulated myself on wearing a long shirt that covered most of my problems.

And to top it off, I threw a rib out. I hope you will forgive me if I don’t have much to say about this day. It was not a good day. I am confronting my physical limitations, and not very happy about them. I took more Imodium, which seemed to solve the immediate problem. (BTW, Tom has not suffered any gastric problems at all. I believe the food and water here are safe—I just have a gut that resists any change to its biome.)

I did manage to wish Juanita a happy birthday in Spanish (Johnny told us it was her birthday), and I am proud of my presence of mind, which was more than a little discombobulated by this time. Johnny and Juanita were very cute together in the front of the van, holding hands and giggling. They seemed very fond of each other.

And we made it to this beautiful hotel, Si, Como No. It meets all of Tom’s expectations—tiers of rooms spilling down a jungle-clad hillside with exotic flowers, scarlet macaws, and phlegmatic lizards. Our room overlooks the ocean and is absolutely gorgeous. Tom kindly brought me a double scotch, which was so extremely helpful.

We had a very nice dinner in the hotel restaurant. I had fish tacos, which came on homemade corn tortillas. I have noticed that they do not add much, if any, salt to food here—I sort of expect hot countries to add salt, but not here. With a little salt and sauce picante, the tacos were a delight.

Costa Rica Day 14: a visit to Flamingo Beach which has no flamingos and and never has had any flamingos

Posted on by
Reply
My beloved at CocoLoco.

On the advice of the hotel mom, Marie, we decided to go to Flamingo Beach. She said it was a beautiful white sand beach, but the wave break is pretty strong, and I should be careful. She also recommended a restaurant on the beach called CocoLoco. So we hired a car and driver, whose name was Orlando, and set off, bathing suits under our shorts and shirts.

Flamingo Beach

We already knew about Flamingo Beach because our driver Roger said it was very nice and he lived there. He also said there used to be roseate ibis there, which would be exciting to see. People mistook the ibis for flamingoes—hence the name. I doubt there are many ibis left there, as it has been developed. It looks nice to us, but I am sure it ruined the ibis neighborhood.

We rented a tent for shade and some chaise lounges. There was very little shade on the beach, and I am a very white person who burns badly. (Of course, I was wearing sunscreen, but sunscreen only goes so far.)

I waded into the water. Marie was right about the break, but getting out was no problem. The waves were powerful, but small, breaking almost on the beach. Past the surf line, it was still quite shallow very far out. I was cautious about my feet, thinking there might be stingrays. But I didn’t see a single, solitary fish of any sort as I bobbed around in the warm water.

Getting back to the beach through those waves was another matter entirely. The waves broke hard, and then pulled strongly back out. Having grown up swimming in the ocean, I allowed them to knock me down, relaxing into the force and not resisting, trying not to put strain or torque on my knee or shoulder, but making steadily towards the shore when possible. I was absolutely astonished when one of those little waves knocked me down and boiled me! Having learned to survive boiling in the much larger waves of Southern California, I wasn’t hurt. Eventually I found my feet and crawled onto the beach, dripping with compacted sand that filled my bathing suit.

Then Tom went in (we took turns because leaving our stuff unattended would be stupid, right?). Tom saw myriads of baby manta rays (they do not sting), swimming everywhere and surfing in the waves! I could see them in the breaking waves. Evidently, they do it for fun, because they swim back out and go again. He also saw a four foot fish with a dorsal fin that might have been a shark. But the shark, if that’s what it was, was uninterested in him.

CocoLoco

When Tom returned, we packed up and walked the short distance to CocoLoco. We sat at a table on the beach and ordered margaritas. Tom had yellowfin tuna tacos. I had taquitos with chicken, and we shared a watermelon-feta-cashew salad. We ordered more margaritas, and then Orlando showed up, right on time. When we returned to the hotel, I showered in my suit and the amount of sand that flooded out was astounding. Then I went for a brief dip in the hotel pool, which was cool and refreshing. Then I took the suit off and took a real shower. I discovered that my cleverly-designed bathing suit, in addition to drying slowly, was fashioned with many clever nooks and crannies, apparently ideal for sand storage. Another avalanche of sand in the shower.

We ate at Dragonfly again. This time I had beef empanadas and the kale salad. Delicious. The music was ghastly—a monotonous bass beat with an electric guitar tootling around it. Every number sounded just like every other number. I guess people would rather listen to any kind of music rather than have an actual conversation.

Today was the first day since we arrived at Tamarindo that I didn’t take a siesta. Maybe I am acclimating?

Tomorrow we leave for a week in Manuel Antonio, near a large biological reserve. I had my doubts about TamaGringo when we arrived, but we had an enjoyable stay. I can’t close without mentioning how they manage dust control here. They periodically come through and spray the streets from a huge truck. But it’s not water. It’s something with molasses in it, probably combined with oil, because it collects in the ruts, but doesn’t evaporate. The bugs don’t go for it either, although it is sticky with sugar. It sits there in odiferous, dark-brown puddles, making walking all the more interesting.