Today is gorgeous,
beautiful, sunny, and way too warm. I
want to go outside and sit in the sun and read a book, soak up some natural
vitamin D. But, I really shouldn’t.
You see, in the past few
days I’ve been at the beach and outside at pools. I’ve been in the water, both beach and pools,
and out in the wonderful summer sun, as well.
Yesterday’s pool trip cost me a little redness in the chest area where I
didn’t sunscreen the suit top area as well as I should have after doing my
customary twenty minutes in the sun unprotected.
Normally, this doesn’t
bother me. I mean, I have a few reddish
spots but nothing is burned like when I was younger and just didn’t care. I’m careful in the sun but not guiltless, and
this slight sense of guilt is going to come back and kick me in the ass
big-time tomorrow.
My doctor has been good
about this in the past, like two years ago when I was out in the sun so much
that I’d tanned myself out by mid-July.
Hey, I had two weddings to attend as mother of the groom then six weeks
later as mother of the bride. I couldn’t
look sickly, and I needed to melt my freckles into my complexion.
I walked into my doctor’s
office that year, and she suddenly looked at me seriously. Here it
comes, I figured, here comes the
lecture about wearing sunscreen and keeping out of the sun and damaging my skin
and giving myself skin cancer – yadda yadda yadda.
“Oh, I see you’ve been out
in the sun,” she exclaimed, leveling her sternest look at me.
But, I was armed and
ready. “Yes,” I replied, “twenty minutes
a day without sunscreen, when I can manage it, because natural vitamin D is
good for the body.”
Woohoo, what a huge load of horseshit.
Her response? A huge grin crossed her face. “Good for you!,” she said happily, and went
about her business. After my blood work
came back, she sent me a letter that I no longer had any vitamin D deficiency,
but that I actually had elevated levels of D.
Upon hearing this news, I
vowed to give up the extra D vitamin I had been ingesting every morning. After all, one shouldn’t give up anything natural,
and the sun was and is in nature, so it all worked out.
As for tomorrow, who knows
what that will bring. I am just hoping
to have normalcy in every facet so I can claim to be healthy and get myself
back out in the sun.
