Oura Ring - First Impressions - and Booster Update

I woke up this morning to 3 degrees/feels like -7 (Fahrenheit) and all animals were alive and seemingly o.k. We ended up having only a dusting of snow but thankfully a ton of rain but not so thankfully it had frozen before turning to snow so conditions yesterday were a bit treacherous. Lily, one of my mama cows, decided to play head butt games with the other mama just as the sun was going down and the temperature really dropping last night and she ended up walking around lifting one foot because of the cold snow on her feet, just like the dogs do. Except unlike the dogs I had no idea what to do for her. Eventually she went in her dry loafing shed but was soon back out in the snow again. Worrying but she's big and has a mind of her own. She seemed fine before I went to bed and she seems fine today. Angus cows are so very hardy. As are the chickens who weathered everything o.k. 

I was bracing for a poor reaction to my booster shot. I had bad, long term dizziness/fatigue/brain fog from the first two shots. Even though it's Moderna so just a half dose for the booster, Jonny had a worse reaction to his booster than he did to his original doses. Just one extra day, but still, I certainly wasn't expecting it to go well for me. So far, it's been something of a nothing burger. No fatigue, dizziness, or brain fog. I didn't even have a day of feverish symptoms. My temperature went up to 99 degrees at its worst and this wasn't enough to give me any sort of noticeable symptoms other than being a bit warmer than usual which was fine with this cold snap.

My Oura Ring, Gen. 3, arrived November 18th so I have a couple few weeks of data now. Overall initial impression is that I'm really pleased with it. It picked up on my vaccine symptoms right away and suggested I turn on 'Rest Mode' if I'm feeling under the weather. The triggers were an elevated overnight resting heart rate, decrease in heart rate variability (HRV) and a 2 degree increase in average body temperature. It also showed an elevated respiration rate though I'm not terribly familiar with that metric and it's significance. HRV in particular was super low (high is better) and is what you'd expect if you were ill so I was pleased the ring had picked that up. Physically I felt fine and if I'd been left to my own devices probably would have tried to start training again which is why I suspect I had such a poor reaction the first go around because getting back to training was exactly what I did. This time around I decided to treat the booster like a race that would require both tapering and recovery. So I've had four days so far of mostly rest with just walking. I had the shot on a Tuesday and Wednesday morning's walk felt a bit difficult and slow, felt like my heart rate was too easily elevated. But Thursday felt fine. Yesterday I couldn't walk much more than a mile because conditions were treacherous, ie icy sidewalks with a mix of pavement and ice which is often the worse combination. Today things should melt off and hopefully I can go a bit farther.

The only noticeable symptoms were the standard dull pain/ache at the injection site, and this was very minimal, and swollen lymph nodes under my armpit. It was a bit sore for a day or so but the swelling was huge, like the size of an avocado. Yesterday the swelling went down to about half an avocado and remains at 1/4-1/2 an avocado today but no soreness to speak of. I was hoping to ease back to training with light weight lifting but I'm not sure about this with the swelling. On the other hand, Professor Google says this swelling could last for weeks or months and I can't take that long off. So today I'm introducing some mobility stuff and in the next few days I'll introduce super light weights and longer sessions. Hopefully the movement will help the nodes drain. I also remember when I got my Kangoo Jump Boots and was taking classes that used them, the instructor said the jumping was good for lymph node drainage. I thought this sounded hokey but I'm going to bust them out and give it a try. We'll put this bit of wives tale/hokery to the test.

Today my biomarkers are improved, I turned off Rest Mode and Oura has assigned me some reasonable amount of activity for today. But HRV is still low at 22 and I'd like to see it more in the 30s. Just for laughs I checked HRV with my Garmin and it was 100 which is the highest and worst possible score on Garmin's scale (Garmin uses a scale where a higher score is worse). So today still needs to be easy. I'm going to continue to use the Oura ring to monitor and guide recovery so hopefully I won't end up in that bad fatigue/dizzy place.

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A couple more days have gone by, today is Tuesday or one week post injection, and still no ill effects from the booster. The swelling in my lymph node has gone down considerably and can best be described as some puffiness. I can see my armpit again and neither the lymph node nor injection site are sore or tender to the touch. No dizziness, fatigue, brain fog. So happy with this.

On Sunday the 'Readiness' on my Oura app said this:

Which seems a bit passive aggressive. Why not just tell me, 'You've had enough rest lady, get off the couch and move your lazy ass!'. The sun was shining so I went up to Boggy Draw for some snowshoeing. Word on the street was that there was a foot of fresh powder and when I got up there, conditions did not disappoint.

I was out for around 2 miles and 1 1/4 hours. I kept my heart rate nice and low, around 110 bpm, kept the pace nice and slow and stopped for photos and moments of whimsy. It felt so good to be back outside and moving through the world again. I'd been walking every day for the past 5 days but hadn't done much else. This was just the right amount of activity because I had an excellent night's sleep and woke up to this 'Readiness' score on Monday morning:

I was planning on no running for another week but the sun was shining and it was perfect running weather yesterday, Monday, so I hit the trails. I kept my heart rate to an average of 118 bpm so I was super slow and my Garmin watch wasn't pleased with this pace. I went for around 50 minutes, 2.75 miles, SO slow. But I felt great afterwards, exactly what I was hoping for. I'm hoping that if I keep my heart rate nice and low for the next week or so that I won't trigger a vaccine reaction. 

This morning the Oura ring suggested that my recovery was going well but since I'd done 'a lot' yesterday maybe I could take it easy today if I wanted. So wishy washy. These daily messages make me laugh whether they're supposed to or not. Anyway, today will be getting back to weight lifting. I did about 10 minutes of light weights yesterday and some of it was fine, some a little twinge-y. My injection side arm apparently wasn't back to 100%. We'll see how it goes today. 

New Farm Baby

My cow Lucy was due to have her calf on Thanksgiving but I threw the blinds open at dawn the Saturday morning before and this little nugget was running around.

She was born sometime during the night or early morning and it was cold, probably high teens. That Saturday was cloudy and in the 50s, not too bad but not great due to the lack of sun. And rather than stay with mom, she kept crawling under the electric wire to bed down in a ditch. I kept checking on her and she always felt warm. That night at dusk Jonny carried her out of a ditch to be with mom. The following morning I found her by herself in a ditch again, a layer of frost on her back. But when I went to lift her up, or rather just get her to stand up, she was toasty warm. I coaxed her back under the fence to be with mom. After another escape that morning we decided to put up some sheep netting type fence rather than rely on the wire since even two rows wasn't keeping her in. A couple weeks later and this has worked a treat. It's just a nuisance to set up compared to posts and wire and I don't have enough for a really large paddock. We've transitioned now to a bigger paddock with a mix of sheep netting and wire/posts with triple wire. So far it's working. She much larger now.

I don't have many photos, black cows are so hard. I try and it sucks so I get discouraged.

Proud mom Lucy and baby

 

I also don't like to interfere with mom and baby too much in those early days. The baby is actually not fearful but mom gets stressed out. The baby actually gets more fearful of people as she gets older. But this little bug is pretty confident, this morning she was going to take on a buck with some decent antlers all by herself. Mom and the others came in for back up thankfully and the buck took off into the neighbor's pasture. It was a bit sketchy for a few tense moments since the buck had an injured rear leg and I wasn't sure it could jump but thankfully it mustered enough adrenaline to get over. It was a bit too much Wild Kingdom for first thing in the morning.

She needs a name. And more photos. And video. She has hilarious running fits, charging around the pasture and kicking up her heels. Unfortunately she only predictably does it at dusk when the lighting isn't fabulous. Part of the reason this post is so delayed is because I wanted to get more better photos but clearly it wasn't happening. And after much debate I finally decided to go ahead with a booster shot which I got just a few hours ago so chances are I'm going to be out of commission for some time.

As an aside, I had really wanted to have the needle aspirated if I was going to get a booster and this is something that isn't typically done in the U.S. This is done to ensure that the needle hasn't gone into a vein and requires a simple pull back on the needle plunger to make sure there's no blood. It takes a matter of a second but the CDC doesn't call for it. The risk of hitting a vein is low, 1 in 1000, but it's still a risk and may be responsible for some of the more serious vaccine reactions we're seeing emerging. There's no down side to it, the only problem is finding a practitioner who will do it, especially if you're in the U.S. Jonny got his booster at a mobile vaccine bus unit and they refused to do it. So I called the local hospital clinic and asked very very nicely if they would do it for me. And the pharmacist agreed to do it! The one small advantage of living in a small rural town with major vaccine hesitancy, exploding case rates, and statewide hospital capacity nearly at its breaking point. I had to wait a bit because the first person that came to give me my vaccine had never aspirated a needle before and wasn't at all comfortable trying. But the pharmacist, busy as she was, made time to come in and do it for me. She also had never done it before but she was comfortable trying and managed beautifully, in fact I never even felt the needle go in. She apologized for making me wait and I thanked her profusely for doing it for me. Here's a video about needle aspiration for those who are interested. Again, the risk of hitting a vein is very very small but an aspiration takes no time at all and carries even smaller risk so why not do it? Better safe than sorry, especially when there's no downside.

We're supposed to get snow on Thursday night, how much remains up for debate. Weather Channel says 1"-3", a local weather forecaster says more like 6"-8". In general the Weather Channel is more accurate but we'll see. The real worry is that the high for Friday is 27 degrees, going down to 3 degrees overnight. The calf has mostly experienced the 50s, today I think is the first day in the 40's. She seems pretty hardy though. We had one day of rain and 50's right before dark when she was only a few days old and she was out there running around in it all hyper crazy pants like it was the best day of her life. She has a loafing shed and the rest of the herd to keep her warm so I'm hoping she'll be o.k. And that I'm not too debilitated with vaccine reaction to deal with it. 

I've had my Oura ring now for a couple few weeks and some interesting date from it, more on that to come.