Sean Versus The Sun

The title of this post probably isn’t as catchy as Joe Versus The Volcano, but I like it.

I recently went to the doctor for my annual examination. While I had high cholesterol in the past, my numbers have been fantastic lately, well within the normal range. All of my other blood results came back fine too except for this item:

Vitamin D, 25-Hydroxy - 24.8 ng/mL (30.0-100.0)

So I now have low Vitamin D numbers. Here are the actual notes from my doctor:

Excellent labs lipids
No dm or anemia

Chol 163 great
rtc one yr and pm
He is in good health
sl low vt d 25 so take otc vit d once a day and get some sun exposure to help bones heal well and remain strong
Not a major issue however

I’m not a doctor, but I’ll decode this message to the best of my abilities.

Excellent labs lipids

Damn right I have excellent lab lipids. Take that lipids.

No dm or anemia

I guess no direct messages for me on Twitter or Facebook for the next year, so just email me instead.

Chol 163 great
rtc one yr and pm

For the next item, I believe this means that I need to go to Reston Town Center once in the evening during this year.

The rest seems rather self-explanatory though I’m not sure why I need to attend the Offshore Technology Conference.

Back to the low Vitamin D numbers, I decided to look at my lab results from the last few years and found that they were not part of the documents. Did they not test this in the past? Basically, have I always had low Vitamin D numbers? If this is something new, I have a theory as to why my numbers are low. The weather.

The Washington DC weather is likely to be the wettest in history. It seems like rained every day over a several month period in the summer and fall, and even if wasn’t raining, it was still cloudy.

Since it’s unlikely that I’ll get much sun in what sounds like it will be a cold and snowy winter, I guess I’ll start taking Vitamin D tablets to go with my fish oil pills. Pharmaceutical companies win again!