After what happened to Steve Jobs last month, I'm even more reluctant than before to talk about my health, lest Philip Elmer-DeWitt or some other unreconstructed bozo decide to remotely diagnose me.

On the other hand, I know some of you genuinely care, so here's the short version, and this is all I intend to say about it:

1. My heart is fine. My heart function is still double where it was when initially diagnosed with CHF in September 2006, and identical to where it was a year ago, and six months ago. Because of this improvement and stability, I don't need another echocardiogram for a full year. Yay!

2. My cholesterol is up, which doesn't surprise me since I largely ate a low-fat vegetarian diet before the diagnosis, and I've eaten a lot more meat and eggs since then because they're lower in sodium than many of the ingredients traditionally used in vegan-type diets for flavor (stocks, soy sauce, fish sauce, olives, capers, and so on).

   I need to reduce that, but since I ate that kind of food for nearly a decade, that's not much trouble. My trusty pressure cooker makes eating beans and grains reasonably fast. (It's hard to argue with a pot of black-eyed peas ready in 25 minutes.)

3. My kidneys may need further attention. Other doctors will have to look at the test results and see what they think.

Of course, like any kind of medical test, I freaked out about it for a few days in advance, and then took a few days to come back to earth afterward. Bad news would be, well, bad news. If my heart function had declined, I would need higher doses of beta blockers, which would return me to a pre-November 2007 level of energy (i.e,. not enough to get anything productive done).

Plus my back has been hurting because, due to poor dietary choices in the week before the tests and not fixing them fast enough, I've gained about ten pounds since the first of the year. I have to get back into the regular exercise to start getting that back down, and even lower than before (ideally). That's going to take some energy, too.

It's not all that fun to have dietary cholesterol targets now, and some days it's going to be difficult if not impossible to keep it below 200mg or 300mg (since one egg has about 175mg of cholesterol). Fortunately, many days I get less than 50mg of dietary cholesterol, and on a significant number of days I get less than 10mg. Keeping a weekly limit of 2000mg of cholesterol, or a four-day total of 1000mg, should be doable without too much difficulty.

So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.