Ups and Downs

In the world of bizarre weight fluctuations, I'm back down 4 lbs today, and Michael is up 3. Just weird, hard to make anything at all of it. Roll on tomorrow, see what the next day brings. I am guessing that our bodies are doing some sort of strange reset with the anti-yeast stuff and whatever else is going on... Michael was feeling just terrible yesterday, and even I was lethargic beyond belief. So I'm trying not to hook into this too much, just see what happens. But it is discouraging after his steady weight loss lately.

It's that kind of a week though. In life things, nothing to do with low carb, probably not even appropriate subject matter for this blog, my mother's ovarian cancer seems very likely to have returned. This is just awful news, although we won't know the extent of the awfulness until Friday or Monday. But this is not a good kind of cancer, if there is such a thing. It was miraculous that she got better the first time; it would be even more so now. But you never know. Tests can be wrong, and miracles do happen. That Michael and I are here and together is a mini-miracle of its own, so... you never know. You just never know. Still. Good thoughts of any kind appreciated. These things matter.

There's a hideous sense of deja vu about this, though. A year ago, just a little before this time, things looked pretty bright. And then she got the first cancer diagnosis, and shortly after that, Michael started feeling oddly unwell and gaining weight again, and right after that, we had the horrible car accident that pretty much meant that the whole summer was spent going to doctors, either here or in Baltimore with my mother. Hanging on a cliff of worry. I finished classes yesterday (finals still to go), and was pleasantly anticipating a summer that might include good things... a trip to Maine for the first time in many years, a lot of free time to work on some projects that I wanted to do and work on the house, more weight coming off... Today, the whole landscape seems different and frightening.

There was an article in the Science section of the New York Times a day or two ago that said something like, humans are the only animals who have the knowledge that they will die, that there will come a day when they are not here. I'm not sure how you prove that, but it's certainly true that you hit a certain age and it's hard to keep the shadow of mortality... yours and that of the people you love... from darkening everything about life. You whistle in the dark and go on with the day to day things, but it's always there behind the next door.

Don't anticipate the bad before it happens. It doesn't help.

And I am determined not to let the rest of life derail the weight loss. We simply cannot afford it. I can't deal with being so afraid about Michael's health all the time, on top of everything else. We have to stay determined and committed, no matter what happens here.

Sorry for all the gloominess, but where else do I say these things? And this is life, isn't it. It's what I said the other day; the problem with trying very hard to lose weight is that there are only so many hours in the day that you can devote to it. The rest is all the other things.