Sunday again

Updating...

A thank you to everyone who has been so encouraging about the calorie thing... my plan, which I've been doing in sort of a half-hearted way this week, is to keep a rough count on the applet on my iTouch (have I mentioned how much I love, love, love, love this iTouch? Useful in ways that I never imagined.). This has been going pretty well so far, to the extent that I've been doing it. It's not ideal in some ways, but the ways in which it's not ideal kind of keep me from getting as insane about it as I would be likely to do with a more sophisticated program. I used to use... well, I've tried FitDay (not crazy about it but a lot of people really like it), MyFoodDiary (best of the online programs, if you ask me, but still not fast), SparkPeople (not my cup of tea but again, great for a lot of people), and then ultimately I bought the software for DietPower, which I think is a really excellent program if you want to track every possible nutrient, and you have the ability to do this without spending all your life obsessing about it. (In other words, if you are not me. You don't even want to hear about the Great Selenium Debate of 2008.)

Anyway, this little iTouch applet is great, it was free (Lose It, for anyone curious), it's really fast, and you can easily track the three things I care about, calories, carbs, and protein. And the days that I have kept track, I have lost small amounts of weight. And the days that I have not kept track... you guessed it, I haven't. So you would think that someone with half a brain (and I'd like to count myself in for at least half...) would put this all together and actually do that. Which is my goal for this coming week.

In all fairness, the day that I really didn't track... yesterday... was kind of a Epic Fail sort of day anyway. Michael's been having another incidence of these mysterious symptoms he gets... afternoon fever, edema, extreme fatigue, nausea... and he feels like death, and he's depressed as hell. Part of the trouble is that he gets up in the morning and feels relatively ok, but in a few hours, he's awful again. Anyway, yesterday, I took him for a drive, just to get him out of the house, and it just was one of those ideas that seems good and turned out just bad bad bad bad... he was uncomfortable and miserable, I was miserable because my happy plans had not turned out that way, he was more exhausted than he would have been otherwise... and we didn't exactly eat properly, either, although "not eating properly" for us these days isn't exactly an extreme thing.

The trouble is that I seriously have no idea what the right thing to do about this problem is. We go back to the doctor time and time again; he does tests, and he doesn't find anything. I don't think that he has a clue where to go with this next, and I also don't think that he takes it that seriously... he doesn't see the extent to which Michael is incapacitated; he doesn't see what it's doing to him psychologically, either. I just don't know where to go with it. I'd like to have someone else see him... but who? My sister keeps suggesting that we go somewhere like Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic for a complete workup, but I have no idea if my insurance would pay for it, and the other problem is, doctors take one look at him and they think that it's all about weight, and they want him to have surgery. Yes, he's still over 400 lbs. But he has lost over 200 lbs., and he feels worse. If he were not losing weight, we would consider surgery. But as long as he is... and he is, when this stuff is not going on... that doesn't seem to me to be the right choice at this time. I need for someone to see past the weight and try to get to the bottom of what causes this fatigue, the fevers, the edema.

So I will call the doctor on Monday, for lack of anything else to do, and I will try to get him in to see him, although I have a hideous schedule next week, and doing this will be very difficult.

We will get through all of this. I know that. It just would be nice to be able to see the road ahead a little more clearly.