The world at the moment...

I just haven't had the heart to post lately, when you get right down to it. Things have not been very happy here, to say the least. And I am not happy with my response to not being happy, which is, you guessed it, a combination of eating too much and just making myself incredibly miserable.

But it has to stop here. It has to stop now. I realized this last night when Michael went to bed, and I sat here and basically ate everything I could get my hands on in 15 minutes (hey, you can eat really low carb, and still stuff your face! Great....). And then felt sick as anything, and just... I don't know. Not so much angry at myself, but awash in that nauseating sea of familiarity, that knowledge that I've done this a thousand times, and here I am again. Everything I've done, everything I've learned, and still, you get the right combination of stress and unhappiness, and I'm right back at square one.

What can you do, though, but try again, try to do something differently, try not to lose heart?

The situation here is... well, hard to explain, I guess. On the weight side, Michael continues to lose, and with luck will actually be below 400 lbs. this week. Very exciting, very good. But he is so uncomfortable, so depressed, and in so much pain that it is almost meaningless. He has lost nearly 220 lbs. now, and he arguably feels worse than he did before he started. I don't really know why that is. That is, I understand some of the reasons, and I think most of them have to do with a combination of his hernia and the weird collection of symptoms that he gets from time to time, but I have no idea what causes this. Plus I think that his overall level of depression plus just how long this has all gone on contribute to everything.

And then there's the chair saga, which is the only remotely funny part of all of this.

When Michael first came here, I bought a lift chair for him... he was 620 lbs then, and getting up was a huge issue. There wasn't much available then... three years ago... all very expensive. I bought... oh, I've forgotten the brand now, but it was the only company that made really large lift chairs (which are mostly made for tiny grandmothers, I think). It was huge and terribly uncomfortable, and it cost about $1,500. So, after 2 years of it getting more and more uncomfortable, last summer we bought a new chair.

The new chair was a LaZBoy... normally pretty good chairs. They didn't have a floor model, so we had to order one, but the smaller one was almost ok, so we thought, fine, it's a LaZBoy, it will be great. Well, to make a long story short, it is not great. I don't know who this chair is designed for, but not really for someone with a human body, let's say. No one is comfortable in it. No combination of padding and such can make it comfortable. It is just structurally all wrong. Oh, and it cost about $1,500, too. So now we're $3,000 into the chair saga.

Fast forward to something like October. Chair is becoming intolerable. So in a flash of... well, not exactly brilliance, as it turns out... I go out and buy another chair. Beautiful leather recliner, very comfortable... or so I thought. $1200. Very comfortable for a week or two... and then it's clear that this isn't working, either, the size of the chair isn't quite right, plus it doesn't lift. Back to the horrible lift chair.

And back to being incredibly uncomfortable. He's in a lot of pain a lot of the time anyway, so this discomfort thing isn't just a matter of not the perfect chair or something; it's never being comfortable, and being tempted to just go to bed and stay there (which is the last thing I want to see). So last week, I can't stand it any more, and I go buy another chair. $900, and I sat in EVERY chair in the store, I think. (No, I couldn't get him to go pick one out.)

So this chair is wonderfully comfortable until he tries to get up from it, and then it becomes clear that he's not going to be able to actually get out of this chair, because it's too low, and it rocks, so it's tippy. So we put it up on concrete blocks to get it a little higher and keep it from rocking. Which, after about 3 tries, is maybe going to be ok. So now we're $5,100 into the chair saga, and I'm still not sure that we have a chair that is workable. If I even say the word "chair" to my son, he runs screaming because he figures he's going to be dragged into more furniture moving.

I wrote all of the above a few days ago, and then I just stalled out, kind of at a loss for where to go from there.

But since then, things have actually gotten a little better. Michael is on an antidepressant, and, miraculously, it has made a HUGE difference in just a couple of days. And when his mood brightens, the whole world seems like a different place. And he has agreed to see about hernia surgery... maybe still not possible, but just thinking about it is a step in the right direction.

So... well, no brilliant wrap-up, just restart, try again, see what happens.

Tomorrow will be our third anniversary.