Nothing, really

Every single thing we do changes us. Every step that we take, until we're so far away from the origin that we can't remember how we started, what we were then.

I was at my father's house recently for a week of semi-vacation, and my sister had unearthed a lot of the things that my late mother had kept. Things of my childhood, but mostly things from high school. Some things that just made me shake my head and wonder why on earth she'd saved these things (like letters I'd written to her during fights. I threw those away unread.), but mostly things that took me back to a past that I'd mostly forgotten. I still can't remember who she was, the girl who thought she could make music, the girl who was confident and brave even in the face of a lot of reasons not to be. The girl who had never been told that she couldn't achieve anything that she wanted to.

And I look back at that now, and part of me just wants to cringe. How could I have been so young, so naïve, so laughably confident when others must have known that the things that I wanted to do were nothing but fantasy? Another part of me, the part that I'm finding just as I write this, is angry for her, angry and sad and defensive, and mostly I just wonder what happened to her? Where did I go from that kind of confidence to what I am now? When did I stop being brave in that young and foolish way?

These days, I feel like everything is just eroding me, wearing me away until there's little left. I think often that I should just end this blog; it's lost its original purpose, and there's little left but these constant futile musings. And my sadness, which isn't exactly helping anyone else.

A Failure to Fly

Sometimes I can perform that magic act, walk high on that high wire, see myself for a moment as the person I want to be. And I have this illusion that I'm getting better at it.

And then something happens, and I fall… Icarus flying to close to the sun, all the wax melting and dripping, and I fall hard and fast, and I forget that I could fly.

Things have been close to good lately. Really so close that I could touch them. Michael has mostly been feeling ok, and we've been working on the weight, and I've had the energy to work on getting the house organized… it's been wonderful getting the newly-repaired living room and dining room back to something civilized. Everything seemed… all right. Pretty good. Possible.

And then yesterday… Michael was ok; he said he was feeling happy. But I was low and sad; something set me off, and I would have been ok in a while, but right at that moment… not happy. But I forgot that I'm not allowed to be sad. I forgot that I'm supposed to be the cheerleader, the happy person all the time. I let myself be sad… and I let myself have a glass of wine while I was making dinner, too, and that's always and inevitably a problem, especially if things are already tense. And it all went to hell, quick and fast and hysterically, and you could just smell the wax and burning feathers.

I blame myself, although I'm certainly not the only person at fault. But I know that I need to keep these things to myself. I just couldn't manage it yesterday.

Worse, last night and today, I'm trying to cajole him into some kind of happy, and it's not working, and it's making me feel a thousand times worse. I thought that the balance had tipped for a moment, but it didn't… or something else set him off, and like the marble, I couldn't quite get escape velocity, couldn't quite get him out of the bowl. And so here we are, back in the bottom, clinking against each other, unable to get any kind of momentum up.

I can't bear it. It's stupid and foolish, but it just makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. I need to separate myself from all this, but I don't know how. I don't know how to do anything like take care of myself without doing the things that would sever the bonds entirely, things that truly would be a betrayal. There is nothing that I can do or say that would not make this worse, and trying is ripping my heart out.

And it's two days later now, and things are better on the surface, but they are really no better in reality. I am filled with despair, which sounds melodramatic and pathetic. But I can't find other words.

 

 

Complexities

It's hard to know how to feel about anything these days.

On the one hand, Michael has been well, in a certain sense, for more than six months now. It's the end (maybe) to those years of mysterious disease, of him sleeping most of the time, the weakness, the delirium… all the symptoms of undiagnosed porphyria. On the other hand… we still are only fractionally closer to a way of eating that will allow him to lose weight without losing his mind… in this case, quite literally. And as a result, his weight has ballooned, in every sense of the word. He's about 160 lbs. above his lowest weight, and all of that in the last eight months. It is staggering. In every sense of the word.

Our latest attempt to level things out is working, in some sense… he is eating every 2-3 hours, small meals… and when he does that, exactly that, plus stays pretty gluten-free, his weight starts to go down. But it doesn't take anything much to screw it up. Yesterday, we went to the movies, shared a medium popcorn between three of us and then went out for some Indian food… and today, his weight is 5 lbs. higher. Sure, that's illusory and water and day-to-day fluctuations. But it is still really depressing. Plus the constant, constant, constant degree of vigilance required…any sort of relaxation and fun, and we're back to square one.

But what can you do, really? Except try another day.

Try another day.

It's a summer night, and I want to be outdoors, in a field, listening to a band, drinking a beer, and dancing.

I don't think that this will ever happen in my life again.

I am too old and too young all at once.

Escape Velocity

Another restless night. Michael didn't sleep well; did back bothers him all the time since he's regained so much weight. Plus the two new kittens, who are living in the bedroom… unbelievably adorable, but wanting to play at the wrong times. Of course. Fortunately they're still so tiny and totally cute that no one minds too much. But Michael got up early, and then I got up, and he wanted to go back to bed… and I feel lousy, so I tried, but my head was just spinning into a thousand unhappinesses and resentments, nowhere good. So I got up and made a cup of tea, and ate some cottage cheese and dried apricots, a combination that doesn't fit into any eating plan that I know of.

And thought and thought and thought. About escape velocity, about that analogy that always hits for me, of a marble being spun in a bowl, never quite getting up enough speed to make it out, always falling back to the center. It's what I feel like… I have a few good days, a few days when the past doesn't seem so real, or I can visit the happy parts, when I get things done here, and it all seems possible and manageable. When it seems likely that Michael will get truly well again, and we'll have a real life, and I'll lose weight, and it will all be… I don't know. Perfect and wonderful, and we will live happily ever after. And then there's a day like yesterday, a morning like this one, when it's all too much. When I see how little things change, and I hit that sure marker of depression for me, that counting of how many days I have left. I want to talk to someone about this. I want to talk to my mother, to say, how do you cope with this, what do you do? But even if it were possible, the words would stick in my throat, and I wouldn't ask for help. I never do. I never have.

In a way, the worst part of all of this is that I feel so stuck. I feel like I'm in this rut, and it's more about the psychology of it all than about the actual physical constraints. I am learning nothing from this; I am feeling nothing but pain. I don't know where to go with it. Other things… I can see how much better I'm getting at some kinds of things, about letting things go, not needing a resolution to every little quarrel, at just existing on my own, not so attached to everything. All the years of not-exactly-regular meditation practice, of breathing and metta prayers has done something for my ability to coast through the day to day without getting so hung up into it.

But instead, I get caught in the past and the future, two meaningless places to be. I run the movies of the past in my head, and sometimes they're entertainment, a connection to a different world, sometimes a way of understanding. But there are deep, dark traps, and there's nothing good once you hit them. They're all about resentment and anger and loss, and it's hard to remember a time when my life wasn't about those things, on some level. And the future… well, who knows? I don't think I have the energy to speculate.

I'm just tired. Really tired.

Light of Heart

I went last night to see a musical with a friend of mine. The play was called Girls Night Out; I think it's touring this summer, and it was very fun if not exactly a masterpiece of the theater. The plot is basically an excuse for the women to sing a lot of classic songs, I Will Survive, At Seventeen, Cry Me a River… great songs to just belt out. The loose plot is about four women and their dead friend and how their lives have evolved over the last 22 years… which really makes it sound a billion times more serious than it actually was, especially since really they could have just skipped the plot and sang and it would have been equally good. But anyway, there's Kate, the nerdy, gawky kid, and Anita, the depressed one, and Lisa, the insecure one, and Carol, the party girl who never shows her friends the pain inside. And at intermission, my friend asked which of those people I'd been in high school. And really, the answer was, none of those people. I mean, I'm the most like Carol, but I never in my life have had the ability to just be fun, to be a party girl, to cut loose like that. Even with alcohol, I'm mostly morose, and everything I do, everything I am, seems to be about this relentless seriousness.

And I've always been like this. Always too serious as a child, always the one at college parties who'd just be lost and bored, and would go home and read. A little less so in grad school, which was filled with people Just Like Me. And now… well, still that way, no knack for small talk, no knack for chit chat, not good at lightness.

I've been musing about this post for days… started Thursday, and it's now Saturday, and I'm betting on Sunday before I finish.

And it's Saturday again.

And all this time, I've been trying to think of what I mean, about this lightness thing. I don't really know. I just feel so sad all the time, and worried, and when I'm not sad and worried, I just feel overwhelmed. This house, the garden, the pool, my job, the eBay business, my consulting work… and then the things that really come first, Michael and my son, and the day-to-day stuff. Just making it through the next day. You can't lose weight by thinking about losing weight. I mean, it doesn't hurt, and usually there has to be some thought in there somewhere, but ultimately you have to actually DO something. And it's the same thing with everything else. I look around me, and I think, tomorrow I will do this, tomorrow I will clean all this up and finish my work and finish knitting this sweater, and I will be beautiful and strong and dance and laugh. And the next day is the same as this day.

So usually at this point, I do the pep talk thing… how tomorrow really will be different, how I will try harder, how it will be ok. But I don't feel like that today. I feel like curling up and crying and wanting someone to fix it all for me. I want my mother… the mother that my mother should have been, if her life wasn't a lot like this, too. I want a thousand things that I can't have, and today… it all seems too much to even try.

But I will.

 

Saturday

Yesterday was another busy day, and a terrible food day… I was off for most of the day with my knitting friends, came back to find Michael in a foul mood, long story short, didn't get to thinking about dinner until about 9, so we went to Applebees, ate far too much food, drank yummy lemon drop martinis (me, not him), and generally had a nice time… and then of course, I came home and felt like death.

And so of course, this morning, I'm thinking and trying to figure out how to get back on track and STAY that way. Plus there's the endless problem of diet and Michael… and I'm not talking about the constant weight gain he's experiencing now so much as the problem of porphyria and what might have an influence on it. In the porphyria group that I've been reading a lot of lately, there's a lot of discussion about eliminating anything that's processed plus wheat and so forth. And anything synthesized, like vitamins and drugs. I'm not so sure that a lot of that is possible… and I'm hoping that if we can ever try the heme therapy, this all may not be go necessary… but it would be interesting to see what kind of an effect eliminating all of this, plus all spicy food and so on, would have. If he could tolerate the boredom, which is the biggest issue, I think. It's particularly hard for him to eliminate wheat, just in terms of it getting rid of so many of the things that he likes (and are good carb sources, too). But I've long said that he's wheat-intolerant. I just didn't know why.

I don't know. I'm buried in work, and everything seems to require a kind of attention that I can't work up. I'm tired all the time. I'm way, way too fat. I'm out of shape, more than I've been in a long time, and my hip is mostly bothering me again. The house is a danger zone, pretty much. And where do I go from here?

I think for today, I'd be happy if I just got my book reviews written and a little cleaning done, and the plants that I haven't planted actually in the ground. That would be kind of a lot. And eat reasonably. And write it down.

 

Musings du jour

I keep musing about this "who do I want to be" thing. I've had a lot of musing time lately… we had another long day, doctor and then oncologist this morning, then hanging around all day in Rochester killing time until therapist appointments this evening. With the amount that we've been out lately, you'd think that we were actually having an interesting life.

So… when I was 18, this is who I wanted to be

Kelly Capwell. Actually Robin Wright, playing Kelly Capwell on the now-dead soap opera, Santa Barbara. I thought she was the most beautiful thing that I'd ever seen, and I still kind of think that…you know, in that sense of, if you could pick exactly who you wanted to look like, I'd look precisely like that. Tall and thin with long, straight blonde hair. And Kelly's storyline in the beginning of the show (I actually watched this soap opera from the very beginning, and I'm sure that I'm just trashing all my seriousness cred by even talking about this. But I was about 18, ok?) was that she was the very sheltered innocent daughter of this mega-millionaire, something-else Capwell, and she was madly in love with some poor but gorgeous guy who was trying to win the approval of Daddy Capwell, whatever his name was. Yeah, it's an old, old, old and really trite story. But still a good one. And that's who I wanted to be, the fairy princess. Robin Wright was that, too, in The Princess Bride.

I wanted to be the princess, or the ballerina (we were watching a documentary on Russian ballerinas the other night, and Michael said, I didn't think you were interested in this. But of course. When I was 6, I was desperate to be a ballerina and have pointe shoes and a pink tutu. Unfortunately, I was also chubby and uncoordinated, and they don't start you out with the tutu and toe shoes.)

That was before the days of the Disney Princess franchise, and these days, it sounds beyond silly to say that you wanted to be a princess… and it probably did then, too. And I turned out to be the ogre princess, anyway, like Fiona in Shrek. The trouble is, I've never given up wanting to be that princess. Beautiful and thin and blonde and cherished and taken care of. I think because I never had that… a child with too much adulthood too early, a father never really there, a mother occupied with other things, no one to trust or look out for me. Not a sob story there, just a description of reality. So you long for what you don't have.

But here I am. And in some ways, my cherished dream is not any different from what it was when I was 18, although I would never have admitted it, then or now.

So what do you do next when you wanted to be a princess? There's not a lot of alternate dream choices for "failed princess."

Nobody Loves a Fairy When She's Forty.

Who do you want to be?

It's been a really tedious day... ALL day sitting at the car dealership waiting for tons of things to be done to the car... about 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Michael came with me, which was sweet but unnecessary, really. And we sat, and drank coffee, and did computer things, and chatted with an interesting and nice guy who used to work for Microsoft and just happened to break down near here, and listened to an endless conversation about duplicate bridge... and I like bridge, but eek... and all and all, it went on too long.

But I had lots of time to think. This is what I've been randomly thinking about lately: who do I want to be? And shouldn't I know that by now?

My almost-16 year old niece was here a couple of weeks ago, and I took her to the spa, and we had our toes done, and some other things, and then we went to the mall, and I bought her some clothes, and then we went to Sephora, the make-up/perfume place. And she said, "I'm the kind of person who wears a different perfume every day." I thought... (1) I've always been the kind of person who wears a single, signature perfume, and (2) maybe I'd like to be the kind of person who wears a different perfume every day? And then I thought, ok, this is a trivial thing, but this kid knows more about who she is and who she wants to be than I do, and I'm more than three times her age. And then I thought... sometimes this seems like everything that's wrong with my life, this not knowing what I want to be, or how to be it. Wrapping myself around the latest thing that attracts me. Finding my own identity in these things.

This bothers me, and leaves me uncertain, and makes me wonder when, if ever, I'll get to be who I really am... not the person that the people around me shape me into. Because I am not loving that person all that much these days....

Melting

The Northeast heat wave continues... 93 at the moment, and humid, and really, really tiresome. I just don't want to do anything. Trying to plod along getting something done. Mostly just knitting and watching stupid TV on Hulu in lieu of actually moving and sweating.

Michael's porphyria attack is worse today... bad neuropathy yesterday, and he woke up this morning and seriously didn't recognize me for a moment. This is scary, really scary. Shades of his last hospitalizations, plus a sign that the neurological symptoms are worsening. And his weight was up, despite having a reasonable food day yesterday. So... we see the doctor as planned on Thursday, and push hard for the Mayo referral, see what we can do to get that in the works. I don't know what else to do.

It's all pretty tiresome. I was thinking yesterday... the greatest truth, in a lot of ways, is that youth is wasted on the young. I've been watching the past series of Greek... if you haven't watched this, it's a pretty formulaic but sort of charming ABC series on fraternity/sorority life at an Ohio university. And I will never, ever admit to enjoying this kind of show.... but ok, I do; it's a weird guilty pleasure. But it's also my childhood and my college days, in a way, or what they might have been if I'd known what I had when I had it. I remember back to that time, and it was so... carefree, although I would never have thought it at the time. That self-absorption of youth, and all the things that hadn't happened yet, and the future holding limitless possibility. And one day, you wake up, and the horizons aren't like that any more, and people around you are aging and dying, and everything is about health and problems and worries. We ought to live backwards, like Benjamin Button (not that I either read the story or saw the movie), living in reverse, having things become better rather than cruelly worse. Yeah, I know, it's all a little melodramatic... but it's hard to keep putting a positive spin on things. Yes, they are better than they were a year ago. But it's a long, long way to something that feels like a normal life.

And I so long for that.

One of those days

I didn't feel like this yesterday. I probably won't feel like this tomorrow. But today, everything is a little bit much.

Michael slept badly and has been feeling bad all day. I'm sure it's another low-grade porphyria attack... because his weight was actually lower yesterday and the day before. And this is starting to be the pattern, with a nauseating, horrible regularity. As soon as he cuts food enough that he starts to lose any weight, this happens. And what then? No alternative except to carb load, and it's always quick carbs, and the worst things for him, and I have no idea what this is doing to his blood sugar. It makes me cringe. It makes me sad and angry all at once. And the ugly part is that it makes me resentful as hell on a petty, stupid level, too.

Because I'd like to have a legit reason to go have a Whopper and fries and a chocolate shake. (Actually, none of those things appeal to me at all, but it's the idea...) The unpleasant fact, for me, is that in order to lose weight, I have to be eating less. A lot less. On a low-carb diet, I maintain. If I add any real carbs at all, I then start gaining, and that's exactly what's happened over the last year or so. To actually lose weight, I have to watch every calorie. And get the exercise that I'm not getting. The ugly truth is that you can lose weight on low carb pretty easily if you're young, and you haven't done it before, and your metabolism isn't already screwed up. For the rest of us... it's different. It's not so easy.

And I have no choice. I have to be well enough to take care of both of us. There isn't another choice, and that means getting this weight off, so that my hip doesn't hurt all the time, so that I'm not so tired all the time, so that everything is not sure a huge deal all the time. I have to do this.

But I'm hungry. And I hate it, and it's hard for me to be hungry and not be resentful. At least some of the time.

The 4th of July

It was broiling hot here by yesterday afternoon, and we were both having a pretty bad mindset day... me because I just couldn't work up the motivation for anything, and Michael because he gets up in the morning and feels ok, but by evening, he just feels terrible, and everything is such an effort. So we went out to a movie... the two really good things that have happened, in terms of quality of life in the last few months are that Michael's started driving again (YES! I can sit and knit, plus I really think it makes his mood better, though he says no.), and he's been willing to go to the theater. So we went to see Toy Story in 3-D... FUN movie, nearly as good as the first one, I thought, plus there's a Totoro toy which won my heart. Ate some movie popcorn because we hadn't had time for dinner before this idea, and regretted it... but not a ton of popcorn, so ok.

Anyway... I got out of the theater, and went right back into that wretched headspace that plagues me these days, where everything is about sadness and loss and regret. It was a beautiful night, warm and clear, and you can almost touch what it felt like to be 16 and have all the promise and infinite possibility ahead of you, and these days for me, that's a combination of joy and deep, deep bitterness. It takes me back to missing my mother, to missing someone I loved and lost, to feeling like my whole life has taken these unexpected and awful directions. And it just feel bad. I am working very hard these days on trying to keep myself present, to stay in TODAY and not the infinite past.

I was doing just that leaving the grocery store, chanting to myself, "stay present, stay present...", and I stepped outside, and there were fireworks everywhere. So we sat in the grocery store parking lot, and watched the fireworks, and it was... if not magic, at least it was here and now.

So that's the task for today. Stay present.

Weight the same as yesterday, not surprising with popcorn and late dinner. Michael actually down a little, which is very good.

Summer Saturday

I miss you, too, lovely anon person. It means a lot that you're thinking of me.

I keep trying to write, but I don't know what to say these days. I don't know where to start, don't know how to focus. So much has happened over the last few years, over the last few months, over the last few weeks... and yet it's all the same as when I started, in a way. I don't know where to start. And really, I think what I need to do is just start over.

When I started this blog, Michael and I had just started on low carb. And in the two plus years since then... well, he lost a lot of weight, I gained a little weight, my mother died, Michael came close to dying, and in the process, he finally got accurately diagnosed with what was really wrong, hereditary coproporphyria. Making him genuinely rare, explaining a hell of a lot of his life story, and, ironically, making him one of the very, very few people in the entire world who really can't eat a low carb diet. Sometimes you just have to laugh. Or put your head through a wall, I guess.

And so since then... we've been trying to adjust. And it has not been easy. There's a lot more to it, and I'll write about it eventually, but the very short version is that he's gained a lot of weight and continues to gain weight, and is, I think, usually having low-grade porphyria symptoms of one kind or another. But not the scary stuff; that's the good part. So he's better, really better... but at the same time, we have to find a way of stopping the escalating weight. We're trying to get a referral to the Mayo Clinic; they have a porphyria clinic, and maybe they can help us. It's hard to know what to do. I've never felt quite so much at a loss about what to do.

Then there's me. The carb-fest that's resulted from Michael needing to eat a high carb diet has not been good for me. It is much more difficult for me to skip this stuff when it's around all the time. Yes, I've gained, and I feel like hell, and I'm not getting any exercise... and all these things aside, it's just been a really, really rough spring. I've been sick and exhausted, and I feel like all the stress of the last couple of years has all sort of exploded... everything I just sat on while I had to be the strong person who coped. And it's taken a long time to get anything like equilibrium back. I feel like I'm just starting to edge there.

So... I don't know where to go. I don't want to spend this blog whining about how crappy everything is... especially because it's not quite so much, these days. But somewhere this stuff needs to be said, and it can't be at home, most of the time, for so many reasons. I'm going to try to be back here.

And on the weight front... I'm trying for compromise. Trying to keep the mostly low-carb, which makes me feel better. But back to food diary, to writing everything down again. It's good for Michael. And it's ok for me, although when I gave up charting food years ago, it made me REALLY happy. It was much easier for me to not be so obsessive about food. But it's what we have to do to try to get back on some kind of track.

We'll see what happens.

Today

I lay in bed last night and thought and thought about this. I don't know what to do. I'm not losing weight, but that's not the biggest deal... I will be able to get this together and exercise and so forth as soon as the semester is over. I think so, anyway. My hip is better than it was. I'll be ok... or I can be, anyway, if I can stop worrying about Michael.

He is gaining weight every day. He says he wants to lose weight, but he's not doing much that looks like it to me. The problem with the porphyria diagnosis is that it's given him latitude to say "I need more carbs." And to some extent, he does, truly. But he cannot eat this level of carbs and lose weight. It's how we started on all this. There's some balance... and some days, he's there with it, his head's into it. But more often than not, it isn't, and when it isn't, it's all about, what can I eat next? He's not ready to put real effort into this, and if he was just maintaining, I'd be ok will that. But he's not. He's gaining, and every pound is less mobility, and more important, it's a pound farther from being able to have that crucial PET scan.

I am trying to stay the hell out of it, because it does NOT help when I say anything. But I cannot bear to watch this. It depresses the hell out of me. And it makes it harder for me to take care of myself; the only way I can do it is to try to separate myself from him, and that's not good for anything.

Sometimes I feel like I'm building this invisible wall around myself, brick by transparent brick. It hurts. It keeps me safer. And it's all wrong.

Where to go from here

I haven't posted in ages. Partly because I had the cold from hell for nearly two months straight, but more because I don't know where to go from here.

When I started this blog, years ago, Michael and I were on the low-carb journey. He was losing weight, I was at least maintaining, and it seemed like mostly a matter of patience and so on. Then he got sick, stayed sick, got sicker. And continued to lose weight, down to his low weight of 325. And I mostly maintained my weight, until recently.

But then everything got so much worse, so much scarier last fall. I gained weight again while he was in the hospital, partly because I just didn't have time to eat right, partly because I didn't have the will to do it, and partly because I was comfort eating like mad, burying my head in a book and all the food I could grab. And now, nearly six months later, I'm probably 40 lbs. heavier than I've been in a decade, with a hip that's killing me, and a lot of sadness and anger and frustration.

And Michael? Well, the good news is that in a certain way, he's a billion times better than he's been in years. Alert and lively and himself again. Which is wonderful. The bad news... he's also 100 lbs heavier than his lowest weight, somewhere around 425. The result of steroids during chemotherapy, plus not being able to eat a low carb diet, plus some odd metabolic things... but also because of depression and the lack of will to really work at the weight stuff, because it's hard, so hard, when everything else is so difficult.

I look at him, and I see his mobility decreasing and his weight rising by the day. I see the neuropathy from the chemo, and the joint pain from the excess weight and whatever other reasons... and it breaks my heart, but at the same time, I can't make him do anything. I only drive him crazy by worrying at him about it. He has to get to the right place.

But I can't wait for him. I have to figure out how to take care of me, and now. I have to change the way I'm doing things, how I feel about food, about nearly everything. I have to do this, or in a year, I'll be fatter and immobile and then what will happen? We can't afford to have both of us incapacitated.

I'm scared. And I feel very alone with this, because I can't talk to Michael about it without the other question hanging there... the "why aren't you doing something" question.

So I think I need to be back here. I think I need to rethink what I'm writing here, the focus... less about us, more about me. I can't do this alone. Well, I can do this alone, because I have to. But I'm hoping that some of you will be here with me.

I hab a code

Woke up this morning to nasal congestion, sore throat, and a kid who missed the bus. AND I have people coming over for dinner tonight. Bleah. Maybe we can just eat them. That would be low carb, right?

So this is Friday of my first week back on hard core low carb, and I'm doing... ok, I guess. I don't know why everyone else in the world gets this whoosh thing and loses something... I am down 1.3 lbs. That's it. But I feel better, and I'm moving more easily. I just need to get through the double challenge of people for dinner and being sick without hitting the bread or something.

I haven't had a chance to really tell the whole long story, but at the moment, the other part of the challenge is eating low carb while living with someone who must eat a high carb diet. So far, this is going ok, because I'm pretty motivated (aka DESPERATE), but I succumbed to tasting the pasta yesterday, and that's not a place we want to go....

Bleah

Yesterday, ate less than 1500 calories. Weight: up that 2/10 of a pound that I was down yesterday.

I know I'm retaining water like mad for some reason; I'm just beyond bloated, and so tomorrow when I can be home all day, I'll probably take a diuretic and see if that helps any (not today! No fun teaching classes and running to the loo all the time, no way!). But I just have to wonder what in hell is going on with my metabolism.

For the last however-many years, it's been really hard for me to lose weight, no matter what I did. In a way, I didn't care so much, because I was more worried about other things, and I was at a weight that was not exactly uncomfortable for me. But now... I'm way above that weight, and Michael's relative health is giving me a chance to focus a little on me. And whatever's going on with my hip is making it mandatory. So this issue is becoming critical.

Trying to Get Back in the Swing...

I'm going to write the long update one of these mornings... one of these mornings when I'm not teaching, and I'm not half asleep... in the meantime, I'm just trying to get back in the habit of writing something.

So, the weight front... NOT GOOD. The consequence of having spent most of the fall and early winter with Michael in the hospital was a chain of bad, and to some extent, comfort eating. I find myself at a horrifying 311, about 30 lbs. higher than when last I blogged regularly. I have a pretty good idea how I got here, but I'm not quite sure how I'm going to get back, because my body is being incredibly stubborn about wanting to release weight.

But we try. My short-term plan: get back in the habit of writing down everything I eat. No, I'm not going to bore you with this, and I'm not going to get obsessive about it. But yesterday, I ate less than 1500 calories and very few carbs, just salad and green bean carbs.... weight today, down 2/10 of a pound. This is a tad discouraging, but we'll just have to see what happens. Start again, hang in there, try not to get discouraged. Get back to this as a way of life.

It's Been A Long, Long Time...

I'm back. Hopefully to stay.

There's been so much to say and update and everything else that it's kept me from writing anything lately... just too much; I don't know where to start. So I'm just starting, and I'll tell the stories later.

Michael is ok, and I'm starting to believe that he's going to be fine. And I'll tell that long story later, because I just want to get going.

And I'm ok, all things considered, but I've gained a fair amount of weight over the last six months, and I absolutely have to get it off, because my hip is incredibly painful, and overall I feel terrible.

So I start again. This moment, now, because all I've been doing is saying, "tomorrow I will do this, and tomorrow it will be like this." And so forth. And then tomorrow is always the same. So it's not tomorrow; it's now. Yesterday, today... every moment is about making choices that lead somewhere different. The one thing that it isn't about is tomorrow, because the future, in some sense, never happens. It's all about the choice of the moment.