Grim

If you want to read cheerful things, you're at the wrong blog today. For that matter, this is not all that diet/low carb/anything of the sort, although I do want to talk a little about maintaining lifestyle in the face of life problems.

I've known since my mother's cancer recurred that the likelihood of a good result was slim. Recurrence in this short a time period is nearly always a terrible sign, and her age is against her, too, and ovarian cancer is a killer. Yesterday my doctor sister decided to say what I already really knew, that she'd seen the scans and that they basically look terrible. The best hope of the chemotherapy is to buy a little time, not cure anything. I knew this already, knew it when I heard the symptoms weeks ago. In a lot of ways, I deal better with reality than with the vague "everything's going to be ok" sorts of notions. At least reality is... well, real. Not an ephemeral hope that's never going to materialize. And then you can sort of plan.

There is always hope. But you have to temper hope with realism. And you have to use the time you have wisely.

I'm just sad. Nothing else, really. There's nothing else to be. There are so many things you could say, so many ironies to it all, which is a whole different story... so many things you could say about living for the day and life and death, and so on. But I don't have the heart for any of them.

The best scenario is that somehow this will be able to bring some healing to my fractured family, and that in turn will give my mother some kind of peace. The last time my entire family was in the same place, maybe 6 years ago, my uncle was dying of pancreatic cancer. This all has a horrible familiarity. But that was the beginning of the deepest and worst fractures. So maybe this will be able to mend some of the things that happened then. Maybe. The scars run pretty deep.

And the other thing that this does is what I do every day... renew my determination to beat this weight thing. For me, for Michael. I'm determined not to let this be a reason to let the structure of diet and exercise that we've so carefully put in place disintegrate in the face of chaos. Determined not to let food be a comfort for things for which there is no real comfort, anyway. I see so many thing... well, I see my own life, and the way that I've gained weight around every crisis. I see other people say, I was doing well, and then this thing happened. And I know how easy it is to go down that slippery slope. I don't want to do that this time. Neither of us can afford that... and I want so desperately to get physically to where we need to be to have the life we want. Yes, before it's too late.

The Waiting Game

Today is all about waiting for Mom's CAT scan results, which maybe will come today and maybe won't. But I feel like everything else in life is hanging on this, so it's hard to concentrate. But I need to just stick my head into some kind of work and get on with it.

But the good news is that everyone's weight is down today. Michael's back to his low of 498.5 (yes, it will be nice when we get a little more comfortably away from nasty 500 number), and I'm at a new low of just over 280, which I'm really psyched about because I'm actually losing something for a change, and it would be nice to see the 270s again; it's been a couple of years. Hip still bothering me, too... I'm getting a little tired of this; I figure it's just a rest and gentle stretching thing, but it's tedious and I still can't play racquetball, and my partner will be off to China in a week and then I won't be able to play until July probably. Which I suppose might be just as well.

And I'm thinking again about commitment and choice, about that endless and every day process of making the right choice for weight loss, the right choice for health. It's a full-time thing, most days. But it's the only way. I have this vague hope that one day it will become automatic... not having to talk myself out of the higher portion size that some part of me thinks it wants, stopping eating when I'm full, not eating when I'm bored. One day.

But that's what it's all about, the slow process of change, and anyone who tells you different is a liar. The trouble is the whole huge industry that's wrapped around the promise of a magic bullet for weight loss... and it's that industry that's partly responsible for the attitudes, for the idea that there can be some sort of quick change, change without effort. And it's filled will beautiful people who I will never look like, even if I lose all the weight that I want to. Genetically, I'm not them. It feeds people this drug of false hope and fantasy, and there's nothing that's so seductive as hope. Except maybe fear or paranoia... if anyone remembers the BerryTrim ads that they'd mail you... an apparently ripped-out newpaper clipping about the product with a handwritten note on it from an anonymous "friend"... so you could worry yourself sick about who thought you were so fat that you might benefit from this. Ugh. The whole thing just makes you want to take a long, hot shower just to rid yourself of the smell. It's not that there aren't good products out there and people who genuinely want to help, but the quick-change marketing gets in the way of what's needed most, lifetime change.