My Inspiration

I posted recently about missing my grandfather and how he was a big motivator for this surgery. My grandfather was a healthy and active man most of his life. When he was 80 years old he was winning chin-up contests at the gym. He was also a healthy and active smoker, it eventually caught up with him and he was diagnosed with lung cancer. The cancer changed him from a strong and vibrant man to a man who was physically very weak. We thought he was getting better and then he has a stroke, testing after the stroke revealed cancer in his brain, the lung cancer we thought was under control has metastasized around his body. It was three short and shocking weeks and then he was gone. My grandfather chose not to have drastic measures to save his life and when he was unable to feed or care for himself he went into hospice care. We spent seven days watching him breathe. The doctors told us they couldn't tell us when the end would come, but as his breathing slowed the end was getting nearer. We took turns sitting there for a week, counting his breaths, hoping for one more and wishing that he could be in peace. What I wanted more than one more breath was one more moment with him as the man I remembered. The day he died was really the day my weight loss journey began, I was angry with him for being a smoker, I saw every cigarette as a moment that was taken away. Slowly I began to see these extra pounds as moments, moments I was taking away from myself and from my family and I decided I wanted them back. With every pound lost I feel more vibrant and more alive and more at peace with the loss of a man who meant so much to me.

Idle Hands

Make for lots of recent pictures of me.

My WOW Moment

Flying has been difficult the last couple of years. I recently went to a children's museum with my nieces and they had a fake cockpit complete with airline seats. Not only did I fit in the seat, I buckled it with room to spare!

Walk down Memory Lane

My three nieces are visiting me right now. We have been having a blast and tonight we decided to have a slumber party. The girls wanted to look through my wedding album and watch my wedding video. I was a little hesitant to watch it because it is hard to see myself when I was heavy, but all I could see was how happy I was that day. My niece looked at me and said you look different now than you did that day. It was the first time she's mentioned it. There is no question that I am happy with the weight I have lost, but I was happy with my life before too. I don't want this blog to create the impression that my life as a heavy person was not filled with happiness, it was, but now I am more of a participant than an observer.

My 31st Birthday

I turned 31 yesterday and this past week has been like a walk down memory lane for me. I spent the last week at Virginia Beach with my mother, my nieces and my sister. I spent many summers at Virginia Beach as a child, my great grandmother has a cottage there and I went there every summer until I was about sixteen years old. I went back many summers while in college and law school to share the memories with my friends. Just after my husband and I got married the cottage was sold and my Husband and I went to the beach to clean it out. I hadn't been back to Virginia Beach since that day, I had mixed feelings about going to the site where so many of my childhood memories were made and seeing an empty grass lot where the cottage had once stood. On the way up to Virginia we stopped to visit my grandfather's grave.

My grandfather died three years ago. He is a major reason that I am the person I am today and each time I look at my progress I feel a small pang of regret that he never got to see me live up to the full potential he always believed was there.

We avoided it for a few days, but we took a drive past the place where the cottage used to be. There was nothing there but grass. Even though the cottage was gone, we still had a blast at the beach. It was comforting to know that even though the house was gone I could still make memories at the beach. It is a lame metaphor for my life, my former identity is gone, but I can make new memories the way I am now.

This weekend I walked on the beach in a bathing suit, and while I don't exactly feel like a Hawaiian Tropic model, I didn't feel like people were pointing and laughing at me either.

Here is a glimpse of some of those new memories:

A little story

I turn 31 next Friday, turning 30 was hard for me, all I could think about was how much I had wanted to accomplish that I had not yet done and all the things I felt I would never accomplish. Turning 31, is not nearly as bitter sweet. As a matter of fact this is the first birthday I can remember where I'm looking forward not back.

Five months ago, weighing 270 pounds I went to the mall with a friend and bought a size twelve skirt. It seemed like such a far away and lofty goal at the time. Today I took some pictures in that skirt, and it was exactly what I needed in the middle of this long and frustrating stall.

8 Months Out

At eight months out from the surgery life is far more normal than I thought. My eating issues seem to be behind me and I can eat a relatively normal diet, just a lot less than what I ate before. I had my second round of post op blood tests and have been directed to follow up with a hematologist. My hematocrit and hemaglobin counts are low and the doctor wants me to follow up to make sure I am not developing a problem with anemia.

My weight is stalled, hopelessly and completely stalled. I have lost 152 pounds, but not a single pound in the last six weeks. I am trying not to frustrate, but I do wonder at what point a stall becomes the weight my body is determined to maintain. The truth is I would like to be thinner, now that I have come all this ways, visions of finally being thin dance in my head, but I have accomplished every other goal I set out for myself.

My niece is here for the summer and for the first time ever, she's wearing out before I do. It is uplifting to know that I can keep up with the often boundless energy of children.

I haven't taken my pictures yet, but they are coming soon I promise.

The one major change in the last month, my elusive collar bones have finally made an appearance and I am happy to see them!

Ham Update

This post has gotten more responses than any other post I have made on my blog. I'm not quite sure what to make of that, but for those of you who are curious (and there were MANY) I still have not located the ham and no the trunk of my car does not stink. I will post additional ham updates as they become available.

My first post surgery outing.

In a lot of ways the recovery from this cyst surgery has been more difficult than the recovery from the bypass surgery. I think the recovery has been slowed because I am slower to hear now than before. So in all my infinite wisdom I decided to go to Target on my own the other day, the following ensued;

Went to the doc this morning, he insisted on seeing me before giving me a refill of my pain meds to make sure I didn't have an infection. No infection, just a swollen ass.

So I decide to go to target by myself to fill the prescription. He said I could drive whenever I was ready as long as I wasn't taking any narcs.

I'm leaving target and it looks like its about to down pour. So I run as fast as a person with sixty stitches in her ass can run. I'm halfway to the car and the sky opens up. It was like someone was dumping buckets on me. I throw the groceries in the trunk and then have a dilemma.

It is going to take me five minutes to get situated behind the wheel of the car. So I open the back door and dive in the backseat and lay there waiting for the rain to stop. After about three minutes I hear a knock on the window, I look up and see a police officer standing there in the pouring rain. I struggle to get up, I kneel on the floor of the car and open the door for him. He asks me if I am ok, I say yes, I had surgery on my butt and I'm sore. He asks me to repeat myself. Then he says are you sure you don't need any help. I said nope I'm fine just waiting for the rain to stop. He looks confused but walks away. He goes and gets in his car and waits for me to leave the parking lot, then he

When I got home I unloaded the groceries and somehow lost a three pound ham. I have torn the house apart and have no idea where it is.

Oh and the cherry on top, I caught rotovirus from the freaking hospital!! Nine years of working as a nanny, two years as a preschool teacher and I never catch it, I spend half a day in the hospital and whammo.

(The maxi pad is taped to my bum to cushion the stiches, it was the doctor's idea!)

Home from Surgery

About two weeks ago I was diagnosed with a pilonidal cyst. For those of you who haven't heard of this it is a cyst on the my tailbone. A few weeks ago it flared up and was causing me quite a bit of pain. (For those of you who are curious about this I don't recommend google, the images are gruesome.) Mine was not nearly as inflamed as some others get but the pain was not going away. Ironically this is usually something found in people who are overweight. The pain from mine only became unbearable after my surgery. It is strange that this is now the second time I have suffered from something that theoretically should have gone away after the surgery. I still don't regret the surgery and half of me wonders if perhaps I am just paying more attention to problems that were always there. I had surgery this morning to remove the cyst and I am home and recovering. I have strict orders to avoid sitting unless absolutely necessary for the next two weeks, so I may be updating my blog every ten minutes.

My weight is still stalled, this marks week nine of my stall, however yesterday I noticed that my shorts were quite loose, so hopefully that is a sign that I will start losing again soon. When I met with the nutritionist he mentioned that it is not uncommon to stall at a weight your body was at for quite a while. The size I am now was the size I was at for most of college so that may be the explanation for the stall. It would be nice to see the scale move again though.

The nausea is gone!

It appears that my problems with nausea after eating were indeed related to acid reflux. After several days on a much stronger acid reflux medication, the nausea is all but gone. Words cannot express how happy I am about this!

Falling off the Wagon

Yesterday I didn't follow any of my eating rules. I think saying I fell off the wagon is an understatement, it is more like I ripped the wagon apart and set if on fire. If there was food there I ate it and the unhealthier the better. Nothing in particular set it off, except possibly the stress of building a new closet organization system. My bedroom and master bathroom look like a bomb went off, and I won't be able to get it put back together until this weekend. While I am handling the stress better than I normally would, it still has left me feeling out of sorts.

Normally something like this would have set off weeks of bad eating. But today I'm back on the wagon, no junk food, healthy protein, and eating only every two and a half hours. Like I've said before, you fall down, you get up. Its my new life motto.