My mind likes to come out and play in the tender hours of the night, just as the light has gone out and Attie and Charles start snoring. My eyes close, and then like a college dormitory after lights-out, the doors of my mind all creep open and all kinds of thoughts flutter about . Some are good, some are not so good, often there are puzzles to be figured out and - my favorite - art projects come zooming into 3-D and I start designing things in my head. Love that part...
But, tonight, the door to my Repressed Issues came swinging open and out danced my chubby hips, and "fluffy" buttocks...my adipose tissues are haunting me.
There's a reason for this - this evening, I started reading "Ultrametabolism," a diet book by Dr. Mark Hyman. Those of you who know me well know I DETEST diets. I've been on a number of them, and they've done me no good. They've even added weight. I don't like to talk about them, I don't like to be in conversations about them, I don't like being around people who are obsessing about them - diets piss me off.
Get me around a bunch of women discussing their weight and I develop a need to pull the table cloth off, wrap it around myself, climb up on the table and begin lecturing all of my newly-created stunned audience that they're SO MUCH MORE THAN THEIR WEIGHT, that the size of their asses and their tummies SAY NOTHING about their worth as a human being. SO THERE.
But my dirty not-so-secret issue is - I'm overweight. And I hate it.
So, let's go back to the book. Why am I reading it? My nutritionist told me to. If Natalie the Wonder Nutritionist tells me to read something, I'll buy it and trust that she knows what she's doing.
Natalie Ledesma worked with my brother Chris, both as a peer and as his oncology nutritionist. Based at the University of California in Berkeley, Natalie works with Dr. Garret Smith, the oncologist my brother worked with as he fought his KS and as he wrote his book for trainers working with breast cancer survivors. (And for those of you who have managed to keep up with the timeline of Big Events in the Goad family, that's two years before I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I feel like my brother has been looking out for me!)
Natalie started working with me during my first diagnosis. Let's just say I'm not a model patient. I think she keeps me around because I'm "family" and we like each other a great deal. She's the stalwart type - even in the face of my too-frequent random indulgence in shrimp po'boys and philly cheese steak sandwiches, she sticks with me.
The last conversation we had came immediately after a call from my second opinion here in Houston. Dr. Naqvi let me know that she'd talked to my radiation oncologist and he insists that my cancer recurrence was within the field of the radiation treatments I received at the end of chemo last year. Theoretically, the recurrence shouldn't have existed. It should have either been killed by the chemo I received, or roasted by the radiation. Unfortunately, it was a resilient little schmutz, so the assumption is that I have a very aggressive form of breast cancer. If it is metastatic, I will know in the next year. It will show up somewhere.
Natalie called just after I got this delightful bit of news, and we had a frank discussion about how the docs are doing all they can for me - it's going to be up to me to make the lifestyle changes necessary to give me the best chance of surviving this crap.
Believe it or not - it's easier for me to get chemo then to make lifestyle changes.
That sounds awful. It's also unfortunately true.
I have never had a moment in my life where my weight was not an issue. I have memories of being a little girl, in first grade, and looking at my brownie pictures with some unremembered Important Person In My Life who made a comment about how fat I was. I was so ashamed. It only went downhill from there.
My world was the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The value of a woman was her looks. Oh - wait. Gee, what am I thinking?? That's the same thing for the 90s and into 2000. And it was true for decades before that. Wow. I guess women have been judged by the size of our keesters and our sex appeal for, like, ever....I'm a little bitter about that.
But I digress.
I have always been outsized. Taller than everyone, a little heavier, strong features. I feel like I stick out like a sore thumb. My features are combined with pretty sensitive nature and a dysfunctional family that moved a lot, which meant that I was always the "strange" kid at school, which meant that I was pretty much tortured by other children at school. As you can imagine, this led to my always wondering what was wrong with me. I never thought to ask the question of what was right with me. Too many people were ready to tell me otherwise.
Combine this with a propensity to put on weight, and a family obsession with both food and being thin and what you get is yo-yo dieting, a constant feeling of being a failure and a perception that my body is out to get me. Certain family members' obsession with my weight led to all kinds of crazy behavior, all perpetrated with the idea that, if I were pushed enough, embarrassed enough, told how socially unacceptable I was, I would finally get off my lazy butt and lose weight.
Yes. I'm bitter about this. At the time this was going on, I had become so socially reclusive that I was eating my lunch in the library of the high school, translating Robin Hood stories from the Middle English in the Oxford Book of Ballads. I wouldn't talk to anyone anymore - I trusted no one. Lunch consisted of a my bagged sandwich, apple, three cookies and a snickers bar. I walked every day, worked with horses and rode, and took long hikes into the ranch behind our house. I liked to come home after school and watch the Muppet Show or the 3:00 movie. I sometimes did my homework in the pasture with my filly, Chantilly. I was not lazy, nor did I snack all the time. But my body still put on weight.
I dieted and ate differently from my family, munching on weighed portions while they had what they wanted. I lost weight and was elated; I'd put it back on again and hate myself. I'd watch as my food was measured out while everyone else's was just put on their plates. I endured comments from older family members about my shorts looking like I was a cased sausage. Visiting relatives seemed to always comment on my weight, whether I looked like I was heavier or whether I looked "good".
Needless to say, my issues with weight and identity were a pattern that went on for a long time. I started Weight Watchers before Charles and I were married and lost 50 pounds. Every 10 pounds I would find myself standing in front of the mirror, gazing at my newly lightened figure, and wonder at what I ever thought was wrong with myself at that weight because I was beautiful. How could I ever have hated myself at that weight? And then I'd lose another 10 pounds and, again, I'd gaze at the image and couldn't imagine what my problem was at that weight! At 30 pounds I was astounded - I loved what I saw and bought myself an antique dress, celebrating the beautiful woman I saw in the mirror. And on it went.
And then I lost my gall bladder. The low fat, supposedly doctor-created diet had exacerbated a pre-existing, inherited condition and out it came. And then the weight started coming back on. I found myself unconsciously staring at my figure as each decade of weight layered itself on my hips and stomach, and I unconsciously found myself standing at the mirror telling myself how much of a pig I was.
Finally, at the same 30 pound benchmark, I realized that I was the exact same weight that I was when I was so proud of myself and bought the dress. The only thing that had changed was my perception of myself at that weight, not the real beauty that was standing, weeping, in the mirror. I decided to try to quit beating myself up.
I made it a game - I realized that I was just as harsh in my mind to the women around me as I was to myself, so I challenged myself to find something beautiful about every woman I saw, and if I could, tell them about it. The results were astounding - I felt better about myself. (And I made a lot of women around me feel better about themselves as well.) I've dieted a few more times after that, but each time I do, I care less. There's a portion of me that see's a diet and does everything it possibly can to rip it to pieces and to never to submit to that kind of humiliation again.
This didn't stop me from crying myself to sleep the night before my wedding, sure that my dress wouldn't fit and that I would look like a pig in my wedding pictures. That all Charles would see when I walked down the aisle was a fat woman he'd been chained to. I worked through that. But, thanks to a variety of issues - hypothyroidism, a sedentary career, my hysterectomy, chemo, my denial that food is not necessarily friend - I'm the heaviest I've ever been, and it's looking like that extra weight could kill me.
There are those of you out there who are reading this and maybe don't understand what I'm talking about at all. Weight is an easy, black and white thing for you. Eat less, exercise more, weigh less. What's hard about that? But the equation is not complete - it's like simple math. You might get an nice, easy answer, a whole number, but once you get deeper into reality, you realize that whole numbers are only real when you're counting out apples, not when you're really trying to describe something of incredible importance. It's also similar to saying that poor people are poor because they spend too much and don't save. Nope. There are too many variables that are not being accounted for.
Being overweight is not symptomatic of a weak will. It's not a sign of laziness or lack of character. It is not a sign that someone is a success or a failure in life. Nor is being thin an indication of intellectual brilliance or a sterling character. Being fat or being thin is often a chemical accident of our genetics, just as surely as that of our skin color being black, brown, yellow or pink.
I know some of you will want to lecture me on this subject after reading this post. Please, do not give in to that temptation. I will be rude if you do. I'm working with a very talented, well trained, well studied nutritionist and she will be my source for all nutrition-related issues in my life. Say a prayer of patience for her - she'll likely need it. But she will be my only source for this. I want to hear from you if you understand what I've said here, I want to hear from you about your own issues with this, I want to hear that you love me and want me around - but don't even begin to lecture me or say "I told you so." I won't like that a'tall.
I know this is a no-fun post, especially before the holidays, but it's where I'm at right now, at 12:16 p.m. This is my spectre tonight and now that I've exercised it (pun intended) I'm off to bed.
Good night.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Christmas Signs
It's December already. I can hardly believe it - life has been moving at absolutely rocket speed. I can barely remember Thanksgiving.
It's been a full month. At the end of October, I told you about two events in our family - Diane Ottenweller's death and Lisa Goad's new diagnosis of lung cancer.
Diane's family is working through their grief. There's a "Thank God" moment in it all - for many years, the family was living a bi-continent lifestyle, with Diane and Mark in Jo'burg with their daughter Leslie and her husband Tony, while the other two kids were living in the States. They were finally all living on one continent when her death occurred, allowing Mark and kids to grieve together, rather than alone, separated by literally 10,000 miles. That is absolutely a blessing.
Lisa is still in the hospital, but we have great hopes that she'll be out this week. She finally, FINALLY, got her chemo a few days ago. This isn't a failing on the part of the docs - many things had to happen before she was able to get the drugs. First, she had a gamma knife operation on the brain lesion. (Frankly, if it wasn't true that this cancer stuff is freaking scary, it is also absolutely fascinating! The Gamma Knife is truly revolutionary. Remember in Ghostbusters when it was baaaad to cross the streams?? That's what this technology does - it takes two streams of radiation, which on their own are benign, and crosses them at the lesion site. There's a milimeter of miss in the device....just a milimeter. Amazing!) They don't know if they got all of her tumor, but they gave it a good shot.
Then came the radiation to her back. It took about 2 weeks; Hermann Hospital in the Med Center, where she is, doesn't have the radiation facilities she needed. Memorial City, west of town, did. It's where my treatments were. Every day, Lisa was loaded into a private ambulance and driven about 14 miles to receive radiation. Now - hold onto your hats - get this: for the first week or so, every day, these private ambulances would get lost. Yep - that's right. Lost. They couldn't find their way to (1) the hospital (it's a big hospital, I promise you) and then, once they did, (2) the radiation facilities. Lisa's dad started riding with her to treatments and between the two of them, they helped the drivers find where they were going. I assume these folks were new to town...maybe to Texas... who knows. I was incredulous when she told me - how can an ambulance service not know where a big, prominent, as obvious as a sore thumb, hospital is?? It says a lot of Lisa that, by the time her treatments were done, she and the ambulance staff had bonded. They gave her a present and big hugs when she was finished.
But then, I'm not surprised. For those of you who've not met Lisa, she's a woman I can only describe as embodying grace. You'd be so proud of her - she's been in the hospital for 8 weeks now, being poked, prodded, in pain, away from her family and children, stuck in one bed for hours on end, and her peace remains. Serenity is hers, for the most part. Don't think for a moment that it is total - please trust me, this disease attacks serenity and faith as surely as it eats at your tissue - but her faith is doing its job and she's doing pretty well. I think she'll do even better when she makes it home.
We've had her's and John's two girls for a few weekends while Lisa's been at Hermann. I wish we could have had them more often - I know they're my family, but they really are wonderful kids. Hannah's the oldest. She's 9, and she's rolling with this situation very well. I not only love my niece, I also like and respect her. I'm very proud of the way she's been handling herself through this. I have sooooo much fun when they're here! Last weekend, we had a neighbor friend over to play, as well as my wonderful 14 year old niece Suzie, who's the daughter of Charles' sister Jean, and we moved the dining room table to in front of the fireplace, and then proceeded to sit around, enjoy a toasty warm fire, and work on Christmas stockings. I had a BLAST.
And then they go home. I think I like this aunt thing a whoooooole lot:)
So - I guess I should talk about where things are at for me. In a word - crazed. Look - I'm trying, very hard, not to put myself through the ringer and do too much, but I'm too awful at it! I don't know I've overcommitted myself until I'm standing in the middle of the room, wondering where the floor is. I'm working on my project at the Medical Museum - still loving every bit of it - but have hired a science writer to help wrap it up, just to take some of the load off while the Universe is giving me my turn at playing "Job". (No, not "Jobs"...that would be a different type of torture...:) I'm also doing some projects for HexaGroup, which include some web writing, project managment, and script writing.
Also, I did an interview with the father of one of my good friends last week, Mr. Gilbert Baker, founder of the AFP Group here in Houston. His firm is paying me to write the article for a local newspaper, in celebration of his 50 years in business. I can say, without equivocation, that this is one of the finest men I've ever had the grace to meet. The article will only be difficult in that I won't be able to unrestrainedly gush about the guy - I mean, I am being paid and it would sound like just so much tookus-smooching, but honest to God.... He's a man who totally lives by his ethics and creed to better his community. His company provides financial planning services for people - that's how we know them. His daughter Ann is not only one of my favorite people, she's also been our planner for the past 5 years. (She jokes that she's the 3rd person in our relationship, since Charles and I can't make a financial decision to save our lives!)
Gil loves helping people plan their futures, because he's seen first hand how his work saves lives. Yeah - saves lives. Never knew a 401k had that kind of power, huh? But he's helped 3 generations of clients save for retirement and planned for those unplanned eventualities - like what Lisa, Mark and I are going through - and knows that what he's doing allows families to continue on in dignity, with room to do what they need to for their loved ones and grieve, without relying on someone else's charity. That's very powerful. So, I'm enjoying the project.
My cancer treatments continue... we'll have to see about tomorrow's abraxane dose, tho. I've had a WHOPPER of a cold, an absolute head stuffer - bad enough that the doc office put me on cipro because I'd developed a sinus infection as well. Bleh. That's the stuff that kills absolutely everything - it's what they give folks exposed to anthrax. I spent the day in my pjs, kinda just mooching around the house... until, at 4:30, when we HAD to go get dog food (he was totally out) which woke me up, which meant we ran a few more errands, which meant I found a christmas tree, which meant we had to take care of it when we got it home...and I ended up pretty wound up....and now blogging at 11:3o at night.
We were coming home from a christmas party last night, listening to an irish music program as we cruised down the highways towards the house. We were on the North Side, coming through barrio areas. The elevated highway gave me a bird's eye glimpse into the neighborhoods as we zoomed past.
Beneath me, the humble dwellings were merrily festooned with christmas lights. I could see distinct yards as we passed, draped with zillions of little lights. The Irish music tilted along in the background - an earthy, centered music, that matched the humble state of the those homes I watched. It seemed to me so incredibly beautiful that these people, who have much less than we do, spend their time and emotional energy so lovingly on hanging those lights. They took such joy in the effort... these are people who's son and daughters are in Iraq. They joined the armed services for a way to pay for a new life, go to school, provide for their family. And their families back home were putting out christmas lights - not just as a cumpulsory activity for the season, but as a sign of Hope. The coming of the new year, new times, new decisions, new family moments. Hope of good family times to come. Hope in their God for protection for those they love.
That essence of hope came home with me last night, and amazed me with it's power. It's so easy to forget Hope, to instead become mired in the everyday dirge that has to be done and cleaned up, without realizing that Hope is waiting outside the door, ready for us to break free of our trying times and discover new life.
......wowoo...look at all the pretty swirly colors... I take it my Ambien has kicked in:) nighty-night.
It's been a full month. At the end of October, I told you about two events in our family - Diane Ottenweller's death and Lisa Goad's new diagnosis of lung cancer.
Diane's family is working through their grief. There's a "Thank God" moment in it all - for many years, the family was living a bi-continent lifestyle, with Diane and Mark in Jo'burg with their daughter Leslie and her husband Tony, while the other two kids were living in the States. They were finally all living on one continent when her death occurred, allowing Mark and kids to grieve together, rather than alone, separated by literally 10,000 miles. That is absolutely a blessing.
Lisa is still in the hospital, but we have great hopes that she'll be out this week. She finally, FINALLY, got her chemo a few days ago. This isn't a failing on the part of the docs - many things had to happen before she was able to get the drugs. First, she had a gamma knife operation on the brain lesion. (Frankly, if it wasn't true that this cancer stuff is freaking scary, it is also absolutely fascinating! The Gamma Knife is truly revolutionary. Remember in Ghostbusters when it was baaaad to cross the streams?? That's what this technology does - it takes two streams of radiation, which on their own are benign, and crosses them at the lesion site. There's a milimeter of miss in the device....just a milimeter. Amazing!) They don't know if they got all of her tumor, but they gave it a good shot.
Then came the radiation to her back. It took about 2 weeks; Hermann Hospital in the Med Center, where she is, doesn't have the radiation facilities she needed. Memorial City, west of town, did. It's where my treatments were. Every day, Lisa was loaded into a private ambulance and driven about 14 miles to receive radiation. Now - hold onto your hats - get this: for the first week or so, every day, these private ambulances would get lost. Yep - that's right. Lost. They couldn't find their way to (1) the hospital (it's a big hospital, I promise you) and then, once they did, (2) the radiation facilities. Lisa's dad started riding with her to treatments and between the two of them, they helped the drivers find where they were going. I assume these folks were new to town...maybe to Texas... who knows. I was incredulous when she told me - how can an ambulance service not know where a big, prominent, as obvious as a sore thumb, hospital is?? It says a lot of Lisa that, by the time her treatments were done, she and the ambulance staff had bonded. They gave her a present and big hugs when she was finished.
But then, I'm not surprised. For those of you who've not met Lisa, she's a woman I can only describe as embodying grace. You'd be so proud of her - she's been in the hospital for 8 weeks now, being poked, prodded, in pain, away from her family and children, stuck in one bed for hours on end, and her peace remains. Serenity is hers, for the most part. Don't think for a moment that it is total - please trust me, this disease attacks serenity and faith as surely as it eats at your tissue - but her faith is doing its job and she's doing pretty well. I think she'll do even better when she makes it home.
We've had her's and John's two girls for a few weekends while Lisa's been at Hermann. I wish we could have had them more often - I know they're my family, but they really are wonderful kids. Hannah's the oldest. She's 9, and she's rolling with this situation very well. I not only love my niece, I also like and respect her. I'm very proud of the way she's been handling herself through this. I have sooooo much fun when they're here! Last weekend, we had a neighbor friend over to play, as well as my wonderful 14 year old niece Suzie, who's the daughter of Charles' sister Jean, and we moved the dining room table to in front of the fireplace, and then proceeded to sit around, enjoy a toasty warm fire, and work on Christmas stockings. I had a BLAST.
And then they go home. I think I like this aunt thing a whoooooole lot:)
So - I guess I should talk about where things are at for me. In a word - crazed. Look - I'm trying, very hard, not to put myself through the ringer and do too much, but I'm too awful at it! I don't know I've overcommitted myself until I'm standing in the middle of the room, wondering where the floor is. I'm working on my project at the Medical Museum - still loving every bit of it - but have hired a science writer to help wrap it up, just to take some of the load off while the Universe is giving me my turn at playing "Job". (No, not "Jobs"...that would be a different type of torture...:) I'm also doing some projects for HexaGroup, which include some web writing, project managment, and script writing.
Also, I did an interview with the father of one of my good friends last week, Mr. Gilbert Baker, founder of the AFP Group here in Houston. His firm is paying me to write the article for a local newspaper, in celebration of his 50 years in business. I can say, without equivocation, that this is one of the finest men I've ever had the grace to meet. The article will only be difficult in that I won't be able to unrestrainedly gush about the guy - I mean, I am being paid and it would sound like just so much tookus-smooching, but honest to God.... He's a man who totally lives by his ethics and creed to better his community. His company provides financial planning services for people - that's how we know them. His daughter Ann is not only one of my favorite people, she's also been our planner for the past 5 years. (She jokes that she's the 3rd person in our relationship, since Charles and I can't make a financial decision to save our lives!)
Gil loves helping people plan their futures, because he's seen first hand how his work saves lives. Yeah - saves lives. Never knew a 401k had that kind of power, huh? But he's helped 3 generations of clients save for retirement and planned for those unplanned eventualities - like what Lisa, Mark and I are going through - and knows that what he's doing allows families to continue on in dignity, with room to do what they need to for their loved ones and grieve, without relying on someone else's charity. That's very powerful. So, I'm enjoying the project.
My cancer treatments continue... we'll have to see about tomorrow's abraxane dose, tho. I've had a WHOPPER of a cold, an absolute head stuffer - bad enough that the doc office put me on cipro because I'd developed a sinus infection as well. Bleh. That's the stuff that kills absolutely everything - it's what they give folks exposed to anthrax. I spent the day in my pjs, kinda just mooching around the house... until, at 4:30, when we HAD to go get dog food (he was totally out) which woke me up, which meant we ran a few more errands, which meant I found a christmas tree, which meant we had to take care of it when we got it home...and I ended up pretty wound up....and now blogging at 11:3o at night.
We were coming home from a christmas party last night, listening to an irish music program as we cruised down the highways towards the house. We were on the North Side, coming through barrio areas. The elevated highway gave me a bird's eye glimpse into the neighborhoods as we zoomed past.
Beneath me, the humble dwellings were merrily festooned with christmas lights. I could see distinct yards as we passed, draped with zillions of little lights. The Irish music tilted along in the background - an earthy, centered music, that matched the humble state of the those homes I watched. It seemed to me so incredibly beautiful that these people, who have much less than we do, spend their time and emotional energy so lovingly on hanging those lights. They took such joy in the effort... these are people who's son and daughters are in Iraq. They joined the armed services for a way to pay for a new life, go to school, provide for their family. And their families back home were putting out christmas lights - not just as a cumpulsory activity for the season, but as a sign of Hope. The coming of the new year, new times, new decisions, new family moments. Hope of good family times to come. Hope in their God for protection for those they love.
That essence of hope came home with me last night, and amazed me with it's power. It's so easy to forget Hope, to instead become mired in the everyday dirge that has to be done and cleaned up, without realizing that Hope is waiting outside the door, ready for us to break free of our trying times and discover new life.
......wowoo...look at all the pretty swirly colors... I take it my Ambien has kicked in:) nighty-night.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)