The Importance of Little Victories

 

OK - another weigh-in day. And, for the first time in four measured weeks, progress in the right direction. 

Today: 16 stone, 8.75. 232.75 pounds, or some batshit number of kilos.

Down 2.5 pounds on the week. I have no real explanation of why that would be the case, except perhaps that it's the first post-bathroom weigh-in in a couple of weeks, so potentially it's just closer to the truth than either of the last two weigh-ins have been.

Nevertheless, it feels like a little victory and I'm happy to take it.

Other little victories this week have included d finally (again, after about four weeks) being seen by a doctor and prescribed the right medication to help with her diabetes and her arterial embuggerance.

Four weeks of going it alone, doing the right things off her own bat before the doctor was available to get her the right medication.

In a counterbalancing little frustration, she still has yet to see the local diabetic nurse to discuss ideally non-stabbing methods of blood sugar monitoring. That was supposed to be happening today, but was yet again cancelled yesterday, postponed until next week.

The diabetic nurse works only Monday and Tuesday, creating a natural bottleneck in the number of patients she can see in any given week. And she's recently been ill, which has reduced that number even further. We don't of course blame the nurse for that - but for there to be no contingency in place to serve the diabetics of the district is absurd. The procedure states that only after an appointment with the diabetic nurse can diabetic care prescriptions be dispensed.

So, right now she's at the bottom of a bottleneck.

Which is why we're celebrating the little victories - because the potential to wallow in the big frustrations is too high.

In other news, it's a year ago today that we lost my uncle, who, while his lungs filled with fluid, was hectored and lectured by a paramedic that he should lose some weight and get some exercise.

Little victories, little victories, little victories...

The Incremental Death of the Black Spot

 

This whole Disappearing lark, while seeming to go in the wrong direction as far as my weightloss journey is concerned, is beginning to bear fruit. 

Back when we began, d's diabetic toe ulcer was such that we were sombrely warned of amputation, and chances of avoiding such a fate being around "50-50."

She's been good ever since, cutting out cakes, desserts, and the like, cutting her soft drink intake right down, and so on, so as to allow the bloodflow she has in her legs a fighting chance to regrow healthy toeflesh and fuck the black spot (her name for the ulcer, and a nod to the whole of piratical historiy and literature) right off. 

This week, there was significant progress. The black spot is lifting, under the pressure of freshly grown healthy flesh! If we were given a 50-50 chance, it seems d's efforts are driving us firmly down the right path, towards keeping every digit we have!

Also this week - after quite the game of appointment hopscotch with our local doctors, she got her new medication schedule, so she's now finally getting chemical help to maximize bloodflow and rein in the diabetic effects.

So, while I may rail against the Nazi Scales and why they continue to nudge my numbers in what is clearly the wrong direction, there is at least identifiable evidence of reduced sugar-pressure on the system. 

Yay!

The Grapes of Wrath

 

 

 

d: "This is the worst time of the day for me."

 

Me: *Chomping grimly through grapes.* "Mm-hmm."

 

d: "I want something SWEEEEET!"

 

Me: *Swallows grape passive aggressively.*

 

d: "At least you've got your grapes."

 

Me: "You WANT some grapes?"

 

d: "Hell no!"

 

Me: "I don't blame you, they're a million light years from pleasure."

 

d: "Eat the damn grapes!"

 

---

 

Soooo, that's how we're doing.

 

In additional news, the universe is clearly fucking with me.

Went away for three days last week to meet the people with whom I now, newly work. Schlepped from West Wales to Leamington Spa, and found myself on relatively short rations, inasmuch as I couldn't do my usual thing of grazing throughout the day, because - humans.

 

Did the good things - eschewed the massive red velvet cake that was offered to me, didn't drink the alcohol, had only coffee and soft drinks.

 

Let the record show that the hotel in which we stayed had no diet options - so a potentially unfeasible amount of wildly unrestricted lemonade and a fair few J2O sugar-bombs went down my neck.

 

But nothing that might under normal circumstances be considered excessive.

Had what I euphemistically describe as a "digestive flume" Sunday morning, which has only one benefit, in that it cleans out your system and should, in any even remotely fair universe, make you weigh less than you did beforehand. 

I weighed half a pound more than I did at my last official weigh-in. So clearly, that can fuck right off.

As can this morning's weigh-in. 

16 stone, 11.25 pounds. Overall, up two full pounds since I started avoiding the drawerful of chocolate I have, and suchlike other fun things.

There's a certain righteous "Fuck it all!" urge that rises when you do the better things and get what feels like "punished" for it. All I can say is my eyes and nerves and kidneys and such better be thankful for this bullshit, that now sees me closer to the next half-stone upward than I am to my original goal of the downward half-stone.

Humph.

Am off to eat a grape, dammit.

The Chocolate Bars Uneaten

Well, whoop-de-doo.

It's weigh-in day, and unlike last week, I'm here for it, at least physically.

Two weeks ago, I started out at 16 stone 9.25 pounds. 233.25 pounds, or...some kilos.

Missed weighing-in last week, and this morning's weight is...16 stone, 9.75 pounds.

Up. Half a pound. In spite of all the chocolate bars uneaten.

That's enough to inspire a hearty "Fuck this shit!" in my brain, but crucially, this time, makes no connection with my body. I'm not about to fall - or indeed, jump - off the bandwagon over this perversity. Clearly, I've eaten much more healthily than "normal," but also, there have been some carbfests, so it's not like I can rend my garments and wail to the ancient, uncaring, probably-already-dead stars "WHHHHHHY?! WHY MEEEEEEE?!"

I mean, you know what I'm like, so you know that's kind of what I want to do right now, but instead am going to be a stinking, lousy, rotten, sonofabitch grown-up and crack the hell on.

I s'pose.

Yippee!

Am off to a corporate entertainment gig for two days tomorrow, with travel also tomorrow and Friday, so things may be looser than usual, but still going to maintain my overt sugar avoidance malarkey, to keep the body unhappy, stressed and jittery - because that's just what you need the first time you meet your colleagues in a new job, right?

Onward, while flicking V-signs at my new half-pound fellow traveller.

The Saundersfoot Camille

 

d's coming to that point of melodrama that every Disappearing person goes through - and indeed, occasionally lives in.

While walking through the store in which she works earlier, she passed by the chocolate aisle, and she swears this complete thought went through her head:

*Sighs wanly.* "Ah! Never again shall my lips know the soft, intoxicating caress of Bournville..."

Bournville, for the depressingly uninitiated (which tends to mean my American groovers) is a bar of dark chocolate, rather than some mesmerising Mr Darcy figure, ready to sweep her up in her crinolines and kiss her in a way that makes her remember she's a woman.

Chocolate.

Damn good chocolate, to be sure. But chocolate. 

I'm away from home three days this week. The struggle, it seems, will be real.

Death of a Garbage Can

 

Apologies - we've been away for a day and a half.

In the world of delusions where this matters to anyone, it'd be quite an important day and a half - I missed the first official weigh-in yesterday morning, because we headed to Carmarthen for the day, so as to be within cabbing distance of Glangwilli hospital for ds appointment with the vascular surgeon.

Long story short on that - seems like good news. The surgeon clearly said he thought the ulcer would probably clear up and naff off on its own, with a little help from aspirin, statins, and good blood sugar control.

He wants an MRI, to get a baseline map of the arteries in d's legs and feet, and suggested two levels of surgical intervention if the arteries in her feet are dissolving like a meringue in the rain - ballooning arteries, and potential bypasses. 

What he very crucially made absolutely no mention of was any level of amputation - which came as a huge relief, in terms of the narrative we've been given so far. We're taking that as a victory.

Oh, for those who are reading this consistently - there were no plain croissants available. We're taking that as the universe throwing a bitch-curve, but also, removing the potential of a quandary.

If you're thinking "So? Go weigh-in now, show us what you've managed in a week!" - Shan't. May not weigh-in now until Friday morning out of utterly convenient and entirely borrowed "superstition." Not getting tomorrow off to any kind of negative start, because I intend to entirely hammered by the end of it, doing a shot for every leading Tory who loses their seat. 

One thing has become clear over the last couple of days, though.

I'm releasing myself of the responsibility to be the garbage can at mealtimes.

Some of you will instinctively understand what that means, but for those who didn't grow up relatively poor, here's the deal:

There are generational elements to this - If the phrase "There are children starving in Africa" means anything to you, you'll understand the generational efforts of parents to ensure their kids ate as much of the "good stuff" as possible. But if you were relatively poor, there was an extra dimension to it. 

We were never as poor as people are these days, proably - food banks were not a national network of necessity when I was a kid. There was always food in my house and my gran's, but it was usually extremely good, standard, carb-based stuff. Or if it wasn't, I wasn't interested in it. 

But somewhere along the line - my therapist would invite you to think it was about the time my parents divorced and certainties became less certain than they had been - I formed the learned instinct that if there was any of the good stuff left on anyone else's plate, it was my responsibility (not to mention my significant pleasure - which is how it got classed as the good stuff!) to eat their leftovers, as well as my own plateful. And to polish off any seconds or even thirds too, rather than let good food to waste.

I've more or less always done it.

Except when I Disappeared before. 

The last few days, I've found the mentality creeping over me to cut that nonsense out. To eat till I'm sufficiently full, not burstingly full, and then to leave the rest - my own and other people's (which to all intents and purposes these days means d's).

I'm not gonna lie (well, not now, anyway). There's a kind of fear response in doing that. Y'know how some people can't pass a picture that's crookedly hung without righting it?

It's that sensation. Somewhere, I've associated only the feeling of being burstingly full with being actually full, and being actually full with being OK, nurtured, safe from want. With the world being right.

That, I think, has played into my bingeing behavior - it's been an answer to an actual panic sensation. But it also feeds in to my grazing behavior - keep topping up, keep topping up, keep topping up and everything'll be fine.

S'probably killing me, to be fair. 

So the notion of not eating everything, including others' leftovers and seconds, actually triggers a mild panic reaction even to think about. 

But I've started doing it. And it started fairly naturally. So we'll see where it goes. Death of a garbage can?

Now, in full transparency, tonight's dinner was pad thai, and d couldn't eat all of hers. Did I step in? Yes - but I can genuinely say that that was in response to a "relatively" healthy trigger: the combiantion of continuing comparative hunger and the tastiness of the food. It wasn't in response to any panic stimulus attached to not being full enough.

Rationalizing?

Maybe, but man, the food was good.

We'll only see if the garbage can is really dead by drawing a graph of a trend over time, of course.

For now, we're taking the good vascular news, and not using it as a Get Out Of Blood Sugar Control Free card. Onward and downward are the only ways to avoid poor consequences.

(No Muppets were harmed in the production of this blog entry).

The Joy of the Green Jeanie...

 

Quite the newsy day, today. As d says, we've been working like a well-oiled machine, together and in the same direction.

Which, for the first day of a 

First of all, we went to Tenby, taking her toe along with us. It was unveiled, and a whole new concave basin of fresh puss was revealed. How did your Monday start?

d was brave while the puss was more or less scooped out of her living flesh. The podiatrist wasn't entirely able to say whether fresh puss was a good thing, a bad thing, or just a Monday, because, as she put it, "We can't tell whether it's been there building up for a while."

She did however give us some useful information on the availability of those automatic, non-stabby blood sugar monitors on the NHS, so we'll be pursuing that. In fact, d's taken an appointment with the local diabetic nurse to discuss that and more on the 8th July. 

The day I start my new job, or I'd be going too.

Had breakfast (d's braver than me - she went for post-pussfest omelettes, although now I think about it, I had a fried egg roll, with yolks that burst and oozed yellow liquid, so y'know, bravery is as bravery realizes, I guess), and then - on the first day off we've had together in a while - we did Tenby. Up it, down it - d bought me a book, I bought her a couple of scarves, I bought myself a glorious, outrageous hat, and we sauntered back to town.

Long story short, I start a new job a week today. A week Wednesday I schlepp some six hours or so by train up to Warwick to actually...y'know...meet these people in four dimensions. 

That means ideally abandoning my usual style of "Two sacks of shit preacariously tied together somewhere round the middle" and actually wearing Real People Clothes.

Most of me, of course, hates Real People Clothes, but I threw some things into an Amazon basket - most of which, if I'm honest, are disconcertingly green. In my head, probably, was some idea of the traditional Riddler look.

What I personally will look like in a mostly green ensemble is the oldest leprechaun in the Lucky Charms factory, but we persevere.

The point of telling you this is that I ordered the stuff from Amazon - and it mostly fit. By which I mean it all fitted in the important ways - the jacket (Green-ish) almost did up and just needed a couple of inches taking off the sleeves. The smart (significantly more green) jeans (proper, branded ones and all - they were a frigging steal, to the point where they've already jumped back up in price from what I got them for), didn't look like they'd fit.

"Oh, those are going straight back," said d as she saw me get one leg in.

"Let me just confirm," I said, sliding the other leg in.

And they fit. They did up. I could sit, stand, walk, do everything I need to do with The People in 'em. 

Now, granted they needed a good eight inches chopping off the bottom and tailoring because clearly, you're not supposed to have a bodily girth like mine unless you're at least six feet tall. But bugger it - there's a lovely seamstress on the Strand in the village who's doing both sets of alterations for under a tenner, so screw you, unrealistically tall standards. I shall be both short and stylish!

And...did I mention, very, very green? Like Kermit's unreliable uncle, wandering up to Warwick for quarterly meetings and - I kid you not - "corporate fun."

All of which is just to highlight the fact that I bought a bunch of random clothes - off the internet. 

And, with a little faffing about sleeves and quite a lot of faffing about the legs, they fit me.

If you've never been too big to wear off the peg clothes, this will entirely fail to connect with you.

But my big folk, my tall folk, and frankly women (because why would there be standard agreement on sizes) will get the point. Yes, there's lots of ground to cover, lots of change to make, but, for instance, when I started Disappearing the first time, this would never have been an option. I even had to buy an extra-special fancy-dancy exercise bike, because none of the click-and-buy ones you can get online were rated for my weight.

So, as the Monday between jobs goes, lots of time with my girl, an impressive puss-explosion, potential information towards better blood monitoring, and an ability to buy clothes off the electronic peg - and get 'em tailored to my needs. Not too freaking shabby.