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).