Saturday, July 1, 2000

11:46 PM -- This holiday weekend is a bit of a personal retreat for me. I think what I am trying to do is to build up some kind of reserve courage so that I can begin to start taking care of myself. I've been going through my collection of self-help books (did you ever hear that there is a direct relationship between one's weight and the number of self-help and diet books they own?) and reflecting on the role of alcohol and food as anaesthesia for me. I don't think I've mentioned it so far, but on top of the weight, I also have been struggling with a dependency on alcohol. While for me the problem with the eating started sometime in puberty, the drinking problem came later. When I drank, I really drank, but as I grew older, there was some semblance of maturity with the drinking.

It became a problem right after my mother's heart attack six years ago.

I was at work in the middle of January. I got a call from my father; my mother was in the hospital. Things didn't look good. I hopped on a plane (thanks Amex) and after a surreal cab trip where I had to give the cabbie the right directions to the hospital, I got to the hospital, where we spent a pretty horrific three days. Although it was fairly long ago, there are still a few things I remember clearly. How unreal it seemed that with my mother so close to death (there were at least two times when she appeared on the brink), the hospital employees could go around as if it were just another day. I remember passing two nurses or aides in the hallway having a casual conversation about the weekend coming up and their plans. I was probably on the way back to the CCU where they were deciding whether my mother should risk being intubated. I also remember thinking that I wished that it had been cancer. We would have had more time. And another very strong memory: after a couple of days, my mother was stable enough that we actually left the hospital for a real dinner. I remember having red wine. And I remember the buzz. I had the very clear thought...now I know why people become alcoholic.

To make a really long story short, my mother managed to recover sufficiently after a four-week stay in the hospital. As an oldest daughter without husband or children (and courtesy of Clinton), I was able to take two and a half months off from work to stay home (somewhat like the movie One True Thing).

I stayed with my mother until the end of March. I think I left on the 27th. I remember watching her wave from the front door as my father and I drove off to the airport. On April 15th, she died from a cardiac arrest. I had known this was a possibility. I'm a reader, and after my mother's heart attack, I had read as much as I could get my hands on. And the location and severity of her heart attack had made her susceptible to this...something about the scarring of the heart walls and the electrical impulses.

If I had been a stronger person, perhaps I could have survived this in a healthier fashion. But losing my mother really hit me where it hurt the most. It's only been recently that I've been getting glimmers of how.

Wednesday, June 28, 2000

6:37 PM -- Let's see...last time I was talking about the fun I had in the medical lab filling tubes with blood to see what ailed me. Alas, the results are in...aside from borderline high blood pressure, there doesn't appear to be anything out of the ordinary.

So...the hair loss is probably about stress. Hmmm, perhaps I could be a poster child for the new book about fat after forty? The author, Pamela Peeke, apparently talks about fat being a result of 'toxic' stress.

Well, I'm sure that's part of it, but I've lately gone down another path. In The Road Less Traveled, Peck quotes Jung as saying that "neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering" (p. 17). The question has been how to get a handle on this. It's one thing to be fat...it's another to be so fat that basic things most folks take for granted (like wiping your ass after a sh*t) become challenging.

Sunday, June 25, 2000

7:20 PM -- I visited the doctor's recently. I've been having some problems with hair loss, and was concerned that there was something wrong (besides the obvious). At the first visit, I just had to laugh when the very well-meaning and nice physician asked 'have you ever tried Weight Watchers?'

'Ummm...is the Pope Catholic?'

Well, no, I didn't say that to her. But hello! Yep, I'm the cliche, the I've tried just about everything you can think of, short of surgery, to get this weight off. And actually, I lost about 125 pounds once on one of those liquid diets. And contrary to the cliche, I actually kept it off for about two years. Of course, I probably was exercise bulemic at the time, but hey, I didn't have to buy the chubby clothes!

Anyways, back to the doc. So, she orders up scads of bloodwork. Gotta check the thryoid, gotta check the hormones. I go downstairs to the lab, and this young punk lab guy is unable to do a stick on someone already there. The lab director says she'll do it, and then he comes out and sees me. I'm thinking, 'Shit.' If he can't stick this other woman, what are the chances he'll really make a mess of me? Since I passed the 300-pound mark, my veins apparently are next to inaccessible.

The good news is that he gives up on me without a single stick. And the nice lab director manages to find a good vein on her second try. But the mental anguish before she succeeds is tough. Like I said, being this fat really sucks. And if you could answer the question about why this, among other things, is not enough to get me to change my habits, you too could make a gazillion dollars in the weight loss industry.

7:37 PM -- I can't decide whether to keep the timestamp in. Am I really going to post to this more than once a day? I figured this'd be a great way to wile away the time at work, but then I decided that the a**holes who worked in our IT department didn't need to find this stuff as they were getting their jollies reading the firewall logs.

8:05 PM -- Okay, one more question tonight...why in the h*ll does the most recent version of IE for the Mac insist on displaying Blogger's post box as absurdedly small? I long ago realized that there were problems between the default type sizes for Macs and PCs on the web, but this is ridiculous.

Good thing I didn't delete my old version of Netscape.

Obligatory link (I'm feeling guilty). Go check out the coolest Internet radio site ever...HOBER.

Thursday, June 15, 2000

1:32 PM -- I was born a poor black child. No wait, that was Steve Martin in The Jerk.

I was born a small child. But now I am large. Really large. And while I went through my NAAFA phase and do think our society needs to be more accepting of fat people, I'm really tired of the quality of life that, for me, is inherent in being 200 pounds overweight.