The Voice Didn't Stand A Chance

My observational research tells me that either my no-shampoo routine is not nearly as interesting to people as my no-soap routine, or that Thanksgiving is a terrible day to publish a new blog post. Pride kind of demands I assume it is the latter. Whatever the case, I'm happy to be able to talk about these new ways of doing things in my life, whereas before I wasn't mentioning them because I wanted to get people's unbiased opinions and reactions.

This next one is a little different, though. This is something I haven't told a soul I was doing, for two very specific reasons: 1. I hate (HATE) talking about weight loss and "dieting" and I feel like that is what most people will take away from it, and 2. I don't like having anyone "monitor" what or when I eat unless I ask them to. And I'm not asking. :-) This is all on me.

So, for me, this really falls into the Operation Eleanor model of doing something that scares me because I know I'm opening myself up to comment on something for which I don't particularly seek comments. But hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that, right?

Potentially Surprising Personal Revelation #3: I don't eat after 9pm.

Nothing, unless it's simply impossible to finish eating before that time, but absolutely nothing after 9:30pm. All I'll have is water, preferably as cold as I can make it, or sometimes hot tea. I've been doing this for six months and although it wasn't easy at the start, I can count on one hand the number of times I've breached the rule and only one of those times was a moment of complete forgetfulness. The results have been really positive, so I have no plans to change what I'm doing.

Why am I doing this? This will require a little personal back story. In case you don't know me in "real life," I'm overweight and have been since I was child. I've never been a big one for diets because I'm convinced they don't work plus I just get bored. I'm not a real fan of exercise, though I do enjoy walking and hiking; I just don't do them enough. I have something called Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), which makes it easy to gain weight, and a sluggish thyroid, which makes it difficult to lose weight. Diabetes has been a health threat that looms over me, given my weight and family history, but I've never had that come to pass. What I do have, however, are high triglycerides. They have been a little high when tested in the past, but nothing serious. By May, however, they had shot up to over 400 mg/dL, more than double what's considered the normal range.

I felt like I was on a fast track to a heart attack, so I decided to act but, being me, I wanted to do it my way and on my terms. I took a good hard look at what I was eating, what exercise I was (or wasn't) getting, what I was willing to do and what, realistically, I felt I could do. I love food and I don't think life is worth living if I have to deprive myself of things I really want to enjoy, so I needed to figure something out that would let me eat what I want, but help lower my triglycerides. I decided that it was pretty much the late-night snacking out of boredom that was hurting me the most. I live alone and that's the time of day when I feel the lack of someone special in my life most keenly, and I used to let myself "eat my feelings," as they say.

I actually have a lot of willpower (when I choose to exercise it!), but it's a lot harder to stop once I've started snacking than it is to simply not start snacking. It's too easy to say, "Just one more..." and let that turn into a dozen "one mores." So I had to pick a reasonable time and make it an iron-clad rule not to eat anything after that time had passed. I found that the more I exercised the willpower needed to make this work, the easier it was to exercise it at other times during the day. I snack, in general, very little during the day now.

I've pretty much managed to change my relationship with food and, while I haven't quite mastered the art of conscious eating, I'm a lot closer to it than I used to be. This is different than dieting, because I'm making the rules and they are ones I can live with, long-term. I eat when I'm hungry, not just because the clock says it's time to eat, and I don't let myself eat out of boredom; I don't deprive myself of the treats I really want, I just limit them a lot more; I try not to eat full portions at dinner when eating at a restaurant, because usually half a meal is more than enough and I get a second meal out of the leftovers; and I have tried to slow down when I eat, in order to really enjoy what I'm eating -- this has proved to be the hardest for me because I don't like eating hot food when it gets cold, I don't get up early enough to have a real breakfast every day and, because I'm eating less, I'm really hungry at mealtimes!

There's more, but I think you get the idea. So, what has the result been? In the first three months, I slashed my triglycerides almost in half. They were still above the normal range when tested, but a hell of a lot closer to normal than they have been in years. I've lost 25 pounds, though I have also tried to increase my exercise by walking more, I just don't do it consistently. I've learned that I can survive the feeling of hunger and I don't need to feed The Voice every time it pipes up. (Remember this post? That was the day I started this.) I've re-learned something important I found out a decade ago but managed to forget: Just because something is delicious doesn't mean you have to eat it until it's gone; the last cookie isn't any more delicious than the first one, so enjoy the first one to the fullest (or, okay, the second one, too) and you don't need to finish the pack.

Have questions? Fire away. But first, it's time for lunch. I'm hungry!

A New Leaf

I honestly didn't mean to let all of December get away from me without a post. I even started to write one on New Year's Eve and Murphy's Law bit me in the ass for being a procrastinator and I had computer problems that made it impossible.

I haven't done much better with January, obviously, but I'll be damned if I don't live up to my own promise to myself to get one post in before the month is out, even if I did manage to completely miss my own blogoversary on the 22nd. Unlike me, to be sure, but I've had a lot going on.

I don't exactly have a theme for the year yet, unlike the last two "Year of" ones, but we'll see how it progresses as I'm still playing around with a couple. But, big changes this year in my life. Clearly, last year was one of massive change, however I think it's what we do with ourselves after times like those that really define who we are and what we can be. I've decided to try to turn that change into as much of a positive as I can.

I came to realize toward the end of last year that I wasn't going to find a job that suited me, who I am and where I am right now in my life, in any meaningful way. So, because I have the time and opportunity to do something I've always wanted to do, I've launched my own business. As breathtaking as it is sometimes for me to say that out loud, it's what I've done and I'm going to make of it what I can.

It's a personal concierge service, which seems to be as challenging for people to grasp as it is for them to spell. (I'll admit, even I stumble over the spelling occasionally, after a lifetime of "i before e except after c" recitation.) Essentially, I am combination of personal assistant and errand runner for people. I can do for people what they're too busy to do during their workday or that would take them away from family time; anything from picking out gifts to dry cleaning pick-up, or pet sitting to sitting there waiting for the cable guy. It's kind of something I've been training for my whole life so it comes as second nature to me. Whether I can make a living from it remains to be seen!

Now, ideally, this would be where I'd direct you to my website so you could see exactly what I've put together and send excited recommendations to all the busy people and over-booked parents you know in the Bay Area. But. But, I haven't quite got that part done just yet, so we'll save that for (hopefully) next time. I need to finish reaching out to my network of Internet-savvy friends to get those last few pieces in place, but I couldn't wait any longer to share my news, since it's been bubbling along all month and it's happening, it's really happening.

If you have any specific questions about it all that go beyond something you'd want to put in a comment, feel free to email me, using either the "email me" link above or sending something directly to my Gmail address, if you have it.

Otherwise, I hope you'll peek in from time to time to see how things are progressing and whether I have any good stories to share as I'm out there in the "trenches" of Silicon Valley, on the other side of the commute lane.

How To Lose a Limb: A Cautionary Tale

As I write this, I'm sitting in the hospital, next to my mother's bed. She has dozed off but I can tell after many, many hours of watching her sleep that she's only sleeping lightly and can be wakened with little effort. She has become a champion sleeper during her time in the hospital (then the skilled nursing facility, then the hospital once again); you have to be to get any rest with all the noise and interruptions a hospital brings. I've seen her sleep through blood draws. It's really quite impressive.

I just wish this were a skill she hadn't had to develop. She's tired of being in the hospital. She's tired of the needle pokes, vitals checks, blood sugar tests, IV flushes, bed repositionings, med distributions, ultrasounds, procedures, catheter adjustments, blood transfusions, nursing shift changes, doctor drop-ins and, of course, hospital food. I'm tired of all these things for her, too, because it's hard to watch her endure them day in and day out. (Although I think the food is better than she does.)

And we're not done yet. I've been hesitant to detail exactly what has been going on with her for a couple reasons. 1) I wasn't ready for all the questions; sometimes I don't do well when a lot of questions are thrown my way. After a while, I start to get defensive -- it's a personality flaw I'm aware of and it's one I'm trying to get past. So bring on any questions. If it doesn't violate her privacy, I'll do my best to answer it. 2) Then there is, you guessed it, her privacy. If you've been reading here for any time at all, you may have realized that I don't talk about super-personal things here. I don't fault bloggers who do use their spaces in that way, it just wasn't ever what it was about for me. I figured that if I don't talk about my own personal health issues here for the most part, how could I talk about hers? But her health issues are about to change my and my entire family's life in significant and unavoidable ways. Now that this time is here -- it has always been in the offing, but we've been keeping it at bay best we could -- it's now part of my life and this blog has always been about my life, in one way or another. So it's relevant and it's what I need to write about. 3) It wasn't certain what was going to happen. She has a lot of medical concerns and it wasn't clear which one was going to "get" her first. I think perhaps I felt like not defining things here kept them nebulous enough to avoid dwelling on them. Does that constitute denial? I'm not sure.

As I alluded to in my last post, Round 2 is here and it's time to take it on. My mom has had Type II diabetes for decades. This has caused a myriad of medical problems for her, especially over the last decade. The most problematic has been her circulation, especially in her legs, and she has had: two femoral bypasses, one in each leg; surgery on her carotid artery to unblock it; two heart catherterizations that have resulted in multiple stents being put in her heart; multiple laser eye surgeries to stop bleeding in her retina; the onset of congestive heart failure; foot ulcers and dry gangrene; and the amputation of four of the toes on her left foot. She has also been on the brink of kidney failure for about a year, which has required blood tests every two weeks for that time, and we know that dialysis is almost certainly in her future. Another round for another day...or year.

She has come through each of these things, some more easily than others, with a lot of effort, a lot of love, a lot of tears, a lot of pain and a lot of time. It does get harder each time, however, and though each was serious unto itself, life always went back to normal eventually. That's not going to happen this time.

Tomorrow morning my mom's right leg will be amputated above the knee and she will likely never walk again. Because of her age and weakened condition, she may not be able to get or adapt to a prosthesis, so we anticipate that she will be in a wheelchair from here on out. I hope that it will be one she can move herself, but she has little upper body strength so I am not sure that will be possible. (An electric one is, of course, an option but she has an aversion to them and they're a little too big to use in her condo.) I am her primary caretaker and while she has been the center of my life for the last year, this surgery will probably double the effort required to do pretty much anything and everything.

I will do the best I can, with a lot of help, but there's no doubt that it's going to be overwhelming at times, for all of us. My mom's biggest concern, as I imagine it is for most parents in this kind of situation, is that she is going to be a burden to us. I can't say absolutely that, at times, it won't be a burden; I think in part it depends on how you define "burden." I don't approach it as a burden, but I know that it is weighing on her mind so heavily that I worry it can affect her ability to recover and rehabilitate and I know that it is life-changing. The emotional part of it has been, and will be, very hard. But, to me, that's part of family. It just is.

Another part of family is knowing the best and worst parts of your family members, and how who they are affects who you become. Case in point: I know that my mom has always put us first, to the detriment of her own health. She was told in the mid-70s that her blood sugar was high and that she should just cut out sugary soda and other foods. This was right before we moved from California back east to New York and our lives were turned completely upside-down. We all switched to diet soda and kept right on going, trying to make the best out of some crappy circumstances for the duration of the 80s. Mom made sacrifices for us and was always there for us, working full time and taking care of us and the house, while putting up with two kids and a husband who had a boatload of his own problems. She dealt with money issues, worked day in and day out until retirement, got us both through college, became a widow, took in her two elderly aunts and nursed one through the ovarian cancer that eventually killed her, helped us move back to California (each of us moved out here at different times), packed up a huge house and sold it, and moved to California, too.

During most of that time, she ran on stress and adrenaline and didn't take great care of herself. She was too busy taking care of us to dwell on how she was feeling. I come from a family of stoics, and she learned those lessons well. Too well. In the late 80s/early 90s she was diagnosed with Type II diabetes and had to make significant dietary changes and start taking medicine. But really, it was too late and the damage had already started to impact her health.

The consequences of not addressing her own well-being in favor of taking care of her family for all those years led us in a straight line to today, on the brink of major surgery that has her worried about how she will live the rest of her life and how it affects her children. It's this last part that has me shaking my head over the irony of the situation; this is far worse than if she had said no, we can't do that because I need a break, or you're going to have to skip that birthday party because I need to attend a class on nutrition, or I'm not going to be able to take you to the mall because I need to work out for hour or two. We would have been okay, if disappointed at that time -- or, okay, as teens we would have been devastated...for all of an hour -- but we also would have been better off for seeing our mom make her own mental and physical health a priority. This fear, this worry, this emotional draining now is so much harder than it might have otherwise been if she had said "no" to us and "yes" to herself just a little more often. I think it's this part that is more of a burden than any difficulty we will face as she learns to transition from a wheelchair into a bed: She loved us more than she loved herself and now she's paying a steep price for it.

Now it's time to go wake her up so she can have a last few drinks of water before it turns midnight and she's not allowed anything to eat or drink, pre-op. Tomorrow will be another stressful and emotional day. We'll get through it together, barring any of the many complications that could arise, and we'll be back here tomorrow night, with me watching her sleep and wondering about how the next day will go.

Ode to June

Hello June, you little minx. You crept in while I wasn't paying attention, snuck on past while I was otherwise occupied and whacked me in the ass before blasting off into July. So, you know, thanks for that.

This was definitely an interesting month, and not all in good ways. My mom has spent the last week plus in the hospital and it has been pretty damned stressful. But, like I said, she's one of my heroes and she's coming through it amazingly well. I do have to give my brother and myself credit for keeping her afloat and moving forward for a couple of those days, when it didn't seem that she had it in herself to do it. I'm hoping that, in the long run, she'll also see it as "keeping her afloat" and not "badgering." We can be pretty persuasive.

I learned a few things, though. I learned that I sure as hell hope that I have as a good a friend as my mom does in her decades-long friend, Pat, when I'm facing my mortality. That woman is in-cred-i-ble. I now call her "The Velvet Hammer." We may be persuasive but it's hard to stay objective when you're staring your mom's possible death straight in the face and I challenge you to do it without crying. Pat was like this calm voice of reason and compassion and straightforwardness, with emotion but not tears. She made me want to do whatever she told me to do! And she uses her power for good, not evil.

I also learned (again) how much I enjoy my cousin Michael's company. He came in pretty much as soon as he heard what was going on, and it was so comforting to have him here. We are a really small family, but what we lack in size, we apparently make up for in...I don't know...awesomeness when we all get together. At the very least, we crack each other up, even when we're all a little shell-shocked by the goings-on.

On the other hand, I also learned that, as sad and devastated as we will be when the day comes that Mom isn't able to rally one more time, my brother and I will be okay in the long run. Every time she was going in for some test or procedure (sure she wasn't going to make it), Mom would say, "You two take care of each other." And we're ready to do that. He's been pretty great and I hope that he thinks I have been throughout this, too. He's more likely to whack me with a soda bottle than ever tell me that, but I think I might be safe in thinking that.

The last thing I learned is that having friends who are available to me online is the most wonderful thing when you're in the middle of a personal crisis. I reached out and they were there. Every. Single. Time. People can make fun of social media, and Twitter in particular, all they want but at the end of the day, they can kiss my ass. It was one of the biggest comforts imaginable.

So, bring it on July. I'm ready for Round 2.

Death Becomes Her

When thinking about a post for today, I'd planned to write about candy. I mean, why not? But then, as I do most days, I popped over to dooce to read her latest post. What I ended up reading, and the hours after, changed that. A lot.

Now, if you go over, please read what she says about the site she features before you go clicking on it, lest you be a "Mimi," too. "This somber series of portraits [was] taken of people before and after they had died..." I did read, and decided it was something that I didn't want to be looking at during work. Instead, I started reading the comments since she'd opened them, and those were moving enough. When I started reading there were about 141 comments; at the time of writing this, there are 901. By about number 44, I was already fighting tears and I hadn't even gone to see the pictures under discussion. Clearly, the subject of death, and our reactions to it, touched a nerve.

I decided I was going to wait until I got home to go view the gallery, and went to lunch not too long thereafter. I didn't have a lot of time, so I went to a nearby falafel place that I enjoy. There is a large TV in one corner that's usually tuned to Al Jazeera in English....which I don't generally watch. But when I glanced up at one point, mouth full o' falafel, I was startled to see a man in a coffin on the screen, quite dead, being made up prior to his viewing. I still have no idea what the story was about because I couldn't hear it and it didn't really matter -- the visual from it, on top of what I'd just been reading and thinking about, was enough to boggle my mind a bit and mull over how differently news is presented elsewhere in the world.

On the drive back and for a while after that I was thinking about death and its place in our society, our lexicon and my own life. Many of the commenters at dooce mentioned our fear of death and how it plays into the reactions people have to the photos. That made me think about how, on the other hand, we use the concepts of death and dying in our language so easily and perhaps carelessly. I realized that, a bit earlier in the day, I'd written an IM to someone wherein I'd said, "She is absolutely killing me today," without a second thought, the way we all do. Hmm, I'm pretty sure I'd said essentially the same thing...about the same person...just the day before. And here I am, still alive.

Think about it. "I'm dying of hunger." "This will be the death of me." "My head is killing me." "He's rolling over in his grave." "That is a dead end." Those are just the first few that come to mind, I'm certain you can think of many more. Why is it we're so comfortable referring to death in these offhand, casual manners, but the thought of death itself freaks us out?

As I've been thinking about this for so much of the day, I eventually realized something about my own reaction to the idea of death and dying: It's not the idea of my own death that bothers me, or thinking about people in my life who have died, it's contemplating the death of friends, family and loved ones in my life now that makes my own internal wig-out meter go bonkers.

So, let's see, here I am, seven paragraphs into this post and I still haven't gone to see the photos that started all this. I'm not actually procrastinating, as I don't have any true hesitation in viewing them. I just wanted to be done here because, if they're as haunting and beautiful as people said, I think I'm going to want some tissues instead of a keyboard afterwards. Now, however, as a friend of mine says, it's time to pull on my big girl panties and deal with it.