Exercise isn't Fun

I've been bad lately about exercise.

I haven't gone to the gym for some time. I've not been carving time to go there.

I have reasons that I find valid. Parent meetings after work, feeling blah after getting home as the sun is falling due to this stupid time change crap, circumstances surrounding having to get a new car after totaling my old car in an accident...it just plain sucks.

I have been trying to ride my exercise bike instead in the basement a few times a week to keep from totally falling off the bandwagon, reducing the impact instead to something more like holding on to the back of the bandwagon by one arm.

Exercise is something that is rather hard for me to justify. I didn't see visible results from going to the gym. I feel stupid going without having someone there to "hold my hand", so to speak, and verify that I'm doing things properly. The primary reason I was exercising was to try losing weight, even though I know there are other reasons to do so, and my research shows that the plain 300 calorie cheeseburger easily takes an hour on the treadmill to burn off. An hour?! Better off just not eating the burger...those reasons alone are really big demotivators balanced with the whole having to get changed, drive there, exercise, come home and shower and redress and in the process get a nice change of clothes that now needs laundering.

It just seems hard to justify when exercise isn't exactly an item on my "Hey, I have an hour to myself, what can I do that's productive and fun!?" list. It's lonely. It's boring. The only thing I do that seems immediately productive is burning through my collected downloaded podcast items on my iPod.

Again, I've not been adding much to the bariatric blog lately, and most of that is because I've been spending more time on my editing of a novel draft rather than running around the gym or having blood drawn. The only real change I've had lately to my routine was avoiding the gym and instead doing more with the bike. We finally had a snowfall outside, so I'll probably end up eventually taking the snow blower/thrower out to clear off our rather large driveway, and somehow justify that as an exercise.

I still browse blogs (Hi Lee!), I still occasionally get some work done (Hi novel! Oh, and day job, there you are...). I still stick to a pretty routine diet for simplicity, and haven't had any blood removed recently for testing.

If you're interested in my occasional blathering, there are other blogs. My profile should have them listed. The most active...even though it, too, has been quiet as I've been working on editing more than creating new material, is my New Author Chronicles blog. Check it out or my other blogs. My updates dwindle as I'm filling time on other projects, but I am still very much alive out here!

Quick Update: Where Have I Been?

Life simply gets in the way. I have been shifting my priorities a bit; I've been busy with work, but most people say that, and it sounds like a cop-out. On the other hand what I've also been busy with is my first draft of a novel, which I've been writing about in my New Author Chronicles blog.


I've actually been making headway, too. The first draft weighed in at 112,240 words, and from that I've cut (so far) over 3,000 words. I'm hoping within a month or two to have something to start shopping around and see if anyone will be willing to represent it.

On top of that I've had my parent's birthdays and anniversary.

And a car accident. On my way to work one morning another car lost control and slammed into mine. No one was hurt, but my car was totaled, which in turn meant another week of dealing with the insurance companies and car dealerships. My car actually looked kind of interesting...the demolished driver's door looked like it had been sliced by a can opener.

But as Richard Fish would say, "Bygones."

I even managed to squeeze in a date night with my wife.

Basically, life has gotten in the way. I've prioritized my attempt at writing a novel, birthdays, even a staff party over my blogging and gym routines (I've been trying to spend time riding the recumbent bike in lieu of the gym time). I will need to make a whole separate blog entry regarding my exercise issues lately.

So I haven't disappeared. I'm still here, struggling with my plateaued weight.

Until then...time to play with my newly recalled new car!

When Bad Things Happen To Good People

I logged into my account this afternoon and found a disturbing post from my loyal reader, Lee. He, too, has been going through a weight loss surgery journey and blogging about it. I don't really know him personally, only through his blog posts and messages here, so I can't speak for him (just what he has already shared in messages and posts, if I may be allowed to do so).

On his blog he posted that his wife has breast cancer and because of various complications may not survive this time around. They have time to live together and celebrate their lives for awhile, but I imagine it is still hard news to bear.

I have wondered about my death. Like Lee I pretty much accepted that my obesity was a death sentence. I enjoyed my eating habits, and since weight and lifestyle takes months or years to change rather than a day or two it seemed as if losing weight was out of reach.

I basically accepted I was going to die early. In some ways I almost looked forward to it; no more aches and pains, the potential insurance payout could help my wife and kids get out of debt a bit more, no more dealing with the stress of my day job and waking to the dread that I would never find a better source of job satisfaction; all I hoped for was that it would be quick and relatively painless.

But I eventually took the steps to get the surgery and added some hope that I might see my young son grow up and maybe even grow a little older. I temper this with the realization that I could be killed in a car accident or some other freak incident as happens to hundreds or thousands of people every day.

Lee found the surgery and then changed his view to accept that maybe he, too, would buy more years with his wife and children and grandkids. And so you can imagine the irony of me finding his news posted today on the eve of my own birthday that I didn't know I would see.

I don't know what to say to him, really. Because of my Asperger self I am afraid to say much because I'll probably say the wrong things so normally I don't say anything. Better to be seen as an unfeeling jerk than a cruel moron incapable of relating the way other people normally do. After a lot of thinking I posted a comment to him for moderation; I hope that since he's followed so many of my own posts he'll understand what I mean, even if I'm not the best at conveying my thoughts on emotional topics.

It led me to thinking about the question of what would happen if you knew you were going to die in a certain span of time? I really liked the movie Krull; it had a character that was a Cyclops, and in the realm of that movie the Cyclopian race was cursed with seeing the when and where they would die, so they knew how long they had to live.

I know at the rational level that I could die at any time. A family friend just had an aneurysm but looks like he'll survive. I had an uncle that survived as half the man he used to be for several years after a stroke. I had a roommate that killed himself in college. The loss of weight doesn't mean I'm home free of strokes and heart attacks, and of course there is a possibility of fire or car accident killing me as well. Unpleasant, but those are the facts. I actually had a fixation on the thought that after my six month or twelve month followup to the surgery I'd be given a "green flag" that all was going well with no complications only to be in a pileup on the way home.

So would one rather know when they were going to die, or that they had a certain time to live? We have our mortality looming over us every day, and unlike the Cyclops we don't have any certainty when our lottery numbers will be drawn. Every day is an opportunity to spend living or dying. Most of us get so caught up in our constant routines of life that we get into a rut and don't give it a second thought. Some people get hit with the news that they will soon pass away and they suddenly find a new meaning to their lives, like the inspirational story of cancer victim Randy Pausch who ended up unintentionally becoming an motivational hit with his Last Lecture (which I highly recommend watching on YouTube and reading the resulting book).


I suppose the question is, what would you do? Would you want to know when you're going to die, or remain ignorant of it? Would you rather believe that you make your own fate every day, or know when it's time to buckle down and make the most of your days as the time draws near? So many people face this question every day in oncology departments in hospitals that it's become an invisible question for those who aren't directly affected by these issues.

My best wishes go to Lee with this challenge in his life. I hope anyone else that stumbles on my little corner of the blogosphere could also take a few moments to share their wishes with Lee as well, since he and his wife will no doubt look forward to some good wishes from others as well.

Why Do I Blog? And How Offensive Do I Get?

I don't know if I ever actually said why I'm blogging.

I had toyed with the idea of keeping a blog for awhile, but what really pushed me into doing it was the surgery. At the time I had to absorb a lot of information and sort through a lot of thoughts and issues pertaining to bariatric surgery.

So I suppose the push to actually do it was the surgery. I wanted to keep an account of what happened in case other people might search for anecdotal evidence of what it was like for me.

I decided early on not to keep it just about bariatric surgery, though. I knew that I'd run out of information. It would get repetitive very early on, I thought, and besides that, the information I passed on would have a bias from my life. My life is affected by other things; my technology obsessions, my Asperger's, even facing the possibility of my death in the surgery brought into question my religous views. As a result I decided to open the blog to being bariatric surgery with commentary from my point of view of my life.

I didn't want to define my life by the surgery. But at the same time I cannot escape that I have largely defined my life by my weight, my obesity; after more than a few decades the obesity had come to define too much of who I was and shape much of what I had become. Hence my blog name and strong obesity/diet/WLS bias.

But at the same time I do put items in that are somewhat controversial. I'm not out to poke sticks into wasp nests; I don't aim the offensive guns just to generate controversy or offend people.

Besides, if I wanted to do that, I could. It would be way to simple. But pointless

I figure my audience is far too small for my posts to cause ripples. But I do on occasion post things that some would find offensive.

It's nothing personal.

Posts regarding religion are showing my viewpoint of the world; it's part of what shapes my worldview. It's supposed to help illustrate part of why I believe what I do, why I understand the world the way I understand it.

I haven't had any complaints, so if anyone has read something they took offense to he or she hasn't voiced it.

But I thought I'd put this in just to clarify things a little. I wanted to do a blog for awhile. But I actually did it because of the surgery, and since then I've used it to act as a sounding board for who I am. It's a way to send my little voice into the big wide ether; I don't pretend that others will pay attention or even that it would make a difference to others, but there's always the chance that this can help create a legacy in part for my children to have after I'm gone, or get some insight into who I was long ago.

My father is still alive, but I have almost zilch knowledge of what he was like growing up. He's simply not an open person. I don't think he's ever even going to read this blog...I know only bits and pieces of his childhood history. I'm hoping that this is a record for my kids to go back to and find out more about where I came from, my beliefs, my worldview, and to a degree the problems I encountered in this period of my life.

I suppose this blog, potentially offensive bits and all, are just a way of staking a little corner for my voice among a chorus of millions out there. It's not much. But it's something.

Smooth Sailing Still Has Waves

Like I've said...I'm excited about the weekend.

But there still seems to be issues with my emotions keeping in check.

I got home last night to find that the dog...our overgrown moron of a dog we saved from the pound...had half-pulled down the blanket I put on the window. See, this dog has the habit of jumping up on the couch to look out the window, thus slobbering all over the window, pulling the curtain over the couch, and knocking things off my desk and onto the floor. Again. It's an almost daily occurrence.

This dog has cost us time in the ER after my wife decided to take an ill-advised shortcut of taking the dog out by standing on the porch with a long leash and the dog, all eighty pounds of her, decided she saw something worth chasing and took off, pulling my wife through the air until she landed on concrete pavers below. After I'm fully recovered she'll need to go to the doctor's to determine if she needs surgery on her knee.

She's eaten two leashes and two harnesses.

She's eating shoes while we're gone...that only ended when we bought a plastic tub to store the shoes in.

She craps on the floor when she's mad at us for leaving; I got angry at burning electricity (and the life of the flatscreen LCD TV) to appease her and so we compromised on leaving a radio on to keep the dog company while we're out for more than an hour. Otherwise, we come home to a sewer pile on the floor. Multiple sewer piles.

I thought she was going to damn near kill me when she pushed her paw into my incision to "launch" herself from the couch while I was recovering at home. Even with Percoset...OUCH.

She barks at nothing, or worse, barks ferociously at some visitors, or jumps on them repeatedly unless they give her food despite our efforts to break her of this habit.

She's taken off when she escaped her leash or tie-out to run to the neighbor's house. Usually it's when we're guilty of being lazy and three feet from the porch one of us lets go of the leash, thinking she's going up the stairs and instead she bolts off to the side. I learned my lesson the first time she pulled this on me. Other times she had escaped her collar.

Oh...and she's destroyed a collar.

She seemed such a sweet dog at first. She probably still could be. But she has me SO FRUSTRATED. My wife has said we'll take her to training. That would have to wait until summer, when someone is home with her enough to enforce the training. Plus there's the cost of training.

All my pets growing up were apparently trained by my dad. I asked him how he does it...he shrugged and said, "We got them as puppies. Wasn't hard."

This overgrown doofus was fully grown when we got her from the pound.

I turned red at her once again getting dirt on the couch and pulling on the curtains AND thwarting the blanket on the window to keep her down, and my wife just gaver her exasperated, "I'll look at getting rid of her..."

I don't want to get rid of her. I promised my son at potty training that once he was a "big boy", he could get a puppy dog. He really wanted one because he remembered the promise for months. That's an accomplishment for a two year old. We also spent several hundred dollars and some hazard time on icy roads getting this dog fixed and the other usual vet bills.

I just want her to BEHAVE.

It's frustrating to have a pet that rules over you instead of the other way around. I wish I could trust her, that she'd stay in the yard and not have to be kept under lock and key at all times like a prisoner. Every time my daughter or wife takes a shortcut with her, is lax with the leash, anything...I cringe. I don't want her near me while I'm recovering for fear that her paw will rip the (much smaller and slowly healing) wound open more when she decides to leap at me. And she's definitely not stupd...she's like a teenager. She's selectively stupid. She knows not to jump on me, and she stays off the couch when I come into the room. she knows.

I simply get so frustrated...and last night, making things for selling at the art festival, daughter whining to go to the boyfriend's tonight, getting student grading work and notes online for their reference (second job...),...all the little frustrations and irritations...I just plain blew up. A growing well of anger and frustration at everything in life just made me want to ram my head into a wall. Fortunately it manifested itself as just being very testy and agitated with a bonus of yelling after a short fuse being lit from a bit too much whining from the children, but still it was one of those moments where I really felt like I needed a time-out from living, some kind of escape from life.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's not the recovery, maybe it's just me, and I'm somehow imbalanced and unable to deal with life and its frustrations.

Life Is Good

While this is the name of another blog on Blogspot with a similar name to mine, this is more a reference to the fact that I am totally psyched about this weekend. I've had good news regarding my wound healing, my pain is far more managed and tolerable, I'm getting up and around more with less pain, and this Saturday is Free Comic Book Day and an arts festival!

I was in such a good mood after the evaluation of the CAT scan that I stopped at my wife's favorite mealspot, Panera Bread, and picked up a to-go meal for her lunch (the aroma of the dressing on the asian sesame salad is divine).

I told her recently how much I was looking forward to the weekend. She replied with something to the effect of, "...as long as we do what you want to do, everything great..."

Well, that was kind of a killjoy. I asked what she wanted to do, and she said, "Nothing."

I know I've been difficult with the recovery and surgery and the ensuing issues, and I thought she'd be relieved that I was finally having a good week, being positive about something going on. Instead, I was being self-centered.

sigh

I am hoping it's just the fact that I've been so negative for so long that when my mood finally swings the other way her mood lags behind.

But no matter; I'm still psyched for the weekend, and feeling better about the promise the doctor made about having the "fullness feeling" after switching to solid foods and that the wound is indeed healing...slowly...but getting there.

A Thank-You

I've focused quite a bit here about the problems I've been having and not enough on the good things. While I'll still put in the bad...this is supposed to be a record of the bad as well...I realize I need to focus a little more on the positive aspects of the operation.

I'll start out with this post where I thank a couple people. Lee is a follower of the blog who started emailing me. He has difficulties in his life adapting to some of the post-op lifestyle changes, but he sent me a number of emails where he focused on getting me to look at the positives. He is many more months into this life change than I am, so he has some perspective on what he's talking about.

Second was an email from an online acquaintance I hadn't emailed in a month. He is a frequenter on a mail list for Ubuntu-users help; knowledgeable and ever helpful, he's one of the common names on the list for people seeing assistance. I had stopped following activity on the mailing list after my surgery. It's a place of much drama, I had enough drama in my own life to deal with, and more important I was getting short tempered and easily frustrated and having to slog through a hundred or more messages a day with the same issues over an over again with the same answers and same requests not to top post or not hijack topics was starting to get to me.

So like I said...I stopped following.

Imagine my surprise when I was gone nearly a month and then I found an email from NoOp, one of the closest things the list has to a wizard on the list, waiting for me. He was asking how my surgery had gone because he hadn't heard anything lately. I was shocked. To be honest I didn't think anyone on the list would notice or care that I had disappeared.

Between Lee and NoOp I was put into an emotional place where I needed to reevaluate my situation and see that yes, I have problems, but I also have been making progress. I can move more easily. The quarter-sized hole in my gut is closer to a nickel-sized hole now. I managed to stick to roughly forty to sixty ounces of milk and three 4 ounce pureed servings of food per day. I can get up more easily and slowly, very slowly, I'm increasing my ability to move and adapt to my healing and sore muscles. I can get through most of a day of work without falling asleep at the keyboard or curling over in pain or suffering outbursts of pure honesty of what is on my mind when I find yet another person making one and a half to two times my income is not able to follow simple directions nor use complicated adjectives to describe what is actually happening to their computer.

So thank you Lee and thank you NoOp. I don't know if you guys will see this note or not, but thank you for your help in seeing that my life is more than a faux bullet wound in the tummy and that there is progress being made in my healing process.

Yo Ho Ho Back To Work I Go

I returned to work for my first day since my surgery. My wife tells me that several coworkers think I am insane for returning after a such a short period out...I'm returning wearing stretch pants instead of dockers.

My wife dropped me off and headed to work, then came to pick me up after work. I survived my first day back....that's a good thing, right?

I was pretty tired. Didn't fall asleep or anything like that, but there were times where I felt kind of out of it. My shorter temper is something I need to keep in check, especially when some of the requests came in that were...shall I say, challenging, in that people were describing that XYZ wasn't working when it clearly was. My first impulse was to ask said people if they were dropped on their heads as infants.

But I didn't.

My wife and I had a few errands to run tonight; after a somewhat long day we went home and changed and I pureed some Split Pea and Ham soup from Progresso, packing one of the four ounce containers in a bag with some milk and my multivitamin before we headed out again. She enjoyed some Panera food after heating my soup puree for me; then off to pick up a couple supplies, then probably head home. If we avoid arguments for the rest of the night, I guess I'd have to say it's been a nice day overall. I even managed to take only a grand total of two painkillers to get through the day's challenges.

Tomorrow I have an afternoon appointment to get a tooth filled and the day after that I have an appointment with my bariatric doctor, hopefully to get this hole in my gut re-examined and get rid of the remaining staples (especially the one that is dangling out of me...ohmygodohmygodohmygod this thing freaks me the F@# out).

All By Myself

My wife is gone on a trip. She won't be back until Sunday.

She left early this morning; it was a long bus trip on which she's a chaperone so she had to get to the loading area early enough for their "bag check" and load things on to the bus. It kind of sucks that her ex-husband, mental issues and all, is one of the bus drivers for the trip. I didn't like it too much but there wasn't really all that much that we could do other than my wife requesting that she's not assigned to ride the bus that the buffoon was driving lest he decide to make a big show of driving off into a field to show how her presence affects him somehow.

After she left the daughter got out of bed and got around then got the little guy dressed for his trip to the babysitter's. While my wife was getting around this morning he decided he wanted to come into the bedroom and lay down with Daddy for a few minutes; that seemed like there was no harm in that so my wife rearranged some things and made room for him to lay down to catch another hour of snooze.

The daughter got him up, managed to convince him to try going potty, then got him all dressed up. Somewhere in there I'm assuming she found her birthday card (making her officially 17) but she never said anything to me. Her boyfriend arrived to take them to daycare, the little guy said goodbye to Daddy and daughter let the dog back in and they left. They soon reappeared in the driveway at 7:36 because she had forgotten to take her homework. Then they left and I began my own day.

By starting my own day, I mean I realized the pillows and blankets normally on my right side in the bed that I used to help support and prop myself upright to get out of the bed since my abdominal muscles aren't working properly weren't there any more; my wife moved them when she made room for Lil' Dude to lay down. I had a few moments of panic set in, alone in the house, little mental alarm blaring that I myself had to use the potty, staring at the ceiling, a dull aching throb reminding me that the painkillers had long ago run out of my system and wondering how I was going to get up now.

The realization of how ridiculous it would look to be found eight hours later laying in bed unable to get up prompted me to redouble my efforts and push through the ache to get my body upright. I'm glad to say that seeing as I'm typing this at the computer, I made it.

I came out to the living room, managed to chop up my horsepills and have some milk and Jell-O and such for food. My father came up for a few minutes to tell me that the tire he took for repair can't be repaired. Apparently the layers of the tire were separating; that made it leak air, and fortunately for my wife the air just hissed out instead of the tire disintegrating at highway speed. I told him the best thing to do would be to take one of the winter-treads we were going to use in the fall, mount that, and we'd get that swapped on to the family vehicle later.

Of course since someone had come up to visit, the dog thought there was an invisible canine-edible monster lurking outside the house and got worked up. My father was already gone and she continued to run from one end of the house to the other, peering out windows and yapping at invisible pixies. Then she ran up and jumped on me. Her 80 pound frame hit me just off-center in the stomach as I sat on the couch and I could only thank the invisible friends in the air that she hit me with two paws and off center.

The pain was immediate and paralyzed me for a few brief seconds, then the scream came. It poured out of me. Unintelligible, dripping with venom, and loud, the scream apparently spooked the dog, sending her backwards as if physically pushed. When my lungs refilled with air I managed an actual non-reflexive yell that had actual dictionary-residing words in it; the selection included terms of what I'd like to do to her neck and then to the necks of her parents and their parents followed by a command that translated to, "Get out of my sight forever".

The dog calmed down a bit and I was tenderly poking my side and checking my incision for any additional bleeding. Finding none I finally started to relax and take comfort in the fact that my own painkillers were starting to finally take hold.

I stared into the empty house now very much aware that if something bad happened I'd be at least 20 minutes from getting help; I was very much on my own here. Scary.

Right now I think of this as a day where everyone is at work. It hasn't quite sunk in yet that my wife is gone. My stepdaughter, and eventually my son, will return tonight but it won't be the same. I'm consoled by the thought that at least she's having fun out there but I still miss her presence here.

I'm adapting to these changes that have come my way and continuing to heal. My daughter is really good about helping with her younger brother and while she didn't acknowledge her birthday card this morning at all she did manage to get her brother to daycare in one piece and she'll have a plate full getting some chores done.

Life happens. Whether you want it to or not, whether you like what is happening or not, life will continue to happen and you just have to weather it. And watch out for 80 pound dogs trying to eviscerate you when she knows everyone else in the household is gone.