Finally back on line!

I had to purchase a new copy of Windows XP, and I lost all of my old documents, except for the ones I remembered to back up. Strangely enough, I'm not too upset about it. I have other concerns that are a lot more pressing.

Apparently God has a much higher opinion of my capability to handle all of the issues of daily living than I do. You know that old saying, "God doesn't give you anymore than you can handle"? Well, you have my complete permission to slap the next person you hear say that. Ooops. Loki is supposed to be gone now. I'm supposed to be sweet and loving and spiritual right now with the moon in Pisces. Well, I'm not. I'm abstinent and working my recovery program today. That's as good as it gets, as far as I'm concerned. Like I've said in the past, it's a miracle that I'm not trying to run over slow-moving old women in the aisles of the grocery store like I used to when I was stark, raving abstinent. That is what I call what I have been for the past 48 days--stark, raving abstinent with absolutely NO slips or breaks. I haven't dumped over furniture, cussed out a policeman or chased off winos asking for spare change with the intention of doing them bodily harm like I did when I was abstinent in the OA-HOW program. (This was during the late 80s and early 90s. I lost a lot of weight, but I was absolutely insane.) Thank God that the only person I have hurt, at least that I know of, has been myself.

I lost a little over 80 pounds in OA-HOW, but I gained it all back plus another 60, which brought my weight perilously close to 400 pounds. After several years of hovering near the 400 pound mark, I lost about 40 pounds to qualify for gastric bypass surgery, and I weighed in at 331 on the morning of July 11,2002, which was my surgery date. I thought it would be smooth sailing after that, and for a time, it was. A total of 140 pounds came off almost effortlessly. But then, life and all of my old demons came crashing in. Nothing was working the way I wanted it to. Notice the word *I* in the previous sentence. The problem was that I thought I was controlling my food addiction and my life. But my ability to control anything is quite limited, due to my longstanding addictions to food and fantasy and the resulting stunted emotional development. After the first post-gastric bypass year, I realized that I just didn't know how to do life while keeping the food out of my mouth. Sooner or later, the dam was going to break wide open. And it did. I regained over 70 pounds, after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery.

I'm dealing with the result of all this gaining, losing, then re-gaining weight right now. Due to all that life-long up and down the scale movement I have torn a rather large, at least to me it is, break in my abdominal wall. When I went to my follow-up appointment with my primary care physician yesterday, I felt the hernia. I also felt my intestines protruding through the tear. Dr. Lo, my PCP, showed me how to lay flat and put my intestines back inside so that the the abdominal muscles do not contract, trapping the intestines outside the abdominal cavity and cutting off the blood circulation to that organ. This is not only quite painful, according to a recovery friend who had the same thing happen to her (she was also once over 300 pounds), but it is a very life-threatening situation. Terrific. Another fine mess my addictive eating has gotten me into.

The protruding intestines getting trapped by the abdominal muscle is called an "incarcerated intestinal hernia", or something like that. So yeah, I have to make sure my guts aren't in jail. Ha, ha. Funny, huh? Imprisoned guts. The bad part is that I can't laugh. Too much laughing makes my guts fall out. Can't have that. I'm used to my ex-husband being incarcerated, not my intestines. Yeah, ha, ha again. It's lame, but it's the best I can do right now.

Dr. Lo said that I will need to have surgery to repair the hernia "in the very near future". She scheduled a surgery consult on Monday morning with the surgeon who saw me in ER last Wednesday. The good news is that when I get to my weight loss goal (please God, for the first time in my entire life, help me get there), the surgeons will be much more willing to do a tummy tuck because the weight of the excess skin might break open the hernia again. Can't have that. Jailed guts are a very bad thing. The bad news is that I'm now looking at a total of three more surgeries--hernia repair, tummy tuck and hip replacement.

The wreckage of my food addiction has become very apparent to me. Only God is keeping me sane right now. I'm going through this without returning to cramming excess food in my mouth. It's pure insanity to return to the activity that got me into this mess in the first place. But that's the definition of addiction--insanity.

Today, I sat outside my apartment in my wheelchair (for now, I can't walk too much because of aforementioned condition)and watched an abbreviated version of the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels performing at the former Mather Air Force Base. I've been attending air shows for nearly forty six years, and it never grows stale or boring to me. As those F-18 engines boomed through the cloud-filled sky, I thought about how I used to dream about being a fighter pilot when I was a young girl. I had no idea that it wasn't allowed for females at the time; I just loved the sight and sound of those jet engines and wanted to experience that power. Now I know that I wasted my time daydreaming about that. I never would have made the weight limit, even if women were allowed to fly planes back in the day. Fat girls don't fly jets.

As Langston Hughes once wrote, "What happens to a dream deferred?" In my case, it mutates into a lifetime of morbid obesity and a struggle to remain alive.

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