Weighing in on: Division in our country

 I know that I started this as a weight loss/health blog, but I think it's just going to become my blog. Just me and my random-ass thoughts that I want to put out there.  Maybe you, dear reader, will agree with them. Maybe you won't. I try not to judge. (There are enough people in the world to do that for me, thank you.)

So, I recently had what was probably food poisoning, but it kept me at home for the last three days, making sure I didn't get too far from the bathroom.  I seem to be recovering. (I lost 13 pounds this week, but will probably get it back when I stop shitting my brains out...Hey! I need those brains!!)

What brought me here, drear reader, is that in my ick addled phase, I didn't want to think very hard, so I turned on a movie that I used to use to teach genocide and the Holocaust: Hotel Rwanda.  I haven't seen it in years, but when I was finished watching it, I was sobbing at the end - and not for all the dead Rwandans, although that was sad as well. 

(Side note: Do you ever get that feeling that everything is just kind of better if you've had a good cry.  Sometimes I put on REALLY sad movies just to make myself cry. I love those movies, and I do have a good cry, and then I feel a bit emotionally better.  Yeah... Catharsis. Love that.... anyway, back to the show).

So, if you haven't seen Hotel Rwanda, here's the plot in a very small nutshell. Rwanda is in political turmoil, some political mucky muck dies, a band of one group of people blame another group of people and decide to kill everybody who they think is responsible because of... some arbitrary bullshit thing that a  group of white Europeans put on them. As this band of people goes around trying to kill everybody (thus the genocide bits), one brave dude is like "not in my hotel" and sort of accidentally ends up turning a hotel into a refugee camp, which gets attacked and threatened and nearly loses his family and his life and... lots of people die. In the end, enough of his guests are important (read: rich) enough to call in some favors and get the UN to help them out. Lots of people die, but hotel dude saves like.. a bit over 1000 people or so. (Kinda like African Schindler's list in the 90's).

Now, that's all sad and stuff. People die. They show a lot of dead people. They show bands of people with machetes and machine guns just murdering swaths of people. It's awful. But that's not the part that got me right in the feels the hardest.

There is a scene where Joaquin Phoenix (as this American camera man) is hitting on one of the young women at a bar, and he asks them which group they belong to. They admit to being on opposites sides (but still friends.. yay!) JP comments that "they could be twins", and that's where I kind of got all chilled up weepy... and scared. Mostly because I see so many parallels to our current political situation and that scares me.

Because- Democrats look just like Republicans. Like the Civil War in the 1860's, people take up arms to  fight against brothers and sisters, cousins and parents, because of a stupid belief, and I worry so much that someone on the internet may just put out the call to "Cut down the tall trees" like they did in Rwanda to signal the time to kill, and then that will be that and we will have blood on our streets again.

No matter what side you are on of the political debate, you have to admit that the internet and everything is kind of making things crazy, and there are people on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum who look like normal people, but when they open their mouth the crazy just pours out.  And that's scary, because on the fringes of "normal people" who are just trying to make a living and get by, are the crazies, and it was the crazies in Rwanda who started taking over and killing people, who took up machetes and machine guns. What's to stop them from doing that here? 

I know, there are a lot of fail-safes and systems in place here to stop that from happening. National Guard, military, normal sane people. But it's still scary when you start seeing the little bits of common sense that you thought people have just sort of leaking away.

Do have I have solution? No. Just fear.  And hope. And hope is stronger. 

We must learn from the past.

Episode 87: Fear or No Fear

I promised AM that when school was over, I would work on getting healthier again. Well, I have 3 more school days, and so here I am, considering and thinking about what I want to do to get healthy again.  I have taken almost a year off - a year since my wedding last June - from thinking about my health. I have reveled in the convenience of fast food and eating out, quick meals from Trader Joe's that weren't  always the healthiest choices and I haven't tracked or done much exercise since I got my Fitbit, figuring it would do all of my tracking for me.  But now that the date for me getting healthier is less than a week away...I have to admit, I'm a bit nervous, or to put it more precisely, I'm scared.

I am scared that I will try to start something and my body will just give up or not let me do that something.  I am scared that the pain will be so overwhelming that not want to move at all.  I am afraid that I won't be able to eat carbs anymore and that all of my food will become bland and tasteless.  I am scared I won't find healthy recipes that I like and be forced to eat foods that are boring. I am scared that when I become healthier, people will expect more of me and I won't be able to give it to them.

On the other hand, I am scared that I won't be able to walk around Disneyland when AM and I go there for our humungous Anniversary bash in a few years once alimony is over.  I am scared that I will keep gaining weight instead of losing it and become one of those people who has to be cut out of her house and put into a truck in order to go to the hospital.  I am scared every night that I will go to bed and not wake up the next morning and then I would be without AM, without my life, that I will leave the people I love the most behind me.

Fear plays a big role in my life.  I know that I have to get over some of these fears in order to be healthy again.  When I was in high school, there were all of these T-shirts that said "No Fear" and I didn't really get it back then.  I still don't honestly get the idea now, except that it was a brand name, but you know, fear is healthy. Fear is something that, while not entirely tangible, we can feel.  In a genetic, predispositioned, evolutionary way, we are programmed to feel fear and to react to it. Fight or flight.  Well, I guess it is time to stop flying and time to start fighting...and that scares me even more.

I start at the end of this week.  More moving, more fruits and veggies, more posting here about how I'm feeling.  I need to get back into the habit of this again too.  It is good for me, and I miss the feedback from people who support and love me.  I can do it this time.  Time for the next round.  Fight the fear!

Episode 35: Separated but equal

A lot of stuff going in my life right now.  Too much to post, and I'm not in the mood to talk about it.  Suffice it to say, I've sort of fallen off the bandwagon here lately, though I am getting all my fruits and veggies and trying to stick, at least, to the basics of eating right.

I live in fantasy too often. My life is about to get real in a lot of different ways.  I'm scared, but I know that I can make it through.

You have to get rid of the old to make way for the new. That is just the way life is.  I guess I should stop being a hoarder.

Love is a strange, weird thing sometimes.

It is time to be strong.

Episode 1: I hate Hospitals

It took me forever to name this blog.. but here I am, starting a new journey into a new phase of my life, all because this weekend, I got the scare of my life and it opened up my eyes.

Friday I was sitting in my reading group, getting ready to discuss Dostoevsky's short story "Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (interesting story, by the way. I recommend reading it).  With midterms coming up, my grading system not working as well as I like, and after losing one of my best friends, the stress just got to me.  I was sitting there, struggling without a voice in Second Life and then it happened.  A stabbing in my upper left abdomen made my whole body freeze.  It felt like someone was trying to take apart my ribs with a crab cracker or something.  As the pain started, I breathed in deep, thinking of every lamaze class video you ever hear about where they talk about "breathing through the pain" as I didn't want to deal with it and had better things to do. But then... it got weird.

Not sure why, but as the pain increased, the urge to laugh became uncontrollable.  If I tried to sit up, the pain worsened, so I leaned back in my computer chair and laughed to the sky.  I couldn't stop laughing it hurt so bad. My Adorable Husband (AH) turned around to look at me, asking me if I needed to go to the hospital, but I just waved his concern away and kept laughing.  This went on for probably a steady 3-5 minutes. Just laughing. It felt good to laugh.. it felt real... and sitting up wasn't a possibility.

The pain passed, eventually, and I grabbed my cell phone and immediately called the Urgent Care nurse on duty, who asked me a bunch of incredibly mundane questions to try to determine exactly what was wrong with me. After determining that it wasn't indigestion, and probably not a heart attack, she told me to call back if it happened again or got any worse.  It didn't and in fact, the pain sort of faded away.

Until Saturday night.

My left arm has been - and is still - kind of numb.  Not like I can't feel it or anything but it prickles from time to time.  Then my chest started feeling this weird crushing tingly stabbing pain. Not the same as Friday, but still really uncomfortable nonetheless.  I went to bowling with AH to work on some lesson plans and review the tests I am giving for midterms.  AH comes up and asks me if I'm OK. I say I hurt a bit and ask him if my lips are blue. He says go check for myself, so I did.  There was a slight purplish tinge along the lower ridge of my lips and my chest felt like it was being crushed.  AH nagged me a few more times until I gave in and finally went to the E.R.

I hope I never ever ever have to be in an ER at Dameron Hospital again. Ever.

It was gross, it smelled funny, the woman in the next bed kept vomiting and the man one curtain away from her was groaning with a broken nose since he got his butt kicked at a liquor store earlier in the day and damaged parts of his face.  Oddly enough, this all made me feel better, as I wasn't them.  What made me feel worse was that they wanted to keep me overnight, which wouldn't have been so bad, if they had let AH stay with me.

The prospect of staying in the hospital alone, in a weird uncomfortable bed next to a woman who snored and moaned alternatively and also talked in her sleep scared the bejeezus out of me.  It scared me so much, I began to sob so hard that warm salty tears ran down my face and into my ears (I was laying on my back), pooling in little weird eddies in the hollow of my ear.  AH was concerned, and kept asking why I was crying, but I could not articulate the utter despair I felt at a night alone in that place. I just shook my head and kept on crying. They gave me sleeping pills and made AH leave with all of my stuff except my writing notebook and my wedding ring.  I did eventually succumb to a drug induced haze and was only woken up by the beeping of some monitor on the woman behind the privacy curtain.  It was 5am. Damn.

When the doctor came later, after AH came back with extra clothes, I insisted that I was going home that day - right then - if possible.  The doctor dithered in her really thick Asian accent and told me that they wanted to keep me an extra day, as the treadmill stress tests were never performed on a Sunday. I told her in as polite a way as I could that I would not be spending another night in the hospital, that I wanted to go home and that I had better things to do than sit around in a room and watch crappy cable television.  It was really really hard not to start yelling and crying. Finally, they let me go.

A birthday party for a one year old... some video game playing.. sub plans made.. Sunday passed.

Today I decided to change my life (again, with my prodding from AH). I went into a store front and promised, once again, that I needed to change, but this time... I needed to change with a purpose.

Today I joined Weight Watchers... again.  But this time, it will be different.

This time, I am ready to change my life.
This time, I am scared to death of being in a hospital bed again, staring at a ceiling hoping that the pain goes away and I get to see AH again and feel his hand in mine.
This time, I go in knowing that I want to watch my nephews and niece grow up and become who they are.
This time, I want to be a good role model for my students and get my self-esteem and confidence from being a good person, but also from the way that I look.
This time, I am ready to change my life, because if I don't, I may not have any more life to change.

This time, it will work... because it has to if I want to keep living.

In case you were wondering, so far my EKGs and enzymes came back fine. I have to schedule a stress test with the cardiologist and start taking medication for acid reflux just in case it was just really severe indigestion brought on by anxiety and overload.  I have a two week break coming up.  I am going to start using it to change my life... for good.

Thanks for reading! -TL