In high school, I wasn’t thin like a cheerleader but I was definitely close to slim, had long hair, looked like a hair band guitar player and felt good enough to wrestle with friends and do just about anything I wanted to do.
After hating my first three semesters of college, I gained a little weight and got hooked on building websites. I quit college, got a full time computer job, gained a little more weight and hung out with people who kept me in a constant state of anxiety. In 2001 I moved to Nashville, lost a little weight, came back to Arkansas and went back to school and gained a little back.
I didn’t eat very well in college (apparently few people do) and due to my frequent computer use was losing curve in my neck and getting too much in my lower back. That meant doing normal things like cleaning the bathtub made my back feel like the muscles were trying to pull me over backwards. It only got worse.
In October, 2006, two things happened within a week of each other: Sandy West died and my mother came home to tell me she’d been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
At the time we had a roommate I could not stand, who went out of her way to make me feel bad. I eventually got rid of her, but in the first year after mom’s diagnosis, I gained almost 45 pounds. The combination of not eating the best, severe stress, putting off my original plans and watching my mom decline really had an impact. So in 2008 I buckled down to lose some of the weight and feel better.
By combining daily mile walks during my lunch hour (a river is half a mile from our door, so it was easy to do the mile when I got to see the river in the middle) with eating better, Hindu pushups, some basic karate and very basic yoga, I lost almost 15 pounds in a couple months. The problem was that the daily walks made my back hurt so bad I could hardly stand it for up to an hour after the walk. So I went to a sports store and bought custom shoes.
What I should have done after that was ease back into my walks, but that’s so not my style. So after a week with the new shoes I gave myself plantar fasciitis in both feet and a killer case of Achilles tendinitis in my right foot. I was in a wheelchair myself for almost a month, then in and out of it as I tried to get better so I could take care of my mom.
After several months of only getting worse and being banned from using mom’s lift by my podiatrist (he was afraid I’d rupture the Achilles, which was quite possible… one time when a caregiver got canceled without my knowledge and I had to use the lift my foot swelled to almost double its size), I started using the money mom had saved for my brother and I to hire caregivers. The plan was to follow my doctor’s instructions so I could get better and take over.
Unfortunately, except for not having to use the lift anymore, the amount of getting up and doing stuff I wasn’t supposed to be doing didn’t really decrease. Even though I was paying people to do it. Go figure. So I just never got better.
Not being able to do much for fear of rupturing a tendon isn’t fun, and I stopped bothering to eat right. Depression doesn’t help either. So I put the weight back on plus some, and didn’t feel much better after my mother died in May of 2009. I spent three weeks with her in hospice, took one week off to plan the funeral and take care of business hours only matters, and took no time off to grieve. This is apparently not good for your mental state, as I’ve now learned.
Depression, stress, an injury and everything that comes with all of those don’t work well together, at least not when it comes to me being healthy. An infection broke out on my hands for no good reason and I felt very tempted to commit myself to some facility for a few weeks. Of course if I did that I’d have no income anymore, which wouldn’t help the stress level when I got out.
So I started thinking and came to some conclusions. I’m tired all the time, don’t really plan for the future anymore (I guess I don’t see much of one), have no energy and have to fake my way through a lot of stuff. The only times I really enjoy myself are by going out and watching Big Bad Gina (the ever present smiles of the two women I usually hang out with when I do that certainly help). I’ve managed to rest my feet enough to get mostly rid of the under foot problems but still have some issues with the Achilles tendon. So that still cuts out walking for a while.
Guess what? I’m sick of it. Literally, sick. Besides the infection on my hands I have constant headaches and acid in my stomach almost all day. I have a tailbone that hurts if I sit too long. Recently though I got involved with two things that are making me think about life a bit differently.
The first of course is the Walk to D’Feet ALS in honor of my mom. That serves as a little reminder that if she were still here, she’d be more than a little ticked off at me. The second is Wrestlers Rescue, which besides reminding me that things could be a LOT worse, has given me a little confidence boost in the last couple of weeks.
So the mission is clear. I’m getting blood work done on the 10th to make sure I don’t have anything underlying going on besides high blood pressure, and if I do, to fix it. I got a bladder infection and a skin infection on my chest and simply decided I didn’t want them, drank a lot of water, and got rid of both myself in two days. Now that’s liquid fueled determination. The infection on my hands is receding too.
So now I’m throwing out all the stuff I don’t need to be eating. I just spent a half hour making my punching bag wish it had never come into my house and in a few minutes I’ll be taking a far infrared sauna after riding my exercise bike for a while. I might not be able to walk like normal yet, but I can ride.
I can’t get rid of some of the stress, because I can’t control other people. But if I don’t get myself on the reverse track now, there really won’t be any point in planning a long future. I have a chance to meet some of my favorite wrestlers next year, and I want to be healthy when I do it. I’m going to find a new counselor and go more than once every two months. I’m going to grieve, whether others want me to or not and I’m going to have fun on my cruise in October and stop looking at it as “the trip to spread mom’s ashes.” It will only take ten minutes to do that. If I don’t enjoy the rest of the time, I’d be doing her a big disservice.
So a new journey begins. The first goal is ten pounds, to have something to celebrate. Then to get under 200 again which might just end my high blood pressure and foot problems. Then it’s to get back to where I was in high school – not cheerleader thin, but healthy and able to move.
The only thing I feel sorry for is the freestyle dummy coming in the mail. It’s going to get stretched and pummeled until it’s flat.
I been up, ‘n’ I been down
I been messed up ‘n’ turned around
I been a fool, ‘n’ I been wise
I’ve seen shit ‘n’ paradise
And I still got the aces up my sleeve
Fast mover, ‘n’ ya can’t catch me
