The Ebb and Flow of Gaining Weight with CF
As you can see by my “growth chart” in the far right sidebar, I’ve been up and down, and way down yesterday. Let’s just say life. is. busy. It’s really hard to eat and drink when I get this busy. I am not an unconscious eater – I have to think about food unless I’m already starving. Throw stress into it, and I can ignore my hunger for hours. This is a story. This is a story about how a weekend can be hard and throw a wrench in your progress. In the end, this story will kick your butt and take your name. Please chime in with your comments if this strikes a chord with your and your life, struggles, achievements.
Saturday
Saturday, Beautiful let me sleep in until 9:15 because I was up until 4am coding for a client project that was pre-paid. The reason I was so inclined to stay up all night was because it was no earlier than 6pm that I realized that my Spanish 2 homework was due on Sunday. Then I realized that my Advanced Composition essay and exam were due on Monday. I had yet to begin any of said work yet because of, well, life running a business.
After my 1,000 Calorie breakfast, I headed upstairs to use my laptop on the big monitor with the big keyboard and my mouse to spread my Spanish notebook out and go at it. At noon, I e-mailed my professor with a question after trying one section 36 times only to receive an out-of-office reply that she would be back on Monday. Great! I was on my own because my study partners hadn’t started yet. I came downstairs and had some lame lunch… a leftover plate of sweet and sour chicken…. and headed back upstairs. I plowed through it and got up to around 90% by 5pm to make some dinner after I had to cancel going out with my parents because I simply didn’t have the time or energy to go anywhere or be with anyone.
We had Hamburger Helper – I not only shared it, but we had leftovers. That is the perfect example of what stress does to me. I watched TV until 6:30 or so and went back upstairs to write my essay, which ended up being about CF, and pounded out 950 words in just over 2 hours. Not magazine quality, but better than most newspapers would require. Good enough for an A. I came back down around 9pm and vegged in front of the TV numb to everything. I wanted to reboot life in the sense of dropping everything where it was, quit all my obligations, and start over with new ones.
Sunday
Sunday was more of the same, only different. I didn’t get to work until around 3pm when my brother-in-law was able to help me finish my issues in Spanish to get a higher grade, but then I was burnt out again. I couldn’t make myself do anything. I ate leftover Hamburger Helper and wrapped up another client obligation. I pretty much stopped working after trying to medicate my tight, spazzing back with Vicodin around 7pm and resorted to a Xanax at 9pm and going to bed. I requested to be awoken at 5:00 when Beautiful got up for work rather than my usual 6:15. Maybe tomorrow would be a re-boot.
What separates the winners from the losers in the game of life and the game of life with CF is how quickly you recover from a down cycle.
What do you do when food and life struggles hit you with a cycle? We all have cycles. If you don’t think you have cycles, you’re either heavily medicated or lying to yourself and/or others. This weekend was a huge cycle of “get away” and “reboot” for me. By Sunday night, I wanted to curl up on the couch and cuddle, but she wouldn’t have any of that because I was freaking out about all the work due the next day. What separates the winners from the losers in the game of life and the game of life with CF is how quickly you recover from a down cycle. I see boys/losers every time I go to clinic. I hear from my RN that I should talk to some of them. Sure I could, but without some fire inside, that won’t do any good.
Light a fire
Maybe I could light a fire, maybe not. I know very few things light fires in me. Fires usually get lit under me. Here are some triggers for a fire:
- Love – doing something because someone loves you or you love someone
- Fear – doing something because not doing it would be worse
- Satisfaction – doing something because doing so would rock!
This almost comes back to goals, so I’ll go there again. If you don’t have goals, you are going nowhere in life. Maybe that’s okay with you, but maybe you should ask your parents, friends (unless your friends suck – if they do, skip them), significant other, spouse, or some other close family how they feel about the path you’re on. Is your health the way it is because of your path? Barring some really bad transplant rejection or some severe MRSA affecting your meds’ ability to work, I’d venture a guess to say it is.
Mine was, and this is my journey.
Exercise journal: I did 30 push-ups to failure and then 20 more later to enforce the pain with no prior working out in months tonight.
