Cystic Fibrosis Fatboy — Page 68 — The daily quest to gain weight

Portion Sizes are a Challenge in a CF Family

July 14, 2010

It’s summer BBQ time! We have to spend a little extra time buying our grilling meats because I need to be sure that Beautiful gets a normal person portion and I get a “are you seriously going to eat all of that?” look from any number of service personnel, including wait staff at restaurants. When I was younger, they would warn my parents that something was a really big portion, to which they informed them that my nickname was “The Insinkerator” and to just bring me what I ordered.

Here is an example of a portion that I give myself in the evening. I believe I took some photos of spaghetti dinners with my phone, too – those should go at the bottom. What we have here is 1/3 of a 4-serving bag of steam-in-bag corn, a 12oz pork chop, and 3/4 of a bag of rice. If you have CF, I don’t know how you can make it without moderate culinary skills, and grilling is an essential skill to learn to get good protein in a new and palatable method after a long, cold winter. We do love our grilling recipes, and I do love my grill that Beautiful everyone pitched in and got me for my 30th birthday almost two years ago! I even got a BBQ recipe/tip hardcover book for Christmas the year I got the grill, and it’s got some good rubs in there and makes me feel grilling equipment inadequate. There sure are a lot of toys to go with my shiny grill that I don’t have yet.

[Read more…]

Scar Tuesday – Show off Your Scar(s)

July 13, 2010

Meconium Ileus Scar: 1978 Style

I’ve got a huge meconium ileus scar that I’ve been self-conscious about my entire life. Now, in my old, fat age, it’s not stretching with the rest of my gut, leaving an odd-looking line across my midsection when I stuff myself after a good meal and I’m wearing a t-shirt that has become a tad snug around the middle. In fact, my favorite shirt I’m wearing to the right is starting to look a little ridiculous, so says Beautiful. I guess I have to agree at this point.

It wasn’t until I started following other CFers on their sites that I found out that there seems to be more who have a vertical scar than a gaping horizontal scar like mine. I’ve heard my dad say on a number of occasions that the surgeons really butchered me up with that first surgery – probably because it was 1978 and they didn’t give me much of a chance of living past 5 or 10, so what did it matter what my scar looked like.

Now, it’s a bit of a nuisance to the point that I’d consider some cosmetic surgery to re-align all of my muscles to get a beautiful 6-pack and get rid of anything in there that is pinning my scar in tighter than the surrounding area. A middle-aged gut on a CFer is a badge of honor that I will wear with pride, though I’d rather work back down to a washboard and maintain this weight.

My other scar

My other “big” scar is from my port when I was picking at the scab, not realizing how it was pulling apart while healing because they only used that 3M glue bandage that started peeling after a couple of days. The more I picked at the itching incision, the wider and more transparent the scar turned. This probably isn’t the best shot of the scar, but I haven’t found that new camera I’ve been looking for yet to take nice macro shots.

You can link to an external photo, such as Flickr or your Facebook or Posterous account in the comments, and it should show up for us if you want to show off your scar in the comments. Otherwise, tell your story on your blog and link to it with Linky Tools below with a mention/link to this post in your post so people know what’s going on.

Blog About Living With Cystic Fibrosis

July 12, 2010

This entry is part [part not set] of 19 in the series What CFers Do

I’ve been blogging since October 2005. It all started innocently enough: a daily diary of my gameplay time in the online game, World of Warcraft. My memory is so terrible, I thought it would be neat to create a daily account of my time in the game, and ended up creating a whole persona and eventually a following of fans that would follow me from game server to game server as they filled up and got too slow to enjoy playing on. It was an incredible sense of “someone cares about what I’m writing about.”

Traffic got up to over 1,300 unique visitors per day and I was raking in the money with link ads and affiliate sales. Those were the golden years of my blogging life. It’s stalled at 801 posts, even though I still play a few hours per week to relax – I just haven’t taken the time to continue posting my exploits. Financially, I should… those were good days. 😉

Time for a personal site – how about talking about CF?

In May of 2007, while leaving for Chicago for my first blogging conference, SOBCon (no, not that kind of SOB – Successful Online Bloggers), I got onto my host and created my personal blog so I could talk about something other than my digital persona without being weird. It turns out that most of my regular readers actually cared about the person between the chair and keyboard, but it looked strange to me to have a story about Beautiful freaking out about a spider on a site dedicated to a game. It was time to have a personal site. I just wanted to have a place to post everything about my first trip to Chicago for a cool geek conference. A WoW blog was no place to house that sort of content.

Yet cystic fibrosis hardly ever came up. I just did a search of the 445 posts on my personal site, and the phrase “cystic fibrosis” only comes up 13 times in 3 years. I clearly didn’t want to talk about it.

Writing brings validation and reality to a topic

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Faith & Cystic Fibrosis: Observations & Discussion

July 11, 2010

I don’t know if you’ve noticed in your cystic fibrosis blog-hopping, but it seems like there is a disproportionately higher number of CFers proclaiming to be born-again Christians than the general population. However, those who are more on the agnostic or atheist end of the spectrum seem to have a disproportionately higher angst in their writing than, say a non-Christian business blogger. I’ve seen all lower-case drivel consisting of nothing but incoherent, disjointed complaining and anger at life in general. Living itself is a miserable prospect to some.

A fitting post for Sunday

I thought this would be a good topic for the day, since my premise is that most of you will be reading this before or after church, if you’re able, and can get the juices and discussion flowing on what is a normally slow blogging day.

It’s an interesting discussion of nature vs. nurture, I think. Are we more prone to think of our future – our eternity – than most or were we raised by parents who had to have something/someone to lean on during our struggles if they weren’t already living a faith-based life? [Read more…]

Portion Sizes are a Challenge in a CF Family

July 14, 2010

It's summer BBQ time! We have to spend a little extra time buying our grilling meats because I need to be sure that Beautiful gets a normal person portion and I get a "are you seriously going to eat all of that?" look from any number of service … [Read more]

Scar Tuesday – Show off Your Scar(s)

July 13, 2010

I've got a huge meconium ileus scar that I've been self-conscious about my entire life. Now, in my old, fat age, it's not stretching with the rest of my gut, leaving an odd-looking line across my midsection when I stuff myself after a good meal and … [Read more]

Blog About Living With Cystic Fibrosis

July 12, 2010

I've been blogging since October 2005. It all started innocently enough: a daily diary of my gameplay time in the online game, World of Warcraft. My memory is so terrible, I thought it would be neat to create a daily account of my time in the game, … [Read more]

Faith & Cystic Fibrosis: Observations & Discussion

July 11, 2010

I don't know if you've noticed in your cystic fibrosis blog-hopping, but it seems like there is a disproportionately higher number of CFers proclaiming to be born-again Christians than the general population. However, those who are more on the … [Read more]

My other scar

Time for a personal site – how about talking about CF?

Writing brings validation and reality to a topic

A fitting post for Sunday

Time Elapsed Since IVs