Tag: Health

Take A Hike!

Jane 2 Comments

It must have been obvious that I was not doing well.

So obvious, in fact, that my mother’s dear friend and my stand-in godmother (who also takes on role of great auntie and sometimes even grandmother in her friend’s place) informed me that she was coming to watch the boys on Wednesday afternoon and that I should leave the house.

She didn’t offer to watch the boys. No. She informed me she was going to watch the boys.

Alrighty, then! I’ll leave!

But where to go?

In the Before Times I’d have booked a massage, or perhaps an afternoon sewing lesson at a local fabric store. Maybe a mani-pedi or a visit to the hairdresser.

But in Covid Times (despite being vaccinated), either these activities are unavailable or seem unsafe.

So instead, I checked the weather report and then wrote to a friend.

“I know you’re working and you have responsibilities and everything, but I’m not okay and my godmother is watching the kids tomorrow and do you want to go on a hike with me?”

The response was swift and encouraging: I’ll make it work.

Outdoor Escape

That’s how I found myself in the car headed west on a mid-week afternoon (on St. Patrick’s Day, no less!).

I’d gone on AllTrails and found a lovely-looking hike within reasonable distance of home. I packed my hiking backpack with water, a first-aid kit, my knitting, two hunks of cheese and a Swiss army knife, grabbed my walking sticks and my mother’s old hiking boots and hopped in the car.

We met at Sky Meadows state park, a lovely park with several trail routes. After encountering a brood of chickens zealously guarding the restrooms, we struck north and tackled a 4.4 mile loop with gusto.

The first part of the hike was the hardest, but the view was worth it. As we stood at the top of a very steep hill, winded and sweaty after just 10 minutes of hiking, I thought to myself, “This was a wonderful idea.”

So Grateful

That hike in excellent company (and the delicious meal that followed!) was exactly what the doctor ordered.

So many things can crowd together to fog my mind and put me in a funk. Tedium, boredom, loneliness, feelings of inadequacy… We all have these feelings sometimes.

What we don’t all have, and what I am privileged to enjoy, are resources and opportunities.

Resources like the wonderful people who support me: my husband, my mother’s best friend, my own friends, family. Opportunities like being able to take a hike mid-week.

For these, and for so much more, I am very grateful. I hope to never take the people and the circumstances that surround me for granted.

If You’re Feeling Blue

You’re not alone. Though trust me, I know it feels like it. Depression sinks us further into isolation, which is a scary side-effect of social distancing.

If you or someone you love is suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (or SAMHSA–I know, catchy, right?) also offers a 24/7 hotline for free treatment referral and information: 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

There are lots of online resources like Better Help and others. I have no personal experience with these and don’t know how they work. Many of them are for-profit companies, so be aware of that.

If you have a family doctor, you can also reach out for tele-health appointments and referrals.

You can also write to a friend, or call. If you’re reading this and you want to talk, just drop me a line or give me a call. My friend rearranged her work day to take a hike with me. That’s what friends do. I’ll do the same for you.

Photo credit: Brittany Baker on AllTrails.com

Motivation Flagging

Jane Leave a comment

I was doing SO WELL!

I was steadily losing weight. My energy levels were up, my fitness levels were great, and my digestion! Well, I won’t go into the details, but it was great.

Then Came Christmas.

The Christmas cookies. The Panettone. The mulled wine. The port wine! The red wine! The white wine! THE CHAMPAGNE!

My normal rule of only having an alcoholic drink on the weekends went out the window.

That’s not to say I drank to excess, but I had more frequent glasses of wine than usual.

And it wasn’t just the tasty booze. Chico spoiled me rotten with littleneck clams and hake on Christmas eve. New Year’s Eve was yet another culinary treat.

Everything was too tasty to have just one helping!

So Naturally…

The numbers stopped moving downward on the scale. They halted and hovered. Then they crept back up slightly.

While I kept up my regular exercise, it wasn’t enough to counteract the excesses of the table.

And so I fell back into bad habits. My blood sugar started spiking and dipping as it had always done before.

All the hard work I had put into levelling out my blood sugar and fighting hanger, lost!

CURSES AND DAMNATION!

Struggling to Get Back to It

And so here we are in January, and I’m struggling to get back into the habits I had fought so hard to build before the holidays.

The funny part is, I felt so much better before indulging over the holidays.

I notice it especially in my mood, my energy levels and my digestive health. Overindulging in carbohydrates, sugar and alcohol has thrown my system out of whack.

But the addictive nature of these foods makes it hard to break the cycle.

A Little Willpower & A Lot of Help

It’s time for a little force of will and a lot of moral support.

Part of the willpower is removing temptations. Like the Bug’s leftover birthday cake, the panettone lingering in the bread bin, the opened bottle of wine in the fridge, the Christmas treats…

I may face pushback from other members of the family, but they’ll get over it. They’ve had plenty!

The other side of the willpower coin is taking the time to plan. Now that we’re back to our normal routine, I have to remember to plan appropriately for meals.

That means making sure the fridge and pantry are stocked with healthy options.

The help and moral support mostly comes from my Chico who is pretty much the only other adult I see on a regular basis these days.

But encouragement from family and friends, and from those of you who read this blog is a big help.

Not About the Number

In the end, though, this effort I’m making isn’t so much about the number on the scale.

(Though that number is definitely a factor, I can’t lie. Numbers mean a lot.)

The biggest motivation behind my desire to lose weight is to avoid the persistent back problems I’ve had.

Since dropping 5kg and increasing my overall fitness and strength, I haven’t had a single crisis with my lower back.

That’s huge. I used to have them nearly every month, and I had a particularly bad one in the fall that left me nearly immobile for a whole day.

(Joining the kids on the trampoline might have had something to do with that…)

So while it is nice to see numbers trending downwards on the scale, and measurements shrinking, the biggest reward is being pain-free and being able to hop up the stairs two at a time from the basement to the top floor without being winded.

So I’m ready to hold onto that thought, and get back into the business of taking care of myself.

Because if I don’t take care of myself, how will I take care of my boys?

Rethinking Food

Jane Leave a comment

Yesterday I finished reading The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz.

This book isn’t new. It was published in 2014, and boy! Did it make a splash when it came out.

Basically the conclusion is this: nearly everything we think we know about healthy eating is wrong.

Saturated fat is not bad for you.

Cholesterol is not a reliable indicator of risk of heart disease.

Dietary fat found in butter, red meat, eggs and cheese is good for us. In fact, it’s necessary for healthy body functioning.

A Complete Upheaval

For decades, we have been told that the best possible diet involves cutting back on fat, especially saturated fat, and that if we are not getting healthier or thinner it must be because we are not trying hard enough.

But what if the low-fat diet is itself the problem? What if the very foods we’ve been denying ourselves—the creamy cheeses, the sizzling steaks—are themselves the key to reversing the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease?

In this thoroughly researched analysis, Teicholz meticulously combs through all the data that is the basis of the low-fat diet recommendation.

It turns out that the low-fat diet is based on a hypothesis. It was a hypothesis that there is a connection between dietary fat and heart disease.

That hypothesis has never been proved. And in fact, Teicholz finds in her analysis that study after study showed either no connection, or a very tenuous one.

But because of forceful personalities in the early nutrition science world who were pushing this hypothesis as truth, every time a study came up with unsatisfactory results, they were either manipulated or ignored.

To learn this is truly shocking.

The Result

This startling history demonstrates how nutrition science has gotten it so wrong.

How overzealous researchers, though perhaps beginning with the best intentions, through a combination of ego, bias, and premature institutional consensus, have allowed dangerous misrepresentations to become dietary dogma.

Americans today are heavier and unhealthier than we have ever been. More than 42% of Americans are obese, according to a recent article in the Washington Post.

And despite adhering to the USDA and NIH’s recommendations to reduce meat, egg and dairy consumption and to increase grain, vegetable and fruit consumption, as a nation we have never suffered more from chronic weight and diet-related diseases.

Incredible

In seems unbelievable that nutrition experts for the last 60 years could have been so incredibly wrong. That what we know to be fundamentally true (namely: vegetables & fruit are the healthiest foods, animal fats are the unhealthiest) can be so completely wrong.

Yet it’s true.

In fact, in the six years since her book was published, the scientific evidence backing Teicholz’s research has grown, and the studies have become even more robust.

More and more evidence is now pointing to sugar and carbohydrates as the main culprits in these diet-related diseases. And while more research is needed, it is not clear that whole grains in large quantities are that much better for us than refined white flour.

My Takeaway

This book was a dense read, and I didn’t get through it quickly. In my Goodreads review I gave it 4 out of 5 stars for that reason.

But the takeaway from this book, for me, was huge.

Though I had heard about the Atkins diet, and at one point it seemed that everyone I knew was cutting carbs, I had dismissed it as a fad (I even remember repeating the misinformation that Dr. Atkins died of a heart attack!).

But this year, when I started to increase my exercise and get really serious about tracking my food to trying to lose weight, I was feeling so incredibly frustrated that I felt hungry all the time.

That’s when my aunt recommended Atkins and The Big Fat Surprise. She said, “Just read the books and then decide what you want to do.”

I have read them. I’ve read them and I have given myself permission to eat more butter, more cheese, more eggs and more meat.

And by God do I feel good! And OH MAN DOES IT TASTE AMAZING. After an initial feeling of withdrawal, I eventually realized that I wasn’t obsessing over food anymore. That I was feeling satisfied after every meal and that feeling was lasting longer.

I’ve lost nine pounds. I feel more energetic. I feel less guilty about enjoying bacon at breakfast, or cheese for a snack.

HOWEVER

It is, I think, very important to note that eating a high-protein, high-fat diet is EXPENSIVE.

Meat, eggs and cheese are not cheap, especially if you’re trying to buy organic or free-range. A low-income mother could not afford to feed this kind of diet to her kids. A person struggling to make ends meet doesn’t have the money to eat a high-protein diet.

I am fortunate that I can afford to eat either meat, fish or eggs daily. Not everyone in this country has that chance.

And it’s heartbreaking that those who need health food the most are the ones who are suffering the most from diet-related diseases.

They’re also the ones who are dying of covid-19.

Noom: More of a Bust than a Boom

Jane 18 Comments

Yesterday I told you about my experiences with Weight Watchers (aka WW). Today, let me tell you all about Noom.

Noooooooom!

Okay, enough of that silliness.

First Off

The name is dumb. It means nothing. And part of the company’s “playful” and “cool” schtick is to try to push it as being sooooooo mysterious and aren’t you dyyyyyying to know what it means?

No. No, I am not.

Credit Where it’s Due

To give the company its due, I did learn about it through one of its sponsorships.

Noom sponsors NPR, and I am a big NPR listener (or at least I was until the pandemic made listening to the news an anxiety-provoking activity). So, well done Noom on hitting your target audience. Bravo.

Noom bills itself as a lifestyle-changing program, rather than a diet. Though, like any other diet, you are assigned a daily calorie budget with some extra weekly points you can use to “cheat” with–like in WW.

You then begin on a daily regimen of trite inanities.

What Now?

Yes, that’s what I said. You’re put through some pretty painfully dumb readings, quizzes and assignments.

Alright, I understand that this is a program designed for all Noom users, and that perhaps I am not what you would call average in terms of rapidity of thought and concept comprehension. Nor, however, am I an Einstein.

But PLEASE! I think what drove me most insane about Noom was the stupidly vapid, annoying and sometimes rather condescending tone of voice it uses in all its communications.

What You Actually Have To Do

  • On Noom, you weigh in daily. Weight Watchers and other programs I’ve heard of have you weigh in only once a week.

Noom argues, however, that weighing in daily helps you to conquer “scanxiety,” aka “scale anxiety” (See?! It’s these stupid terms that annoy me!).

Fine. I didn’t really mind that.

  • Then, you have to spend a good ten to 20 minutes on your phone, reading all the day’s articles, taking the quizzes and preparing for the day’s “assignments.”

At first, I diligently read all the articles, tried to absorb the “psych tricks” (“It’s all based on real psychology!” Is there such a think as fake psychology?), and obediently tried out the assignments.

It wasn’t all BS, though. I did glean some takeaways for portion control, tips for avoiding temptation at the grocery store, and even got a couple of nice recipes.

But spending that much time on my phone soon became undoable. I do not spend that much time on my phone in one sitting. As life butted in, I found myself dropping off halfway through an article to help dress a child, prepare breakfast, or (Heaven forbid!) actually go pee myself.

Then the day began and suddenly, I was behind on my assignments and felt like I had to try and play catch-up for the rest of the day.

  • And of course, you count calories. Foods are either green, yellow or red, and you’re steered towards a certain amount of each per day.

In the end, Noom is like any other program you’ve tried, just with jauntier lingo. The long and the short of it is that you have to count calories.

The database of known foods may be growing as people add in grocery store items and ingredients, but when I tried it, it was still quite limited. I mainly shop at Giant and Wegmans, and many basic products I bought there were not recognized.

And, naturally, I had to put in all my go-to recipes again and calculate how many portions they are (I dunno, I’ve made them up!), and how many calories a portion is.

Other Elements of the Noom Program

At the beginning you are assigned a coach. Your coach is a “health consultant” but is not a registered dietician.

I don’t know what qualifies a person to be a health consultant, but the supposed lady who was my coach seemed more like a robot giving automated responses. She was worse than useless.

After a period, you are also added to a support group. I think you’re matched up with others who began at more or less the same time, have similar lifestyles, goals and habits (they ask you about these things when you sign up).

Honestly, most of the time I ignored what was going on in my “support group” and what the group leader (another Noom employee) was posting there. She was supposedly setting challenges or giving motivating advice, but most of the time it just felt like even more stuff to read and assignments to complete.

All In All

Okay, so I did lose a little weight when I started Noom. That’s probably because my calorie intake was limited to 1,400 calories a day (whaaaaaaat? Yeeeeeeeeees, I know it’s ridiculous).

I spent a lot of time hungry. The “green foods” Noom suggests you focus on were not enough to fill me up. Lean proteins and even healthy fats like avocado, nuts and seeds are classified as “red foods,” so I avoided them.

Funny, but it seems to me like (in moderation) these are precisely the kinds of foods that help to satiate while also stabilizing blood sugar. But hey, I’m not an expert.

(Though it seems I already know more than my Noom “health coach” did.)

I fell behind in my readings and quizzes and soon became overwhelmed and unmotivated. My tracking fizzled, and before long I had quit and deleted the app.

And the weight crept back on.

In Conclusion

In terms of personalization, good coaching and support, Weight Watchers is definitely superior to Noom. Their database of known foods is also much better.

If you want to try a diet that encourages low-fat, low calorie consumption, and you don’t want stupid people talking to you as if you are the idiot, then skip Noom and use Weight Watchers. If you’re going to be hungry, you don’t want to feel like someone’s adding insult to the injury by belittling your intelligence.

Personally, I’m ready to try something else. Something drastic.

Watch this space.

Why WW Didn’t Work for Me

Jane 6 Comments

In this article, I refer to the company as both Weight Watchers and WW. The official name used to be Weight Watchers, but they recently rebranded to just WW. A lot of people still refer to the company by the long name, so I’m using both interchangeably.

I wrote a few days ago about my decision to count calories. Or, if not count calories, at least track everything that I eat.

This decision comes as I realize that I need to take my health (and the health of my lower back!) seriously. Not so much focused on a number when it comes to weight loss, but on my back feeling less pressure, feeling strong and healthy.

I’ve Tried WW Before

At the end of 2011, I was about as heavy as I am now. In 2010, I had surgery on my lower back which eliminated running from being my principal exercise.

In 2012, starting a new life in a new place, I decided to try and make some changes. I signed up for what was then Weight Watchers, which is now officially WW.

In the first week, I felt seriously hungry. I remember breaking down in tears at the thought that this was my future: feeling hungry all the time.

It Got Better

Gradually, it got better and just by tracking and eating less (not exercising regularly), I did manage to lose a good 10kg in about nine months.

I noticed, though, that Weight Watchers steered me heavily towards low-fat and low calorie options, and encouraged a lot of fruit consumption (high in sugar).

I was doing WW online, and I liked the app and the relative ease of tracking. However, putting all my recipes in (since I do mostly cook from scratch) was pretty tedious, and the database of known Canadian ingredients wasn’t huge.

At one point, when I had hit a plateau and wanted to try and re-motivate myself, I attended a couple of meetings.

Meetings Were a No-Go

The meetings heavily pushed Weight Watchers products. There were always arrays of packaged “healthy” foods: treats, salty snacks, prepared meals, all branded.

That was a bit of a turn-off. Also, the focus of the meetings didn’t seem right to me.

Instead of talking about making healthy lifestyle changes, the leader and other members seemed to focus on how to “cheat.”

They were constantly looking for ways to try and fool their taste buds or their stomachs into thinking they had eaten something they craved, or eaten more.

I stopped attending after two meetings.

Fizzled Out

Eventually, the whole process lost its charm, and my use of the app and tracking fizzled out.

I have actually twice signed up again for WW, only to let it drop. Once in 2018, when we were living in Germany. It is not huge in Germany, and I was using the American site. Tracking the ingredients and foods I was eating there was very difficult, and I soon gave up.

A second time was earlier this year.

Rebranded from Weight Watchers to WW

In early 2020, I tried again. Weight Watchers is now WW and the rebranding has included a revamping of their points system.

You are assigned a color, and based on your color, some foods are “allowed” and others are not.

If you are purple, you get fewer points for eating potatoes than if you are blue, for instance.

I also tried attending meetings again (this was pre-pandemic). But once again, though there was more sharing of tasty recipes in this group, there was a lot of talk about “fooling” yourself into think you’re eating what you’re not.

Already a bit skeptical, when the pandemic hit I didn’t bother to try the virtual meetings. I also found that their points system didn’t work for me, and I gave up tracking again.

Eventually, I canceled my membership yet again.

An Individualized Approach

After thinking about it and wondering why I found it so hard to stick with WW, I have come to a couple of conclusions.

  • Firstly, I don’t like being told what to do by someone (or some entity) I don’t know and respect. With the online version, I don’t have any personal interaction (minus the online discussions, and let’s not even go there). And in the face-to-face meetings I attended, I couldn’t respect the person leading.
  • Secondly, despite having lost weight on WW before, I wasn’t really building lasting habits. I don’t think any app or program can do that for me, and WW certainly didn’t. I lost a lot of weight, looked great in the photos at my wedding, and then went back to old habits.

It’s not like I don’t know what I need to do. And it’s not like I am a weak-willed person who cannot discipline herself enough to build new habits.

But I think that I need something more personalized and more tailored than Weight Watchers offers.

That’s When I Tried Noom.

I’ll tell you about that another time.

(Spoiler alert: IT SUCKED.)

I Am Not a Garbage Disposal

Jane 2 Comments

It’s my new mantra.

I have to mutter it to myself 4-5 times a day, as I look at what my children have left on their plates.

This is a huge pitfall for parents trying to lose weight, I have learned.

Still Counting

It’s been about ten days, and I am still counting those calories. Thanks to some very sagacious advice from my godfather, I have also added some strength training to my fitness routine.

There have been good days and bad days. Some days I have too much, other days I don’t even eat all my allotted daily calories (rare), but I’m counting everything.

Some days, I feel perfectly satisfied.

Other days, I feel like I spend the day hungry. I’m convinced it’s psychological, because those days are the ones when I have less going on. I’m not as busy, hovering around the kitchen more.

Those are the days when my kids’ plates are especially dangerous.

Family Rule

We have one kid who simply doesn’t eat a lot, and another kid who is a picky eater. The Bug will taste pretty much anything, but he won’t eat lots of it. The Bear will flat-out refuse to eat things.

To mitigate the exhaustion and unpleasantness that can be mealtimes, we have instituted one simple rule:

One bite of everything.

Whatever foods are on their plates, they must take one bite of each. This can lead to faces, complaints and protests, but generally they comply.

The trouble is that whatever they don’t like gets left on their plates.

Often, the things they don’t like are the things that I love!

After eating, once they’ve cleared their plates to the counter, I have to steel myself before heading to the kitchen to start tidying.

It’s so easy to finish off what they’ve left behind! And it seems like such a waste!

(The worst part is that Chico can finish their plates AND have his own helping of seconds and never bat an eyelash. If I were to do that, I’d see the difference on the scale the very next morning.)

Building Up the Willpower

Different people have different approaches to this problem. I’ve heard of people squirting dish soap on their kids’ plates as soon as they get to the kitchen in order to avoid the temptation.

What’s helped me, though, is the knowledge that I must write everything down.

Today, the school-provided lunch was “pizza crunchers.” Basically, fried balls of mozzarella stuffed with tomato sauce. Neither of the kids liked them very much, and they left most of them on their plates.

The golden lumps of fat gleamed up at me from their plates. Their siren call was in their smell. They smelled delicious.

Just one bite, I told myself.

I picked one up, but instead of feeling a crispy crust between my fingers, all I felt was a soggy, smooshy lump.

That broke the spell. I dropped it back onto the plate (splat!), quickly carried it into the kitchen and emptied it into the garbage.

Whew! That was close!

Feeling Pretty Good

I managed to resist temptation. I was feeling pretty good about myself.

And then the boys and I baked brownies.

https://morealtitude.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/evening-star/

It’s Been a Week

Jane Leave a comment

First, there was the whole Covid-at-daycare situation.

Which was thankfully followed by two negative test results!

But then came Thursday evening. Thursday evening was a bit of a bust.

A Dumb Accident

It was typical evening of roughhousing. I was practicing piano downstairs when suddenly I heard screaming from upstairs. I heard Chico calling my name, and I ran.

The Bug was on his knees on our bedroom floor, his right arm limp at his side. It was hard to make out what had happened through his screams, but it involved a twist and a pop.

Assuming his elbow was dislocated, I prepared to take him to the ER. I gave him a dose of Motrin, grabbed a new chapter book, water bottles and our masks, and we headed out.

Three and a half hours, several X-rays and a splint later, and we were home with a new toy in hand, given to him by the doctor as we were leaving. There are perks to going to the pediatric ER!

We had to follow up with an orthopedic surgeon on Friday, and it turns out the Bug has such a small radial fracture that it didn’t even show up on the X-rays.

He shouldn’t need his cast for more than a week.

And Now… Trump Has Covid.

We don’t have Covid, but the president does.

(I should say that what I’m writing about now has little to do with the above. It’s late. I’m tired. It’s been a week.)

I haven’t been on Facebook since the news broke, and I intend to stay off it for a while. I don’t really care to know what people think of this situation.

I cannot wish him ill, though. He’s a monster. He’s the human version of Covid, and yet I cannot wish him ill.

The Value of Human Life

It’s appalling to me the way people here seem to undervalue human life. On TV, in films, and even in the news, I see people throwing away human life as if it were nothing.

I read in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago, that a dispute got out of hand between some neighbors in Fairfax county, Virginia. They were townhouse neighbors, and apparently for years they had been arguing.

One day, one of the men walked up his neighbor’s front steps. He knocked on the neighbor’s door. The neighbor opened his door, and immediately opened fire on the man. He shot him three times, and the man staggered back. He shot him three more times as he fell backwards down the front steps.

And finally, he shot him as he lay at the bottom of the stairs. Seven shots. The man died before an ambulance arrived.

What kind of country is this?

In the midwest, a young man drove hours from his home to shoot protesters in a city in a neighboring state.

All over the country, people are being shot at and disabled or murdered by the police. And then no one is being held accountable or responsible.

And now, on social media, people are spewing forth with vitriol, wishing death on the president.

I’m sure it happens in other places, too, but what terrifies me about the United States is that devaluing human life seems to be part of the culture.

Whether it’s by arguing about the right to own guns, to the normalization of violence in pop culture, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s not just on one side of the political divide.

This disregard for the value of a person’s life seems to be just as prevalent on the left as on the right. The left just seems to be a bit more hypocritical about it, it seems to me.

Tying the Two Together

Though our son was never in any danger this week, a visit to the ER is always enough to give one a little perspective.

My son’s life is just as precious as the president’s.

I recoil at the sight of those words, but the thing is they are true. No one’s life is of greater value than anyone else’s.

That is why Black Lives Matter is so important, because as things stand Black lives are not valued as greatly as white lives. As things stand, a Black man like George Floyd is not as valued as my precious son.

And he should be. Because every single human life is precious. Every single one.

Even the president’s.

Waiting, waiting, waiting

Jane 3 Comments

I went.

I listened to my mother’s voice nagging in my ear. I listened to the kind and concerned advice from family and friends.

I went to the gynecologist.

The Diagnosis

Well there wasn’t really anything to diagnose, but the doctor did have a couple of concerns.

His first priority was that I schedule a mammogram (my first). From now on, I will have to do them every year.

His second priority, upon looking at my family history, was to recommend the genetic test for the mutation of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.

Luckily, my insurance covers the test and they were able to take a blood sample right there in their lab.

What This Means

First off, I have to wait three weeks to know the result. That’s hard.

And secondly, the result terrifies me.

If the test is negative…

It could mean very little. My mother tested negative, and she still got breast cancer.

Her cousin had it, and she also tested negative for the gene mutations.

According to the CDC, “most breast and ovarian cancer is not caused by genetic mutations” anyway. So getting a negative result doesn’t mean I won’t get breast cancer.

Hardly comforting.

If the test is positive…

I guess if it’s positive at least we’ll know, right?

If the test is positive, then we can start looking into options and discussing possibilities.

Maybe it would just be easier if the test came back positive. It might make things more straightforward.

A Terrifying Emotional Load

A friend very eloquently said that all this comes with a terrifying emotional load.

I couldn’t have described it better.

Knowing my family history as I do, it almost feels like there’s an expiration date stamped on my butt.

Use by June 2050

Feeling that way can sometimes spur me into action (Life is short! Grab the bull by the horns!) or freeze me into depression (Is my life already more than half-way over?).

And I can go back and forth between the two (and be anywhere in between) several times in one day.

Talk about a rollercoaster.

Is this what a mid-life crisis looks like?

Is It Okay to Feel Like Crap?

Jane Leave a comment

We all have those days, right?

It might be an isolated day, or it might be a couple of them back-to-back.

Where you just feel crappy.

Sometimes you feel physically crappy, like when you’re sick or injured. Sometimes you’re just mentally pooped: tired of everything.

And let’s not even talk about how emotionally drained we all feel with this pandemic.

Unproductive Thoughts

When I have days like this, I often feel like I should “snap out of it.” Like my failure to make myself feel better is somehow a personal failing.

I also start to make a mountain out of a molehill. If I feel this bad more than one day, what does this mean? Am I always going to feel this way? Will I ever feel better?

These thoughts, as you can imagine, do not help.

So… What to do?

Why do I have to do anything?

Why do I need to change the fact that I feel like crap?

Sometimes, the best thing to do is to just let yourself feel crappy for a day or two. Usually, for me, it passes soon enough. (If it doesn’t pass, that’s another kettle of fish.)

After a couple of days, I’ll wake up and feel like getting out of bed. Maybe I’ll even feel motivated to do something I know will help me feel better.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember in the fog of a bad day, but when the fog starts to clear, I try to remind myself:

This too shall pass.

A Slight Case of the Plague

Jane 1 Comment

You’ve all heard of the man cold, right?

That’s when a man gets a cold. Anyone who has shared a home with a man knows what I’m talking about. To listen to him you’d think he was dying.

Well, I have a man cold.

I am dying.

It feels like my sinuses are going to cave under the pressure, and I sound like I’ve been singing along at a K.I.S.S. concert.

Staying at home with the kids while Chico is away, it’s hard to take the time I need to rest and get well.

Mom guilt kicks in whenever I lie down for a bit, instead of doing the one million other things I think I SHOULD be doing.

Like preparing a healthy dinner for the boys, or applying for another job, or getting some exercise, or folding the laundry, or, or, or…

You get the picture.

So here’s a message to all the mamas out there suffering from a cold:

YOU CAN TAKE THE DAY OFF.

Well, you know what I mean. You still probably have to get the kids off to school, but it is TOTALLY OKAY if you want to get back into bed when you get home.

Your kids will not fail to get into Harvard just because you didn’t take them to the library this afternoon.

(Let’s face it, they’re probably not going to get into Harvard anyway…)

That extra episode of Sesame Street? Yeah, it won’t kill them.

They didn’t get much exercise today? Whatever. They’ll be fine.

Self Care Starts with Me

There’s a whole industry out there that tries to sell me products labeled as “self care” products. Things like manicures, scented candles, bath salts, facial creams, a glass of wine…

But if you ask me, that’s all horse hockey.

Self care is taking care of my mental and physical well-being.

When I have a cold, that means giving myself permission to take the time I need to recover.

This week, I’m setting the example to my boys of what it is to take care of myself when I don’t feel well.

I’m eating healthy foods, drinking lots of tea, bundling myself up like a babushka and resting as much as possible.

The Boys Kinda Love it…

The Bug and the Bear are so much enjoying all the extra TV time that I suspect they’re going to TRY and get me sick as much as possible.

Come to think of it, it WAS the Bug who gave me a full-on kiss on the lips and then sneezed into my face.

Clever boy…