November 27, 2021

Medical friends, a question. I know I’m an impatient patient but where should I be 18 days post surgery? I’ve done more today. I’ve been sorting closets and laundry. I’m changing out summer and winter clothes and packing up stuff for KARM. I will work in spurts and then lie down. I was told at the urologist (the one who did the emergency surgery) that, until the stint is out in Feb. , I will have pain and bleeding with movement. I’ve had that today but I just don’t know how far to push it. I’m resting right now but I know I need to move as much as possible. I guess what I’m asking is do you think I’m doing too much? It’s so hard to know what’s normal. I know I have restrictions: I can’t lift hardly anything for three more weeks, after that, it’s under 20 pounds until Feb., no exercise other than some walking. I’m just so bad at sorting out between lying around and doing too much. I’m a terrible patient. 

 November 27, 2021

For several days, my emotions have been fluctuating and I’ve been fighting off depression. We did have a wonderful Thanksgiving with family. I was crying before we left the house and then spent the rest of the day laughing and talking. It was good medicine.

Yesterday, the depression got worse. It wasn’t until last night that I realized what was going on. I’d thought it was the result of the unexpected surgery and the long, forced recovery period but once I realized what was really bothering me, the depression faded away. My appointment with Dr. Saunders is on Tuesday and we will discuss prognosis and treatment. The way I’ve been feeling, the anxiety, the depression and the revolving door of emotions, it’s all got to do with that appointment. Yes, I am ready to get all of these delays over with but I still dread hearing my diagnosis. It’s like when I made the mistake of googling my type of cancer and I saw that low survival rate. Yes, as Dr. Hahn said, gross statistics mean little to individual patients. Yes, those numbers are based on many people with much more advanced cancer. Yes, I still have faith and truly feel in my heart that I will survive this and God has plans for me beyond it. BUT seeing that number, reading those words felt like someone hit me on the head with a sledgehammer and drove my usually positive spirit down low, very low. Tuesday, it feels like I’m getting sentenced and part of me is still afraid it will be a death penalty. But realizing and admitting to those fears actually eased my anxiety. I’m much better today. I’m still moving slowly and working in short spurts but I am doing more than lying around. I still have faith and I still feel the love of God around me. And I still feel, no matter what words I hear on Tuesday, I will be okay.

 September 4, 2021

Our morning walk. Appreciating the beauty around us.

September 3, 2021

Okay, got some worrisome news today. You may recall my doctor being concerned about my kidney function. He wanted me to super hydrate for two weeks and then have a series of tests run today. My ultrasound showed a severely swollen right kidney. There is something blocking the kidney or the urinary tract but they don’t think it’s a stone. I’ll get the results of blood tests tomorrow and I’m supposed to consult with a urologist next week. Yes, I have to admit this threw me for a loop especially seeing the concern on my doctor’s face as he viewed the images but I’m trying not to worry until I actually know what’s going on. The silver lining to this, it gives a reason for so many off and on symptoms I’ve dealt with for a long time. I’ve felt so guilty for long time periods that I got little done because I felt so bad. I’ve never felt it was sickness unless I was throwing up or felt near death. I thought I was just a failure when I gave in to fatigue and pain. So, now, knowing there is a cause, I have hope to actually feeling better and being more consistent with my energy levels. So, that’s what I’m choosing to focus on. Still, I’d appreciate your prayers and good vibes.

 

 September 2, 2021

Below is what I posted on this day. Sadly, I was going to find out how very wrong my oncologist was within two weeks.

I had my six month check up at the oncologist today. Everything was fine and next check up will make five years. That means one more six month check and then it’s just once a year! Yay!

After a month of weight gain and the hike to the summit of Mt LeConte that I've committed to for my birthday in a month, I've decided to get serious about my diet. I have to admit, I do have a lot on my plate right now (figuratively) with trying to get the house back in order and my new studio/office space created so I can get back to work BEFORE the end of this month. I don't know if I can do it to be honest but I'm still trying even though I keep getting distracted. If it's not my own wandering mind and attention slowing me down, it's commitments to friends. I've promised to drive my friend, Jane, and bedroom furniture (that I inherited from my late, best friend Candis which I'm giving to Jane because she's divorced and moving in with her kids) down to Georgia this week. Next week, I have an appointment with my therapist Tamala (and hopefully great progress toward my goals to report) and my friend, David, is visiting from Nebraska and I'm meeting him at, our art teacher from college, Anne Power's home for lunch. I'm sure all of these things will be enjoyable but right now, all I can think about is getting my act together and being back at work by October 20! Working all of this around my three workouts a week with my trainer, Josh and finding time to run to the grocery store to buy all of the healthy food I should be eating is a daunting task. Still, I know I will feel better if I'm eating right and I'll be better prepared to tackle the tasks and prep to meet my two goals, getting back to work and hiking Mt LeConte. So, I'm looking into healthy meal prep blogs, web pages and books to help keep my diet on track and keep me away from the ever convenient and fast, pizza.

I've ordered several books this morning and found a couple of related blogs that all look like they have great ideas and recipes for streamlining my life.

https://www.skinnytaste.com/

Buy on Amazon
















Buy on Amazon
https://fedandfit.com/

Buy on Amazon
https://damndelicious.net/category/meal-prep/

I have to admit, I’ve been a wee bit envious of all those clients Josh kept posting videos of. I wondered if I just wasn’t good enough at anything to be included in that group of lauded clients. Then Sunday, I got a message saying Josh had tagged me in a video. I was so excited and then, I saw it mainly shows my backside. 🤨 oh well, at least I finally made the cut and he does have nice things to say about me. Thanks, Josh. https://www.instagram.com/p/B2UzCR1jwV7/?igshid=wi8gppwdognc

Just noticed my long lapse between posts. I have plenty of excuses but they are all in the rear view now. I just promise to do better but also a brief explanation is needed for the post below which is my first in awhile. I’ve been struggling with both my fitness and weight loss over the past few months since my last post. Most of that was because of injuries but I also just couldn’t seem to stay on track with my diet. So, Josh has been asking me about goals and I didn’t really know what I wanted beyond wearing a smaller size jeans. Then I had a lightbulb moment when I saw a friend had hiked Mt LeConte on her 73 birthday. That hike has been on my bucket list for a long time. I’ve decided to try and do it on my birthday on November 6. Yes, I do realize that is only a month and half away but Josh, my trainer, is sure I can do it. I’m not so convinced but I do plan to give it my best try. 

First Steps and in Praise of Costco

 Took my first walk this morning. It was my first fitness walk in months and my first steps toward that 11 mile trek to the top of Mt LeConte and back that I’ve set as my birthday goal. Steve is trying to talk me out of it because we’d have to make the round trip in one day because the cabins are booked a year in advance but my brother in law, who has hiked it many times in a day, assures me it’s doable. So, I’m still holding on to that goal and maybe, when they start taking reservations for 2020 in October, I’ll go ahead and book us in for next November. 

My walk this morning was only 1.4 mile which I did in 36 minutes. Not great but it’s not only day one, I also had Bodie in tow and he has to stop every couple of yards to sniff. I also would like to do a sprint then walk pace but we got a later than hoped start this morning which meant not only heat but people out to see me embarrassing myself. 

Ahhh, how I love Costco, let me count the ways. It’s not just the low prices or one stop shopping or even bulk buying to keep me away from one of my least favorite activities longer. Those things are certainly pluses but the thing I love most is all of the organic, non gmo and whole food choices both in produce, the freezer and even packaged. I’ve always praised those organic, frozen, dark cherries. I eat them as a chilled treat straight out of the bag! Now, I’ve discovered so many more delicious options, cauliflower tots and cauliflower fried rice are easy and fast to fix right out of the freezer, also new (to me anyway) in the freezer section are avocado chunks so I don’t have to worry about the fresh ones going bad before o can use them (although they do have the best, freshest avocados I’ve found anywhere in their produce section), also in the produce section, great organic lettuce and greens and the sweetest, plumpest blueberries you’ll ever eat, then there is the Alpine Valley whole grain bread that contains nothing but natural goodness and loads of fiber, finally, if you want a sweet treat(and don’t have any of those frozen cherries), give Cave Man brand protein bars a try, they have no artificial ingredients, are gluten free, non GMO and only 7 grams of sugar. Here’s to clean and healthy eating!

I apologize for my long periods of silence over the past few weeks. I’ve been busy with appointments, both planned and unexpected. Friday, there was a rushed visit to my optometrist after I called to tell them I had been seeing lightning strike like flashes for several days along with dark shadows out of my left eye. It wasn’t painful, just irritating and threw me a bit off kilter. I had a friend who lost her sight from a torn retina (hers was completely dislodged) so I knew the symptoms. After a thorough exam, Dr Vine told me that the vitreous material in my left eye has broken loose from the back of my eye and is pulling on the retina but thankfully has not torn it yet. I’m suppose to be resting it but was able to go for my workout with Josh Friday afternoon. The doctor told me just to avoid any bouncing or jerky movements.  I’m thinking now, maybe I shouldn’t have done the mountain climbers but hind sight is twenty-twenty....unlike my actual vision right now. The difference between the vision in both eyes is not extreme but it is making it difficult to read or do up close work. 

More news for the Not Great column, I’ve gained five pounds! So much for my out of control eating, I need to get back on the diet straight and narrow. I admit, I’ve been eating pizza, for the last month, like it was going to be banned at any moment. It doesn’t help that Friends is being removed from Netflix so I’ve been binging on it as well. Some of that TV time has been while doing other tasks and moving about but a good portion has been sitting on my butt with a bag of (healthy???) chips in hand. So, the five pounds is not totally unexpected. 😕

I’m not freaking out over the weight gain because I know it will take just a few habit tweaks to get me back on the right path but I do see two doctors for follow ups this week. With one of them, I’ll be right where I was six months ago when she last saw me. With the other, I will have gained five pounds since my last visit. I guess, she won’t be calling me Skinny this time. 

It’s not all discouraging news. Kendra, the physical therapist, has me down to once a week and she said, I’ve improved so much in the last two weeks, I shouldn’t have more than three weeks left. She attributed my great progress to my workouts with Josh, whom she’s bragged on numerous times for knowing what he’s doing and being great at his job, and doing the exercises on my own that she assigns. I’m just grateful to be able to not only move better but to sleep pain free at night. And, happy dance, Kendra said I could start taking yoga again in August!

More good news, I have a plan for getting back to work sooner and adding the needed structure to my life. I’ve been looking at this all wrong and also totally ignoring Steve’s good advice. Lol. I thought I needed to get the master bedroom finished before I could turn our current bedroom into my new studio. I’d put everything else on hold until that one room was done. Months have passed and I’ve made absolutely no progress towards accomplishing this goal. Steve had suggested many times that I combine my office space and studio space. I stubbornly refused to listen because, ever the planner, I had a set idea in my head of exactly how each space was supposed to look, right down to the art work on the walls. When I finally opened my ears and my mind enough to embrace this idea, I realized it was a quick and fairly easy solution to many problems...several of which were of my own creation. 

Of course, being me, I had to complicate things. I’ve decided to move our bedroom to the office space and make the room with better light my new office/studio. There is still lots of work to do to make these hopes for changes reality. I have to clean out both rooms and in the process, want to clear out unnecessary clutter. I also want to repaint both rooms and my work bench and drafting table need new paint. I have new lights that need to be hung in both rooms and that will require Steve’s help. I want to get new chests to go beside our bed and I’ll need to paint those (I will post photos of that project). I don’t plan to put down new flooring yet. These rooms will wait until we do the rest of the house. I know that cleaning out my workshop and getting it back in working condition will take some time but I really would love to be back at work on my art by the second week in August. I’ll keep you updated on my progress. 

We can not start over but we can create a new beginning.

For the last decade perhaps longer, I've felt overwhelmed and out of control. It's felt as if I was one of those balls tumbling around erratically in the lottery cage with very slim odds that I'd end up on top of the pile. I've written before about how I spend half my time yearning for the days when my life seemed perfect, when I felt in control and as if I was nearing the top of that mountain called success. Then my mom died and the life I thought I was so in control of the path I thought I'd mapped so perfectly began to crumble. I think my life probably still appeared to be running smoothly and I looked like I had it all together but I felt as if I was just treading water in a vast, endless ocean full of sharks and other dark and unknown threats. It took another decade before I stopped trying to climb up. I was tired, emotionally exhausted by my silent battle with an enemy no one else could see but me. Another decade and my tumble down that mountain finally ended with me crashing to the bottom, broken and struggling to piece myself back together.

The saddest part is, I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way. I think we all tend to think everyone else has their life pulled together especially in these days of social media providing us a picture perfect view of others lives but I doubt reality lives up to the edited view we're given. Everything is filtered now, photoshopped and perfectly lit with all the bad parts cropped out but everyone's life has flaws and there is probably no one who has a life that lives up to their expectations.

I think that's one reason I started this blog. Sure, reason number one was to help myself to improve myself and get my life back in order but I also wanted to let others know, they are not alone in this struggle we call life. My niece once asked me why I was always telling stories on myself where I came up short or did dumb things. Well, for one thing, you have to learn to laugh at yourself but also, I want people to know, it's okay to mess up because we all do it. True, some like me seem to do it more than others, lol, but I do provide a nice cautionary tale.

I apologize for being all over the place with this. I'm just trying to work it out in my own head. I've realized lately that I'm never going to regain either the body or the life that I had twenty or so years ago and I have to accept that before I can move forward. But I've also realized that, just because I'm past sixty, my life isn't over. Yes, for the past year as I attempted to gain a foothold on this new climb, I've either been spending my time looking back to what was or imagining how things could be if I'd just get my life together. Perhaps my stalemate with this challenge comes from knowing, in the back of my mind, that I will never achieve either of these "perfect" goals. My past is a lot like those perfect pictures of people's lives on Instagram and Facebook, the memories are heavily edited. Sure there were good times, new adventures and experiences and I was in good shape with a body whose skin didn't sag but there were struggles then, too. I just gave the appearance to others that everything was okay. In our memories and our expectations we live in airbrushed perfection. But perfection is unattainable because it is a myth, it doesn't exist.

So, where does that leave me? Learning to appreciate the here and now no matter how scruffy or dirty or flawed it is. If we can't love ourselves or our lives or homes or jobs in all of their broken beauty, how will we love them once we piece them back together? It's like my house, which is in dire need of repair and renovation (a tree fell through the roof for heaven's sake, I haven't had a real working kitchen for over ten years and the foundation problems have been repaired but the front porch still needs to be rebuilt and what about that ten year old leak under my kitchen sink that Steve keeps promising to get to?), we can fix all of the problems but the scars are still going to be there. I can lose weight, firm up those muscles and be stronger and healthier but it's still a sixty-three year old body and the wear and tear and abuse I've put it through, for all of those years, is going to still show.

That brings me back to where I started this novella, we can't start over but we can create a new beginning. And the first step is accepting where you're starting from. We can still appreciate the past and all of the joy and heartaches that brought us to this point but we have to stop grasping for it. We can still have our dreams but we can't reach them if we spend all of our time fantasizing about what might be, what could be. To begin again, we have to have a starting point and that is the now and with each step forward, we will still be in the now. This moment in time is all we have. It is not infinite. It will be gone in a moment so don't waste it trying to live in the past or the future. Live for now, do what is at hand and then take a step forward and repeat. Who knows how far we can go. We really have no control over life and all of the planning in the world can't guarantee success or progress. The only chance we have to change our future is to live in the now and make the most of what's right in front of you.