An Unfat Kathy

They say every journey begins with a single step.

After a couple of reschedules on the appointment, today I took that first step on getting to be an unfat Kathy and sat down to talk about it with my doctor.

Well, actually she's a nurse practitioner.  And she's a fellow fat Kathy.  Almost.  She's a fat Katie.  She had Bariatric Surgery and then, all in the same year, she went back to school to advance her degree, got married, and moved from Pittsburgh to Cumberland.  And with all that stress, she gained most of the weight back.  I like that she not only knows the struggle, but she's right there in the trenches with me.  It feels like a whole different ballgame than when a skinny person is cheering you on...

I wasn't quite sure what to expect today, but it seems that in the beginning there's a lot of mental working out.  I came home with about 20 pages of 'homework' to fill out reflectively.

And it jumped right into the hard stuff.

The first thing was to complete a chart.  On the left side, it lists a series of weight ranges and across the bottom age groupings.  The task was to make an "x" for low and high weight in each age grouping and then draw a line connecting the dots.  Basically, it would be a Line Chart if you were doing it in Excel.  Next, you look at each point where the line is trending upward and add a note about the major events happening in your life then.  It was eye-opening to see the correlation between some big traumatic events and big weight gains.

For example, when I got my tonsils out (at age 29) I was raped at the hospital.  Whoever was taking me from the operating room to the recovery ward made a stop along the way and pushed the stretcher into the closed for the day pre-op area where you get undressed, meet the anesthesiologist, make the mark on what part they're operating on, and that kind of stuff.  I was in and out of consciousness... the paralytic drugs from surgery were still in effect so I couldn't move and I couldn't scream.  I remember dark eyes and black eyebrows between the green cap and mask.  And that I went home gooey and bruised far from where your tonsils are located.  That's when my hatred and distrust of all things medical-related began...  Almost to the day the following year I had to have a thyroidectomy.  I was so freaked out about being put under anesthesia that I postponed it 7 times.  That very frustrated surgeon kept asking me questions until I told him what bits and flashes I remembered.  He went many extra steps to assure me that I was safe in his hands.  And even then it took a truckload of Valium to get me to the hospital!  Then the cyst he thought he was removing wasn't a cyst at all... there were so many tiny tumors in the gland that it couldn't be saved.  He tried all day. My waking memory is him yelling into my eyeball that it was cancer, but "it's the good kind."

As if there's ever a good kind of cancer.

Between those traumas and the hell that hypothyroidism unleashes in your body, how could my body mass not balloon rapidly?  A few years later, add care of a parent suffering from a slow spiraling descent into dementia...  Then my knees started to go out and people around me didn't believe me when I said I was in pain and made jokes about it.  And there's the past 3-4 years that I'm just not ready to talk about yet.  Each experience was horrific in and of itself. And each used the trauma, fear, and distrust ingrained from previous events as a foundation for a more distorted image of myself.

Now begins the process of undoing that damage, both the physical and the mental...

I'm not sure yet what tools we'll use.  There are a number of surgical procedures that are an option as well as several different kinds of drugs and some heavy-duty lifestyle changes.  Stick with the journey and find out!

Today's Crisis Taught Me That I'm 'Neurotic'

Today's little crisis that sent me searching through online research for ways to fix myself has, in all honesty, been building up to this moment for a long time.  The most immediate trigger being tomorrow's appointment with an orthopedic specialist because I have what they call advanced degenerative arthritis in my right knee.  The same right knee that I've been complaining about for more years than I can even remember.  The same right knee that every previous doctor has said the only thing wrong with it is I'm too damned fat.

I don't want to be fat.  I've tried endlessly not to be fat.  But here we are at an utter impasse:  I am still too damned fat.

And I'm not too proud to tell you about the negative effects this has on me.

• It means that every doctor I see grabs for the prescription pad.  Well, ok... they rush to today's electronic version of a prescription pad.  There's a pill for blood pressure. There's a pill for pain.  There's a pill for depression.  Sometimes it seems like there's a pill they want to prescribe just because there's a pill!  And my internal psyche interprets every single one of them as further evidence that I am defective.
• It means I can never buy clothes that are cute.  No one even expects it of me; I think they are just happy that I can find something to keep all the blubber covered.
• It means my job prospects are limited.  Limited not just because my knee is so worn out that I can't bear to walk or stand on it for more than a few minutes at a time, but there are places my body mass can't squeeze into (not that that is all bad... most of those tight little spaces would be in fast food establishments and ewww! Lord, no!!)
• It means my recreational opportunities are limited, again not just from the crapped out knee but also because it takes a lot of huffing and puffing to even go shopping.  A hike would kill me!  And many activities come with weight restrictions to keep machinery functioning safely.  So there are thousands of things I would love to do, but simply cannot.
• It makes me feel ugly and unattractive.  I've got classes coming up that require posting videos of myself which my instructors and fellow students will watch and respond to.  That's terrifying!

So... I look horrible.  I feel physically awful most of the time.  And the only time I don't feel bad emotionally is when I'm asleep.

More than one person has hinted they think I'm depressed.  I don't think so, or, if I am I contend that sometimes depression is an appropriate response when life continually throws one to the wolves.  Willing to explore the idea, though, I followed several links and ended up reading a  Psychology Today article titled Four Kinds of Depression and Self-Hate that might shed some clues into what's malfunctioning inside my head.  It says that in neurotic depression the conflict is internal and it's like you are moving "through life as if you are a short-tempered nanny with an ugly or annoying baby. Your depressive lens for interpreting the reactions of other people makes you want them to agree with you that the baby is an intolerable burden."

That analogy is so spot on that it made me pause and blink.  More than a few times, even.  But the next paragraph is the one that made me cry...

"When others treat you well, you resent it, like a nanny watching the usually inconsolable baby cooing in someone else’s arms. If a therapist suggests you treat yourself better, it enrages you, because it implies that this is your fault and not a natural reaction to the little brat you happen to be saddled with. You want the therapist to give the baby a sedative."

In another article, Psychology Today suggests cognitive behavioral therapy and practicing mindfulness may help one become less neurotic over time.  And in still another, this one titled Mindfulness, they accentuate the positive aspects of living in active, open attention to the present; of observing your thoughts and feelings without judging them as either good or bad.  I think they may have forgotten the big one, at least in how it all relates to me and my crisis moment:  just suck it up and deal with the problem.

More about that in a moment.

I wanted to tell you about my path to these self-reflections, even they aren't altogether kind, because there's some really good material to read if you are also quietly trying to work on yourself.  It all started when I clicked into a Marc and Angel article that was shared on Facebook: 20 Things to Start Doing in Your Relationships.  #1 made me realize that sometimes I am that negative person I need to stop hanging out with.  Then I jumped over to a linked article:  9 Things it’s Not Too Late to Start Doing for Yourself.  This time it was #2 that sent me to Google 'core values' and that led me to My 2016 Integrity Report.  The content is good but it's the well-explained thought process that really provides the value.

So about me being too damned fat... I made an appointment with my doctor to see what medical interventions might be available because nothing I've done on my own has helped even a little bit.  Here's to whatever adventure Tuesday launches!