It hasn't been quite a week since embarking on the journey of an unfat Kathy, but already there's a bit of progress to report.
One of the things Katie (my PCP) asked me to do was either purchase a pedometer or download a step tracker app on my phone. With no confidence at all my phone could handle it (it's pretty much junk), I started the download. Surprise!! It was successful!
Right now there's no official daily step goal. The purpose is for me to learn just how much I walk during a day. Or don't walk. I think these numbers are cause to celebrate! Much of the past 3 years, I was consigned to the space of 1 cushion on a broken down love seat in a house where I didn't want to be and wasn't wanted. There were days I would bet I didn't take 50 steps... So a goal of 1,000 seemed like a challenging starting point. I hit it on day 3 of using the tracker.
Day 1: 609
Day 2: 946
Day 3: 1,121
My revised personal goal is 2,500 steps each day for a week. For my stubby little legs that equates to just barely more than a mile a day.
Another of my health goals is to get off as much medication as possible. I have a thyroid supplement that I will be shackled to like a prisoner with a ball and chain for as long as I live. But all the drugs they put on in the hospital last November are on the table to be eliminated. And I am doing just that! Warfarin is the most recent one to get the boot from my daily schedule. Now there's only a blood pressure med to go!
I am not a willing pill taker. Nor am I very good at it. My philosophy is the only good pill is for someone else.
Katie wanted me to continue the Warfarin for an undefined "a while longer." But I was just physically and mentally done with it. I was perfectly compliant for the 90 days the hospital doctors, specialists in this sort of thing, had said was an adequate course of treatment. And I was experiencing a lot of gastrointestinal distress with it. That's not a really common side effect for Warfarin. If you go digging through the drug literature it's pretty far down the list. I'd researched and tested and there was nothing else in my daily routine to cause gas so painful that sometimes it had me doubled over and multiple times daily violent caustic diarrhea. My poor bumhole was so raw and sore! So I used my favorite word for doctors and said "no" to the suggestion of adding Immodium to my routine to control the side effect. I don't take pills to manage what another pill is doing to me. I swallowed the last pill on Thursday morning. It takes a week for Warfarin to clear your body but already those icky issues are easing. I took my first normal poop in weeks today!
Physical therapy is what Chris (the therapist) coined "pre-hab." We are working on muscle strength and range of motion so that recovering from knee replacement surgery will be easier. This morning we discussed those goals and measured my progress. The two big numbers the surgeon will look for when setting a date for the procedure are how straight I can get it and how far I can bend my knee. Both are measured as degrees. Zero is normal and desirable for a straight knee. Basically, the back of your knee should touch the surface you are laying on. And bent, 110 is optimal. That degree of bend makes things like climbing stairs easy. We took baseline measurements at the assessment 2 weeks ago so today was my fifth session.
Baseline February 17
Flat 11 4
Bent 89 93
To me, these are milestone moments on the journey...
Showing posts with label Unfat Kathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unfat Kathy. Show all posts
Monday, February 17, 2020
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
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!
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!
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