mission accomplished

One word could describe how i felt yesterday after i met with the dietitian: underwehlmed. Who knows if that is a word or if i even spelled it right. Anyway, the D was nice enough, but she did not weigh me, or even give me a target weight, two things that i had very much psyched myself up for! Mostly, we talked about my history and behaviors and goals yada yada yada, and then treid to iron out a very non-threatening meal plan. What we came up with is pretty low calorie, but is meant to be a place to start from and we will build on it later. The main goal is to stop purging. My other goals are to take a multivitamin and to drink 3 glasses of water a day in addition to the water i drink with my miralax. This last one is aimed at decreasing my intake of diet soda. I'm not ready to start conciously cutting back on the soda, but i figured if i drank more water, i might drink less soda without even trying.

She asked me if i wanted to come back in one week or 2. I hate it when they do that! I dont want to decide! I want to come back in one week, but i dont want to seem too needy! I asked her what she thought but she just kind of shrugged and said it was up to me. Grrr! In the end i mad an appt fot next thur, which is like a week and 2 days.

I guess i would say the appt was a success, overall.
I finally figured out how to put pictures on my blog! I just put up some random ones of me and my family, so people would know who i was talking about. I will probably change them once in awhile. What do you think, are my girlies cute, or what?

cold feet

k, so tommorrow is my first appointment with the dietitian and i am having some serious misgivings, doubts, fears, ect. I know people can relate to this because alot of the things i have been thinking have been written in other blogs at various times over the last several months. Like the perrenial favorite "i'm too fat to see a dietitian". But here's the deal- when i got the referral for the D i was somewhat underweight and therefore thought i "deserved " the help- not that any of you who aren't underweight and see a D dont deserve it, i just hold myself to a different standard, screwed up, i know. So anyway, since then i havent been working out for various reasons, and i have been able to eat some regular meals without purging (yay), thus there has been some gain, how much i dont know, but i know i am not underweight anymore, which is a good thing, but it makes me feel crummy and worthless and undeserving of help. Phew!

On the flipside, i am still purging every day. And im not consistenly keeping meals down. So maybe there is some value to me seeing the D. And i also would like to know what my target weight is once and for all, cause i think that the target they put me up to at the univ of ia hospital ed program (aka evil hell) was way too high. And that's not just my ed talking, i'm basing that on the charts and graphs and stuff. I mean, it was in the normal range, but at the high end of normal; why would you do that to someone with an ed? Just to freak them out? So maybe the D could give me a more doable target and we could go from there.

I really should quit stressing out about all this and just keep an open mind. I'm sure there is stuff she can help me with, even if i dont need to gain weight. And i'm going to be honest and tell her every thought i just wrote about, so she can confirm or deny any truth in my thinking.

Mom is still in the hospital. I have gotten to go see her a few more times. She is doing well, but has abnormal chest tube drainage (yuck, i know) so she cant go home until that gets better.

Oh, and Emma is going to Bosnia with Zlatko for a month on june 6th. More on that heaping pile o'goodness later.

st lukes

wow, i feel like it has been forever since i have posted...even though it has only been one day... i just have so many thooughts rolling around in my head...

Thanks everyone for your support and for asking aboutt my mom and stuff. I finally got to go down to Cedar Rapids to spend the day with her yesterday. First let me say that for me, walking into St Lukes is always a little uncomfortable for me, as i have been a "guest" of their psych ward many times. But the last time i was there was is 2000, so it has been awhile. Still, i get nervous. i did see one person i knew from my stay in child psych, but i didnt think he recognised me. I just held my head up and kept telling myself "that was a long time ago. I'm a different person now!".
Anyway-back to my mom. She looked really good and was up sitting in a chair and everything. I helped her go on these walks she's supposed to do 4x a day, which are kind of an ordeal cause we have to bring the iv pole and the catheter and the chest tube thingy. So it's more of a shuffle than a walk. Oh- i brought my mom the one mushroom i found the other day cause i thought she might want to see it-she hunts mushrooms too and is really sad to be missing out on mushroom season. She got ridiculously excited over it and showed it to everybody that came into the room- doctors, visitors, everybody! And it was so small and pitiful and dried up, but she really got a kick out of it. She is going too shelac (sp?) it and wear it on a necklace! My mom is kind of a hippie :)

I did get emotional one time, when i was getting ready to help my mom wash her hair. My mom said to me in a serious voice "lisa if this makes you uncomfortable at all you dont have to do it". I just hugged her and told her that i knew it was possible someday i might have to take care of her more and i was ready, or something like that. I was kind of choked up. i think it meant alot to her cause she was choked up too. Then we got down to the business of hair washing and the moment passed.

I know this is a long post already, but i wanted to write about something else. When i was helping my mom get ready for her walk before lunch i was standing with her chest tube drainage thingy in a akward position and i was feeling king of weak and could feel myself becominf frustrated and i knew it was because i had not eaten well so far that day. So i thought" I should eat something soon" and then i thought "no its too early" and then i thought " no, no this won't do at all. How can i have the strength to stay here all day and help my mom if i'm restricting!" And then and there i decided to eat lunch when moms lunch came. So when moms luch came i went down to the cafeteria, picked up a tray, and it was almost surreal. Maybe it was because i was in a hospital cafeteria, but i knew exactly what to get. There was no freaking out, no calorie counting. Meat, potato, veggie, roll, cookie. The only thing missing was the milk but ok i will NOT go that far! And i ate all of it, and didnt purge or freak out. I felt strangely calm the rest of the day.
I thought about things on the drive home. i know alot of people say you cant get better for someone else, but cant that be good motivation? Like my mom, what if she needs full time care someday and i am too sick with my ED to help out, or in and out of the hospital myself? I feel motivated right now by a need to be strong, physically and emotionally, so i can handle whatever comes next. And it felt good, really REALLY good, to be on the giving end, instead of the recieving end, of help. I am by no means cured, just extra motivated, but i'll take what i can get.

one single mushroom

k, so i was supposed to go to cedar rapids to visit my mom in the hospital, but my plans went to he** when little Annie got the pinkeye. I cant send her to the babysitter's cause she's contagious. So....guess i'm stuck in Waterloo. Which is where i'm usually stuck, but today its worse, cause we cant hang out with anybody, cause anybody we hang out with has kids, and Annie has the pinkeye. And I cant go workout, cause i cant put Annie in the playroom, cause you guessed it: pinkeye! And I cant take my kid and her eyeball germs to the mall, cause she would want to play on the play area there. And the children's area at the library is out, too. So, we are barred from doing all the things that we normally do to pass the time. Well, I am NOT going to be stuck in my tiny apartment watching Maisy videos all day!

So i have a brilliant idea; i decide to take Annie mushroom hunting! Here in this part of the midwest it is morel mushroom season, which is very exciting for those of us who hunt these things. But i never seem to get a chance to get out and look for them. And im not sure how tramping thruogh the underbrush is going to go with a 2 year old in tow, but i'm desperate enough to give it a try.

So we head off to Hickory Hills park; about 20 miles outside of town, and it starts to rain, but thats ok. I still figure i made the right move; anything is better then what we were doing before. It stops raining by the time we get to the park and I pull off the side of the road near an old tree where i found some shrooms last year- a good bet. I have to carry Annie thruogh the underbrush, since we are not using a trail, and i set her down in a claer spot and procceed to scour the ground, but no luck.

Then we go the the next place where i have found them before, and here i find one "little gray", a kind of smaller, gray morel. This gets me very excited and i am sure we will find more, bunches, but again i am dissappionted.

Annie is tired of being IN in the woods, so we find a trail and walk for a little bit. We ggo over some bridges and see some baby geese and willd flowers and i am just thinking how happy i am that Annie is having this experieence in nature ang hoping she is enjoying it when she starts to whine "i want to go home! I want to watch cartoons! I want to watch Maisy". Sheesh.

Before we leave, we visit the wildlife exhibit and feed an apple core to an elk and see an albino deer. Annie falls asleep on the ride home. When we get back, I wake her up and feed her lunch and wrestle some eyedrops into her eyes. And put her to bed.

So, i only found one mushroom. Am i dissappionted? Yes. Sorry we went? No way. I can think of worse ways to spend a morning in quarantine.

cancer

my mom is in surgery at this very moment. She is having a growth of melanoma removed form her chest cavity. most people think of melanoma as being a skin cancer, which it is, but my mom's is stage 4, which means it has gone inside the body and has infiltrated the lymph system and stuff. It still doesn't seem real to me. Like, 18 years ago she has a cancerous mole removed, and then everything was fine, until this last december, when she found a lump in her breast. At first they thought it was breast cancer, but a biopsy showed it was melanoma, and the only thing that the doctors can think is it spread from the mole that was removed 18 years ago. So anyway, they removed that lump, and she has been on interferon to help stop/slow down the growth of new cancer in her body, but since december this new one has grown in her chest despite the treatments. And it is in a bad place- near the spine and the aorta. So i hope they get it all.

She will be in the hospital 5-10 days. She is going to have two chest tubes and an epidural for the pain and a various other tubes and medical thingys. I am going to drive down to cedar rapids as much as i can over the next several days to see her. i am kind of stressed ou cause i still have my kids to take care of here- chris is working and has finals this week. And i had to reschedule my therapy and my first dietitian appt, but i am going to stilll go to my psychiatrist appt this week, cause i am running out of meds. I am doing ok, though. Still cant seem to get through a day w/o purging, but i am having some success with eating small portions of regular meals and keeping them down and not freaking out too bad. because of this my weight was up slightly when i weighed myself the other day, but i am trying to have a healthy attitude about it. i figure i might need a little extra padding right now, a little margin for error, because between my moms cancer and dealing with my evil ex and the upcoming move, i sense some stressful times up ahead. I dont want any stress- related weight loss to put me in the danger zone. Does that make any sense?

It's so beautiful now, and we are outside playing alot, and it's kind of weird, but sometimes i find myself getting angry at the sun. You know, because it gave my mom this cancer. Which i know is totally irrational. And not to mention stupid, since the sun gives every living thing on this planet life, every day. i guess i'm just feeling angry. And helpless.

turd

no, this is not another post about my bowels (though things in that department are running smoothly athankyouverymuch). I just wanted to state that my ex is a Turd. A big, fat Turd. That's all.

swimming

today I made the ultimate sacrifice for my girlies- I hauled our stuff to the Y, donned my swimsuit(which seems to have shrunk since i bought it), tiptoed into the freezing pool water, and stuck it out for almost an hour! I hate swimming! I hate getting wet! I hate rude kids who splash me in the face! I stood there, one eye on the clock, wishing i could magically be transported somewhere warm and dry and not full of screaming kids.
But....
I love watching the girls! I am so proud of them! Emma is such a good swimmer ( all the sweet old ladies lingering after water aerobics said so)! And even little Annie was trying to go it alone in her life vest, saying, "I did it! I swimmed!".
The warm glow of pride that i felt almost made me forget that my extremities were numb with cold.