So I wore my only pair of heels today. I LOVE them! I think they are really great shoes, and they're so comfortable. What I wore to church today was the 7th outfit I'd tried, and it was SO GREAT to feel like I actually looked good. I've lost 160 pounds (but gained back 40 this last year, so my net loss is 120). Anyway, it's still a LOT, but I have 120 more to go (though even 80 would have me looking so much better). I think I'm nearly at the place where I don't look terribly obese and it's my number one noticeable physical trait.
For quite a few years I tried to hide. It's very hard to hide when you weigh 365 pounds. Yup, I said it out loud. That's the last time I weighed. I quit weighing after that and I know I must've had another 25 on that before I started loosing. When you're morbidly obese and trying to hide but have to go out in public anyway, oftentimes you start wearing darker colors. Or neutral colors. Certainly nothing bright. I didn't wear any shade of pink for 10 years. I didn't wear any jewelry except simple earrings, maybe a very small necklace. I had my hair cut short so it wouldn't stand out (I would've looked better with bigger hair probly). No highlights. Nothing fancy.
Not only was I hugely obese, but I felt physically HORRIBLE. In fact, I felt like I was dying and I believe I was. It's hard to get up and get dressed when you're dying. I was diabetic, hypertensive, hypothyroidism, low kidney function, my adrenal glands were over-producing cortisol, which gave me the look of someone on prednisone (moon face, buffalo hump, major fat around the abdomen). I was in a great deal of pain, all the time, and on ENORMOUS amounts of pain medicines on top of all the other medications that were trying to control my disorders. I am the 1 out of 100 who has very few opiate receptors in the brain. It takes 4-5 times the dose for a normal person to do the same thing for me. I almost always have to have a nerve block for any dental procedure because my body metabolizes things like lidocaine way too fast. I have felt almost every stitch I've ever had sewn in because doctors didn't believe I didn't know the difference between pressure and pain. The point is that it took SO much pain medicine to keep me from hurting so bad I wanted to be dead.
The problem is that when you're on narcotics for years, they turn your brain off. It becomes incapable of handling any pain. There's a reason our brains produce endorphines and other things like oxcytocin. Those hormones give us a sense of well-being and energy and help control pain. My brain couldn't do that. It couldn't do anything, so I was on a bunch of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds as my brain couldn't manage anything but keeping my heart beating and my lungs breathing, and THAT was becoming hard.
I ended up having to take heart medication because my heart was skipping beats and going way too fast. I was short of breath all the time. One of my arterial blood gas draws showed only a 64% oxygen level in my blood. It should be close to 100%. Anything under 95% is reason for concern.
I was sick. I was dying. I knew I was. I know I was. And though my children weren't neglected or ignored, I certainly wasn't being the mother I wanted to be, nor the human I wanted to be.
If I didn't have children, I believe I would have died. It would've been so easy to lay down and die. Literally. I could've let go....so easily. It would've been a blessed relief. I considered going ahead and dying so my kids could get a new mommy, a better mommy. I told Brad if I died I wanted him to move on as soon as possible and find a good mom. I'd been hospitalized 13 times in 10 years, the last time being incredibly serious. I almost died from low potassium, and the doctor was sure I had a blood clot. I was given heparin therapy and they chased the clot all over my body with ultrasound and scans but never found it. Maybe it wasn't there. Maybe the Heparin broke it up. The doctor was very sober, and I said "I need you to keep me alive, I have kids!" He said "I'll do what I can." You see? I knew I was dying and would die if I didn't stand up and live, get out of bed and live, get dressed and live, get out of the house and LIVE. So, I decided. In the Psalms, David said "I choose life!" So *I* said "I CHOOSE LIFE!" The Psalms also say "Where there is life, there is hope." As long as I was breathing, I had reason to hope, and I clung to that hope that for some time was based entirely on the fact that I woke up again another day.
Step by step, one drug less at a time, one pound less at a time, one more trip out of the house at a time, one more time going to church again, one more time going to choir practice again, one more time driving to see one of the kids doing a Bible quiz-meet, one more time going to the grocery store.
Step by step by step by step by step I walked from death to life and into high heels.
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