Mac and Cheese

Nina and Clifton arrived for the holidays last night. It is amazing how much having them here wakes up my all too sleepy home. Clifton's bundle of 2 year old energy was enough to confound the dog and send the cat into hiding. He loves the front and back stairs that lead into different points of the living room and made good use of them. He then decided to check out the hutch to see if there were any new toys there. Instead he found the picture of him and his dad that was taken shortly after his father came home from the last deployment to Iraq. Clifton climbed until I realized what he was after and handed the picture over to him. I know I am being indulgent, but the kid doesn't get to have his dad around this Thanksgiving, he should at least be able to hold a picture of him. He gave the picture a kiss and said "I love you Daddy." It broke my heart. Lizzie and I were both crying.

For dinner I made mac and cheese and green beans and Clifton sat on the stool and actually ate his dinner. This is amazing to me because the kid usually doesn't eat anything I fix for him. After dinner was bath splash and story time and he then didn't want to go to sleep, but that's just a kid for ya.

I'm glad to have my family here. I wish they could all be here, but I'll take what I can get.

Change of Shift is up!

Kim, at emergiblog has Change of Shift up.  enjoy!

 

 

Poppies

We went into Kroger last night to get groceries for the week and on the way in I bought the paper poppies from the lady selling them in the front of the store.  Lizzie asked me why I liked the paper flowers so much.  I don't really like them all that much.  My grandmother used to give us money to buy them from the ladies and I was always disappointed to have an ugly red flower instead of a chocolate bar or something of infinate more attraction to me.  The flowers themselves still hold the same sence of disappointment for me. 

 

In high school I learned the significance of the flowers.  A teacher took the day to explain how the poppy seeds would lie dormant beneath the ground until they were unearthed by the bombing of a battlefield or the digging of graves to bury the dead soldiers, then they would bloom profusely.  The symbol was adopted as a rememberance to soldiers who died on battlegrounds.  Once again the poppies seemed sad and disappointing to me. Instead of remembering vibrant lives that were lived even for a short time, they were recalling the violent deaths of these men. 

 

Now there is a sad poppy sitting on my desk as my only rememberance to veterans who have served.  I have checked e-mail all day hoping that Matt might have gotten time to write a line or two, but not today I guess. 

Roosting Chickens

I was raised by an anorexic mother.  Some of my sisters who read this blog are going to object to this statement, but I know it's true.  It is also true that it was never diagnosed as far as we know by a medical doctor.  It is possible that by the time anorexia became popular in the '70's, the doctors thought that my mother, in her middle ages was too old to be anorexic.  But she ate very little, usually much less than a thousand calories a day.  And she never weighed very much, even when she was nine months pregnant.  Weight was always an issue in our house too, which wasn't so much a problem for me as it was for my sisters and a cousin or two.  Being fat was almost a sin.  It doesn't surprise me that by the time I was a teen I was already primed to be the smallest of the small.  At 5'3" I can remember weighing less than 100 pounds, much less in college when My goal was to wear a size 0 dress to the May Awards Banquet.  Even into my early 20's and approaching my 30's I was always trying to be under 100 pounds.  I didn't always use healthy diets to achieve my goals.  I can't remember what made me decide to start eating, but it probably had more to do with depression and giving up than it had to do with any decision to eat.  But by the time I was 40 I weighed 235 lbs.  I lost down to 170 when I went through divorce and then didn't start gaining it back until afer I finished cancer treatments.  I don't really know if it was the divorce, stress of my son being at war or the cancer that was the real reason that I lost that much weight.  But after cancer I went from a post surgery 145 to 211 in three years.

 

I don't deny that I had eating disorders then and that I probably just traded one for another, though I don't know that a lousy diet is recognized as an eating disorder.  But at least the over eating and the lack of control certainly indicate that I have a problem here.  Still, I thought that by the fact that I now weigh well over what anyone could consider Anorexia and have no delusions about wearing size 0 clothes, I'd at least overcome Anorexia...you'd think, wouldn't you?

 

Maybe not.  I went to a nephrologist yesterday.  I didn't know what to expect, because I really didn't know why my PCP wanted me to go see him.  I had trouble with hypokalemia for a while that wasn't really responding to potassium suppliments, so she asked me to see him.  After going over my history and the test results that had been sent to him by my PCP and my Oncologist, he asked me if I had been anorexic.  I was shocked.  Apparently the lack of nutrition then has caused my kidney's to permanently waste salt and potassium.  He was concerned because the lack of potassium is a dangerous thing for people with LQTS, as is anorexia and several other things that we talked about.  His plan was to ignore edema as well as the weight gained by it and attempt to get the potassium levels stablized.  Then he looked at the last EKG that my cardiologist did and said that he wasn't seeing the LQTS. 

 

I'm confused, do I continue to attempt to lose weight as my cardiologist had said or not and do I or do I not have LQTS?  I called the cardiologist office and they confirmed that in their oppinion and in the oppinion of another cardiologist that I've seen I do have LQTS.

 

So today I didn't take the HTCZ, and I will take the potassium as the nephrologist suggested, but I've been continuing the weight loss diet.  I hate feeling like I don't know what I'm doing.

 

I go see the nephrologist again in two weeks and I think I'm going to attempt to get a better handle on this.  But still, I'm just amazed that a problem like this can be caused by the way I was eating 30 years ago.