"Dear 18 year old me. Write a letter to yourself when you were 18. Be sure to tell yourself what to do more of, what to do less of, and what you have to look forward to in the next few (or several) years."Dear Me:
We have just turned 18. We have graduated from high school and we are sitting on a South Florida beach feeling lost and uncertain. We are at a pivotal point in our life and the decisions we are making right now will impact everything that comes after this point. So I need you to make some serious lifestyle changes. That feeling that we have in the pit of our stomach is dead on. We are not where we need to be. We need to back up and reconsider what where we are going.
The first thing is you need to stop putting so much stock on what is expected of us, and do what you know is what is right for us. There are two other options that we found attractive, but you are afraid that if we follow them we will make other people unhappy. I say go for what we really want to do. If you will admit that going to FBC was a mistake and go home, you will be doing us a favor that will change the course of our life for the better. The people that you are so afraid of making angry won't even be in our life in ten years. Do this for us.
So now let's talk about our health; we have some serious things that need to change. Do you remember the day in third grade when we were standing in line the day we returned to school after being sick for a week and we fainted? The teachers said that it was because we locked our knees. They were wrong. Remember when we were running in Aunt Euple's front yard and we fainted. Again it was brushed off because it was a warm day and we were running around too much. I know that we faint a lot. That is why people don't get so upset when we do it. But we need to be upset. We have an arrhythmia that can be fatal. Granddaddy did not have a massive heart attack. He had a sudden cardiac arrest that was caused by the same arrhythmia that we have. Daddy has it too, and Mike. Somehow we will manage not to pass it on to any of our children, but we need to be careful. We can't be athletic. We have to avoid any kind of competitive sports and intensive exercise. We are walkers, not runners. We also need to turn the alarm clock to a station that plays classical music. We don't need to be startled awake by loud beeping or blaring advertisements. And there are many medications that will cause us trouble. Not many doctors know about our condition in the 70's and 80's, so getting them to not prescribe the antibiotics and antihistamines that are bad for us will be impossible. And the list is so long that there is no way I can give you the whole list. But do avoid Sudaphed and Bactrim. Also, they are going to want to start your labor with Oxytocin. Don't let them. It will cause you to faint during labor.
Our health is highly impacted by the things that you eat. You are already having problems. The episodes of hypoglycemia that you are having is wrecking havoc with our kidneys. Anorexia is the pathological inability to maintain a normal body weight. At this point we have been doing this for years. I know that you don't feel hunger and it is easy to forget to eat. I also know that you use it as a way to stay thin, but the kidney damage that you will experience in our 40's is caused by being anorexic now. You will quit being anorexic in your 30's, but the damage that is done by it isn't reversible. Please learn to eat on a schedule. When choosing what to eat, please ignore the Food Pyramid and eat as carbohydrate free as possible. The book "The Atkins Diet" is a very good primer on how to do it. You especially need to avoid a substance that will soon replace sugar in most foods called high fructose corn syrup. A lot of the problems that we have now can be tied to the use of those products. Also avoid hydrogenated oils. They learned a few years ago that they are worse than the saturated fats that they are replacing in our diet. When you do eat carbohydrates, they really need to be whole grains. That is going to be a challenge, but they will become the fad in the 90's.
I wish I could say that this covered it as far as health problems go, but you will have a lot of problems in the future that you can't avoid. You can only control so much. So go easy on yourself when the problems do come up. But don't go easy on your doctors. There will be some who will want to brush your problems off for many different reasons. When you have a problem that won't go away push back. Ask questions, and expect answers.
The last thing I would say is readily accept the help offered you by your friends, but put off your family. It seems harsh, but things will get complicated when your family steps in. Love them from afar. It will protect your relationship with them.
So, take care of yourself and have some fun. One more thing, don't even consider marriage until you are out of college. It will keep you from making some big mistakes.
Love,
Emmy
This post was written as part of NHBPM – 30 health posts in 30 days: http://bit.ly/vU0g9J
2 comments:
How interesting! Don't you wish you could really send that to yourself? How much would have you listened? What would have you ignored? I think I'll try this exercise too...I might say some interesting things.
You know she, I really wasn't weighing in on what would be heeded. I was focusing on the key issues that may have made a difference. If I was told to focus in on the one thing that would have been scoffed at I think that it would be the part about starting to eat on a schedule. I was severely anorexic for most of my youth. Part of the problem was that I really didn't have a hunger impulse. I could go without food until I fainted before I knew that I needed to eat. The other part of it was that I realized somewhere around the age of 12 that it gave me an advantage over other girls. It got me a lot of positive attention. If I had to focus in on one thing that I'd pray was heeded it would be the advice to follow my own dreams and not care so much about what was expected. But if I said it to a teenager who didn't understand that I was them, I'd say to save my breath. Still, I have stressed to my children to follow the dreams God gives them and not worry about what other people want.
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