Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Mental Note To Self

Just to cover my bases, I asked over on the Fit Fatties Forums if anyone else had run into the MRIs Don't Fit You problem.  Here's a reply:

Re. MRIs. BALONEY! There are "open MRIs" which can accommodate people up to 550 lbs. (and some have a capacity up to 1,000 lbs.) Something like this (http://www.washingtonopenmri.com/open-mri-maryland-obese-mri-open-m...) looks especially useful, because it would show the knee while weight-bearing. Here's more about a standard, open MRI. (http://news.msu.edu/story/1260/) I'm somewhere around 360 lbs., and I have an MRI about once every three years to monitor neuro stuff.

Okay, that's useful.  This particular doctor must not've seen anything that would warrant the extra rigamarole -- I'll go with that explaination, anyway.  Either way, shopping around for another practitioner, and now I know what to ask for.
-BJ

Monday, October 29, 2012

It's Not Waddling, It's Limping

Went to the osteo today to get my knee looked at.  Got some X-rays and a physical exam.  The diagnosis is arthritis, with some bone spurs.  Doctor unable to make a more definitive diagnosis or prescribe treatment, because apparently MRI machines and arthoscopic instruments are just two more things that aren't made in 7X.

About what I expected.  Along with a plug for gastric bypass -- my polite yet short reply that it's contraindicated for patients with binge eating disorders and even if that wasn't an issue the long-term side effects disincline me to consider it an option -- seemed to leave him without an answer.  Polite enough, I guess.  Helpful in that I know there's nothing icky going on in there like cancer.

So it looks like I just got a bum knee, and I have to learn to live with it.  Been doing so for a while now.

Enough.  Topic shift!

Name something about your body that you like.

That's going to become difficult in fairly short order.

**Maybe not as much as you think.**

Oh hey, look who's here.

**Introduce me later, sweetheart.  Tell me something about your body that you like.**

My eyes.

I like how they've got tiny yellow flecks right around the pupils, and I like how they can look like pretty much any color.  Depends on what I'm wearing.  They're nice eyes.  Pretty even.
-BJ

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

No Healing, No Forgiveness

I was bullied as a kid.  What a surprise.

What one would call malicious mischief, I guess -- constant name-calling, the occasional push and shove, some tossed rocks once, everlasting ostracision.  School was never a safe place for me.  I was fat and I was weird and I was never allowed to forget it, ever.  The best advice anyone could give me re dealing with bullies was Ignore Them And They'll Go Away.  Honestly, does that advice ever work?  I think whoever coined it drastically misinterpreted the technique of nonviolent resistance.

There's a scar on the back of my head, right above where the skull starts.  I've had it since an afternoon in the fall of 1987.  I was standing on a merry-go-round, wearing a coat with one of those built-in scarves.  I remember correcting my balance, then suddenly the world went upside-downie.

I don't remember much of what happened next, except it involved a lot of blood and a lot of screaming.  I do know the injury tally included a pair of damn-near knocked out front teeth -- adult teeth too, you can still see the damage if you look close -- and a split scalp.

I'm grateful for a few things when it comes to growing up; that after the divorce my family moved around so much I never stayed in the same school more than two years, and that it happened before the age of cameraphones.  Bad enough the bastards get their classmates as an appreciative audience.  Thanks to the Internet, they can play the entire world for laughs at the expense of their victims.  What is peopleofwalmart but a bunch of bored children laughing at the people who don't fit in?

Yes, I'm still bitter and hateful.  Full of anger that has no target and thus no way to drain away, full of hatred for myself and everyone else.

There's nothing that'll unpoison those years of my life.  You can't see the scar, but it's there and it'll never go away.
-BJ

Some Drugs Are Good For You



Discovered this stuff when I was jacking a register back in the day:
Aspirin/Acetaminophen Pain Reliever Caplets, Analgesic Caplets
It's an aspirin/acetometaphin (Tylenol, or Paracetemol) mix, with a dash of caffiene.  Basically, Extra Strength Excedrin with the ingredients in different proportions.  It's the best anti-inflammatory stuff I've been able to find over the counter.  If your body chemistry is such that Alieve does nothing for you, this is the stuff you want.

A couple caveats; do not take these bad boys on an empty stomach.  You will be made to pay.  Also, if you're taking any prescriptions that use a Tylenol base (includes most prescription painkillers), be careful taking this or anything else over the counter.  It's easy to overdose on Tylenol without realizing it, because there's no symptoms.  Until all of a sudden your liver fails.
-BJ


[1]http://www.walgreens.com/store/c/vanquish-aspirin/acetaminophen-pain-reliever-caplets/ID=prod5518-product

Monday, October 8, 2012

Food Insecurity

I'm not listened to when I say this. People who don't know me -- hell a lot of people who do know me -- just don't think it's possible. I weigh north of a quarter ton, it's just not possible that I've ever been capital-h Hungry.

I have been. Several times in my life. Underemployment, unemployment, bad money decisions, bad decisions generallly. Once I spent my last five dollars on food and while I was walking to the bus stop I slipped, fell on my back, and the carton of milk in my backpack broke open. Another time I lived on pizza, because the pizza place up the road took checks and always took a day or two to cash them. That sounds like fun, but trust me, one pizza wolfed down at lunch a day -- at the time I didn't have a fridge -- does not sustinence make. I've used food stamps. I've paid for macaroni with pennies. Popcorn is good; it's cheap and you can eat it by the handful. Dried pasta and a little margarine's another standby. I hate ramen soup but the noodles are serviceable and if you have a big enough bowl you can cook them in a microwave.

The longest I've ever gone without eating anything is about two days.

If you've never been in that situation . . . it's an interesting experience. From minute to minute, your awareness of yourself shifts. One minute you feel just kind of . . . translucent, but okay. The next, you feel like you could eat your own hand if you weren't so attached to it. Emotional control goes straight out the window. Everything aches, just a little. You're deeply fatigued, yet you can't sleep and what sleep you get isn't energizing. Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is an excellent report on extreme poverty; I love his description of someone living on subsistance rations as a belly with a bunch of accessory organs.

To say that this is what a person is supposed to do, because surviving calorie deficits is what all that disgusting fat is for . . . I don't buy it. I never did, not really. Starvation, even at the very beginning of the process, is not a good thing to do to the body.

The especially insulting idea is that there's some lesson in hunger that I just failed to grasp, somehow. Because if I've ever been Hungry, I would know better than to overeat and thus I would lose weight. So somehow, not only am I a failure because I've been very poor, I'm a double-failure because being very poor didn't transform me into a socially more valuable -- i.e. thinner -- person.

It's interesting trying to navigate the doublethink necessary to make sure fat people are always the losers, but that's another entry.

Now I'm me and everyone else is everyone else and Results Not Typical as the saying goes. But it's impossible for me to feel hunger and not think of it as deprivation. Being cold and afraid, without resources or refuge and with no one willing or able to make it better. Come to find out, I'm not willing to endure that for the rest of my life in the faint hope that society as a whole might (or might not) hate me a little bit less.
-BJ