This was written a few weeks ago during church. I've hesitated to post it here but a conversation around the dinner table last night made me me decide to go ahead and put it up. I'll expand on what was said after I've transcribed what I wrote in church. Remember that the next paragraph was written in the "heat of the moment" when you read it.
I am sitting in church and am struck by how very much it resembles a theatre. The glaring blue lights, the dramatic white against black, the white fabric draped to resemble shafts of light, very similar to the rotating lights of movie premieres. High contrast black and white, not a single window in the room; and I am struck by the contrast between my church (which I do love) and the churches of my childhood. Classic, small buildings with a center aisle and wooden pews, stained glass windows down both sides and a beautiful baptismal at the front. One of those churches was, and is, particularly special to me. It was built by my Grandfather and when I step into it (and it's been a VERY long time since I did so) it feels sweet and familiar. I think I value natural lighting. I think what is bothering me right now is the theatrical artificiality I see in the atmosphere of my own church. It is at a sharp contrast with the truth of the words Rob is speaking. When I sing during worship I am often distracted by the "lights, camera, action!" atmosphere of my church. When did our focus become theatrics????
Yesterday at church I felt the same way, but interspersed with that feeling were moments when the "theatrics" truly did enhance worship instead of contrast with it. We were singing Amazing Grace (the original!) and when we got to the verse that says "when we've been there, ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun" I realized that the lights in the sanctuary had increased gradually and were now much brighter. It was a subtle bit of theatrics that actually enhanced the worship. For the most part the theatrics aren't that subtle, they're usually just distracting. And I find them distracting from both sides of the "stage". When I am on the worship team singing the bright lights in my eyes make it impossible to look out and focus on the faces of the congregation, they make it hard to make eye contact and connect to the people I am (hopefully) leading in worship. When I'm out in the congregation I find the stage lights distracting and have to say that I sometimes hide in the relative darkness of the "audience" so my lack of involvement isn't as readily apparent.
Last night while talking about our worship service the word 'show' was thrown very casually into the conversation. We were talking about things like smoke machines, haze and lighting and shows where those things were used well and added to the experience. That word 'show' really bugged me. Our worship is not a 'show'. It's not supposed to be a show and it's purpose is not to entertain. Worship within your own church is a corporate experience aimed at God, not at a stage and an audience. I struggle with being too critical and I hesitated several weeks before writing this but I have to say I'm having a real problem finding the balance between worship and theatrics.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Porn is Porn! Right?
I know, interesting title. This is why I am thinking about porn right now. As most of you know I am a nurse and I work in a hospital. I am a supplemental staff nurse for the peri-operative services department at a branch of a world-renowned teaching hospital. Right now several of the nurses I work with are discussing a best selling book called Fifty Shades of Grey. It's kind of hard to be at work and avoid the conversations about this particular book and yesterday was no exception. Two of the nurses I work with were discussing it and someone asked me if I had read it. Well, in typical Lorri fashion I didn't exactly keep my opinion to myself. My response was (and this is pretty much a quote) "Porn is porn, and I hate porn! Being porn aimed at women doesn't make it any different and the fact that there aren't pictures doesn't stop it from being porn." Well, you could kind of tell I had put my foot in it and they were a little startled by my reaction. They really didn't think of the book as pornography. Why is that? Do people really think that unless there's a photograph attached something isn't pornographic? There's a tendency to re-label something as though that makes it into something different so Fifty Shades of Grey gets the more innocuous label of "erotica" and that makes it socially acceptable. But it's still porn. It is created specifically to trigger one's sexual response and there is no emotional or spiritual response being sought.
I once heard a pastor argue that romance novels are a type of porn and while I dismissed him out of hand at the time I've come to believe he really had a point. One of the things porn does is create unrealistic expectations in men, one of the primary feminist arguments against porn is "pornography presents a severely distorted image of sexual relations and reinforces sex myths, that it always shows women as readily available and desiring to engage in sex at any time, with any man, and on men's terms, always responding positively to any advances men make." I normally don't agree much with feminists but I think they've hit the nail on the head there. That IS a big part of what is wrong with porn. Now, if you paraphrase that wouldn't it describe most romance novels? i.e. "romance novels present a severely distorted image of male/female relations and reinforce relationship myths" While I think the comparison falls apart eventually there's still quite a bit to think about. Romance novels do create unrealistic expectations in women, read enough of them and you start seeing romantic interest in every man who disagrees with you (because he's really just fighting the love he feels inside) and you begin to believe that the right man will solve all your problems with nothing more than his great love for you (that he keeps hidden because he fears you don't love him back) and you'll live happily ever after (once he's dominated you and swept you off your feet). As you can probably tell I have issues with romance novels also, and I read a TON of them between the ages of 16 and 25!
My husband told me a story last night about Abraham Lincoln (and I'm paraphrasing here as I've only heard this second-hand). Apparently Lincoln once asked an audience "how many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg?" When the audience responded "five" he told them that the answer was still four. Why? Because the fact that you called a tail a leg did not change the fact that the tail was still a tail and not a leg. You can call something "adult" or "erotica" but the truth is it is porn.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
WEIGHT LOSS: HOPES, DREAMS AND FEARS!
Weight Loss: It's funny, I really thought that all my friends knew I had had weight loss surgery but I continue to get requests from people who want to know "how have you done it?" So...I decided to post this little weight history. It's probably more detail than any of you want but it is definitely a complete story about what led me into the 'surgery' decision. This was something I wrote for my doctor, Jason Balette, in answer to his question "What do you hope to gain from weight loss surgery, what are your hopes, dreams and fears?" I'll give everyone a chance to get more into my head than they ever wanted to and later I'll write more about what's happened since February. So...here it is:
I can type faster than I can write (and almost keep up with the thoughts in my head) so I decided to put this on a separate sheet of paper. You asked me to tell you what my hopes, fears and dreams are for this surgery. I’ll start by explaining why I’ve decided to do this and go from there. I’m sure it’s a very familiar story to you.
I’ve struggled with my weight issues for close to thirty years. I was never a skinny kid, always had a rounded tummy and face and for some reason always thought I was fat. I look back at photos and realize I was NOT a fat child but I was convinced from a very early age that I was never thin enough. I had an experience at age 16 that seemed to seal that into my mind. When I was in high school I wanted more than anything else to be on the drill team. My high school drill team had a weight requirement and in order to try out a girl who was 5’6” had to weigh 116 lbs or less. I worked so hard to reach my goal of 116 but the day of tryouts when we had our weigh-in I was 118 lbs and wasn’t allowed to try out. The leaders asked me to go through the motions of the audition so it wouldn’t mess up the other girls in the line but they took my number and told the judges I wasn’t up for consideration. I remember so clearly being determined to be a 'good sport' and going through the dance but afterwards when one of the judges came up to me and told me I was a good dancer and that I would definitely have made the team if I had made the weight I was just crushed. In my mind if I didn’t weigh 116 lbs I was fat!
I steadily gained weight over the next couple of years and by the time I was a sophomore in college I weighed about 165 lbs. I was still a very active person physically and realize when I look back at photos that I didn’t look particularly fat, but in my mind I was huge! Morbidly obese!!! My junior year in college I sustained a very serious knee injury doing karate. I tore my ACL and MCL and both meniscus in my left knee (doing a flying side kick that ended with a crash landing) the doctor who saw me initially thought I had just strained my knee and told me to get back on it. My knee was pretty unstable and I honestly thought I was imagining things but saw a sports medicine doc at UTMB in Galveston who did an arthrogram and finally recognized the extent of my injury. At that point I underwent knee surgery but there was quite a bit of arthritis in the knee by then. Laparscopic surgery was out and instead I had two LONG incisions on my left leg and another three months on crutches. Being inactive was oddly bad and good for my weight. I lost muscle mass and increased in flabbiness but my actual weight didn’t change very much. I decided to start counting calories and restricted myself to 1000 calories a day. It wasn’t too hard to do because I was doing no physical activity that didn’t involve crutches. I lost down to about 135 lbs and was fairly happy with the way I looked. Once I became more active my weight gradually increased into the 150 range but that was more due to muscle gain than anything else and my size didn’t significantly increase.
What you need to understand is that I still felt like I looked fat. Since I still didn’t have a flat tummy and my face was still round I really was never particularly happy with the way I looked. I met my husband Rick during that time and we got married 18 months later in 1987. My daughter Chelsea was born in January 1990 and while I gained weight with my pregnancy I did lose most of what I’d gained. My body never really bounced back though and I wasn’t as able to be physically active so a lot of my weight loss was lean muscle mass. Stephen was born in December of 1991 and I repeated the same pattern of losing some of my baby weight but not all of it. I also need to point out that I didn’t really gain an abnormally large amount of weight with either pregnancy and both pregnancies were essentially uncomplicated. But this is where the mind (or at least MY mind) plays tricks. I was never really honest with myself regarding how I looked. It was like I had a mental picture of myself at 150 and that’s how I thought I still looked, I didn’t recognize the extra 30 pounds I was carrying at that point. I find it incongruous that at 118 I thought I was fat and at 180 I thought I was thin. The mind is a ridiculously powerful thing!
I should also point out that at this point I had developed some tachycardia which we originally thought were just palpitations. I had seen a cardiologist and worn a holter monitor but we could never catch the rhythm on a monitor as it was pretty infrequent. Our family moved to Utah for a couple of years and it wasn’t a particularly happy time. My weight fluctuated in the 180’s and when we returned to Texas I decided to try out this new medication called phen-fen. I lost a quick 25 lbs with phen-fen but the incidences of my palpitations increased too. I have to admit I wasn’t too concerned about my heart. I assumed I was just the typical slightly hysterical female who had palpitations and that they probably weren’t too much to be worried about. At the time I was working in CVICU at St. Luke’s in the Texas Medical Center and one day while on my break my heart started doing it’s funky rhythm. It seemed to be racing for more than 30 minutes and when my break was over I asked my charge nurse if I could sit for a few more minutes until my heart stopped racing. She first felt my pulse and told me that my pulse seemed fine and when I replied that it really felt like it was going fast she put her stethoscope on my chest. Her next words were “OMG, it’s too fast for me to count.” Before I knew it my co-workers had slapped me on a monitor and what we thought were simple palpitations turned out to be V-Tach. I started to see a cardiologist and had a cardiac catheterization and EP Study that showed an idiopathic ventricular tachycardia. Dr. Massumi told me that the origin of my VT was very high in the ventricle and he didn’t recommend an ablation at that time, instead I was started on a beta-blocker and taken off all caffeine and stimulants (and obviously phen-fen). The incidences of V-tach lessened and I was able to come off the beta-blockers and just avoid caffeine. Except for the idiopathic rhythm my heart was in great shape (as Dr. Massumi pointed out anyone who can sustain rates of 270 for an hour without dropping their BP has a pretty good heart).
In 1999 I was pregnant with my youngest child Paul. During my pregnancy we discovered that Paul had Down syndrome and a congenital heart defect. That pregnancy was very stressful for me and I had several incidences of going into VT that did NOT resolve spontaneously. However, my rhythm responds extremely well to Adenosine and twice I was converted chemically after sustaining rhythms greater than 250 for up to four hours. On the day Paul was born in January 2000 I weighed 206 lbs. Not only did I never lose my “baby weight” I packed on more. Life over the next couple of years included Paul’s open heart surgery and a total knee replacement for me as the arthritis in my left knee had reached the point where I could barely walk for 30 minutes without needing to put my knee in ice. I had a GREAT knee surgery, it made a big difference in my activity level but somehow not in my weight, in fact I found that with increased activity I just ate more and instead of losing weight I stayed about the same.
In 2004 we moved to Singapore. Life overseas carries a different set of stressers and my response to stress has often been to eat. I was lonely, isolated from friends and country (although my own family is pretty terrific) and exposed to the amazing food of Singapore. I continued to steadily gain and now I was finding that I couldn’t seem to stick to a diet at all. Now I seemed to always feel hungry and I couldn’t find any of the will power I’d relied on in the past. But still I didn’t truly recognize how fat I had become. Singaporeans however are nothing if not honest. When you look for clothes they tell you “we have nothing for you, you too fat”, it’s a very humbling place to be. But I was in denial and would find myself thinking “I’m not fat, I’m just not Asian” We were both right; I was too fat, and I’m not Asian!
I explored the idea of a lap band while I was in Singapore, I worked with a nutritionist who told me what I should eat and basically scolded me when I didn’t do it right. I seriously considered a lap band but our insurance does not pay for any weight loss surgery. I tabled the idea and kept trying on my own. When we got back to the United States I tried Weight Watchers (for what had to be the eighth time) and even went to Overeaters Anonymous but nothing seemed to work for me. I saw an M.D. with Physician’s Weight Loss and made him FULLY aware of my heart condition, hoping that some of the newer weight loss drugs would be safe. He told me they were safe but I started having chest pain and was not feeling well at all (in spite of an ablation in 2005) and when I called my cardiologist he told me to stop all the medications I was on. I went in to see Dr. Massumi and he did a new echo and my once almost perfectly healthy heart now is showing some mild signs of having to work too hard. So while I have no true co-morbidities to accompany my BMI of 36 it’s like they are all sitting on the sideline waiting for me to just get fat enough for them to jump into the game!
On February 4, 2012 my husband said he wanted to talk to me. He told me we had money set aside and if I wanted to pursue weight loss surgery he wanted me to do it. His exact words were, “of course I would like it if you were thinner but if you don’t do something you are going to end up with diabetes or high blood pressure. We need to prevent those things from happening”. I can’t even begin to tell you how hard that was to hear, but I really needed to hear it. I had felt like having the weight loss surgery would be selfish, it would be just for me and so I didn’t want to go there. Rick made me realize it is actually for him and for our kids, especially our youngest who is going to need us for a long time.
So….finally I can actually answer your question about my hopes, dreams and fears. I hope that losing this weight will improve my health, that I’ll be able to have enough stamina that I won’t feel like I’ve been beaten after working a 12 hour shift, that I’ll be able to run up the stairs without huffing and puffing and be able to get up and moving instead of wanting to just vegetate in front of the TV when I have free time. I hope that I can arrest my heart disease and prevent any new heart problems from developing. I hope that I can NEVER develop Type 2 Diabetes or high blood pressure. My grandmother died in 2007 at the age of 96 and she needed NO prescription medications. I hope I can match her in the prescription way (but I actually have NO desire to live to 96!). In fact my hopes are really my expectations! I expect those kind of improvements.
I dream of going to the beach and not being embarrassed to wear a bathing suit, of raiding through my 22 year old daughter’s closet and wearing some of the cool clothes we got for her in Singapore that she never uses (and that I always envied when we were there) and of dancing at my son’s wedding in 4 inch heels!!!! I dream of taking a ballroom dance class and a second honeymoon somewhere with a gorgeous beach. I dream of a new wardrobe and of seeing something in Dillards out of the corner of my eye and actually fitting into it!! I dream of showing up at a family or class reunion 100 pounds lighter. Those are dreams.
My fears are more complex. I’m afraid that I’ll be a failure at this as I’ve been a failure with weight loss before. I know enough about surgery and it’s complications that I have a healthy fear of anesthesia, infection, and bleeding but my past surgical history has taught me that being determined and following the doctor’s instructions makes all the difference in the world. I fear that I will look older after surgery and I told my husband that losing weight won’t make me 25 again (he just laughed). But I do fear that I won’t meet whatever expectations he has of this surgery.
Rick sees the surgery as similar to diet pills, something to help me lose weight that I can’t lose on my own. I see it as a drastic decision that I can’t take back, it won’t just help me lose weight, it will force me to lose weight. That’s a big part of why I am so excited about it. For me it’s a lot like my knee replacement or my ablation…they both made a huge difference and improved my life dramatically but neither of them turned back the clock. My knee will never be “normal” again and neither will my heart. This will do the same thing for my stomach but the changes will be positive ones and much, much better than if I’d done nothing at all.
There you have it! Probably my longest post to date. Next time I'll put in some pictures.
I can type faster than I can write (and almost keep up with the thoughts in my head) so I decided to put this on a separate sheet of paper. You asked me to tell you what my hopes, fears and dreams are for this surgery. I’ll start by explaining why I’ve decided to do this and go from there. I’m sure it’s a very familiar story to you.
I’ve struggled with my weight issues for close to thirty years. I was never a skinny kid, always had a rounded tummy and face and for some reason always thought I was fat. I look back at photos and realize I was NOT a fat child but I was convinced from a very early age that I was never thin enough. I had an experience at age 16 that seemed to seal that into my mind. When I was in high school I wanted more than anything else to be on the drill team. My high school drill team had a weight requirement and in order to try out a girl who was 5’6” had to weigh 116 lbs or less. I worked so hard to reach my goal of 116 but the day of tryouts when we had our weigh-in I was 118 lbs and wasn’t allowed to try out. The leaders asked me to go through the motions of the audition so it wouldn’t mess up the other girls in the line but they took my number and told the judges I wasn’t up for consideration. I remember so clearly being determined to be a 'good sport' and going through the dance but afterwards when one of the judges came up to me and told me I was a good dancer and that I would definitely have made the team if I had made the weight I was just crushed. In my mind if I didn’t weigh 116 lbs I was fat!
I steadily gained weight over the next couple of years and by the time I was a sophomore in college I weighed about 165 lbs. I was still a very active person physically and realize when I look back at photos that I didn’t look particularly fat, but in my mind I was huge! Morbidly obese!!! My junior year in college I sustained a very serious knee injury doing karate. I tore my ACL and MCL and both meniscus in my left knee (doing a flying side kick that ended with a crash landing) the doctor who saw me initially thought I had just strained my knee and told me to get back on it. My knee was pretty unstable and I honestly thought I was imagining things but saw a sports medicine doc at UTMB in Galveston who did an arthrogram and finally recognized the extent of my injury. At that point I underwent knee surgery but there was quite a bit of arthritis in the knee by then. Laparscopic surgery was out and instead I had two LONG incisions on my left leg and another three months on crutches. Being inactive was oddly bad and good for my weight. I lost muscle mass and increased in flabbiness but my actual weight didn’t change very much. I decided to start counting calories and restricted myself to 1000 calories a day. It wasn’t too hard to do because I was doing no physical activity that didn’t involve crutches. I lost down to about 135 lbs and was fairly happy with the way I looked. Once I became more active my weight gradually increased into the 150 range but that was more due to muscle gain than anything else and my size didn’t significantly increase.
What you need to understand is that I still felt like I looked fat. Since I still didn’t have a flat tummy and my face was still round I really was never particularly happy with the way I looked. I met my husband Rick during that time and we got married 18 months later in 1987. My daughter Chelsea was born in January 1990 and while I gained weight with my pregnancy I did lose most of what I’d gained. My body never really bounced back though and I wasn’t as able to be physically active so a lot of my weight loss was lean muscle mass. Stephen was born in December of 1991 and I repeated the same pattern of losing some of my baby weight but not all of it. I also need to point out that I didn’t really gain an abnormally large amount of weight with either pregnancy and both pregnancies were essentially uncomplicated. But this is where the mind (or at least MY mind) plays tricks. I was never really honest with myself regarding how I looked. It was like I had a mental picture of myself at 150 and that’s how I thought I still looked, I didn’t recognize the extra 30 pounds I was carrying at that point. I find it incongruous that at 118 I thought I was fat and at 180 I thought I was thin. The mind is a ridiculously powerful thing!
I should also point out that at this point I had developed some tachycardia which we originally thought were just palpitations. I had seen a cardiologist and worn a holter monitor but we could never catch the rhythm on a monitor as it was pretty infrequent. Our family moved to Utah for a couple of years and it wasn’t a particularly happy time. My weight fluctuated in the 180’s and when we returned to Texas I decided to try out this new medication called phen-fen. I lost a quick 25 lbs with phen-fen but the incidences of my palpitations increased too. I have to admit I wasn’t too concerned about my heart. I assumed I was just the typical slightly hysterical female who had palpitations and that they probably weren’t too much to be worried about. At the time I was working in CVICU at St. Luke’s in the Texas Medical Center and one day while on my break my heart started doing it’s funky rhythm. It seemed to be racing for more than 30 minutes and when my break was over I asked my charge nurse if I could sit for a few more minutes until my heart stopped racing. She first felt my pulse and told me that my pulse seemed fine and when I replied that it really felt like it was going fast she put her stethoscope on my chest. Her next words were “OMG, it’s too fast for me to count.” Before I knew it my co-workers had slapped me on a monitor and what we thought were simple palpitations turned out to be V-Tach. I started to see a cardiologist and had a cardiac catheterization and EP Study that showed an idiopathic ventricular tachycardia. Dr. Massumi told me that the origin of my VT was very high in the ventricle and he didn’t recommend an ablation at that time, instead I was started on a beta-blocker and taken off all caffeine and stimulants (and obviously phen-fen). The incidences of V-tach lessened and I was able to come off the beta-blockers and just avoid caffeine. Except for the idiopathic rhythm my heart was in great shape (as Dr. Massumi pointed out anyone who can sustain rates of 270 for an hour without dropping their BP has a pretty good heart).
In 1999 I was pregnant with my youngest child Paul. During my pregnancy we discovered that Paul had Down syndrome and a congenital heart defect. That pregnancy was very stressful for me and I had several incidences of going into VT that did NOT resolve spontaneously. However, my rhythm responds extremely well to Adenosine and twice I was converted chemically after sustaining rhythms greater than 250 for up to four hours. On the day Paul was born in January 2000 I weighed 206 lbs. Not only did I never lose my “baby weight” I packed on more. Life over the next couple of years included Paul’s open heart surgery and a total knee replacement for me as the arthritis in my left knee had reached the point where I could barely walk for 30 minutes without needing to put my knee in ice. I had a GREAT knee surgery, it made a big difference in my activity level but somehow not in my weight, in fact I found that with increased activity I just ate more and instead of losing weight I stayed about the same.
In 2004 we moved to Singapore. Life overseas carries a different set of stressers and my response to stress has often been to eat. I was lonely, isolated from friends and country (although my own family is pretty terrific) and exposed to the amazing food of Singapore. I continued to steadily gain and now I was finding that I couldn’t seem to stick to a diet at all. Now I seemed to always feel hungry and I couldn’t find any of the will power I’d relied on in the past. But still I didn’t truly recognize how fat I had become. Singaporeans however are nothing if not honest. When you look for clothes they tell you “we have nothing for you, you too fat”, it’s a very humbling place to be. But I was in denial and would find myself thinking “I’m not fat, I’m just not Asian” We were both right; I was too fat, and I’m not Asian!
I explored the idea of a lap band while I was in Singapore, I worked with a nutritionist who told me what I should eat and basically scolded me when I didn’t do it right. I seriously considered a lap band but our insurance does not pay for any weight loss surgery. I tabled the idea and kept trying on my own. When we got back to the United States I tried Weight Watchers (for what had to be the eighth time) and even went to Overeaters Anonymous but nothing seemed to work for me. I saw an M.D. with Physician’s Weight Loss and made him FULLY aware of my heart condition, hoping that some of the newer weight loss drugs would be safe. He told me they were safe but I started having chest pain and was not feeling well at all (in spite of an ablation in 2005) and when I called my cardiologist he told me to stop all the medications I was on. I went in to see Dr. Massumi and he did a new echo and my once almost perfectly healthy heart now is showing some mild signs of having to work too hard. So while I have no true co-morbidities to accompany my BMI of 36 it’s like they are all sitting on the sideline waiting for me to just get fat enough for them to jump into the game!
On February 4, 2012 my husband said he wanted to talk to me. He told me we had money set aside and if I wanted to pursue weight loss surgery he wanted me to do it. His exact words were, “of course I would like it if you were thinner but if you don’t do something you are going to end up with diabetes or high blood pressure. We need to prevent those things from happening”. I can’t even begin to tell you how hard that was to hear, but I really needed to hear it. I had felt like having the weight loss surgery would be selfish, it would be just for me and so I didn’t want to go there. Rick made me realize it is actually for him and for our kids, especially our youngest who is going to need us for a long time.
So….finally I can actually answer your question about my hopes, dreams and fears. I hope that losing this weight will improve my health, that I’ll be able to have enough stamina that I won’t feel like I’ve been beaten after working a 12 hour shift, that I’ll be able to run up the stairs without huffing and puffing and be able to get up and moving instead of wanting to just vegetate in front of the TV when I have free time. I hope that I can arrest my heart disease and prevent any new heart problems from developing. I hope that I can NEVER develop Type 2 Diabetes or high blood pressure. My grandmother died in 2007 at the age of 96 and she needed NO prescription medications. I hope I can match her in the prescription way (but I actually have NO desire to live to 96!). In fact my hopes are really my expectations! I expect those kind of improvements.
I dream of going to the beach and not being embarrassed to wear a bathing suit, of raiding through my 22 year old daughter’s closet and wearing some of the cool clothes we got for her in Singapore that she never uses (and that I always envied when we were there) and of dancing at my son’s wedding in 4 inch heels!!!! I dream of taking a ballroom dance class and a second honeymoon somewhere with a gorgeous beach. I dream of a new wardrobe and of seeing something in Dillards out of the corner of my eye and actually fitting into it!! I dream of showing up at a family or class reunion 100 pounds lighter. Those are dreams.
My fears are more complex. I’m afraid that I’ll be a failure at this as I’ve been a failure with weight loss before. I know enough about surgery and it’s complications that I have a healthy fear of anesthesia, infection, and bleeding but my past surgical history has taught me that being determined and following the doctor’s instructions makes all the difference in the world. I fear that I will look older after surgery and I told my husband that losing weight won’t make me 25 again (he just laughed). But I do fear that I won’t meet whatever expectations he has of this surgery.
Rick sees the surgery as similar to diet pills, something to help me lose weight that I can’t lose on my own. I see it as a drastic decision that I can’t take back, it won’t just help me lose weight, it will force me to lose weight. That’s a big part of why I am so excited about it. For me it’s a lot like my knee replacement or my ablation…they both made a huge difference and improved my life dramatically but neither of them turned back the clock. My knee will never be “normal” again and neither will my heart. This will do the same thing for my stomach but the changes will be positive ones and much, much better than if I’d done nothing at all.
There you have it! Probably my longest post to date. Next time I'll put in some pictures.
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