Continued from "My Story - Part 1" & "My Story - Part 2"...
I recently read this about type 1 diabetes:
"Type 1 diabetes is a terminal illness. If we don't work our ass off day in and day out, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, with no breaks and no vacations, we'd die. We fight death every minute of every day."
When you are the parent of a child with diabetes that is what you do. You fight. Every day. To keep them alive. I have often said at the end of a day that it was a good day because my son was still breathing. I had done my job for the day.
I can't explain to you the stress, heartache and anxiety that comes from having a child that lives with this disease. I can't explain to you how devastating it is to your way of life and to all that you took for granted as a parent to have this disease enter your home. You wouldn't understand because unless you live with it you CAN'T understand. Not fully. And I am THANKFUL that you don't have to understand.
What I can say is this: When someone lives with as much stress, heartache and anxiety as us parents of children with diabetes do, it is very difficult find an outlet to channel those emotions.
I, however, very quickly found my outlet: My old friend food had always been there. And it was still there. Food was my shoulder to cry on when I felt that I couldn't put my husband through yet another emotional collapse. After all, he was grieving this diagnosis too...
Food was my best friend when I needed something or someone who understood. Who would sympathize with this constant fear that I was going to do something wrong. That I was going to over-dose or under-dose him with insulin. That he would die. And it would be MY fault. The first year after diagnosis especially I lived in constant fear that I was going to make one tiny mistake and kill my baby boy. Because with this disease that's all it takes!! One small mistake could cost your child their life. None of my friends understood that fear. I was thankful they didn't. But I needed a best friend and it was food. Food made me feel better (temporarily, of course) every time.
Food was my parent. It was where I went to for advice. Some people do their best thinking while they are sitting on the toilet or in the shower. Not me. I think when I eat. Its almost like I can slip into a mindless meditative state where all my happy hormones are there and my mind becomes clear and I can THINK. I can give myself the advice that I wasn't able to get from any parental figure in my life at the time. They didn't understand. They didn't know this disease the way I was coming to know it.
Food was my sibling. It was the big sister that I had always wanted. The one that picked me up and dusted me off when I fell down and said, "You got this - I'll help! You don't have to do this alone because I am 100% here for you."
This went on for 4 years.
But here's the thing: Food was also the two-faced friend that when I was done crying on it's shoulder it turned around and stabbed me in the back. Food was the abusive parent that when it was done hearing me out made me feel like I was failing because I wasn't seeing about my own health and well-being while I was trying to see about my son's. Food was the selfish sibling that after picking me up and dusting me put it's needs before mine. That promise of being there for me proving to be a lie. Food was hurting me far more than it was helping. It was my drug. And it was killing me. I had labeled diabetes the threat in our house. But the truth was it was FOOD that was killing someone. It was FOOD that was killing me. My son was happy, fairly well-adjusted to his disease, and because of our constant vigilance he was HEALTHY!! He was happy & healthy. And I was the one who was dying.
4 years. And just like that, one morning I woke up and I was over 400lbs.
(to be continued...)
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
My Story - Part 2
Continued from "My Story - Part 1"...
Once I started taking a synthetic thyroid medication in treatment of my hypothyroidism I immediately started to feel better! I had more energy. I could move my body more freely and the constant fog that always seemed present started to lift. I was able to see the world around me and the life I had been living SO much clearer. And I didn't like what I saw. What I saw was NOT who I wanted to be. I realized that the relationship I was in was a toxic one in which the man I was living with didn't WANT me to be healthier or happier. He liked me fat & miserable because he had a misguided sense of security that I wouldn't leave him if I felt that the world had nothing better than him to offer me. That said as much about his insecurities as it did about mine, but he was partly right. It was how I felt.
But coming out of the fog, I realized that I was young and I had my whole life ahead of me... I realized that I wanted something better.
So, I put myself out there again. I started caring about what I ate and how I looked. I was broken, but not destroyed and I started to feel that maybe, just maybe I would be okay. I met a nice Catholic boy and we started dating. It was the first healthy relationship I had ever been in with a guy. He taught me that I had something to offer. He showed me what real and stable love looked and felt like. He told me I was beautiful. Every day. I regained some of my self-worth. I rediscovered the morals and values that at some point I had scattered to the wind. And I knew I was going to marry him. I wanted him for the rest of my life.
One year to the day that we met, we married. I was SO happy! Life was becoming the fairy tale that I had dreamed when I was a little girl. Food was still an issue... still a struggle. When I got married at the age of 23 I weighed 350lbs. After all, the years of dependency that I had placed upon my substance of choice were not about to just vanish. But I found I was not depending on it quite as much in my happy state. I still dieted. I tried the Atkins diet, Weight Watchers and several other plans. My weight fluctuated up and down for the next three years. Finally I went back to Weight Watchers and lost about 80lbs on their plan. I was down to 280lbs - the lowest weight I had been since graduating high school. It was December 2005. We were headed to Albuquerque NM for a family wedding when I got extremely nauseous on the flight. Strange. A week later I understood why: I was pregnant!! We couldn't be happier!! A month later our joy doubled when we found out that we were having twins. A perfect little baby boy and girl were born in August 2006.
I loved my babies more than life itself, but was overwhelmed with being a brand new mommy and the work that came with having twin infants. We had very little help the first 7 months of their life. My husband and I were both working full time and the juggling of babies and jobs and some family pressures was exhausting. Food became my refuge once more. It was how I dealt with the exhaustion and the stress. I felt a lot of insecurity as a new mommy and looking back I can see there were some outside pressures that increased that insecurity. When the twins were 7 months old my husbands grandmother passed away. His whole family grieved her loss. It was a difficult time for everyone. And it seemed to open the door for my post-partum depression to make a late appearance. I just remembered I cried a lot. I hid a lot. I ATE A LOT. It wasn't long before I was 350lbs again.
Time went on... our babies grew and became easier to care for. After they turned a year old EVERYTHING got easier!! People will tell you that the first year with twins is the hardest - believe them!! I was the first to tell people - "If you get through that first year with twins, you can do ANYTHING!!"
Little did I know how much that statement would be put to the test.
In May of 2008 we succumbed to the housing market and bought our first house. We had been consummate renters and everyone said "Now's the time!! Buy now!! Stop throwing your money away on rent!!" So, we did. The excitement of buying your first home was amazing! We lived in a bubble of extreme contentment for the next 6 months. In November of 2008 our world came crashing down when our sweet boy was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He was only 27 months old.
That diagnosis was a little like being punched in the gut, having the rug pulled out from under you and falling into a deep, deep dark hole. What can I say? My old friend food was there to catch me...
(to be continued...)
Once I started taking a synthetic thyroid medication in treatment of my hypothyroidism I immediately started to feel better! I had more energy. I could move my body more freely and the constant fog that always seemed present started to lift. I was able to see the world around me and the life I had been living SO much clearer. And I didn't like what I saw. What I saw was NOT who I wanted to be. I realized that the relationship I was in was a toxic one in which the man I was living with didn't WANT me to be healthier or happier. He liked me fat & miserable because he had a misguided sense of security that I wouldn't leave him if I felt that the world had nothing better than him to offer me. That said as much about his insecurities as it did about mine, but he was partly right. It was how I felt.
But coming out of the fog, I realized that I was young and I had my whole life ahead of me... I realized that I wanted something better.
So, I put myself out there again. I started caring about what I ate and how I looked. I was broken, but not destroyed and I started to feel that maybe, just maybe I would be okay. I met a nice Catholic boy and we started dating. It was the first healthy relationship I had ever been in with a guy. He taught me that I had something to offer. He showed me what real and stable love looked and felt like. He told me I was beautiful. Every day. I regained some of my self-worth. I rediscovered the morals and values that at some point I had scattered to the wind. And I knew I was going to marry him. I wanted him for the rest of my life.
One year to the day that we met, we married. I was SO happy! Life was becoming the fairy tale that I had dreamed when I was a little girl. Food was still an issue... still a struggle. When I got married at the age of 23 I weighed 350lbs. After all, the years of dependency that I had placed upon my substance of choice were not about to just vanish. But I found I was not depending on it quite as much in my happy state. I still dieted. I tried the Atkins diet, Weight Watchers and several other plans. My weight fluctuated up and down for the next three years. Finally I went back to Weight Watchers and lost about 80lbs on their plan. I was down to 280lbs - the lowest weight I had been since graduating high school. It was December 2005. We were headed to Albuquerque NM for a family wedding when I got extremely nauseous on the flight. Strange. A week later I understood why: I was pregnant!! We couldn't be happier!! A month later our joy doubled when we found out that we were having twins. A perfect little baby boy and girl were born in August 2006.
I loved my babies more than life itself, but was overwhelmed with being a brand new mommy and the work that came with having twin infants. We had very little help the first 7 months of their life. My husband and I were both working full time and the juggling of babies and jobs and some family pressures was exhausting. Food became my refuge once more. It was how I dealt with the exhaustion and the stress. I felt a lot of insecurity as a new mommy and looking back I can see there were some outside pressures that increased that insecurity. When the twins were 7 months old my husbands grandmother passed away. His whole family grieved her loss. It was a difficult time for everyone. And it seemed to open the door for my post-partum depression to make a late appearance. I just remembered I cried a lot. I hid a lot. I ATE A LOT. It wasn't long before I was 350lbs again.
Time went on... our babies grew and became easier to care for. After they turned a year old EVERYTHING got easier!! People will tell you that the first year with twins is the hardest - believe them!! I was the first to tell people - "If you get through that first year with twins, you can do ANYTHING!!"
Little did I know how much that statement would be put to the test.
In May of 2008 we succumbed to the housing market and bought our first house. We had been consummate renters and everyone said "Now's the time!! Buy now!! Stop throwing your money away on rent!!" So, we did. The excitement of buying your first home was amazing! We lived in a bubble of extreme contentment for the next 6 months. In November of 2008 our world came crashing down when our sweet boy was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He was only 27 months old.
That diagnosis was a little like being punched in the gut, having the rug pulled out from under you and falling into a deep, deep dark hole. What can I say? My old friend food was there to catch me...
(to be continued...)
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
My Story - Part 1
When I was a little girl I was "normal". Normal as far as body shape and weight, anyway. I was an extremely active little girl and while I loved food I had the metabolism and activity level to support a large appetite. I remember at a young age my parents commenting on how much I ate... I remember my dad being concerned that my portions were too large. I remember feeling ashamed that they had noted this about me, but after-all... I wasn't fat (not like that one kid in school!!!) so, who cares?!
When I became a teenager and puberty hit I started to put on weight. I was horrified and distressed that I no longer looked like my friends. I remember seeing pictures of myself at a recent horse show that I had competed in and sitting on my bed and bawling. I was so scared of what I was becoming. I lived in a rural town where everyone knew everyone else and I had already heard some whispers of my increasing size and the pointed looks from other kids at school where embarrassing. I was embarrassing. My mom found me crying on my bed that day and I was put on my first diet. I was 12. We embarked on a low calorie / low fat diet and my fear and frustration only increased when I just continued to get bigger and bigger. Fatter and fatter. Two years later my dad died from complications of type 1 diabetes. I was 14, a freshman in high school and my world was shattered. My relationship with my dad the last several years of his life was not good. He was sick and was not himself. I ate my way through the pain before and after his death. There was crash dieting here and there... but food had become my companion. It was the one thing in my life that I was able to totally depend on. It was my comfort. It was my friend. It made me feel good in a time when everything, including my growing waist line, made me feel bad. My mom was there.. but she was grieving the loss of my dad and the loss of our way of life with him gone. The whispers were louder now... and sometimes they weren't whispers at all. I discovered one day that if I threw up right after I ate then it was like I hadn't eaten it. It was like it hadn't happened. I could have my food and not get any bigger!! Maybe even lose some of this weight. So, that's what I did. And sure enough, I lost weight. For the first time in years I was actually somewhat happy with how I looked. I was curvy, but for a teenager who was suddenly finding herself interested in boys I was aware that I was curvy in a good way. Still, I was the biggest girl amongst my friends and I desired to be thinner. There came a point where my throat started to hurt when I was throwing up... it hurt bad! And then I saw something on TV where a girl my age died from complications of bulimia. It scared me into stopping. When I stopped purging, though, there was only binging and my weight soared. By the time I graduated high school I was a size 18 and weighed 280lbs. Without the purging dieting didn't work. I mean DID NOT work. I often felt like I could just look at food and gain weight. I was still very active... I was still training and showing horses. I had competed in and won a couple of beauty pageants and traveled the rodeo circuits as a princess and then queen representing my hometown. Everywhere I went I had to endure comments about my weight, though. Especially at the rodeo's. Cowboys can be crude. I will leave it at that.
After high school I got brave enough to try online dating. I was well aware of what my options were in the small town I lived it... after all, I had grown up with most of them!! And I wanted a larger pool to fish from. So, I met a guy from a nearby city. I fell in love (or thought I did) and my insecurities about my weight surfaced at a whole new level. Intimacy is hard when you really don't know what you are doing. Its a lot harder when you are ashamed of how you look and feel to the one you are being intimate with. Still, he moved to my town and we moved in together. I continued crash dieting. It didn't work. He left me when my weight took me to 320lbs and I was a size 24. The relationship lasted less than 6 months. I moved away from my hometown and found myself in "the big city". It was liberating to be away from a place where I had experienced so much pain and uncertainty.
I got a job... I started paying my own bills. I was living with a guy I knew wouldn't care if I was the size of a house and I allowed myself to be complacent. For the first time I refused to monitor my weight because I was convinced that I was destined to be fat. Nothing I did worked to lose the weight. It didn't help that I was not longer active. But my old friend food had never let me down It had continued to be my constant. And honestly, I was just so tired of fighting it. What was the point?? My weight climbed some more. It wasn't long before I was 350lbs and a size 28. I got a terrible cold when I was 22 in the winter of 2001. I went to see a doctor so I could get some antibiotics. It was the first time in my adult life that I had seen a doctor. Despite my size I was extremely healthy and had no reason to do so. The doc came in and took my temperature. Confirmed I was sick and wrote me a prescription for the antibiotics. And then he asked me the question that no one else had ever thought to ask: "Have you ever had your thyroid checked?" I didn't even know what a thyroid was!!! I told him no and so he wrote up orders for blood work as well. The results came back and my thyroid levels were well out of the normal range. After taking my history the doctor explained that I probably had been suffering from hypothyroidism for years. Suddenly EVERYTHING made sense. No wonder I could diet and never lose anything! No wonder I always felt so tired and run-down. No wonder I had been battling depression and anxiety. All those years of struggle... and all I had to do was take a little pill every day??
(to be continued....)
When I became a teenager and puberty hit I started to put on weight. I was horrified and distressed that I no longer looked like my friends. I remember seeing pictures of myself at a recent horse show that I had competed in and sitting on my bed and bawling. I was so scared of what I was becoming. I lived in a rural town where everyone knew everyone else and I had already heard some whispers of my increasing size and the pointed looks from other kids at school where embarrassing. I was embarrassing. My mom found me crying on my bed that day and I was put on my first diet. I was 12. We embarked on a low calorie / low fat diet and my fear and frustration only increased when I just continued to get bigger and bigger. Fatter and fatter. Two years later my dad died from complications of type 1 diabetes. I was 14, a freshman in high school and my world was shattered. My relationship with my dad the last several years of his life was not good. He was sick and was not himself. I ate my way through the pain before and after his death. There was crash dieting here and there... but food had become my companion. It was the one thing in my life that I was able to totally depend on. It was my comfort. It was my friend. It made me feel good in a time when everything, including my growing waist line, made me feel bad. My mom was there.. but she was grieving the loss of my dad and the loss of our way of life with him gone. The whispers were louder now... and sometimes they weren't whispers at all. I discovered one day that if I threw up right after I ate then it was like I hadn't eaten it. It was like it hadn't happened. I could have my food and not get any bigger!! Maybe even lose some of this weight. So, that's what I did. And sure enough, I lost weight. For the first time in years I was actually somewhat happy with how I looked. I was curvy, but for a teenager who was suddenly finding herself interested in boys I was aware that I was curvy in a good way. Still, I was the biggest girl amongst my friends and I desired to be thinner. There came a point where my throat started to hurt when I was throwing up... it hurt bad! And then I saw something on TV where a girl my age died from complications of bulimia. It scared me into stopping. When I stopped purging, though, there was only binging and my weight soared. By the time I graduated high school I was a size 18 and weighed 280lbs. Without the purging dieting didn't work. I mean DID NOT work. I often felt like I could just look at food and gain weight. I was still very active... I was still training and showing horses. I had competed in and won a couple of beauty pageants and traveled the rodeo circuits as a princess and then queen representing my hometown. Everywhere I went I had to endure comments about my weight, though. Especially at the rodeo's. Cowboys can be crude. I will leave it at that.
After high school I got brave enough to try online dating. I was well aware of what my options were in the small town I lived it... after all, I had grown up with most of them!! And I wanted a larger pool to fish from. So, I met a guy from a nearby city. I fell in love (or thought I did) and my insecurities about my weight surfaced at a whole new level. Intimacy is hard when you really don't know what you are doing. Its a lot harder when you are ashamed of how you look and feel to the one you are being intimate with. Still, he moved to my town and we moved in together. I continued crash dieting. It didn't work. He left me when my weight took me to 320lbs and I was a size 24. The relationship lasted less than 6 months. I moved away from my hometown and found myself in "the big city". It was liberating to be away from a place where I had experienced so much pain and uncertainty.
I got a job... I started paying my own bills. I was living with a guy I knew wouldn't care if I was the size of a house and I allowed myself to be complacent. For the first time I refused to monitor my weight because I was convinced that I was destined to be fat. Nothing I did worked to lose the weight. It didn't help that I was not longer active. But my old friend food had never let me down It had continued to be my constant. And honestly, I was just so tired of fighting it. What was the point?? My weight climbed some more. It wasn't long before I was 350lbs and a size 28. I got a terrible cold when I was 22 in the winter of 2001. I went to see a doctor so I could get some antibiotics. It was the first time in my adult life that I had seen a doctor. Despite my size I was extremely healthy and had no reason to do so. The doc came in and took my temperature. Confirmed I was sick and wrote me a prescription for the antibiotics. And then he asked me the question that no one else had ever thought to ask: "Have you ever had your thyroid checked?" I didn't even know what a thyroid was!!! I told him no and so he wrote up orders for blood work as well. The results came back and my thyroid levels were well out of the normal range. After taking my history the doctor explained that I probably had been suffering from hypothyroidism for years. Suddenly EVERYTHING made sense. No wonder I could diet and never lose anything! No wonder I always felt so tired and run-down. No wonder I had been battling depression and anxiety. All those years of struggle... and all I had to do was take a little pill every day??
(to be continued....)
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