Shaking It Up

Now that I’ve gained some clarity by writing about my problem (see my last post), I now feel I can return (at least partially) back to me. For the past month, almost all those healthy habits I have talked about have been thrown out the window. I sporadically still sprinkle food with flaxseed, and try to remember to drink copious amounts of water, but the truth of the matter is that it’s enough to remember to iron my clothes some days, much less keep healthy habits. Luckily, this lapse in habits has not caused me to regain those five pounds I worked so hard to lose, so I am encouraged to least try to get back on track.

My latest ally in the War on Weight is the smoothie/shake option. At the beginning of the year, two people in my office invested into the Nutri-Bullet shake maker, replete with the booklet. And while I struggled to remove five pounds, in about a month, they had managed to lose twice as much apiece.

In theory, this shake idea seems great, and at times, I’m almost tempted to give and try it out. But in practice, I know that the fifty-dollar investment will be a fad, because I have neither the time nor the inclination (mostly the latter), to go to the store every week or two days to buy all the fresh ingredients, toss them in a blender and take them out of the house each morning. To put it plainly, I suffer from an acute bout of kitchen laziness. After I get home from work, my closest aspiration to vegetation is to become a vegetable, preferably the couch-potato sort, or if you want a green leafy, to “lie like broccoli” ala Pretty Woman. Maybe this will change as the semester ends and I am no longer going to work six days a week and coming home after ten on Mondays and Wednesdays, but for right now, making a shake from scratch is not my idea of fun.

But I still like the idea of the shake and the whole liquid diet formula. The end result of the smoothie is a portable convenience for the busy lifestyle, which I undoubtedly have in spades this semester. It is for this reason that I keep six-packs of V-8, both veggie and fruit, in my self-made pantry at work, and the reason that I have invested both in Special K protein shakes and Naked Fruit Juices. I can grab and go, still get my nutrients, and not feel quite as run-down during the course of the day.

For instance, I am trying the Naked Green Machine; it was $4.99 for a 32-ounce bottle. Of course, you do not drink the full bottle in one sitting but I have drunk it throughout the course of the day, and I have to tell you, man I feel full! I did actually eat today as well, but not enough to explain feeling stuffed. I can tell that the juice had a lot to do with it. And while I still feel slightly sleepy from the beatdown the allergy season has been giving me, along with the nightly torture of not sleeping that my son has been giving me, I have every confidence that I’ll make it through the rest of the evening relatively well.

The Unsatirical Me

Writing is more than entertaining to me: it’s cathartic. I usually use this blog as way to just share funny experiences, but today I’m going a different route and just allowing myself to unburden what’s been distracting me for the past month or so. Unfortunately for you, my readers, this story may not have the satirical wit that you’re used to reading from me.

Where to start? I guess with just the plain truth. I am, by all accounts, one of the luckiest and unluckiest progeny there is. Both my parents suffer from psychological problems. This is of course, the unlucky part. The lucky part is that I personally have not suffered from any psychological disorder. This is not to say that I have not been affected by it at all. I believe that many aspects of my personality are a result of my upbringing with my mom and her condition. There are other lucky parts as well. Even though both had different mental disorders (my mom is diagnosed as schizophrenic and my dad is considered bipolar), neither are harmful to others, and neither are suicidal. Having researched this as much as I have, I have seen cases where the people who suffer from these diseases are much worse. The other lucky part is that for the most part, both of my parents are functional. I say for the most part, because each should be dependent on medication. What I’ve found out is that my mother can function without it, but that my father cannot.

This leads me to one of the major reasons I have felt like I was in some kind of heavy fog for the past month and a half. My father lapsed into one of his “spells” at the end of February. This is of course disturbing because it is the second such spell in the span of a year. Prior to this, my father had not had an episode in over ten years, thanks to a strict routine, and due diligence on the part of both his psychiatrist and me. What I’ve learned in the past two years is that rapid change is not conducive to my father’s health. To explain it simply, rapid change causes anxiety, and anxiety causes a chemical imbalance. And let’s face it: my dad, like me, has undergone a rapid change in the past three years.

You know my changes: kid, house, husband. Dad’s changes have been going from being my bestie to just my dad. In addition, he moved from his apartment to essentially a room in a basement. While he is no longer responsible for paying that many bills, he is also no longer head of household, and moreso a tenant in our home than he ever was in the apartment. He lost his job, partly because the new owner of the station was putting him through rapid unnecessary changes in the hopes that he would quit or trip up and get fired. The latter ended up happening, and it triggered his first episode at the end of 2011 and into the next year, causing him to miss the first Christmas in the house and Ayden’s first birthday party.

As is and was always the case after Dad’s return, it takes me a bit of time to rewarm up to him. I find myself looking at him strangely, wondering if he’s fully recovered. This was the case when he returned in 2012 after such a long time without a bout, especially since it took an extraordinarily long time for him to recover. But he did, and our relationship improved.

Enter this year: a week after attending my grandma’s 100th birthday party, he started to decline. By Friday, I was packing him in a car and trucking him off to the hospital for another stay. I thought that this would be another semi-routine stay. I could not have been more wrong. My dad had a medical scare while he was there. Whether it was due to the hospital’s neglect, I cannot say, but my father was transferred from the psych ward to the 9th floor because of a kidney infection, then down to the 4th floor cardiac unit after coding due to low blood pressure, then to the fifth floor before being released to a nursing home for rehabilitation. After all this, the original problem he went in for was not resolved, and on top of that, my dad had to start dialysis treatment, something we knew was going to happen in the distant future, but that brought into immediate relief with his last hospital stay.

He is currently still in this rehabilitation center, and they have not done anything to help his psychological state, other than to give him an incorrect diagnosis. This of course is pissing me off because first of all, I feel like my hands are tied since his psychiatrist won’t come out there and since he is not fully medically stable, and since no one from the psych team seems willing to talk to me. I feel that if I don’t keep rolling and pushing and needling and showing my face (and sometimes my ass) to these folks that what I need to happen will not get done and that my dad will end up rotting away in this facility.

I have a Care Plan Meeting with a team of professionals from the hospital. I have every intention of showing up with my own Care Management Team: my aunt and uncles, who have been instrumental by being my ears and eyes when I don’t make it over there.