It’s coming up on Sunday. I was really out of touch with the days and nearly had a heart attack when it finally connected that it was THIS Sunday. Wow.
My Mum had been talking about having a day out at the beach. We’d been debating about finding one of those cheap hotels to stay in, but with her work and hubbie still recuperating that’s not an option right at the minute. It’s going to be a while before he restocks any vacation time.
We might be able to do things while he’s on sick leave, but I’m leery about going too far a field for too long in case something happens while he’s healing.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do for Mother’s Day. Hubbie had been wanting to go and see “Iron Man” but I’m not sure if we’ll be able to do that. Plus his Dad wants to come up and see the place now that we’ve had time to fix things up. I guess this means I actually have to finish my cleaning project which I keep starting and then flaking out on.

I’m pleased to report that our house is tonsillitis free.

It’s been a long day, but right now we’re making the most of down time.

I was up at 4:30 a.m. because the munchkin woke up having a royal fit about something, and decided just to stay up given we had to have my husband to the hospital at 6 a.m. He got home from work and we did a quick turn around and were out of the door. I loaded the car last night and I’m glad we did.

We got in and I was shown to a waiting area with the munchkin while they prepped hubbie and got him set up and then we were allowed to come back to see him until they took him down for surgery at 7:20 a.m.

Munchkin and I went “off-campus” to get breakfast and when I came back it turned out hubbie had come out of surgery around the time we had been getting our food, and was “doing well” unlike last time at the other hospital where they then lost him for almost an hour and found him again only to tell me he had not in fact had surgery when they’d previously left me a message saying that everything was fine, this time he actually was doing pretty well. They were getting his pain managed and then after another twenty minutes and two munchkin escapes we were allowed to go back and see him, and while he was still in some pain he was feeling wonderful because he knew the tonsils were gone.

We were able to come home around noon, after I explained to the nurse that hubbie works nights normally and is used to being asleep during the day and that’s why he was having a hard time staying awake, not entirely the anesthetic lingering.

So, we were home by 1:30 after we stopped and picked up his prescriptions for pain killers, which is a lot better than last time, given last time even though he didn’t even HAVE the operation we didn’t get out of the hospital until almost four.

It’s so easy in today’s society to get impatient. We’re so conditioned into thinking that there should be “instant fixes” for everything that we don’t want to wait. It’s so tempting to figure that you can pop some weight loss pills instead of actually rectifying problems with your diet and way of life. Why should I make the effort? I can just press this button and all the problems will go away.

The thing is that it’s not that easy and doing things in that fashion is a hollow victory, and really setting yourself up for relapse and failure because you’re not fixing the problem. You’re just masking the problem. Victory’s are best when hard won.

We’re rectifying issues within our household and diet over the past few weeks and continuing on. It is hard going but it’s worthwhile. I’ve cut back on the soda. I know I won’t be able to wean off it entirely, but I just have one can a day as a treat, and already I’m noticing some positive changes with my attitude and diet. I’m cutting back on portion sizes. That’s good too. For example, often I’ll combine leftover meat with egg and potatoes and make a breakfast concoction on the weekends, and would then sit there making sandwiches with the food. So, today I got myself two tortillas and filled them with some concoction and left the rest on the stove for other family members to eat. I’ve been fine with what I ate.

Small portions are the best bet. We have fruit for snack food now: grapes, bananas, melon pieces, rather than chocolate raisins and potato chips.

If I go for walks early in the morning it’s not so hot, and we can run around our yard which is very shady during the day and not get too overheated. Once our tax return comes in I’m going to look into membership to our local YMCA gym which is near my therapist’s office. That would be a good way to exercise and be in air conditioning, and my husband would like that too. He could work out while I take the munchkin swimming or something like that.

I’m no longer slacking on this factor of my well-being, and I feel good about that. Overall I still feel a bit “crappy” because I have the remnants of the stomach flu still affecting me. I had a couple of days of “okay” and I’m back in the bathroom quite a bit, but not as bad as I was this time last week where I could only make it off the couch to run to the bathroom.

Anyway, over the weekend I bought some replacement batteries for the scale that I have, and yesterday I was able to put them in and check how much I weight. 242.8. That’s higher than I was last time I was seriously dieting (I got down to 239 then), but it’s lower than I was when I weighed at the doctor’s office three weeks ago. So that’s good. I’ve lost about 3 pounds since then.

Also I’ve seriously cut back on my soda intake. In the past week I’ve had two Mountain Dews, one was a medium sized bottle and yesterday I had a can. This is a major improvement given I’ve been known to drink four cans in a day, at least. The rest of the time I’m drinking water or water with the low-calorie flavor packets in it so that I have a bit of a change from plain water but am not craving the soda. It’s made me a bit irritable because my caffeine intake is severely depleted, but I do still have the tea that I can drink which gives me a little bit of caffeine.

So, here’s hoping that I can get my weight to my original goal. My idea now is to do this by October, because I’m officiating a friend’s wedding in November and it would be good to be able to get into my old clothes and be a bit sleeker by then. Although by my birthday in July I would like to be down at least 15 pounds, I think that’s doable as my birthday is 16 weeks away.

I’ve been kinda sick for the past couple of days, but yesterday it kicked in really badly, and in the horrible can’t stay out of the bathroom for too long sense. I feel horrible, and the munchkin is, of course, being hideously rambunctious to make up for it…such fun.

I’m hoping that this will be the last day of this because I really can’t take much more bathroom time at this point…on the upside my husband doesn’t have to work today and since I’m feeling a little bit better he’s napping right now and is going to get up early so I can try and get some more rest. I’ve been up since 4 a.m. visiting the bathroom every twenty minutes or so. You’d think there’d be nothing more left! But somehow more is found. Urgh.

Thank the Gods for PBS.

So, is Hydroxycut what I think it is? Some kind of weight loss mechanism.

How reliable are these sorts of things? Hoodia was fairly decent for a while, but I kept forgetting to take it.

Of course the way our finances are going we’ll probably be living on ramen and things for a while, so that’ll help with weight loss…ah, the joys of being poor, but we have a roof over our heads, and we do have food on the table, that’s the main thing.

Diet in moderation and exercise is probably still going to be the best way to go, right?

My husband and I were trying to get by each other in the kitchen today and almost got stuck! Yeah, definitely we need to start dieting and exercising, my husband said. My eyes drifted towards the bottle of diet pills that I’ve had for a while and keep forgetting to take.

We’ve been using the excuse that we were going to wait until after my husband’s surgery but that’s postponed indefinitely at the moment, so we’re going to just have to start, and hubbie will just have to take things easy while recovering from the surgery. Perhaps we can drop down to just walking for those few weeks and I’ll do the weight lifting by myself.

My legs have ached so much today I think it’s the fact I’ve actually been getting out and exercising a bit and also there’s been a lot of late nights/interrupted nights the past week because of the munchkin’s virus.

His fever was non-existent today, it figures that the day after I take him to the doctor’s all’s well, but if I hadn’t taken him I would have been that much more worried. His fever got up to 103.8 after I’d made the appointment, but was back down to 102.2 when they checked him at the office. In true “our family has weird health things” fashion he had no signs of tonsillitis or an ear infection, his flu swab came back negative and he was in pretty decent spirits so they decided he must have some kind of virus and sent us home with instructions to keep doing what we were doing, giving him luke warm baths, making sure he drank a lot of water and if he got too uncomfortable and was within limits dose him with motrin or the generic thereof.

He was crabby today but also clearly better, he kept stripping butt naked and running around shrieking and throwing wobblies because he wasn’t being allowed cake but was being asked to eat chicken nuggets or spaghetti. His appetite isn’t quite up to par, but he’s been fussy enough about food lately.

He was scaling the baby gate and running up and down the stairs too. Me, on the other hand, moving like I could benefit from a stair lift…joy. Hopefully tonight I can get to bed a little early and catch-up on sleep. It’s probably going to be a long day tomorrow.

I’ve been quiet for a few days because things have been busy here. My husband was supposed to be having a consultation for surgery, to finally get rid of the tonsils he was supposed to have out just before New Years, except now his surgeon has left the area, and the new surgeon wants to postpone the surgery indefinitely until they do a bunch of tests that he had talked to his original surgeon about bypassing and just getting the tonsils out given the affect that having tonsillitis for over a year has had on his overall quality of life.

So, we’re both more than a little annoyed, frustrated, angry about this turn of events. We’re trying to get a referral to a different surgeon but that’s proving difficult also. Urgh. If it’s not one thing it’s another. I seriously hate what this is doing to him. It’s up and down, up and down, hope and dashed hope. He was looking forward to the end being in sight once more and then when he called me at the grocery store to find out where something was I could just tell that things had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

On top of that the munchkin had me up and down all night because he has a temperate of 101. He’s not lethargic, and is alternately pretty chipper and is still eating and drinking. I’m making sure to keep him well saturated so that he doesn’t get dehydrated, and right now he’s sleeping but I can’t I’m too awake, despite being completely exhausted for most of the day.

I hope we can get this surgery issue resolved soon, but it looks like another round of referrals will have to be done or we’ll just have to find some way to get these tests done quickly. The problem is with all the delays and the relapses hubbie’s been having because the surgery hasn’t been done he’s rapidly running out sick time.

In the continuing efforts at self-health improvement my doctor has sent me for some fasting blood work which I’m going to try and get done first thing this week. This is part of the overall wellness check up that they like to do annually, but given it’s been a while since I’ve been in Dr. M’s care he wants to run some bloodwork to make sure the family history of thyroid hasn’t struck again.
I was reading about colon cleanse earlier and how they flush out your system as though you’ve been fasting, but…I think I’d rather just not eat before going. I might look into a full system cleanse later on, once we’ve got a lot more healthy stuff in the house so I don’t undo all the good work of the system cleanse by going right back to my crappy dietary habits.