The bank showed me -$125 which freaked me out as that would mean more overdraft fees and I don’t want to get into that vicious cycle again.

I think we’ve sorted it out now. I’ve managed to go and deposit a rent check despite the fact that my car isn’t working. This is thanks in no small part to Mum coming and rescuing me. However I’m still disturbed and not at rights and won’t be until tomorrow when the overdrafts don’t happen (as the teller said they shouldn’t). I dislike these things greatly though. My stomach hasn’t been doing well the past few days thanks to a virus and an allergy flare up and here we are getting stressed with goes right to the stomach too.

At least I hadn’t planned on going anywhere and spending anything today.

This came about after my GP had come in, after the preliminary heart/blood pressure checks had been done, he asked how I was doing, and I said “eh, so-so,” so he asked me to explain. I told him how I’d been very lethargic lately and I was putting it down to the fact that my weight had gotten higher than it had been last time I’d started the weight loss plan. Though it has gone down about 5lbs in the past two weeks at least but it’s been hard. I’ve been waking up at 9 a.m. when I was being able to wake up at 7:30 a.m. with no problem and be WIDE awake, but yet I’m crawling out of bed at 9 a.m. and have no drive to keep going, yet it’s not a hideous pain flare and it’s not a general lethargy without drive it’s just being tired, which is more frustrating. At least when it was my mental state that was out of whack I had no drive to do anything so didn’t really notice that anything was wrong. Okay, maybe that’s not better…

On the upside though, it’s not Mesothelioma or anything else that’s drastically life-threatening. It’s just problematic because it’s another thing that I’m going to have to continually manage and that gets very tricky when there’s a multitude of people all using the same body, especially as this medication is apparently not something I can take before bed along with the other one. It’s something I’ll have to take in the morning before breakfast or in the afternoon before lunch, at least an hour before I eat. So, yeah…we’re going to have to really work to sort it out; but it’ll be worth it in the long run because it’ll really help us get the weight issue sorted out and have more energy, which is one of the biggest things we’ve been after aside from internal cooperation.

I wish there’d been a book like this for lung cancer. It would have been very helpful for us when my mother-in-law was diagnosed a few years ago. Despite that she lived a year longer than her initial prognosis. I put that down to her stubborn nature of wanting to see her grandson and also make it to a certain wedding anniversary. She died three days after.

Stage four lung cancer is a little different to Mesothelioma Cancer which is very brutal cancer that affects the protective sacs which cover the internal organs. The main cause of it is considered to be asbestos exposure. After being diagnosed Kraus and his family went through many different avenues for treatment, researching new therapies. They were very successful given that Kraus was initially given a prognosis of a year, and he has since survived twelve years at least. Mesothelioma doesn’t have to be a death sentence. I have to figure that if the treatment methods Kraus and his family explored helped him so much that they would definitely be beneficial to others who have been diagnosed with this often tragic disease.

On the one hand it’s a good idea for me to have a check up. I haven’t been to the doctor since I had the bout of severe bronchitis a few months ago, and that was the first time I’d been in quite some time. I’ve been meaning to see him to see if he could help me get sorted out with this diet plan a little more securely.

I wonder if one of us mentioned that to the psychiatrist at our last visit and when he found out we hadn’t followed through with it he prescribed it. Would be interesting.

I’m a little apprehensive mostly because we’re still having issues with the health insurance and I’m pretty sure I still owe the GP $70 or $80 from the time I went for the bronchitis. I wish the people who did our life insurance did health insurance.

One of our friends came over who we haven’t seen very often, both hubbie and I have known him since high school and he like many others in our circle has only recently found out about the D.I.D. diagnosis which adds to us feeling more comfortable around our friends with regards to switching and things, and our friends are making efforts to understand when the different alters are about and working out the variants between them.

He stayed the night because he’d had several Max-made White Russians and neither he nor we wanted him driving home like that. After everyone else had left he was talking with Z and Max and he remarked that even though he’d known us since high school and all through our relationship with hubbie it was only within the past few months that he’d really started to make sense of us, and how knowing what he does know makes high school make a lot of sense. Max laughed and told him that the past couple of years had make things make sense for us too.

Our friend said that he always prided himself on being able to figure people out, and he’d never been able to figure us out because just when he thought that he’d figured it out his perceptions would get turned on their ear. I said that was pretty standard. I remember a friend in high school running into two of my exes talking at Denny’s about the mystery wrapped in an enigma that was me.

Initially she’d gone into hiding because she didn’t want to be around the munchkin; paranoid as she was about hurting him in some way. She re-surfaced just after we went into therapy in 2008 because Elsie had asked to talk to her and suggested that she make an effort to get to know the munchkin and find out what a wonderful little boy he is. She did that, and she hung around for a few days but she found it difficult to adjusting to life, not only had she missed, for the most part, his first year and a half of life, but we were in a completely different house than she was used to and a completely different body, for that matter, having gained 40lbs while pregnant and not lost any of it, and in fact, fluxing between pregnancy weight and about 10lbs over it. So, it was hard for her. None of her clothes fit. She didn’t feel comfortable physically, and while the rest of us don’t entirely feel comfortable physically we’d at least adjusted to it. For her, she disappeared when we were around 200lbs and came back to us being almost 250lbs. She tried to work out, exercise, do yard work, but in the end she got frustrated by the fact that she was essentially battling the rest of us who had become a bit apathetic to the whole situation, so she challenged us to rectify it, got a plan from our GP, and said she’d come back out once we’d lost some of the weight.

Well, that did and didn’t happen. We’d gotten back down to around 238 when the zombie months hit and the weight came back. We’ve struggled and waffled since then, I’ll admit, starting programs, attempting to cut out soda and things and falling off the wagon more often than not. The other day I weighed and we were 255. Kiddy threw a fit.

We had some discussions the night before about the way things were going and she pointed out that she was done. We’d failed our promise to fix things and apparently a good chunk of that was either lacking willpower, or refusing to act on said willpower (all internal eyes point to Max). So, she said she would come back and that would mean we would HAVE to do something about it. She made some intimations that she could and would be a worse Drill Sargent than Terri ever was. I know Kiddy is often credited as being our “inner bitch” and she comes across as very brash, and at least one of our friends expressed concern about this attitude. However, we do have a cooperative agreement on this factor.

The fact of the matter is we have failed in all our efforts. It’s practically a year ago now that we had spoken to Dr. A about “fixing our body” for our own benefit and continued good health, and in that time overall we’ve gained 6lbs from what our weight was at that time. Our first “going to lose the baby weight” attempt when we were still living at the former apartment. That diet started at 239!! and where are we now? As of this morning weighing in on the Wii 252lbs, which is at least down from last week (we hadn’t done the Wii in 5 days when we signed on this morning). As a side note peak of pregnancy weight was either 246 or 247.

This is BAD. It’s no wonder we have trouble sleeping and feel winded after only a short amount of exercise or walking. Not only are we battling the pain and the fibro, but we have excess strain on our body from all this extra flab. It is absolutely ridiculous, I agree with that assessment. I just tend to flail and waver. I know I do. It’s hard to rectify those patterns, and as much as I claim to have more of a backbone than Ami did I still, well, I eat as though I did more exercise than I do, or I neglect to eat at all, which is equally bad.

So, we have a plan of attack. Kiddy picked up some SlimFast shakes yesterday at the store, and for the first week we’re going to have one of those for breakfast and a few snacks. We’re not going to cut out carbs entirely this first week but we’ve agreed to have less of them than we normally do. Carbs are a HUGE thing with us. There’s some sort of compulsive freak out if we don’t have potatoes when we do the brunch thing and so on, which wouldn’t be so bad if we then didn’t make said brunch into a sandwich. So, if we’re going to have potatoes we either put it in a wrap or we have nothing with it. We reduce the amount we have 2 wraps only, not 3 or 4. No extra potatoes past the original serving. Things like that. Fruit for snacks. We have a huge water melon to work on which will help with that this week, and we can start getting apples and yoghurt again. If we make something like pasta with supper for everyone else only have half a serving.

These are the common sense things we’ve been attempting to stick with so far, and failing miserably at. More salads would be a good thing too, or other vegetables aside from potatoes such as carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, all of which we like.

In added good things, as of right now there is no soda in the house that we can drink. It’s all Cherry Coke Zero and Pepsi, so there’s no worries on reneging with that one. Water and tea it will be for the rest of the day. Mrgh further caffeine detox.

The other day I saw an article about allergy mattress covers, and I was going…you know we’re supposed to have some allergy pillow covers somewhere. Somewhere being the operative word, as Mum would say, and I think she’s the one who bought them for us in the first place; but things get lost, very easily.

Now part of this is because little things like household chores often go unfinished…which reminds me I’m pretty sure I have clothes in the washer and the dryer that need to get sorted out…and while this is something that singletons are often forgetful about too, and I acknowledge that I think the reason it gets to me is because this didn’t used to be a problem. I used to be able to keep up with things, granted the place would be a bit untidy, but things didn’t keep getting piled up all over. I would remember laundry like clockwork. I would get other chores done easily. So, while “everybody does these things” it still pisses me off, frankly, because I should be able to do it, given I’ve done it in the past. So, every stale mildewed load in the washing machine I have to re-wash becomes a personal badge of failure, further proving to me that I’m incapable.

I know I shouldn’t look at it that way. I shouldn’t; but somewhere in me is this intrinsic knowledge that I should be better than that.

One of our friends brought over a paraffin wax bath the other day. The idea is that you heat up the wax along with some citrus oil and dunk your hands into it and then once the wax dries peel it off your skin and leave your skin soft and supple. You can also put it on your feet and it’ll help to slough the dead skin off along with the wax. The wax melts but isn’t supposed to be that hot. My friends were dunking their hands in and out of the wax no problem; but I put my hand in and it felt like my skin was going to melt off. Logically I knew it was fine; however I wasn’t able to submerge more than the tips of my fingers.

True it’s a matter of knowing your limits, so I stopped playing with the wax and went back to making ice cream. Often times cold causes me issues as well. Joy temperature sensitivity.

That’s something which comes up at times on these rehab shows. The family are so invested in the person with the addiction that they can no longer focus on themselves, in many times they become co-dependent and aren’t going to be able to function without the person who is now going to be in rehab to worry about. There was a show that we watched on USA last year that featured a wealthy person having someone come to their house in order to undergo a rapid detox for opiates. I’ve wondered if they’re something hubbie would recommend to people he encounters on the job who are struggling with addiction, but that, like many rehab programs, are unfortunately often out of the price range of people within our community.

I’ve heard that rapid detox programs are in many ways dangerous to undergo because they can be harder for a patient’s recovery than going through the detox; but at the same time detox itself can be deadly from what I understand if someone doesn’t have observation and medical assistance, so my jury is out on that one.

On the other hand there is no detox for facebook games, so I think I may be sunk on that one.

It gets very frustrating and I feel guilty and disappointed in ourselves. Often times people point out to me that “singletons” have these same issues, but I still tend to feel that, well that I suck and shouldn’t have these issues. I know this dichotomy is part of why there’s such a problem with disability. I feel debilitated by these problems because I used to be able to keep up with everything and they’re going, “This is NOT an issue because everyone overdraws their bank account, forgets to pick up things, forgets to drop off things etc.”

We’re working on being more balanced and knowing what’s going on when the others are more forward and all of that and things like that are helping, but at the same time there are still things which go POOF, I liken it to the fact that when you switch back and forth between TV channels you’re going to miss little bits of the program.