Moj_ Patti

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Last Friday my hubbie and I took the kiddle and my sister to Descanso Gardens in Los Angeles. Immediately before our initial bathroom trip (3-year-olds are notorious for announcing they have to go when you are at the furthest possible point from the bathroom -- so we plan ahead and try to go potty whenever we're near one) I bent over and lifted my 35-pound kiddle out of the stroller and tweaked my back. I figured I'd pulled a muscle. 

Only pulling a muscle for me means that if I take it easy for a couple days, it gets better. It hasn't. Last night I broke down and asked my hubbie to take me to urgent care. I was sick of having stabbing pain everytime I tried to stand up. (I also figured if i yowled "Jesus-God" at 185 decibels one more time I was going to get struck with lightning.)

I was concerned that I had a kidney infection or something because the pain had moved from around my tailbone to an area more inside and to the left. And this is TMI, but the pain had went down a notch after a very productive trip to the restroom.

We got there about 8 p.m. I think I saw the P.A. at about 9:30 or 10. (I spend so much time in doctor/hospital waiting rooms that I don't look at clocks anymore because it always takes twice as long as you think it will.) Peed in a cup. X-ray. Then she told me the results: degenerative disc disease. She said I needed to make an appointment with my doctor to get a referral to a spine specialist.

She wanted to give me a prescription for some heavy duty ibuprofen (I WISH!) -- I said no, can't take it. She wrote a Rx for 10 vicodin. I got home about 11:30.

First thing this morning I called my doc (who after Jan 1 won't be my doc any longer). They couldn't get me in today, but  graciously allowed me to come first thing tomorrow on free client day at her practice. (She does a lot of charity work, which is nice. But the waiting room reminds me of what I've seen in movies and on TV about what a doctor's office in the slums of Calcutta or Mexico City look like. There are more signs in Spanish than in English. And they do everything on paper. I think they use messenger pigeons instead of fax machines. And my biggest beef: THEY DON'T TAKE CREDIT CARDS!)

I missed work today. So now I'll have one day of paid time off left. That I'll probably end up using tomorrow.

So, the week's been painful, literally. I'm upset about what this diagnosis is going to do to my life. Am I going to be able to exercise again? To walk and not list to one side?

I don't know how I'm going to take care of my family, including my 76-year-old mother who is scheduled for an aortic valve replacement (open heart surgery) on December 21.

I'm worried that getting to see this specialist will take forever. (I broke my foot in 2002 and this medical group took 1 1/2 months to get me in to see an orthopedic specialist who said my foot had already started healing and though it wasn't correct, he couldn't do anything about it.) 

I'm worried that I won't be able to have another child.

On the other hand, maybe the spine doc will see me next week and say "you need a pannulectomy right now to fix your problem." Oh, a girl can dream!

So, lately my fat cells must be jettisoning estrogen once again. Four times in the past three weeks when I've gotten injured even slightly, I completely lose it.

My hubbie moved the office chair (no one was sitting in it) and a wheel went over two of my toes. I yelled at him and almost bit him.
While we were getting Thanksgiving dinner on the table, I asked my brother to get down a big wooden salad bowl. It fell while he was trying to get it and hit me in the arm. I ripped him a new one. I got so mad, I saw red and my mind blanked out on what I said to him.
My 3-year-old dropped a brass combination lock on my foot and I almost growled. I barely kept it in check. I sent her out to the living room to be with the rest of the family while I just sort of simmered by myself.
Yesterday I wrenched my back pulling the 3-year-old out of her stroller at Descanso Gardens down in Los Angeles. I got to the point where I just told my sister and my husband that I would wait for them at the end of the trail. Then I went and found a little pond area where I concentrated on just calming myself down.

I've been super grouchy ever since. (My kingdom for a Motrin! Tylenol ain't cutting it. The Lortab left over from my surgery is looking interesting.)

I don't think I'm PMSing. So, I'm thinking I'm having a fat-dumping-estrogen event again. But this must be super potent estrogen that's been hanging around since 1988 or so, much higher octane than normal.

GRRRRRR.

The doc said I have average weight loss. My labs were good.

I finally got copies of my labs. Everything is marked (N) for normal except for two things: my LDL cholesterol was 126 (near or above desirable). My total cholesterol was 193 (N). I guess I'll try eating oatmeal more frequently. (More fiber - yay!) And I'll cut back some on my cheese habit.

Secondly, my Vitamin B-12 was high: 1266. Normal is 210 to 925. But it's down from 2392 in August. I have been slowing down the amount of B-12 I stick under my tongue.  

Now if I could get out of this STALL!! Yuck.

Well, I went to my appointment at my surgeon's office yesterday. Saw Dr. Tovar -- hadn't seen him since he took my drains out the day I went home from Cedars.

Anyway, he was pleased with my weight loss. He said for the next 10 months, I should lose between 5 to 10 pounds a month. He said to target 1200 calories a day.

I got myself all freaked out that I wasn't losing like I should.

I gotta stop comparing myself with other people here on OH. My sister's doc requires 600 calories a day until goal. I didn't have the same surgery, so I don't have to do the same diet. (Sorry, Lucy!)

Hopefully, lovely Lucy won't be eyeballing every carb I put in my mouth when she comes to visit next week. (Love you, Sis!)

I see my endocrinologist on Friday. He'll review my labs. We'll see.

Her angiogram went fine. Except that Mom didn't read the preprocedure instructions and took almost all of her medicine beforehand. (I was growling all the way down the freeway from the hotel to the hospital.)

They didn't keep her over the weekend to do the surgery. They just sent her home (back to our hotel room) after about 7 hours.

Now we're waiting on a call to schedule the real deal valve replacement surgery.

My mother is going in for an angiogram on Friday. If that goes well, they'll keep her in for the weekend and do a valve replacement operation on her heart maybe early next week.

Her regular medical team isn't real helpful. I don't know how much of it is that she has a Medicare HMO and how much is real. When she was in the hospital four weeks ago, the hospital's cardiologist was real positive that getting a valve replacement would improve her quality of life dramatically. (He doesn't work for the HMO.)

Her HMO cardiologist told her all these horror stories about people more healthy than she having strokes after a valve operation.

Her HMO hematologist called her frail (at 200 lbs!) at her last appointment.

Her HMO regular doctor signed her up for a hospice program.

We took her off the hospice program because we didn't think they were looking at the whole picture regarding her health. She has emphysema, but didn't need oxygen until this heart thing started getting bad. They were all writing her off because she's on oxygen.

Her HMO pulmonologist says her lungs are good. They haven't got any worse since she 2003 when she had a mastectomy for her breast cancer.

Even if she survives the operation, will she comply with the lifestyle changes they want her to make? (She hasn't made any of the lifestyle changes they wanted her to make when she was diagnosed with diabetes, but her numbers are good.)

I find myself having moments of total misery thinking about losing her. I don't want my daughter to lose her Grandma. I don't want to lose my Ma.
Then I'll think about turning her bedroom into a guest bedroom. Then I'll feel guilty about that.
Then I'll get annoyed with my brother because he gets all self righteous about taking off a half day of work to take her to a single doctors appointment. I missed five days of work in the past two weeks taking her to medical appointments.
 
I'm really scared because my dad died when I was almost eight. That's what led me down the path to morbid obesity as a kid. I had to become the mom to my three siblings -- I smushed all my needs into a little box, then sat on it..

I know things are a lot different now. She's 76. She's had an okay life. She has the grandchild she's always wanted. I think she's relatively happy. Her mother died when she was 76 -- I don't know how much Ma thinks about that.

Anyway, I'm all over the place with this. I went for a long walk yesterday -- helped with the stress some. Then I came home and ate four Nutter Butter cookies. Carb comaed on those.

After five pints of blood, four days in the hosptial and her 23rd(?) endocopy in the past three years they are releasing my Mom from the hospital today. I guess I'm taking her down to a Kaiser facility in Hollywood to get evaluated for the heart procedure sometime later in the week.

I really thought I was going to have to bury her after this one. We came home from work on Thursday and it appeared that she had spent the day stuck on the loveseat, without her oxygen. She was still in her nightgown, hadn't put her support hose on. I found her glasses inside her water glass about 6 feet away(?). All I can figure is that she got confused and couldn't find the telephone. She was hyperventilating when we walked in the door at 6 p.m. Called the ambulance.

She can't remember how long she was on the love seat. But she said she started having difficulty breathing in the middle of the night (I HAVE NO IDEA WHY SHE DIDN'T WAKE ME UP. WE HAVE A BABY MONITOR ON IN HER BEDROOM FOR A REASON, FOR CHRI'SAKES!) She's usually not up when we leave for work, so nothing was out of the ordinary when we left for work/daycare.

She has gastrointestinal bleeds that can drop her hemoglobin levels (anemia) from normal to super low in a day. She also has moderate mitral and severe aortic stenosis, but she's an incredibly bad surgery risk, so they've has not wanted to put in new valves.

I'm glad she's partially out of the woods on this one. But now is time for my post-Mom-scare binge. Can't do that anymore!!

So, we had two meetings. At the first, my manager told everyone what was going on. At the second, the guy in charge of our contract told everyone a happywashed version. Both told everyone to update their resumes.

Apparently, the 90 figure I heard was close. My manager said 92. At the happywash meeting, someone asked how many positions there were going to be and they deflected the question.

The government has one person writing up 92 job requisitions. Then they're going to post them on the government job site piecemeal as she finishes and we get to compete with current displaced government workers, veterans and the general public for our jobs. Our advantage over the others is that we actually want to work in this God-forsaken place -- we know what the climate is like. So many people come out here for interviews and drive away thinking "hell, no!" Their goal is to have everyone they need by the end of the fiscal year in September.

But it gets better -- my manager seems to think the technical jobs will be higher priority. (The group she manages is all nontechnical.)

If they cut our group down to just one position, I am more qualified than anyone else I work with. I've been here a long time. I can do, and have done, everyone else's jobs in the past. The only reason I'm not in charge now is that I asked to step down from my supervisory position when my mother's illnesses were causing me to miss a lot of work.

I'm older and cranky so I asked if we could work on our resumes at work (when the contract changed in 2002 they let us). The big boss said yes. The manager two levels above me audibly groaned. I've had six people come up and thank me for that. (I feel like Norma Rae!)

I also figured out that, worse case scenario and I can't get a job, my employer will be cutting me a big severance check in September 2010.  I'll deposit it in the bank on my way to Carl's Jr. to apply for a job there.

Change is stressful, but not knowing what is going on is 5,000 times more stressful.

For those of you who don't know, my husband and I are $600 toilet seats. I mean to say that we are government contractors at a military base (can't go into a lot of details). We are a little different, because rather than sitting in some nifty office building in the city or in an industrial park, we work on base with our customer. Right now, I'm sitting in a 20-year-old building made up of 36 trailers stacked on one another. My 20-year-old cube walls are a hideous shade of orange (they  had to be on super duper ultra closeout when they bought them). My desk is probably close to 30 years old. The civil service folks I support live upstairs.

I don't get paid a ton of money for what I do -- if I worked in Los Angeles, I'd probably be making at least $30K more. But I don't want to live, work/commute 2 hours to Los Angeles, so I'm fine with what I do get paid to work here.

Last week the government hosted a job fair that seven different people bugged me about going to. There are two others coming up – I’m going on Wednesday. I figured something was up because government job fairs are basically targeted at military getting out. They have riveting seminars on how to dress like a professional civilian, what’s a resume?, stuff like that – which are a joke for people like me. And most open government jobs are restricted to current government people and former military. It’s like they go into the bathroom at their office and change from their fatigues into shirts and ties. (Don't want to bag on the military -- they are tremendously underappreciated for what they do for all of us. But a lot of them are also 24 years old. I'm 40 and I've been working on this base for 18 years.)

 

Today I heard a rumor from two people in the know who said the government is converting 90 of the 130 contractor jobs here at my office to government positions. The remaining 40 jobs will just go away. We don’t have enough contractor dead wood to make keeping all the good people possible. 

 

I’m not sure how they’re going to do it – functionally, I am not an technical person like my husband. I’m more of a public affairs type. And that office continually gets lots of extra work, no new bodies, mostly positions cuts and crap for funding. The good news is that the people I know in Public Affairs who work there now that I know have good opinions of me. And the Government chief here at my office values me. But in hiring priority, I’m still below a 24-year-old military person who worked in Public Affairs for two weeks before they got out. 

 

This is sort of weird for me because I have applied for almost every open public affairs position since 1996. It has been a goal to become a government person. Their benefits are a lot better than what I have now (a Mom concern), they pay better, and they have a retirement plan that’s pretty cool. I just didn’t want to do it this way -- with unemployment looming if it doesn't work out. There are just NO JOBS for what I do in the area.

 

I am trying to expand my bailiwick a little to cover more technical work. Thank GOD/BUDDHA/THE FORCE I had my surgery, because trying to find a job as a 388-pound person is impossible. (I was 297 yesterday – and I think the loosing is picking up a bit.) With this economy, I don’t think I can get a transfer with my present company.

 

 

The technical work DH does needs to get done, but they could easily contract it out to contractors who don’t have desks on the base.  I guess for him, there’s always the banking industry. (He was there for 18 years before he got this job -- he does have a science degree.) 

 

However, another thing I know is that no one really knows what’s going on right now. The “plan” will change 37 times before the end of this October. The changeover won't happen until next October.

I do know that the young and mobile will start running from the building, like the proverbial rats from a sinking ship. Which will dump work on those of us who are not as mobile. I saw this when my former employer lost their contract in 2002.

 

 

Anyway, I would appreciate warm vibes in our general direction. Needless to say, “fun spending” is going to be cut dramatically. I can’t eat my weight in chocolate to cope, so I've told my fam to expect super mega bitchiness.

P.S. -- Just got an e-mail invite to a mandatory meeting this afternoon. Yikes!

FALL IS HERE! FALL IS HERE!! FALL IS HERE!!!

I am so sick of hot. It was 95 degrees the other day. It was 39 when I walked out my front door this morning! It's gonna be about 70 today. I am wearing a cardigan right now. Although we don't get a big color change in the landscape here -- some of the plants get a little more red or brown, but most are dead from the blast furnace heat and lack of water already -- this is my favorite season here in the desert.

Course, now I'm like a mother hen clucking over all the baby cacti and desert plants I planted in the heat of the summer.  I gotta get some stone mulch in pronto! I know some of them won't make it through the winter.

Small NSV: I can zip up my coat now. When I was down to 260 about 5 years ago I bought a 3X (24-26) coat from Land's End. It fit perfect then. Then I regained a bunch. I refused to buy a new coat. I'd just wear it unzipped with a muffler on really cold days. I had a lot of padding and didn't spend a lot of time outside.

When I could get it zipped, I looked like an enormous magenta bumblebee. Now it almost fits. It's not swinging freely, but I don't look like a purple Michelin man anymore either.