First of all, thanks for all the supportive comments! This first week has been rocky, as I kinda knew it would; I've done SOMETHING every day, exercise-wise, but it hasn't necessarily been as long or structured as I would have liked. I have managed to throw back more carnation instant breakfast, and have approached food as a necessary to-do rather than a sensory experience to be enjoyed. That's not to say that I haven't liked what I've eaten, but I don't just stop when I want to, I keep eating until I'm actually full, and I make myself eat even when I don't want to, as long as I'm not still full from last time...still trying to balance some crazy reflux flare-up issues with all this, so I can't go too hardcore or it'll be 2 steps forward, 3 steps back. I've also continued to get worse, lung-wise, (again, largely exacerbated by reflux nonsense I believe) and actually LOST another pound, so things are getting a little more serious than I'm used to. In fact, I've got exactly 2 lbs between my current weight and the lightest (and sickest) I have ever been, which was a really jarring realization that I'm fighting like crazy to keep from getting too freaked out about...
Since "The Meredith Incident" my freshman year of college, when I got crazy sick, crazy fast, and basically unintentionally ignored it (I'll write more on this later) I haven't had a whole lot of (CF-specific) rapid decline, crazy intense issues...We've tended to act before things got too bad, and so it's just sort of been a "wavy line" rather than lots of highs and lows. This time, however, I just had so much else going on - and after the first of the year, was really NOT wanting to be whiny-sick-girl again so soon, and while I certainly didn't ignore it completely, I overestimated my power to fight everything off with sheer willpower and perfect compliance. Not surprisingly, things seem to have spiraled out of control, and it's only now in retrospect that I see where, gee, I really wasn't so great off then after all.
I've got a clinic appointment tomorrow, so hopefully I'll at least get some answers as to what's going on and how to proceed from here. Fingers crossed that "how to proceed from here" will not involve IV's, as lot of things have changed since my last home-IV stretch, namely my CF doc's trust in the local healthcare places I've used and some major issues with our home-health nursing company that have essentially left me without nurseage. At the same time, I live about 3 hours from my CF center, so being admitted there, even for a few days, is a less than ideal situation, for a lot of reasons. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself, as hopefully they'll just hook me up with another round of monster-powerful oral abx...and perhaps some free scandical until my shipment gets in. I think I might actually take off my super-patient-with-a-large-notebook cape and fess up to all of the crazy crap that's been going on in my head lately, too, and see if they have any (not-medicinal) suggestions.
For now, I'm just going to head off to class, grab a milkshake on the way, and try to focus on legal writing and making sure I'm squared away for my appointment tomorrow, rather than everything that may (or may not) lie ahead. In the meantime, ladies, any suggestions on how you maintain a sense of style and put-togetherness when you've lost a lot of weight?
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