Health: the Big 5-0

No, not my age, but still a pretty significant number: 50 is the number of pounds I’ve lost since September. It’s a huge number, and I’m excited to have reached it. My enthusiasm is tempered somewhat when I think about that number representing only about a third of what I need to lose. But hey, that’s a great start, and if I can keep everything on track, I ought to reach that goal before the end of the year.

That’s pretty amazing, if I do say so myself. This number is an excellent milestone, but there is a more important one for me to hit, and that’s going six months after Cathy’s passing without having a coronary event of any kind. That grim milestone happens at the end of March. So far, so good!

Well, here’s hoping. I am well aware of what a pernicious and sneaky bastard grief is, and my particular plague animal these days is something I’m calling grief gnats. These are tiny mites, flecks of random gibberish, really, that interrupt me whenever I’m in danger of feeling like myself again.

Aftermath: One Month

 Cathy died a month ago today. As hard as the last two years have been, and this includes my own hospitalization and other assorted health problems, and as rough as this year has been, and as painful as the last four months have been, the last thirty days have been some of the most challenging days of my life. I went from the funeral straight to not having a vehicle for three weeks. The enforced shut-in was both oddly comforting and ridiculously stressful, in that it made me feel even more helpless an ineffectual. Running the gauntlet between our wedding anniversary, my birthday, Halloween, and Cathy's birthday sure as hell didn't help matters one little bit. 

All this to say, I am grateful that friends and family don't blithely ask me how I'm doing. Ordinarily I would be loathe to bypass the social niceties (the hi's and how are you's), but my patience is worn tissue paper thin right now, and things that ordinarily wouldn't bother me a bit are sending me into a red rage. But I can't yell in a stranger's face, "I feel like I'm trying to play the trombone with only one arm! How do you THINK I'm doing today!?"

That's how I feel: like I've been amputated. And phantom limb syndrome for me involves walking around the house like a mental patient, talking to thin air and anxiously waiting for an answer that will never come.