Stumbling Through Adulthood

Following some medical stuff a few years back, one of my calves is a lot bigger than the other. It's become more noticeable as I've lost weight.

I've been wearing leggings a lot.

Yesterday, as I got off the bus, a woman called to me, "Excuse me? Excuse me?" I stupidly stopped and said "Yes?"

She demanded to know, loudly, in the middle of a crowd of bus passengers, what was the matter with my leg. Pointing at it.

I told her it was none of her business and walked away.

She followed me, continuing to point and demand to know, the tone in her voice implying that a) I was stupid and didn't know there was something wrong with my leg and b) that she had a right to know. I kept on repeating "None of your business" and "Stop harassing me" but she followed and followed.

And of course, dh was late, so I had to stop walking away from her and wait for him. She tried one last time and I repeated "None of your business" and she finally went away.

That's when I started to cry. I feel like a deformed monster, and yes, I should probably wear clothes that aren't as fitted, but my god, people, mind your own fucking business. I don't remember seeing her before on the bus, so I hope she isn't a regular. If she does it again, I'll go all racist Karen (she's Asian) on her, call 911, and start filming her.

I don't think I'll ever be thin enough to not have people assume my body is public property to be commented on.

I wore leggings again today. My first impulse was to grab some old baggy yoga pants, but I decided against it. Still, I feel like shit. And self-conscious in a way I wasn't yesterday. And fat. And ugly. And all that.

1. I'm devastated at what the media and some leading Dems did to Joe Biden. And disgusted. Some of them were people that I respected. Others were people I sent money to. I will be more than happy to send money to their primary opponents next time they run. I do love that those disgusting people wanted an open primary at the Convention, and Joe Biden, in a Dark Brandon move, denied them that by endorsing her. It was brilliant.

2. I love Kamala Harris. I supported her in 2020 and was looking forward to supporting her in 2028. I've spent this past week, however, in an up-then-down sort of way. There is a lot of excitement about her candidacy, and it's infectious. But then... I honestly don't think she can win. I think that, like Clinton, she'll blow out the popular vote easy but fail in the Electoral College. I hate this. I think in 2028, after four more years of capable and stable leadership and Trump -either dead or completely mush-for-brains- out of the picture, she could win. This year? I don't think so. They're motivated by hate and they have a systemic electoral college advantage. I think we'll also lose the Senate. By not doing any partisan gerrymandering, NY may have cost us the ability to retake the House and after the Supreme Court's decision about racial gerrymandering the few districts we could have grabbed either in 24 or 26 are in jeopardy. So I'm no longer hopeful about our chances this year, and some of the polls are already scaring me (there is evidence that a) Biden significantly outpolls Harris in some swing states, b) that the most reliable voting block doesn't like her -their mistake, imo-, and c) the never-Trump vote might not follow Harris.) I'll donate and maybe even volunteer and be positive etc when out in public but this -with my two or three readers, and three maybe be an overestimate, 🤣- I'm being honest about my feelings. Ugh.

3. Work is sucking these days. I'm bored.

4. Continuing to plug away at the weight loss thing with Zeppy. That drug is a fucking miracle. I've been eating the same way for over a year now and last fall, I'd pretty much stopped losing more than a few ounces here or there. Zepbound restarted that, I suspect with some biochemical tinkering of my set point, leaving my body no longer defending a very high weight. I've lost more than I ever thought I would or could and I'm less than 10lbs from a dream goal, which might or might not happen: being able to ride Icelandic horses here, right down the road from me! If I get there, I'll be thrilled, but even if I don't, it'll be fine, I'll just have to ride them in Iceland where the weight limit they allow is higher, LOL. I feel so much more relaxed about the day-to-day ins and outs of dieting and eating and exercising. I've always hated and mistrusted the addiction framing on people being fat, for various reasons (*), and at first, I was a bit surprised at the data that show that GLP-1 drugs are effective at helping with addiction. They seem to, which is great and I've seen some commentary about how yeah, fatties are just addicts but... GLP-1 are also being shown to be effective in Parkinson's disease and in a phase 3 trial, Alzheimer's. I don't think we're "there" yet on figuring out exactly how they work and how they help people, though they clearly do. (*) Hard to be addicted to something that you need to actually survive. In addition, the arguments seem very much which came first the chicken or the egg to me. Anyhow, as more research into GLP-1 drugs come out, I hope the addiction model gets ditched wholesale, and hopefully we'll get some insight into the brain biochemistry that is very clearly involved. It always was, as many of us fatties have long suspected, just a little bit more complicated that Calories In Calories Out, which, while try, is elides the whole "how the calories are processed".

5. In light of that, I'll share this review: Trapped fat: Obesity pathogenesis as an intrinsic disorder in metabolic fuel partitioning. Normally I'd steer clear of anything with Gary Taubes's name on it (his agenda has led him down some pretty tortuous paths) but this is nevertheless interesting, though I haven't done enough of a deep dive or search on primary sources to trust it all. Still worth a read, if only to be familiar with this reframing.

6. This is in pink! My baby girl turned 21 this week! OMG, how the eff did that happen, she was just a baby two minutes ago! She's an extraordinary young person!

7. We have a few days of camping booked for late September at Crater Lake. The boat tours will have shut down by then. 😢 Why do they stop those a full 10 days before they close the campground? Still, looking forward to that. And we booked two nights (and a previous one so we can get an early start) at a campground near Mt Baker for early September. Had to book Sunday and Monday night, which was the best I could do for minimizing vacation days. We'll get up early Tuesday morning and hopefully I can get into work in time for a solid half day. Tomorrow, we have to drive Linnea to Bellingham so she can start packing hrr place up, since her old and new places don't overlap, sigh, but we'll be taking her furniture down. Anyhow, plan is to leave her the trailer and head out to go on three short hikes in the area.

8. Perry is leaving for a regatta in Canada tomorrow at 5am. I should get some sleep, we have to drive him to the airport. He'll be pretty close to Niagara Falls, and he's hoping to get a group of athletes together to go visit. I hope he does, and I really want to go back there one of these years, I loved going when I was a kid.

9. Still looking for a plan to get my novel moving towards publication. I know I need an agent, but each time I look at agents/agencies, I realize my poor little book doesn't quite fit into any category. Yes, romance, but it's too long to fit their size requirements. One of these days, I'll figure out my next steps. Maybe I should find someone to put it in audiobook format, since that seems to be a good way to get traction. Anyhow.

OMG, this medication is truly a fucking nightmare. Not the meds themselves, of course. They work, at this point, beautifully for me.

Procuring them, otoh, is awful. I just feel, completely stupid stressed about this, how as soon as you get one box, you have to worry about the next

I run out this Thursday, 23 May, which means ideally I have a refill by 30 May but since I'm on the starter dose again, if I go past 6 June, I need another round of the stater dose, rather than a titrate up. I'm fine with either, but I want one or the other.

After a few weeks of decent supply, we're back in unobtainium land for the initial dose, though Costco contacted me yesterday to let me know that my 7.5 Rx had come in. That's was for early April, and no, I am not going up to that dose, I'd be sicker than a dog, I expect.

The lowest dose is working for me so I'm fine staying on it, or going one up. But I have to decide which I ask my provider for and deciding for one when the supply is only for the other would be a bad move.

Basically, it's a black box, complicated by the fact that you need a prescription for everything, which means nimbleness and retooling on the fly aren't possible.

Ugh.

My provider is on vacay until next week. I'd contacted her late last week but she was probably already gone, so yesterday I let an email for the general message line at the place. Fingers crossed someone contacts me and offers me a Rx.

I wish the providers would give me a prescription for both doses and I could fill whichever comes in first.

The FDA has approved selling Zeppy in vials but Lilly won't go for it. I honestly think FDA needs to step in to tell them to stop starting people on a drug they can't rely on being there and while they can't meet current demand. They keep on marketing and starting people and they're completely undersupplied and won't do what it takes to increase supply a bit.

Ah well. I'm grateful the drug exists. A lot less grateful about how it's being distributed.

Scared the snot out of me -I really really don't like medical people- and got my ass to see an NP today.

Rx for tirzepatide/Zepbound has been put in, waiting on insurance authorization.

Funny bit: they pay 90% after my deductible... which yearly is... about the cost of the meds, LOL. But hey, Linnea has to go to the ER last week (ended up being a panic attack, but she could not manage to get her heartrate down with her usual panic attack tricks/coping strategies), so we'll be hitting deductibles this year no doubt, we usually don't. Though maybe the meds paying will start kicking in once I hit my personal deductible, rather than the family one? Ugh, so confusing.

Anyhow. Fingers crossed. I really hope this works for me.

I should, of course, have gone earlier, but they didn't approve tirzepatide until late last year. But now I have to manage to lose at least 5% of today's weight in six months to keep the authorization going. I hope I can do it.

I hope I can lose a bit more weight. Another 20lbs would have me ecstatic, but more than anything, I don't want to regain everything I've lost.

I'm tired of fighting. I'm tired of always being hungry, of always have to think about food, I just want to not want to eat.

Some of the moralistic scolds who talk about weight loss drugs... these are typically thin people who do not know what its like to be fat, and who despise fat people, because they think their own thinness is due to their hard work and discipline so fatties get what they deserive, but also don't want fat people to get any help at all, so these people in the media -check out the Guardian to a whole bunch of them- play up any bad side effects of the drugs, but a few have penned articles about how tragic it was that these drugs made some people no longer want to eat, no longer take pleasure in food etc, and how that alone should keep doctors from prescribing them. Yeah, pretty full of their own privilege, right?

Anyhow. This is where I'm at. I am going to document my journey here, if only for myself, but after this one, I'll try to remember to put things under a cut.

They say the average American gains 5lbs over the holidays. I'm above average! I gained 7 since Wednesday.

My mom is fully delusional today, and angrily accusing me a lying to her, or being delusional and ignorant myself. She thinks her mother -who died 50 years ago- called her, or maybe sent her email, and she wants me to give her Nana's number so she can call her back and tell her that of course she'll go to her uncle's funeral in Canada with her. She's not oriented in time at all, and I'm not sure she knows I'm her daughter, not her sister. I tried redirecting, but that was a fail. So.

And the fucking bunnies ate my brand knew planted 10 days ago asters to the ground, grrr.

And it's supposed to be cloudy on Saturday so that eclipse probably won't happen.

And despite being on track dietwise I haven't lost anything in a month.

It's 11:15, and dh is still working. Dealing with a team in China, I guess.

My mom is refusing to go to bed.

I just really really want to curl up on the couch with my kids and my cats nearby.

Yeah, Saturday. I have three things to say and didn't want to make three separate short posts.

1. Hiking still on for Wednesday even though the weather is going to be less than stellar, i.e. raining. Rain doesn't really bother me unless I wanted to see views (the initially planned hike was near Mt Rainier), so we've changed our destination to a waterfall and we'll just get soaked by rain and spray, LOL.

2. To add to the complications.... Wednesday, one of our favorite bands is in town. We hesitated but dh, Anne-Chloe, and I are going to go to the concert. We should be back from the hike in plenty of time, we'll skip the opening acts, mask up, and the venue is reasonably large, so hopefully it'll be ok. It's a risk, and maybe one we should not take, but.

3. Major small milestone on my weight loss path. Many years ago, in France, I had an MD whose idea of helping me -at that point a semi-recovering bulimic, LOL- lose weight was to... berate me and tell me how disgusting and gross I was. She was not the first or the last French MD to use that, uh, motivating technique but she was affiliated with the university and she held my registration hostage, giving me temporary extensions to my health certificate as long as I came in every other Friday afternoon at 3:15PM to be berated by her. Anyhow, she explained -every other week!- to me that if I gained even 5 more pounds, my life would be over, I would never get married, have kids, do anything, I'd be bed-ridden (at that point, I weighed about 68kg/150lbs, so eh). Then there was the weight I passed today. She said that if I ever got that fat, I should just commit suicide and would spend the rest of the session talking about the different methods I could use. When she found out I was moving back the US, she spent a good amount of time telling me how to blow my brains out with a gun I could easily get there, and to do it in the bathtub. Yes, it was abuse. (*) I've passed her 'suicide weight' more than once, up and down, and it never fails to give me pause, that she truly seemed to think that a fat person's life was not worth living. Anyhow. Oh. She disappeared one day. I showed up after Spring Break for my appointment and found a young-ish man in her place. He asked me why I was meeting with her I said for weight counseling, he said well, you could stand to lose a few kilos, do you need any help or support? I said no, he said to come back if I needed anything and signed the paperwork.

(*) Did I have any recourse? Not sure. Administrative fiefdoms are powerful things, or at least were, in France, and I needed to be registered to be able to a) attend classes and b) legally be in the country. One of my friends was in a similar situation with this MD. Christine had had to go see her for an STI, and got a full slut shaming routine, antibiotic Rx withheld unless weekly visits. So there was a pattern there and I suspect someone eventually did complain.

1. Linnea's boyfriend is a darling. Really like him.

2. Been meaning to make Welsh Cakes since we got back from Europe but never got around to it, plus, eh, lard, which, just no. So I made this recipe with some modifications for breakfast this morning. My sister and BIL were in town before heading out on an Alaska cruise, and there was Isaac, so a good number of people to try it out on, LOL. Delish.

3. My weight, OTOH. Up several pounds this morning, and tomorrow is going to be worse, since I didn't pay attention to what I was eating today.

💜 Attachment and loss of everyday things. Amazon tells me I bought this set of earbuds cases back in 2017. We each had one, mine was of course purple. I've used it since then to hold my Skullcandy wired earphones. My purple-no-longer-available earphones, sob. I lost case and earphones last week, I'm guessing at IKEA which is the last time I definitely remember having them. I'm surprisingly sad. I mean, I have a set of nice Bose overear headphones, but I've travelled many miles with my wired ones, rebuying the same ones as needed. The case itself went to Europe a few times, Canada several, cross country etc. Ah well. Dh still has his case in a computer bag, since he doesn't really use wired earbuds at all, and I'll probably steal it unless I decide to spend $9 to get 5 small cases when I only need one. I can still find wired earbuds but they are getting harder and harder to locate, can't find them in purple at all, and the new models all have a mic, which I don't like. In part because I hate the different feel on each side of my face, in part because Google Assistant seems to un-disable itself more often when it senses a mic. Ah well. Anyhow. I'll miss my pretty purple case!


💚 So we did my aunt's 80th birthday party in Vancouver this weekend. It was both fun and utterly exhausting. I baked three gigantic lemon cakes (of which we consumed 1.75, so I'm glad I had three). David did a beautiful job with the decorating! My aunt was so happy, and it was so nice to see a few of her friends that I've known for a long time again. Best part of course was hanging out with my siblings! And my kids all made it up, which absolutely thrilled my aunt. We of course had too much food, much of which is now in my fridge and freezer, sigh. I wanted to drop most of it off in Bellingham with the kids, but we had a two hour wait at the border (longest wait I've had in over a decade) so we just wanted to get back. I'll bring them frozen stuff later.


💙 My mom is... well, aside from the dementia, she tripped in the kitchen the night before they came and caught herself on the edge of the counter. She didn't complain, brother noted that the wrist was swollen the next morning, and we debated if they should come, but since the swelling went down with icing and that she was using the hand a bit gingerly but normally, it was decided (we all agreed) to come and deal with it here if needed. Which we did the next day, when she woke up with swelling and serious bruising. She's on blood thinners, so some is always expected but this was, to my eye blood settling. Like it did after AC broke her arm. And her foot. And Linnea her foot. Sure enough, displaced fracture of the distal ulna, sigh. My sister went with her to Urgent Care and told them clearly that she would remove anything they put her in. My mother is notorious for taking out IVs, taking out her O2 canula, removing bandages too early, once removing stitches before they dissolved etc, so this isn't a new thing, and my sister was insistent. So instead of a plain "sugar tong" splint, they decided to use a "cast" that hardens. LOL, it was off the next morning, sigh. Basically they put us in the worse of both worlds situation: not a hard plaster cast, not a removable one, but a temporary that is supposed to be "difficult" to remove. We used a wrist brace and the splint to immobilize as best we could. Anyhow, she'll need surgery. A word about my mother and pain: she broke her arm as a little girl, went a week without telling anyone. While pregnant with her first child, who died shortly after birth, she needed a root canal. It was done without anesthesia, because they were afraid of the effects on the baby. When I was 7 or 8, she cut her hand on a broken glass in the sink. I could see the fucking BONE. She put a bandaid on it. We should know by now that her pain cues are not great and the dementia has just made that worse. She's seeing a surgeon today; we'll see what happens. Update: surgeon says it's not displaced, she's getting a molded removable cast. Fingers crossed it heals well.

🤬 I gained 7lbs over the weekend. FML. I don't understand how that can be the case, but there it is. That's about a month worth of <1000 calorie days erased in three days. And while I did eat more than normal, it wasn't outrageous. Sigh. Makes me want to cry. Back on track since yesterday (well, Monday, but I did have cheese and crackers for dinner on Monday.) And everyone always says "Oh, it'll come right off" but that isn't how it's ever worked for me. Those massive gains that people always claim are temporary because they came on fast etc because of an event never are for me.

🤮 I've been taking vitamins for the past month. I ended up getting the gummi ones from Target and while I didn't love them, they were ok. I was told that the Vitafusion from Costco were "great" by a few people. I bought a bottle and ew. I don't expect my vitamins to taste like candy, but ew. I'll go back to artificially colored and flavored asap. Of course I didn't open them until this morning because if I'd tasted them yesterday, I'd have given the bottle to my sister, it's what she takes.

📱 My phone is usually a symphony of light blue and darker blue. I made some changes for spring, LOL.



😥 📘 I'm so sad and angry at myself about my poor little novel. I just cannot find a title and without a title, I'm dead in the water. I can't send out queries or do anything to attempt to get my silly story published without one. I did a full re-read, trying to get some new ideas, but nothing came to mind. I've asked my sister and she has no ideas. And apparently -gulp- my BIL read it too. OMG, it's full of sex, excuse me while I hide. But even he liked it. No title suggestions, though. Sob. I've gone so far as to try title generators on the internet. I really think ChatGPT is going to be my next step.

Normally I am not a vitamin person. As in, I haven't taken a vitamin in... probably almost two decades. I'm not sure they're really necessary and since I do live in the PNW, a vitamin D supplement might make sense, but I've never chased down a study that made the benefit crystal clear and I'm always mistrustful of bandwagons.

But.

I'm on a pretty low calorie diet.

And I'm wondering if I should take a multivitamin for the duration, because I am most certainly not getting enough of some vitamins and minerals via diet at this point.

But OMG, finding out if vitamin supplementation while in a weight loss phase is useful or not is... like looking for the proverbial needles in a haystack. Because so fucking many scammers promote their scammy 'take this supplement for weight loss' bs all over the place, I haven't really been able to find any solid data.

I'll try again tomorrow. Blah.