The Back Story. Chapter 4

Life has a way of messing with your best plans and taking you down a road you didn't even know existed.  It'll hand you a pile of crap, then leave you to figure out how to dig yourself out of the pile without a shovel in sight.  In 1998, my pile of crap arrived.

Blow Number One.

I had been training to run the Marine Corps Marathon to celebrate my 40th birthday.  On one of the last long runs before the race, I hurt my left knee.  Nothing permanent or requiring a surgical fix, but my ACL decided it had had enough and that running Marine Corps or running at all for that matter just wasn't going to happen.  I hated it but I hung up my running shoes with the intent of letting my knee heal for a few months.

Blow Number Two.

Labor Day Weekend 1998.  We had gone to Chapel Hill to see our best friends and watch the opening game of the UNC football season.  GO HEELS!  Friday night, we ate, made merry and drank a bunch of wine.  Saturday morning, I woke up with what I thought was the hangover from hell.  Hoping to sweat it out, my best friend, Lisa, and I went for a long walk.  I re-hydrated, took a hot shower and felt somewhat better.

Off we went to the game, where the headache returned as if the drum line of the marching band was holding practice in my skull.  By half time, I had to leave the game.  By the next morning, I knew something was desperately wrong with me.  The drive back to Charlotte was an excruciating eternity.  Every inch of my body hurt. I felt like someone was slamming ice picks, over and over, into my head.  I was running a fever of 103.  It was agony writ large.

By-passing my regular doctor, we went straight to the Emergency Room.  The diagnosis.  Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

For those of you who have never had it or who think its just like the flu, let me assure you, this is a killer disease.  Literally and figuratively.  I took to my bed September 5th and didn't leave again for three straight weeks.  That I was dying was very clear to me and despite loving my husband and kids, it would have been okay with me to die, if it meant the bone crushing pain would subside.  Fortunately, the tetracyclin (which was almost worse than the disease) kicked in and pushed the fatal component off the table but for me, the recovery would not be simple or quick.  I was sick off and on, with a whole host of pains, for two years.  When my symptoms finally retreated for good, the landscape of my life had shifted.

Chronic pain changes you in ways you can't imagine and at the end of the two years, I was manifestly a different person.  I was exhausted and I was incredibly fearful that every little twitch or twinge was a harbinger of doom, that the pain would come back, that I was still sick.  Wonder woman had turned into wounded woman. And wounded woman lived cautiously.  The sofa seemed safe enough.  Everywhere else looked too risky.  So, to the sofa I retired.

In this time frame, we had moved to Chapel Hill and I had stopped being a vegetarian, because with my illness it seemed unfair to ask my husband to work full time, take care of the kids, the house, the yard etc AND pay attention to my dietary needs.  I also never picked those running shoes up again.  Its funny, even writing this now, ten years later, the sadness I felt over everything that I had lost still effects me.  I can't explain it.  You have to have lived it.

Blow number three.

I turned forty.  For those of you who haven't passed that mile marker, you have no idea what fun tricks your body has in store for you!  Any fat you take with you across the great divide decides it likes the neighborhood so much that it invites all of it's friends and relatives to come for a visit - a long visit.  Exercising?  All muscle memory of what that means is eradicated like you have workout Alzheimer's.  If you try and start a new program?  Its going to hurt and you're going to get hurt because while your brain still thinks you're twenty two, your muscles and skeleton think that's just the funniest thing ever.  EVER!

The three blows added up to the perfect storm and my vow to never be fat again was gone with the wind.  I had regained all the weight and what did I do?  The obvious, duh.  I ate even more and worked out even less.  I was fat, depressed and miserable.  I ate too much, drank too much, spent too much.  I was restless and angry and I became a crusader in the cause of self destruction.  It stopped feeling like something bad had happened to me and began feeling like something bad had been DONE to me.  I spent a good deal of time passing the blame plate around and looking for the culprit at whom I could point the accusatory finger.

Somewhere inside, I'm sure I knew it was me "who done it" and fortunately, before I ditched my marriage or committed any moral faux pas, I realized that I needed to slam the breaks on, get happy with me again and stop expecting everyone to fix things they didn't even know were broken.