I’m up and awake ridiculously early. I don’t know why I get the sense that I want to be, perhaps even need to be, though why, I do not know. Perhaps I will return to sleep once I’ve written this, and in fairness I didn’t recognise that it was quite so early. I can feel that I am tired too but something inside me is saying to me to stay awake for a while. Do you know what? I really fancy toast this morning. Actually having my bread lightly toasted and would really like some warn porridge. Proper porridge, you know – made with jumbo oats and water and then with chunks of apple, fresh raspberries/blackberries/blueberries stirred through it so that the sweetness of the fruit contrasts with the porridge and it’s texture and stodge.
Here all I have to look forward to is Ready Brek and a slice of bread. So I’ll forsake the Ready Brek and try desperately to forget that there is such a thing as toasted bread – the toaster is a heat source and therefore a fire hazard. And anyway, even if there were such a thing as toast, by the time it reached my plate and my bedside it would be stone cold. By the time anyone got around to watching me eat it it would have probably gone so inedible that I’d be written up as not complying with treatment again!!!
Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that I just had a little bit of a doze for half an hour and now it’s 6 am – ironically a minute difference but actually a much more civilised hour to feel awake in. It’s crazy though to have had my obs taken already – and yet have been woken up at 11pm last night to take my MST, although I’d already been given it at 8pm before Priscilla had left on her last day.
And yes – as for Priscilla’s last day. She was delightful towards me, endlessly supportive and helpful and not at all like she can be – forceful and dismissive with an attitude above and beyond that which is necessary for her to carry out her job effectively. A brusque nurse who has obviously witnessed a lot in her life – both through her work and personally – she had become so efficient that occasionally her bedside manner is less than non-existent and descends into blunt obnoxiousness and a lack of care. Yesterday, however, she was obviously trying to make amends to me for her behaviour and rudeness when she last worked and was delightful (fakely delightful, but delightful all the same) in her manner and approach towards me all day.
I have very little else to say this morning. This is largely because I’m getting a little fed up of talking about food every three seconds. It’s a perpetual job for me and essential that I maintain a steady pace of both eating and continuing to feel as if I’m eating more and pushing up calorie counts each day to satisfy my own requirements for weight gain. There is a great deal of my vision that is based on whether I am succeeding and failing based on the mathematical equations I run after each eating juncture. It’s sort of a pathetic, though absolutely understandable, way to approach the nature of my life at the moment. But just because I have to keep on top and in monitorisation of it does not mean that everyone else does and that everyone needs to know the precise ins and outs of how I approach things.
There is one important thing that I felt as I was returning from brushing my teeth last night. I’d had a mighty successful, though stressful, supper. The successfulness emerges from the calorie content, the stressfulness from how I arrived at it. When unplanned I’ve taken to picking at things and having a bit from here and a bit from there, which until yesterday I’ve thought was avoidance and/or actually failing to get the required amount. Yesterday I recognised that actually I would get the same amount of calories from consuming one ‘whole’ thing as opposed to lots of little bits. The faffing is just my uncertainty emerging over whether I am going to achieve the intake required. I always do and seem to need confidence within that. I am much more confident, as I said yesterday, with read-counted things where there is little room for my uncertainty to create any questions. For me there is comfort found in precision at the moment…however correct that will ultimately be is for now irrelevant.
But the important thought that emerged after brushing my teeth was a bubbling up inside of the emotion to be a bit more relaxed around all of this yesterday. Something to do with a second successful Tesco and M&S trip where I discovered yet more meals which I could happily eat from there – a couple of lunches and a weeks’ worth of dinners…it felt good that it wasn’t a one off and it didn’t feel negative that the search criteria was calories as well as taste and response. I’m looking forward to trying some different stuff, some samey stuff and have scoped out the progression of the diet this week and next week – it’s going to be fantastic, I hope! And then I tried my Waitrose Jambalaya – it was OK but unimpressive in comparison to the Marks meals I’ve been having. I’ve learnt that Waitrose is too much for not a lot, Tesco is cheaper but looked vile yesterday. M&S, though expensive, seems to be good quality, fresh and diverse selection and perfectly stocked with variety and taste in order to make the next few weeks fairly simple in their orchestration and scope. I’m now looking forward to it all again.
And I think this helped me relax a little – along with lengthy chats with Mum. I think I may always retain the health paranoia that I’m not doing it because it will keep me pushing and trying in an attempt to guarantee that I am. Whether I am a few or a hundred calories short here and there I feel will even out over the life experience which I am going through at the moment. There is little accuracy when it comes to a ready meal as much as when it comes to the calories burned going round M&S. It’s as much a guessing game as it is worked out. And it makes it a constant effort of mine to stick with my responses. But yesterday I learnt that they were working wonders in terms of ensuring my intake stayed up. Regardless of timings, stress, thoughts of what I’d have or pre-conceived ideas of what I’ll do, I’m still eating to taste and physical desire which often can overcome any ‘bad’ tastes, or simply ones that are not quite perfect in that moment.
So on the whole I feel I’m doing amazingly well and am genuinely pleased with the perfect and admirable way in which I am conducting myself. I’m really, really trying – but more than that I’m not too overly stressed by my responses and where they are leading me to in terms of what I am eating and enjoying.
Sorry I am just observing ineptitude of nurses: a trained nurse is giving a diabetic who has severe difficulty with her sugar levels which they are monitoring under a new injection of insulin regime – wait for it – Lucozade. She has just taken her blood sugar – 4.7 – almost perfect – and yet in a minute’s time they’ll be sky high and she’ll be struggling. Last night she had a banana handed to her, though her Potassium levels are rocketing and need to be kept under control. She is also on fluid restriction and has more tea, milk, soup and lucozade than anyone observes or regulates. She has also been brought fruit – juicy fruit – by relatives as well as Ratatouille. She has loads of milk on her cereal and…oh God I don’t know…nobody watches her with a beady eye – nor the humongous and diabetic woman at the other end with legs that are so swollen with water they literally take up different post codes. She is in here, using hospital resources, money, time and energy, because she has not been given the correct dietary advice. Whilst she steers clear of tomatoes, pineapples etc. – potassium/sodium levels for water retention – she devours butter and marmalade and can only eat white bread…simple sugars and fats. What? Does nobody tell these women about the GI index of things? The only woman who manages her blood sugar effectively in here is a doddery 80+ year old who’s had cancer, heart failure and some chronic hypos which have brought her in. Her levels are too low, not too high. She is almost in a diabetic coma each morning after diligently eating supper – a sandwich or banana – at gone 9pm at night to try and help her last…
…I don’t know. Resources and their attribution seem all to pot and it doesn’t surprise me, given what I have witnessed, that the NHS find it hard justifying spending money on those people who are clinically obese and do not rectify or at least help to rectify their own situation and their own suffering. Instead they rely on drugs – sometimes whole pharmacies of drugs – in an attempt to regulate and keep under control a body which has been turned into an ineffective machine gone haywire after years and years of mistreatment and malpractice.
I am not like that, thank God. I’ve discovered that such neglect is not possible inside of me…it makes me smile. It makes me astounded that they sit and monitor and observe me eating when they really would be better served watching those who are genuinely abusive to their bodies and making sure they get through. But then again, perhaps they’ll never see it like that. They are not looking at overeaters as mental patients, although perhaps in the end they should.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment