Waiting for 150

It's 2am in Bloomington. In my neighborhood it's usually very quiet at 2am, even more so this time because the academic year is done, so any student renters aren't driving home from the bars, there are no car door sounds.

I am upside down right now--I slept most of the day today, for no particular reason, but the sleep felt good, and right. I'd wake every few hours, change the tissue that sops my mouth, pee, and go back to sleep. I do this in intervals under 4:30pm, then I got up and made some coffee for Charles and me.

After a few days of mid-eighties and humdity, we hit a bump and declined to low sixties and rain; it feels cold and it feels wet to me. I'm in bed in my turkish towel bathrobe under the covers. I just had a can of cold Perrier water and it's given me the chills. When you shoot cold liquid directly into the stomach it has that effect, much as coffee can make me instantly hot. There's not much mitigation between tube and stomach.

Mitigation, in fact, is something I live without--

10:28am

I forced myself to work on sleeping as I typed that line about mitigation--perfectly true of course. I tend to live out on angles and edges of treatments I've had--hole in the neck, breathing through a tube, eating through another, the bad effects of new drugs.

Oh yes, new drugs.

Bolstering my immune response will require a combination of antibiotics. They may be the drugs that are bolting my behind to the toilet. Maybe it's the other combo that is keeping my system in check; I don't know. All I know is that my entire life has the consistency of TwoCal HN: high calorie and protein dense nutrition! Flavor: butter pecan.

In defense of butter pecan, it's less offensive than vanilla, and I'm supposed to have four of these per day. Less offensive x 4  is a lot less offensive, overall. I often follow these with an Ensure Complete--at least two per day, chocolate flavored--and that totals 2700 calories. I then get to 3000 usually with an Odwalla I've bought, a Boltinghouse Protein drink, an Ensure Immune health that I have (also chocolate flavored)

I have tried to be compliant with that 3000 calorie figure because attaining it has paid off. In January, I averaged around 125 pounds. Today, I average betwwen 137-139, on my digital scale in my underwear. This is a great triumph of weight gain by force, and perhaps a great triumph of Two Cal over my old hated vanilla ass crack Nutren. To be clear, ass crack is not part of the name of that product, just what I call it.

So, I figure if I keep trying, I might hit 140 consistently, very soon. That would set me up to say that my goal of 150 might be attainable by the end of the year. 150! My god, I'll be a blimp compared to my January figure! I'll need new jeans, again, and some of my old sweaters might not hang on me like I'm a display wire in a retail store.

This Spring I've dug out 5 flower beds that were overrun with weeds and grasses--on my hands and knees, pulling clods that I spaded and working the roots out of the clods, smacking them with my fist (clay soil, very bad), breaking them up as best I could. Being 137 helped, I think--there was more of me there to do the work, more muscle, more desire. Another ten pounds, what could I accomplish?

I mowed the front yard one time recently with the grass catcher attached, and I've mowed the front and back without the grass catcher, pausing often to catch my breath. Would ten more pounds make the mower an easier push? The whole yard with the grass catcher? Possibly. 150 is the weight that I arbitrarily dreamed of last year while my weight stubbornly didn't budge. I wondered how I woiuld make it there when what I ate was making me gag.

I've been fooled by goals before--swallowing was taken away as an option, speaking disappered--and I've held 150 out as a gateway to a normalcy that will never happen for me. No hamburgers are waiting on the other side of that number, and no recitation of the Gettysburg Address, no simple conversation with a friend. I've had to rethink my goals in terms of what is:  150 is just a number but so is Christmas, viewed as a date. Like anything, there's nothing wrong in looking forward to it, as long as you have a reasonable view of what it takes to get there, and what you expect out of it.

So, at 150, I can help with shoveling snow better. I may be back at work at 150. I may be before that. I'll find old clothes I have here more appealing. I'll feel a sense of satisfaction in raising my weight by 25 pounds over a year.

I have taken all the sod tops with clay dirt clinging to them, the weeds, the roots, the spare chunks of lawn that wouldn't deracinate and hauled them, load by load, to the backyard to build up the expansion of my shade garden. I've been putting lawn clippings, old pampas grass, sod clods, leaves, tree branches in one great pile over an area around the maple tree, to build up a raised bed that would support hostas and ferns, bleeding hearts and coral bells.

Bleeding hearts and coral bells, indeed!