Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light
--Milton, Paradise Lost
Every now and then, blogs change direction. Especially if they haven't been updated in awhile. So it is with the case here.
When I first started this blog, I was working my way through a tough period in my life and I dealt with the stress by resorting to poetry. (I don't really consider myself a poet but rather an eccentric and often vulgar storyteller.) However, since my grammar and spelling are often suspect, if not downright offensive, poetry allowed me to wallow in a broader range of mediocrity--or at least that's what I continue to tell myself.
Especially since very few people read my poetry.
But time passed and things changed, as they are wont to do. Now, I am at a very different kind of crossroads in my life and I find I must take drastic and, dare I say, radical action if I want to live much longer.
Melodramatic? Maybe so. But, I do have a team of medical professionals backing me up and if you're going to make a scene, I always say that it's better to do it with a chorus.
So why the drama? Well, my excess weight is quite literally killing me. And this insidious condition has been building for about 20 years now. That's a long time to build 150 lbs. (over 10.7 stone for my UK friends and 68 kg for everyone else in the world, generally speaking) of excess ballast.
Now, granted, I do have a big frame to haul around the extra meat. I stand at ~73" (1.8 meters) and as a younger man I was able to have a relatively active life in spite of the very impressive beer gut I was constructing. As it turned out, I hadn't been respecting the limitations of my skeleton nor the plumbing keeping my meat and other tissues alive. As time progressed, and I gained some stability regarding employment, my middle-aged spread got way the fuck out of control.
And then things started going wrong.
The first to bust out of the normal range of operation was my blood pressure. It suddenly sky-rocketed high enough to give me a stroke scare. Soon after, I was found to have dangerously obstructive sleep apnea. Then my heart developed an arrhythmia (PVCs). After that particular concern was stabilized, my weight continued to climb as I became less active. Then a DVT and resulting pulmonary emboli almost did me in. A year after that close call, I come to find out my asthma was worse and I'm no longer absorbing oxygen as well as I should (I'm hovering in the 90-80 O2 range--normal is around 100). All of these issues have combined to place me in a rather precarious position. Last Halloween, I was hospitalized for four days and then placed on medical leave from work for two months.
I have not improved. Much.
So, while I was in the hospital, I asked my attending doctor if I should consider gastric surgery. My wife had already undergone gastric bypass the year before and was doing very well in the program, so I had a pretty good handle on the life and The Tool--and what changes the new lifestyle imposed.
The doc immediately and enthusiastically agreed.
And she made it rather clear that my body was not going to take much more of the life I was leading. It was, in all ways considered, a very sobering conversation. Over the next couple of days, while I got used to my new and closest buddy, an oxygen line, I had plenty of time to sleep. And to think of what was now laid before me.
Sort of a lady or the tiger moment.
Behind one door, lay early death. As dreadful as that sounds, things are, as they usually are, complicated. Because behind the other door was a road that promised its own version of a road through perdition, but with it came the hope of a longer, healthier life; a chance to reclaim a life I foolishly abandoned decades ago.
Again, at first blush, it seems like an easy choice.
But, as usual, the devil is in the details. Neither journey, from my perspective, promise easy travelling. Recoiling from premature death is normally considered a natural and relatively healthy response. However, in the interests of honesty and full disclosure, it's bloody, damn hard to change direction--especially if you've been travelling a certain path for a long time. Hell, even Newton wrote some laws regarding inertia and in my metaphorical case, they seem to be all too viciously applicable.
Part of the difficulty is the specter of my father's death.
He had many health problems that intensified over time and at the relatively young age of 52, only two years older than I am now, he died from congestive heart failure. In the hospital. In the cardiac care wing. If your ticker is going to go wonky on you, there was literally no better place to be. But he didn't make it in spite of the half hour code. I was 17 at the time.
I grew up a lot in the following week.
I handled all of his final arrangements. I emptied, cleaned up and sold his mobile home--my second home following my parent's divorce. I handled the leg work for all of the estate issues until I turned 18, at which point my half-sister formally turned over executor responsibilities to me.
I stood with him one last time in an ancient funeral home, decorated in late-Victorian whorehouse, and marveled at how young and at peace he appeared to be. I saw, clearly, that he was finally free of pain, stress and whatever demons that had been chewing on his soul. Over time I grew to envy the illusion of peace that death gave him.
I truly hope he found peace. With what's left of my faith, I think he did. I think he's alright and that death isn't at all what we, the living, think it is.
Unfortunately, the experience had a cost for me in a way I didn't imagine: I have a very hard time seeing myself out living my father. Irrational? You bet. Yet, there it is.
Well, back to the now and to the two doors in front of me. And I move toward the surgery, and hopefully, longer life.
I have done most of the preliminary work to fulfill the requirements needed to receive gastric surgery. Yesterday was my first day of class outlining the new life awaiting me. It's what my brain, my intellect wants and demands: I don't want to die. At least I know that to be true.
But, I have my own demons gnawing away at my soul and I have distracted them through the visceral pleasures of process addiction. I can no longer hide or self medicate through my gourmand lifestyle. I'm about to go cold turkey from my maladaptive survival tools, and like many other addicts facing detox, I am afraid.
But as the wise man once said,
what matters most is how well you walk through the fire
― Charles Bukowski
