Diet, Exercise, and Writing, Oh My!

I’ve been struggling with making my retirement an actual retirement and realized recently that I had never fully retired. I went from my state service retirement to working in a casino gift shop (and several other positions within that casino), to working in the shops at the airport, to substitute teaching, and then keeping an online eBay store.

Along with that, I also have been taking care of those around me – Hubbin’s cancer and diabetes diagnosis, son’s surgery, daughter’s medical and single parent-ness, and helping other family members as time and energy permit.

And then there was my own health and fitness – I revised Hubbin’s whole diet and cleared out the house of all foods that were not conducive to a reduction in his A1C and blood sugar numbers. This helped me tremendously and I lost over a hundred pounds this past year.

Well, this past June, I was diagnosed with a heart problem. This TOTALLY freaked me out! Nobody knew it, but my world came to a screeching halt! I didn’t know if I had a day or a year left of my life! I saw two specialists who told me that diet, exercise, and healthy eating were ways I could help myself, but at that point, I had been doing all of that. I dropped into a “Poor Me” mentality and gave up all of my outside extracurricular community efforts, not sure if expending that much energy was good for me and what I imagined was left of my heart and my days. Everybody understood, but I had some serious guilt, as if I was somehow failing everyone.

Here’s the tricky part. Nobody, including my family doctor, knew I even had a problem. My doc heard the murmur when I went in for my annual physical. She ordered some kind of scan, I cannot recall what it was CT? Sonogram? The results echoed in my head when I read them and I wondered if each time I felt a flutter in my chest, it was going to be my last. Of course the “what if’s” overtook me. What if I was driving and my heart stopped? What if I was on a ladder? What if I was looking after my grandbabies? What if I was home alone, taking a shower or cooking a meal? Talk about spiraling!

Someone suggested I seek counseling, but realistically, what could a counselor say or do that would have made this better or gotten me through this? I was put on a seven-day monitor and at the end of it, my cardiologist told me that he would see me in June, telling me that nothing had shown on the monitor.

Even now I’m having a hard time believing nothing is wrong. In my un-medically educated opinion, anything, especially heart-related, that starts out “…moderate to severe…” seems like a big deal, and the ones in the know say nothing can or should be done unless or until my body starts showing signs of “…moderate to severe…”

So today (and trying to put a whole bunch of ‘todays’ together), I am getting back into my exercise routine and eating plan and am ending my eBay store so that I have time to do the things I love – write, paint, and spend time with my family, and maybe throw in some time for gardening, recipe experimentation, and crafts.

Life is too short to have it any other way.