Food for thought

 I’m always wary of referring to anything as ‘ironic’ after poor Alanis Morrisette had scorn heaped upon her for not understanding exactly what irony is.  Which is apparently not raaaaiiiiinnnn on your wedding day.  Tsk.

Having said that, there’s some mischievous entity at work in my life at present.  I have started on the injections.  Good news: really not painful.  Bad news: make me feel sick as a dog.  Well, we’ll come to that unfortunate analogy later.  But pretty much nauseous all day.  These are, I hope, side effects that should last no longer than 2-3 weeks but on day 4 that seems a long way off.  As my mother said brightly ‘well, it’s not so bad if it makes you lose weight’.  You can see where I get a twisted view of food from, right?  But no, this is not how it’s supposed to achieve that aim.  I really don’t want to feel so sick I can barely eat until I’m a size 12 (or whatever).  Even if that were possible.  And here comes the irony bit (or whatevs): the only food I can eat is plain and carby.  The advice is even to eat plain carbs if you feel sick.  Carbs are not a great choice for a diabetic (and this is first and foremost a drug for diabetes).  Last night I ate 6 skinny fries from my colleague’s plate for dinner; lunch today is looking like Ritz crackers.  Hmm.  What is a carb-free alternative?  Nausea and chicken breast do not work well together.

Still, after a weekend away, it’s good to have ricocheted to the other end of the spectrum.  Actually it wasn’t too bad in terms of outright gluttony but did cause a 2lb weight gain.  I think.  Having made the momentous move to get back onto Scales of Doom, I really do need to record it somewhere.  The previous week I lost 2.5lbs.  I would hope the weekend gain is long gone after several days of barely eating.  Not very sustainable in the long term, I continue to avow.

The weekend was nice.  It’s just...  Well, we’re going through a rough patch.  Not with each other but with family stuff.  The most serious of which is that my FIL is, to put it bluntly, dying.  The cancer he fought off 4 years ago is back and brought a mate this time.  They’d started treatment for the first tumour (or second I suppose) before they found the other.  The treatment made him feel absolutely terrible and he didn’t want any more; the second tumour made that academic in any case.  He’s at home now and it won’t be long.  He’s a lovely and sweet man and I will be very sorry to lose him which is slightly subsumed by my concern for my husband and how he must be feeling.  He’s been characteristically stoic and brave but has moments where the grief just erupts, understandably.  I hurt to see him so hurt.

And to ice that particular cake, we come back to the ‘sick as a dog ‘analogy.  One of my mother’s Labs has just had to be put down (yes, whilst we were away).  From nowhere SHE got tumours and within 2 days there was nothing else to do.  My mother is distraught and I’m very upset – both from hearing her sobbing and from missing our very sweetest dog myself.

Finally, I visited my grandparents’ grave on the way back from Devon and put some flowers down.  I still miss my grandmother terribly and that was yet another unpleasant reminder of loss.

P and I are agreed that the only thing you can do is wring every moment of pleasure from life.  Balancing hedonism with dieting is not an easy task – well, factoring in 24 hour nausea does balance it a bit, the food and drink part of hedonism seeming unattractive at the moment.  But it’s something to think on.  We’re planning holidays.  Next year.  At the moment we're living from moment to moment, waiting for bad news.