I slept until I woke up most days until I finally feel rested and my eyes look less bruised from lack of sleep.  My time was my own.  I did limited shopping, got a pedicure, had my hair cut and colored, and took Tessie to the vet.  I drove out to a consignment shop an hour away that I’ve wanted to go to for months, and did genealogy research for my 95-year-old neighbor. I bought furniture.

I went through drawers, boxes, closets and shelves to weed out what I don’t need/want to take to my new apartment, lugging bags and boxes to Goodwill – and even more bags to the dumpster or recycling bins.

But mostly I spent the time alone with Tessie and it was just what I needed.  I enjoy being with people but it tires me out, especially in the chaotic bustle of the holiday season.  I brought some work home but kept it in my bag without opening it – which made me really happy.  More to do when I get back tomorrow, but emptying my head of work was necessary.

I hope I can remember all the codes I need to know tomorrow.  But at least I will go in rested and ready to take it on.

Year of Surgeries:

• Surgery #1 on March 2:  elective plastic surgery to remove hanging belly skin and upper arm lifts.  I was out of work for 3 weeks and took another 4-5 before I was really feeling good.  The arms look amazing and I relished wearing sleeveless tops this summer.  However, I also had complications – abscesses along the lower suture line, and the discovery of a serious infection in my lapband port area.  The surgery wasn’t connected to the lapband at all, but the moved belly button was less than 2 inches from the port and, well, things happen.
• Surgery # 2 on August 2:  removal of the infection, surrounding tissue, and the lapband port.  I had an open wound that is still not 100% healed up, tho it’s not a problem.  I ended up missing work time due to daily nurses for wound care.  Necessary but annoying.

• Surgery #3 on Nov. 22:  Lapband port revision, aka putting in a new port to replace the one that was removed during the infection surgery.  Went extremely well and I’m now starting the process of getting fills to complete

Exercise:

This did not go well in 2011.  All the surgeries didn’t help, as my ability to exercise was limited for long chunks of time.  My personal trainer moved to a different gym 45 minutes away, which is just not convenient for me.  Rather than switch to a new trainer, I’ve decided to let it go for a year, save the money, and work on my own.  I know it’s not the best solution but for now, it’s my choice.  And $110/month adds up nicely.  I still have my gym membership, mind you – just gave up the training.

Weight:

I’ve been eating off-plan since the March surgery.  Major abdominal surgery will do that to you, especially with the fear of having to throw up under those conditions, but I continued to maintain the loss until my surgery in August, which removed all lapband restrictions.  They’re still not back and I can really see the difference.   I can and will improve my eating choices but this has really shown me how much it helps to have the band in place.  I have weight to lose again, and it WILL happen.

Family:

I visited my parents and brother and sister-in-law in October.  Everyone is doing well and staying busy.  My niece/goddaughter got engaged this year and is getting married next summer.  In Houston, in July.  Can we say hot?  Her brother, Football Nephew, is now a member of the Washington Redskins, and was promoted to the active 53-man roster from the practice squad two weeks ago.  We’re so very proud and happy for him.

Tessie and I celebrated our four-year anniversary last month, and I love her more every day.  She was a wonderful therapy cat when I was home recovering, and sticks close unless I’m vacuuming.

Home:

I’m moving!  Not far, just to a different building in my same complex.  I love where I am but will be happy to move to the 55+ building (most residents are retired so I will be the young one) where rent is almost $200 cheaper and I’ll have a walk-in shower, which my knee will love.  It’s the same layout as what I have now, but flipped and a tiny bit smaller – but still over 1100 square feet, so what’s not to like?  I’ll be on the second floor in the SW corner in an elevator building.  Yayyyy!

I move on Jan. 27th so am applying a Peter Walsh approach to looking at my stuff before packing.  Stuff is going to Goodwill or the trash so I can just pack up everything that’s left.

Work:

I’ve completed a full year in my current position, and love what I’m doing, aside from the concern of how to be sure there’s work for my staff on a consistent basis.  Preferably that doesn’t involve too much of my time to dream it up, document, train, produce “work from” lists, and then do clean up.

In July, I celebrated a wonderful annual meeting educational program for my national professional association, after months of work, worries, and details as chair of the program committee.  I also turned down the chance to run as vice-chair/chair-elect of one of our special interest sections.  I’m ready for the next generation to move up and am happy NOT to be in charge of anything.

Have a happy and healthy 2012.  Do the necessary things, but also do what brings you joy.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

So honest, so clear, so intense, so hard to live.  But Steve Jobs did it and oh my, look at what he accomplished in his too-short life.

New York suffered terribly.  You own a very different, deeper pain than the rest of the country.  The people at the Pentagon suffered – but not the way a whole city did.  The people on Flight 93 died, but the planes didn’t slam into building full of people in the heart of a city.

I get all that.  But I’m both hurt and resentful and then guilty for being mad at New Yorkers for believing this is theirs only.  I didn’t lose a spouse or parent or child.  But I know people who did lose them.  Many people in the northeast corridor know someone who suffered a loss or who came out to help with rescue efforts.  Or who knew someone on one of the planes.  I did.

But we are not New Yorkers.  Our home city wasn’t attacked.  We weren’t part of the group that banded together to get through the horrible time.  We were just people who saw the images on TV over and over, heard the words, grieved in our own ways, helped where we could.  The city of Boston grieved and had its own collective guilt because the planes had left from our airport.

New York had it the worst of all.  I get that.  I don’t want to horn in on your anger and loss and pain and solidarity and fortitude.  But please, New Yorkers, do not think that those of us beyond your boroughs don’t feel, don’t remember, don’t care.  We are Americans and we do, even if you resent us for doing so.

I’m so sorry for your loss of innocence and lives.   I’m so sorry for the destruction of the indestructible.  I’m so sorry for your pain and sadness and fear.

But I’m still routing for the Red Sox.

So we started again, my trainer and I.   Because I still have the open wound (yes, after 7 weeks it is still open, though greatly healed), today was more about movement and not lots of weight or pulling motions such as lat pull downs which could pull on my wounded area.  I doubt I’ll be sore tomorrow, usually my clue about how well I worked my body, but it did feel good.

It’s scary to see how easy it is to gain weight back.  Oh, I’ve done it lots of times before (it’s my pattern) but I don’t like watching the scale and the way it has been nudging up a few pounds.  I know what to do to turn it around but have lacked the focus to actually do it – and all of this time away from regular exercise has not helped.  So it was particularly important that I had the appointment today, to get back on track.

On the other hand, it was definitely NOT good to be in the gym on 9/11 with memorials and interviews and related movies showing on every on-screen channel.  I was on the treadmill ten years ago in my Boston gym, watching as the planes hit the towers on one screen with Top Gun air fights on the next screen over.  It looked as though we were watching military scrambling to go after the people who struck the towers.  Unsettling and vivid.

I have only watched one of the myriad 9/11 shows this week.  I overloaded on all the coverage 10 years ago and cannot watch now.  I remember it all without seeing it again.  The one I did see was about baseball and the role it played for New York in the days, weeks, and months after the towers fell.  HGTV has been playing most of this weekend when the TV has been on.

At least we had power.  After Irene came through, almost 70% of Connecticut was without power for at least some time, including many of my staff.  My director’s house had major structural damage from a big tree crashing into the roof.   Roads were closed from flooding all over the state.  Schools ended up using “snow days” before the doors even opened for the year, due to power outages, flooding, and/or damage.

But I was fine here, other than leaking windows and losing cable for 8 hours (and with it, my internet and phone).  I have a good supply of lanterns and batteries, and those will come in handy later in the year when the warning is to prepare for a blizzard.

I’m very happy to share this weekend’s hurricane with them.   As I write, Irene has made landfall in NC and coastal regions along the Atlantic coast and low lying areas have evacuated in state after state.  She will show up here around 10pm, the northern sweep of the storm anyway.  The eye comes almost directly over New Haven on Sunday between noon and 2pm.  Right now we’re likely to get more wind (gusting up to 75-100 mph) than rain (4-8″ here, up to 15″ in the western part of the state – I so want to send it to Texas0.  We’ve been told it’s a matter of how long we’ll lose power, not whether it will happen.l

I’ve done as much prep as I can, or will have by early afternoon.  Already done:

• Week’s worth of medications
• Batteries, including the elusive D’s (shipped from Amazon!)
• Lanterns
• Flashlight
• 30 bottles of water + all pitchers
• Protein bars & canned food
• Manual can opener
• Cat food, treats, and catnip
• Medical supplies to change my own dressings
• Cash
• Recyling dumped

To do today:

• Wash clothes, sheets, towels
• Charge phone, laptop, netbook, iPad, iTouch, Kindle, camera
• Change litterbox
• Trash dump
• Move porch chair to the inside hallway (after I clean it in the bathtub)
• Get a pedicure

I’m very happy that the extremely dead tree right outside my door was cut down two weeks ago.  All I have is a stump, which isn’t photogenic but also can’t come out to be a projectile and smash my windows.

Off to get busy.  Be safe.  In the words of Hill Street Blues‘ Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, “Let’s be careful out there.”

Image source: http://www.geofffox.com/MT/archives/2011/08/26/irene-is-a-serious-threat.php

My mom in her wedding dress

Mom and I were talking tonight about her wedding dress.  My grandmother made it and my mom, her sister, and 3 other women of their generation all wore it.

My grandmother was a wonderful seamstress who actually took dressmaking courses at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn back in the 1920′s.  She made the girls’ clothes (and her own) for years, including this amazing dress.  It’s made of Chantilly lace as an over-dress that was worn over a satiny under-dress, and has dozens of little tiny satin covered buttons down the front and the sleeves.  She covered the buttons herself.

It hasn’t been worn in a very long time.  I obviously didn’t wear it, and my nieces wouldn’t fit into it.  But my mom has had it in a box for 60 years, and even has the dress pattern used to make it tucked inside the box.

My grandmother in her wedding dress

But what do we do with it now?  How to best preserve such a treasure?  Should it be donated somewhere, given away with an ad in Craigslist, taken to a consignment shop?  Maybe cut into pieces and framed?  I would love to have a pillow made of the lace with the buttons on it as a reminder of both my mom and my grandmother – but only if there isn’t a better use for the dress.

What did you do with yours?  What do you recommend for us?  I want to be respectful of the past but also realistic.

(I included my grandmother’s picture because she is totally gorgeous and I love this picture, not because we have her dress, too.)

Quilt Made of the Conference Logo by My Friend Phyllis

I haven’t posted here in quite a while – deliberately, for the most part.   It was actually very relaxing to not have to worry about coming up with words when I didn’t feel them.  But that doesn’t mean that things stopped.   Here are the highlights.

The Good
I spent the last 18 months working as chair of my national association’s annual meeting & conference.  It was lots of fun but at the same time, an enormous amount of work at a time when I was moving into and learning my new position at my paying job.  Everything came to fruition at the annual conference in Philadelphia in July.

It was wonderful!  Simply wonderful.  Everything I had worked and hoped for came together in what I’ve heard some people call the best educational programming in years.   Our meeting had no theme, just the best programs we could put together, and I think that not having a theme actually worked in our favor.   Poster sessions were a part of the meeting for the first time, a suggestion made by one of my committee.

And our keynote speaker, Dahlia Lithwick, was a breath of fresh air.  Instead of starting in by telling us how much she likes libraries and librarians, she launched into an animated, insightful, and humorous address about the Supreme Court and freedom of speech, both within the Court itself, between the Court and the press, and on recent decisions.  We’re law librarians – talk to us about the law!  She did and it was great.

The Bad
A month ago, after three months of mild to growing concern and discussions with the plastic surgeon’s office, I finally learned that those funny lumpy hard places on my left incision line were actually abscesses from popped stitches.

How did I learn this, you ask?  By ignoring the “you’re still getting used to your ‘new normal’ post-op body” messages from the plastics’ office and going to the university’s Acute Care center when I noticed blisters were forming.  I left with strong antibiotics, instructions to apply warm moist compresses, and to return in 2 days.  By then the abscesses had started draining.  They actually still are, a little bit.

I did go back to see the surgeon’s office with a sort of “screw you” message:  I told people for months something was wrong, and no one listened to me – and look, there was a problem.

The Awful
Not only did I have abscesses, it seems I also had been harboring an infection in my lapband port area for almost three months.  I’d reported a swollen belly several times to the plastics people but heard back that “it’s your new normal” thing that I was starting to hate.

When I lay down in bed and ran a hand over my tummy, there was a visible and tangible lump where the lapband port was.  But stupid me assumed that post-op my port was just closer to the surface and therefore more noticeable.  However, when I got to Philly and saw myself in passing in one of those hotel mirrors, it looked as though I had a second belly button:  the area around the port had swollen up around it.

Something was clearly wrong, and at the urging of a friend, I called the lapband doctor from Philly.  They wanted me to come in the next day which was impossible since, uh, I was in Philly.  But I was in the office the following Monday morning.  The surgeon took one look at it, and at me, and said, you are having surgery tomorrow.

However we sliced it, the lapband port had to be removed.  The entire band & tubes might have needed removal as well, if an endoscopy showed them to be eroded.  I was lucky and it was just the area around the port that was infected – and it was badly infected.  The doctor told me they removed about 1/2 cup of drainage along with the port.

I now have an open wound in my belly about 1.5 inches wide and 1.5 inches deep.  It has to heal from the inside out so I have home nursing care to do wound care & change the dressing every day until the wound doesn’t need to be packed anymore.   It’s sore and tender and I was out of work for another week post-op.  Not in the plans  but necessary, I know.

Lesson Learned: 
I am responsible for the whole me, who knows when something is or feels off.   Just talking to a doctor or doctor’s staff doesn’t mean they are looking at orfor the same things that concern me.  If I feel ignored or simply want another opinion, find another doctor and ask – even if it’s back to the primary care doctor who sent me to these people in the first place.

My surgery was on March 2 and by now 95% of the swelling is gone. This is what I looked like yesterday, showing off my much flatter tummy. It was also the first time I’ve worn sleeveless in public for more years than I can count. It was a good time, too, since that wicked heat was up our way. The arm scars are long but not obnoxious, and will fade with time.

Who knew where that would lead?  I certainly didn’t – because I was taking one next step at a time, as they came up, and didn’t obsess about getting to an unrealistic place.  Those steps led to lapband surgery, working with a personal trainer, and most recently plastic surgery to get rid of excess skin.  (Which I’ve told you about in excruciating detail.)

Two years and three weeks after walking into WW, I stepped on the scale and realized I was at my goal weight of 175 lbs (well, okay, 175.2 but I’m still counting it).   I’ve lost 46% of my starting weight for a total of 137 lbs.  The last time I was at this weight was when I was in grad school 34 years ago.

Why didn’t I jump online and tell you all about it, you ask?  Well, I confess to putting it up on Facebook and getting some very supportive responses.  But mostly I wanted to just sit with it a while and let it settle in.

Many people start a weight loss journey at this point and don’t understand why I would stop at 175 lbs when in BMI terms it’s still obese.  But I’m where I had secretly wanted to be when I started all those months and years ago.  I don’t pretend to be skinny.  I will never be down to 125 lbs, nor do I want to.  My primary care doctor set my goal weight at 165-175, and I do intend to lose another 5-6 lbs.  There is no hurry, though, and it will get easier when I’m allowed to get back to the gym.

I’m now 9 weeks out from my plastic surgery, something I had no intention of doing when I had my lapband surgery much less when I started back at WW.   The arms are healed and back to full functionality; the belly still has a little bit to go but then, it was major abdominal surgery.  Sometimes I forget that.  Just another step, though a dramatic one.  But it was the right choice for me, at the right time.

One WW tool I learned (and remembered) was anchoring; having something very specific to see or touch to remind me of what I’ve accomplished and what my goals are.  For me, that’s a silver Pandora bracelet for my weight loss journey.  I already have a clock (it was time), an owl (a wise decision), Chinese symbol for happiness, a present (a gift to myself), a Christmas tree (for the pictures that opened my eyes for the need), a queen bee (“Never underestimate the power of a woman”), an embossed Inner Strength bead, a dangling tennis shoe (exercise and the gym), and pretty glass beads.

Next step:  buy two final charms, one a pair of dangling scissors (for surgical “cutting”) and a butterfly.  For the new me.