Tag: Mental Health

Weird Stomach

Hello folks, here comes another gastric bypass post. Another my-digestive-system-is-no-longer-quite-human sort of post. Sorry. Just bare with me. There will be a cat photo or two as well. Your patience will be rewarded with little four legged fur balls.

Okay…

I’ve mentioned at least 100 times over the past two years that being hungry hurts now. I eat breakfast. All is well. Three hours later I start having a stomach ache. I eat a snack and the stomach ache goes away. I eat lunch, then three hours later I have a stomach ache. &etc, &etc, &etc*. I told my doctor about it. She smiled at me as if to say, “duh!” without actually saying, “duh” and said, “right… you’re hungry.”

My response was, “Huh… duh.”

The downside, of course, is that I can no longer tell if I am having stomach pain because I am hungry, or if I am having stomach pain because something is wrong. I have to have something to eat to know for sure. If I have a snack and the pain vanishes then it means I was just hungry. If I have a snack and the pain stays the same or (more likely) gets worse, then something is wrong. It’s simple and all, but it does up my stress level a little when it happens.

On the days when I work from the office, I usually finish lunch at around 2:00pm. The hunger pain hits at around 5:00pm. It’s not always three hours. Sometimes it’s a little more, sometimes it’s a little less. Every so often it’s a lot less and I am feeling it at two hours. I guess it depends on what the last thing I ate was. So at work, I eat until 2:00, then around 5:00 I’m hungry enough to feel discomfort so I have something to eat. Usually I wait until I am in the car heading home. Everything is fine at that point except…

On those drives home, I often find that I eat a little too much. By the time I get home I am plenty full and I have ruined my dinner. I usually have a little to eat for dinner with Jen, but not a lot. Two days ago, when I got home I was really stuffed. I cooked dinner for Jen but I didn’t have anything for myself. I managed to have a snack an hour or so later and then fell asleep really early. I ended up going a long time without any food. I mentioned in a post yesterday that I woke up around 2:30am with a stomach ache and I had to have a snack before I could go back to sleep.

Did skipping dinner on Wednesday night mess me up? That’s my question now.

Yesterday I could not get ahead of things. I ate breakfast and was feeling empty stomach pain about an hour and a half later. That felt WAY too soon. I had a snack and then felt it again an hour later. That went on all day. I just couldn’t get out ahead of it. I think I had four or five instances of empty stomach pain throughout the day. I had a pretty substantial snack before I went to sleep. That was at 10:00pm. I was asleep a little before 11:00pm and I was feeling fine.

Until I woke up with a stomach ache at 2:00am. That lead to the usual question: Am I hungry or is there something wrong? I had a snack. I was just hungry. That’s two days in a row where I needed food in the two o’clock hour. Let us hope that this is not the start of a trend here. I don’t want to do this again. Clearly I will if I have to, but I really do not want to.

We’ll see how it goes today. I had a pretty big breakfast (for me) in the car on the way to work today. I finished it at 8:11am. Let’s see how I feel around 11:00am today. Hopefully I won’t be hurting until well after that. Fingers crossed.

Now, as promised… when I got up at 2:00am, Robin Sparkles the Cat was sitting on the cat tree in the living room, right near the pantry closet where I keep my snacks. It was like she was waiting for me. Good kitty.

295/365
295/365

And just for completeness sake, before I left the house at 7:30am today, I opened some windows. Lily Pad the Kitty took the opportunity to pose for me, so here’s a picture of her as well. Good kitty.

*That is the correct, deprecated way to abbreviate the word “etcetera” isn’t it? Was it &etc or was it &ct? I tried googling but didn’t see anything. I know it’s been hundreds of years since that abbreviation was considered proper English grammar, but I’m old and stuffy so I want to bring it back.

One Thing

Daily writing prompt
Describe one simple thing you do that brings joy to your life.
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One simple thing. Not some complicated thing like writing a song or fixing a customer’s programming issue or cooking dinner for my wife and our kids. No, something simple. Something small scale.

I’ve got one. A good one.

Somewhere along the line my wife and I got into a routine that had her falling asleep before me. We’d go to bed at the same time (put your dirty minds away, we’re not talking about any funny business here) but due to my weight problems and my massive sleep apnea problem I had a tendency to snore at an absurd volume. If I fell asleep first, Jen would be awake all night. The solution was to have me sit up in bed to let her fall asleep first. I don’t have the weight problem anymore (thanks, gastric bypass surgery) and I don’t seem to have the sleep apnea problem anymore (thanks again, gastric bypass) and while I do snore some, I don’t roar like I used to or do it as often. I still sit up in bed and let her go to sleep first. This is not the simple thing that brings joy to my life though.

There was one additional thing in our nightly bed time routine. While Jen was laying down trying to sleep and I was sitting up reading or surfing the net or watching a TV show on my iPad or laptop, I would rub her back. Thats the thing. That’s the simple thing that brings joy to my life. I just rub my bride’s back every night while she drifts off to sleep. It’s not that big a deal, but we’re both pleased it happens. Sometimes I’ll be doing something on my computer and won’t have a free hand and I get annoyed at myself for being distracted. She asks me to do it every night, sometimes while I’m already doing it. It’s just a thing we do at night and it’s just nice. It makes me happy. Sometimes I keep rubbing her back for a long time after she’s fallen asleep. Sometimes I’ll stop when she’s asleep and then after a while just start again for no reason. It’s just something we do.

Dictionary Edits

Daily writing prompt
If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
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I don’t have the mental focus to answer this question today. I’ll try, I am just completely out of sorts this morning and I don’t know how to fix myself. Ugh… but I must try so…

One word to remove from the dictionary, as it were. Is maga a word? I don’t need to remove the word, I just need to remove the fascist philosophy, if that’s even what it is rather than just open hate and racism and sexism and general fascism out and proud for all of the world to see.

One word… crud. I can’t think of anything. There are phrases that come to mind. “It is what it is” was used by nazi trump to justify thousands of Covid deaths and therefore has been removed from my usage completely forever. Fuck that fascist fucking fuck.

People misuse the word “myself” all the time and it makes me want to punch them in the eyes. I can’t say I want to remove the word entirely though because some people actually use it correctly.

I would say the word “nucular” needs to be eradicated from existence, but it is not a word. It’s an idiotic stupid mispronunciation of an actual word, nuclear. Pronouncing nuclear as nucular is an IQ test. If you do it, you fucking fail.

I am swearing a lot in this post. Clearly that means the word fuck is not my choice to eliminate. Embrace it.

I really don’t have an answer to this one. Let’s just go with mosquito because maybe if we all stop acknowledging them they’ll just fuck off and leave us alone. Yeah, that’s what I’m going with. Fuck it.

Sad Moment of Forgetting

Two days ago the daily writing prompt thing asked about our favorite subject in school. I wrote a little snippet about my favorite subject in Kindergarten being The Letter People. I couldn’t remember if The Letter People (anthropomorphized cartoon letters of the English alphabet) were cardboard cutouts or inflatables.

As I wrote about not being able to remember I thought to myself that I would ask my mother if she remembered. She did some volunteer work in my Kindergarten class.

Of course it took a few milliseconds for me to remember that my mother is no longer with us. She passed away about nine months ago. That was the first emotional kick to the groin. The second came another millisecond later when I thought that it had been years since my mother’s dementia would have allowed her to recall something insignificant like this from over 40 years ago.

I don’t know why I am posting this. I told Jen about it yesterday because it made me sad and I try to share my feelings with the woman I love. Now? I guess I just miss my mother.

Stressed Out

I just had a couple of back to back meetings that I was sort of dreading. They are regular occurrences but I never feel comfortable handling them. I can do it, no problem… it’s just that I don’t enjoy the process much. It stresses me out in a major way. It probably shouldn’t, but it does.

The good news is that the meetings are over and I can breath a sigh of relief. Now if only I didn’t have to make up the time I was late from being stuck in traffic this morning.

Frustration! Really looking forward to going home and not working in the office again until next week. It’s crazy how therapeutic working from home can be sometimes. Even when the job is stressful, working from home is just less stressful somehow. Ugh, what a crazy post-Covid world this has become, right?

Strategies

Daily writing prompt
What strategies do you use to maintain your health and well-being?
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I tell you what, one strategy I should start using to maintain health and well-being should be to stop using the WordPress.com MacOS app to write posts because it doesn’t have a built in spell checker like the browser app does and I am just not that skilled a speller to be flying without a safety net, you know what I mean?

But seriously folks…

I never really thought about strategies yadda yadda. I clearly have them but I just never spelled* it out like this.

There are two types of well-being in play here. Physical and mental. The physical health strategies are, like everything related to my physical health these days, come to me via the weight loss clinic and their instructions to keep me healthy post-gastric bypass. Exercise every day, at least 64 ounces of water every day, at least 80 grams of protein every day, no sugar, small bites of food, chew every bite until it’s obliterated, don’t eat too fast. Those are the big ones. There are also things like keeping in touch with the clinic and not blowing off my regularly scheduled follow up appointments.

So that is the physical question, what about the mental well-being situation? I don’t think I have any specific strategies. It’s more like things that make me feel like maybe I deserve to be thought of as a not-so-terrible human being. That combined with things that just make me feel good in general will have to suffice. I treat my wife with the love and respect that she deserves. When I do that my well-being feels pretty well. When I fail… everything about me fails. Same with the kids. Treat them the way they deserve to be treated. For me that includes loving my two step kids as if they were my own. I do, so that’s pretty easy.

My family is the biggest part of this, but what else is there? Doing a good job at work is important. Helping my staff be the best they can be is incredibly rewarding. I’m honestly surprised by how good that can make me feel. Playing guitar, writing shitty songs, playing with home recording projects. All of that is good for my mental health. Taking a lot of pictures, writing on this silly blog. Those are important too. They help me to keep my head on straight.

I’m sure if I took more time to think about this topic I could add one or two hundred more things to this list. What I have here will do for now though. Hopefully everyone is able to answer this one for themselves, and in doing so keep their heads on straight for another day. This is a good thing.

*See what I did there? Spelled it out? Spell check? Get it? Yeah, I’m so damn clever.

Stress

Why are things stressing me out today? Everything is rubbing me the wrong way. I feel like I am fucking things up at every turn. First my stupidity with the trash pickup this morning. I’m not even going to mention the mouse trap incident from this morning. That would just make me sad.

There isn’t anything specific that’s going wrong today, it just feels like everything weighs 10 times more than it should, emotionally speaking, and I am doing everything wrong.

What the hell, Robert? Stop being like that. Everything is fine.

Everything that is except for the fact that I am in the office when I would rather be home, and it’s friggin’ freezing in this conference room right now. Brrr, babie. I wanna go home and hug Jen and pet the kitties and play some shitty blues rock on the guitar. Those are my happy places. Those are my mental health medicines.

Two Hours to Go

The weekend is about two hours away. 123 minutes, to be exact. I’m finding motivation a little tough to come by this afternoon but I will get everything that needs to be done today done today as far as work goes.

Jen is planning on spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. How good does that sound, right? I will go grocery shopping afterward. I’m a little behind on my protein intake for today so I may need to eat something substantial after I get home. I am ahead of the game on hydration though. My post-lunch one hour pause before having anything to drink will end in about three minutes and I’ve got a 20 ounce bottle of Gatorade Zero upstairs in the fridge with my name on it. After that my daily liquid intake goal will be obliterated nicely.

I put out four mouse traps in the cellar. The cats don’t come down here so it should be okay. Let me rephrase, the cats are not allowed down cellar. They very much want to come down here, I just don’t let them. One trap went off but I think that was due to a ghost, or an Earthquake or something. No mice were involved. I did see one running past the base of the stairs. I was upstairs and opened the door to come down and there it was. Asshole. Was it the same mouse I saw earlier? How the hell should I know, it was a mouse. I wasn’t checking for identifying details. Sheesh.

Reminder to myself: Write lyrics tonight. Record vocals in some random empty parking lot tomorrow morning. Maybe take the cameras to the ocean for sunrise on Sunday. The forecast at Salisbury Beach looks promising. We’ll see. Sunrise would be great, but music is what’s important. I also need to clean the kitchen and do a little work straightening out the kids rooms this weekend. That’s important too, but a different kind of important, you know? Health and well being and happiness vs musical mental health. Simple. Speaking of, when’s the next band practice?

Okay, Robert. Go get that Gatorade Zero and finish your work projects. You’ve got this, red head. No problem. 110 minutes until the weekend.

Post script: There was just a blast of thunder outside that was loud enough to shake the walls a little. It didn’t set off any of the mouse traps though. That’s good.

Rest in Peace Jim Gordon

This is one of the sadder rock and roll stories out there.

Jim Gordon has died. He was a session drummer. He played in Delany and Bonnie and Friends on the tour they did opening for Blind Faith in 1969 which lead to Eric Clapton upending his entire career. Clapton started spending his free time with members of Delany and Bonnie. Then he started sitting in with them for their sets. Then he left Blind Faith and went on tour with them. Then Delany Bramlett produced the sessions for Clapton’s first solo record, which was backed by the Friends. Then Clapton stole Gordon, Carl Radle, and Bobby Whitlock from the Friends and they all backed George Harrison for some of the All Things Must Pass sessions. Then they started playing shows to support Clapton’s solo record under the name Derek and the Dominoes. Then they moved from the UK to Miami, FL, hooked up with Duane Allman, and recorded Clapton’s best work, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Then the drugs went out of control, Duane Allman died, Clapton retreated to his home in the UK to be a full time heroin addict for a few years, The Dominoes crumbled, and then I sort of lose track of Gordon’s career. I think he played in Traffic for a bit (hehe, I just re-read that… he played in Traffic… hehe) but I believe he mostly went back to playing sessions.

Then he murdered his mother and spent the rest of his life in a mental institution. Now he has passed away.

The guy could play. He was fantastic. Listen to his drum solo on Let it Rain from the Derek and the Dominoes In Concert record. It’s magic. His mental health problems were terrible and from a purely musical point of view, they resulted in a tremendous waste of talent.

Rest in Peace, Jim Gordon. Your suffering is at an end.

Planning

My mother passed away on Sunday. On Monday, my brother and sister and I met with the funeral director. He gave us a packet of homework. We need to pick readings and music and some other things related to the funeral service. I didn’t do much on Tuesday or Wednesday. We’ve had some discussions on things over text but nothing concrete from me. I am getting back into the swing of it tonight. We bought a suit for my father on Monday. We’re (Jen and I) going to him tonight to let him try it on. It’s probably not going to fit very well, but hopefully it’s close enough. After that, we’re having a meeting to go over the homework. Speaking as an Atheist, I don’t have a lot of interest in the readings that happen during the mass. I’ll give my $0.02 but I might have more input on the music. There is one song that was played at my grandmother’s funeral that brought my mother to tears. That one will be included. They played it at my Aunt’s funeral a few months ago as well, for exactly the same reason.

It might be a mildly long night tonight. We’ll see. I am working today and need to try and have actual food for dinner at some point. I’ve been so dependent on protein bars and supplements for the last few weeks that I expect my stomach to start rebelling at any moment. I just had eggs for breakfast and I hope to have some chicken for lunch. Dinner… we’ll see.

With all of this going on I am starting to think that my RPM Challenge success streak is in jeopardy. Not that that matters at all. I am, however, about to finish season one, episode three of Star Trek Picard. Maybe I should have been working on some recording instead of watching TV. Forgive me, I am a little screwed up right now. Working on Tuesday and Wednesday was a little tough but the normalcy felt pretty good after the insanity of the last couple of weeks. I’m working from home today and tomorrow and then taking three days of bereavement time on Monday through Wednesday next week. I am allowed to take five days, but I don’t want to. I was even hesitant about taking the third day, but I think it will come in handy, mental health wise.

Okay, it’s time to start getting ready for work. Wish me luck today.