Less of a Man

When writing a blog (or any publication, really) like this, the author has to decide just how much personal information one really wants to throw out there.  Sure, I put a 20 year old picture of myself out there, but I’m pretty sure the only people who would recognize it already know I’m the one behind this blog and it’s not like it’ll come up in a Google search when you look for my name.  And I’ll reference that I have a wife and kids and that I live in Florida now, but, well, there are millions who can say that.

But yet, there are aspects of my story that are deeply personal, and play a big role in how I got to where I am now, the size that I am.  Sure,  there are other reasons that I may go into later and won’t devote a chapter of my history to, but there is one particularly large event in my life that just has to be mentioned when looking at how I got to the size I’m at.

In late 2000, I was (to the best of my recollection) somewhere between 250lbs and 275lbs: overweight, certainly, but nothing like I am now.  In early November of that year (election day, in fact) our first son was born.  There were no signs of any problems and he seemed to be quite the healthy little boy.  Five weeks later, the same day my wife saw his first and only smile (I never got to see it), he had a near-miss SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) episode — he stopped breathing and his heart stopped beating for no obvious reason that anyone could tell or ever figure out afterward.  We were lucky that it happened when my wife and parents were with him at a restaurant (I was at work and they had gone to eat) and there were two EMTs also eating at that restaurant;  he was resuscitated, but not before there was massive brain damage.  He wound up with cerebral palsy and lost many of his instincts; he didn’t blink any more and he didn’t swallow for instance.  After almost a month in pediatric intensive care, he came home with a trach (tracheotomy) and required 24 hour supervision… but while the insurance was generous in some ways, particularly compared to insurance companies these days, they did not cover nighttime nursing care.  Of course, this was our second child;  our oldest (now the 11 year old, then 2) still needed care and attention as well.

We wound up living with my parents and taking shifts watching him;  I went to work from noon to somewhere between 8 and 9pm, came home and stayed up with him from 10pm until around 4am when I switched off with my dad then tried to get what sleep I could before starting over again the next morning.  He had come home in January and the trach came out in April so we were able to get a little more sleep after that, but the fact he had lost his instinct to swallow proved to be a problem – he kept aspirating his secretions, which was particularly bad as there seemed to be a pseudomonas (sp) bacteria colony established at the trach site and he kept giving himself pneumonia.  We lived in Ohio at the time and summers weren’t bad for him, but the rest of the time he was usually in the hospital about once every month and a half.  In spring of 2002 after watching him suffer at the hospital (not from any mistreatment from the staff, but because of what he was going through and how sick he was) we transferred him to hospice care.  He did have another good summer at that point, so he was with us a while longer, but when fall came the pneumonia came back too and he passed on October 1, 2002.

During that time, and for some time afterward, I really didn’t care about what I was doing to myself with food/etc.  I ate for comfort, I ate for stress.  Sometimes I ate just to feel something;  I was so numb to so much through the whole episode.  I can’t say this definitively since I don’t recall my starting weight exactly, but I gained just about 100lbs in that time frame.   I couldn’t care about myself long enough to care about what I was eating, so I ate whatever was available, tasted good (or that I thought would taste good…  some days nothing tasted good but I didn’t stop trying), kept me awake late at night (loaded with sugar and caffeine) and I exploded, more or less.  Even after he passed I was numb enough that I both didn’t care enough about my day to day for a while and often enough ate to feel something through the process of eating things I knew I liked….  in many ways, I was in a downward spiral.  Even as I later started pulling up from the spiral, there were stretches of numbness that would creep in and I just couldn’t make myself care enough to do what I knew I should.

And to be completely honest, every once in a great while there still is a stretch or two.  At points, I have crossed into what I would call self-destructive eating, being very aware that how I was eating was not good but feeling encouragement in the knowledge that it wasn’t good – wanting that bag of chips precisely because I knew it was bad for me, spiraling into depression/desperation that isn’t even always related to my son.  I hit 360lbs before the first time I made  a serious effort to pull myself out of the spiral…. but that’s the story of another history lesson.