Gym-spiration – I Need Some

Two years ago I joined Planet Fitness, determined to get out of my funk of being overweight and exhausted. I had a goal of getting my body back to where it was in my twenties. Now being in my 40s, I realize that was quite a lofty goal, nonetheless I worked hard at it. Because of certain health issues that I have, including COPD and asthma, it does make it hard to keep up with workouts the way healthier people would. I was actually proud of myself because I was going to the gym 5 days a week without fail and continuously upping my workouts to beat my personal bests. I did end up losing about 20 lbs, gaining a lot of strength but not a lot of tone. I still had quite a few inches of fat to lose.


Then the pandemic hit. In March and April, all of our gyms started closing down. Membership fees were frozen until an unknown reopening date. I went ahead and canceled mine because I didn’t want to be surprised with a membership fee when they decided to reopen. During that time of being stuck at home, no longer able to go to the gym which was directly between home and my office, which had also shut down, my motivation went to shit. Now I was waking up to walk 20 steps to my desk where I sat for 10 to 11 hours everyday only to walk 20 steps back to bed at the end of my shift. Working at home redefined a sedentary lifestyle. The pounds came back quickly. The energy left quickly.


Now that the gyms are open again, I have been trying to get back on the path albeit slowly. My lack of energy makes it difficult, as does no longer passing by the gym on the way to the office and back home. Now instead of ending my shift at 8:00 p.m. and going to bed, it means actually getting dressed for the gym, driving down there, wearing myself out, and driving back home. When you haven’t really left the house for 8 months, that’s a heck of a chore. I know that one option would be to wake up a couple hours early and go work out before I start my shift but I’m always leery of doing that because anything could happen to make me late for work. I am no stranger to flat tires and dead batteries. I’m also no stranger to back injuries which lay me up for a few days at a time. One wrong move and my scoliosis reminds me it’s there.


I desperately want to get back to my 5-day a week workout routine. The trouble is finding the energy and motivation to do so. I suppose I do have the motivation in being sick and tired of looking the way I do. I know that the more weight I lose the more energy I will have. So what’s my problem? I think once I got into the gym habit it was easy to go. It was my personal time, my alone time, and I looked forward to it. The lockdown broke that habit however and now it is extremely difficult trying to get back into it.


For those of you who continue to go to the gym, I would love to hear what inspires you to keep at it. Let me know in the comment section below what motivates you to be your best self.

Zombie Apocalypse In My Dreams

I had some weird dreams that continued to play out as I woke up throughout the night and kept falling back asleep. Must have been the migraine…

I was somewhere, not sure where, and someone was preparing their house for the end of the world. They had the house set up for 130 people in the basement, and I didn’t believe any of it was going to happen. They had all the provisions though the people would have been crammed wall to wall. This guy seemed like some kind of false prophet, tall and charismatic.

Dream broke to me having to accompany some woman down to a Walgreens several miles away. It was raining and we were on bicycles, she had her two kids with her riding in a basket on the back. I realized I had forgotten my inhaler and wanted to turn back but she wouldn’t let me. I went into a minor panic attack and tried to breathe my way through it. We got to Walgreens and her male friend who appeared out of nowhere directed me to this “doctor” who would give me a new inhaler.

It took me a while to find this “doctor” and it was getting dark out. It ended up being a house, and the “doctor” ended up being some weird hippy kid who just happened to have a stash of generic meds. He acted very cocky and cool like he didn’t have to help me because I was disturbing him (from what I have no idea because he wasn’t doing anything), then finally gave me something that, after reading the label, I realized I could have just gotten over the counter. Then he crawled back into bed and his mom came home.

Since it was getting dark and I didn’t want to walk 3.6 miles (according to my phone’s GPS – at least I remembered to grab my phone!) alone during the impending zombie apocalypse, I sat in his room for a while, then when his mom came home, I rummaged through his stuff, found an inhaler, and headed off back to the safe house. Was dark when I got to the safe house and people and their pets were all filing in under the direction of the home’s owner. There were no other homes around this place, it was just a regular single family home standing along a sidewalk with nothing at all surrounding it. I ended up opting not to go into the safe house and the dream ended there with no end of the world happening.

Leave it to me to forget my inhaler during the zombie apocalypse.

Challenges never cease

Yesterday, I was looking forward to making the trip 2 1/2 hours south to go pick up my daughter who I haven’t seen in far too long. We miss each other terribly but its been nearly impossible to get up the money to get there as far behind as everything had fallen. Well, the thrill of having my daughter back has been taken away from me yet again as I have been in the hospital since Wednesday with a very sudden onset of right lower lobe pneumonia. I have been unresponsive to most of the breathing treatments, antibiotics and steroids that they have been pumping me with. I was in such respiratory distress yesterday that the doctor strongly suggested intubating me for 48 hours and waking me up after 2 days of ICU treatment. Of course I fought it tooth and nail. He diagnosed me with COPD. My blood pressure upon arrival was stroke level 236/120. My blood sugar is running in the 200’s so I’m shooting insulin three times a day. I’m an unholy trifecta of health problems right now. I had been praying for healing but certainly did not have to go through all this to achieve it. I think I was hoping for more of a miracle than missed child, missed work, missed home. I just hope to God my daughter understands that my being away is not by choice, that I want us together but that I am still financially destitute and severely ill. I still, after all the treatment, cannot get out of bed without taking ten minutes to catch my breath. I don’t know how long I will be in hospital, but I need to start responding NOW to treatment.

At A Crossroad (Perblog Oct. 19, 2013)

PerBlog October 19, 2013

 

After spending the majority of this year out of work and the most recent 2-3 months couch-surfing after I lost my apartment, I am finally starting to get settled in at my new home.  It is 2 ½ hours from where I have been for the past decade, but St. Lucie County had just completely run out of opportunities for me. After my old boss passed away and the company closed behind him in January, I simply could not find work that was enough to take care of my basic needs. I’d found temp work here and there, but nothing permanent came through.  With my apartment several months behind, that was it.  I started another temp job and put my stuff into storage, staying between my car and a neighbor’s house (which quickly became very abusive situation).  I approached people that I trusted and no one was willing to let me stay with them until I got back on my feet so without an ounce of help from my friends and no family in the area, I had a choice to make:  continue being homeless and unable to care for myself much less my daughter, or make a change in my life.

It’s been a very difficult change to make.  150 miles away, a previous boyfriend was willing to take me in and provide food and shelter while I sought work and recovered my losses.  His family (3 kids of his own plus two extended family) has been welcoming and friendly as I try to find work here in a much bigger city and try to adjust, settle in and find my way around.  I am still looking for work, but do have some calls coming back for interviews and I am hopeful something will come through soon.  I have so much I need to catch up on – vital bills that can NOT be ignored but right now there isn’t a damn thing I can do about them.  I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that I am 2 ½ hours away from my daughter until I find work and get a couple paychecks in to be able to get back for visitation, the fact that my belongings are being auctioned off at storage because I couldn’t pay for it, and the fact that I lost two pets in the process, Topper and Moppit, my cat and my dog.  I have very little clothing with me, and only one of my journals – the most recent one – even though I had kept every one of my journals since I started writing them at age 9.  I had to leave when I had to leave, and that meant coming up with only what would fit in my car.  This is the third time in my life I’ve lost it all.  Isn’t it about damn time something other than being shit on becomes permanent in my life?

Well, with nothing to my name, here I am starting over yet again.  Praying to God something permanent comes in so I can once again have gas and food (it’s still scarce here in a household of seven), proper clothing, personal bills paid, and a little to live on.  After those basics are taken care of, I look forward to being able to fix the A/C in this house, as it’s got a bad circuit board and was 92F inside today and my asthma is suffering BADLY for being stuck in this hot, humid air and I’ve no means to get my medication.  Internet would be great too!  Right now my only reliable connection is at the library.  It’s sad, the things we take for granted when we have them constantly.  When not having certain things begins to affect one’s health however, I think there is justification for bitching a bit when trying to change the situation that wasn’t working isn’t itself immediately working.  My life has turned upside-down this year and fallen out from under me.  It is HARD.  Bear with me if I’m angry or depressed or bitter.  All that pretty hope and happiness idealism isn’t always possible.

PerBlog September 10, 2013

Hello, friends.  Please bear with me while I vent.  Maybe you can even relate a thing or two to your own experiences and silently lend support with a shake of the head and a sighed, “Been there…”

So yesterday was a MONDAY.  It was a Monday to the extent that I tweeted an exasperated:

 

 

It took no less than a half hour to get my sleep-through-a-nuclear-annihilation child out of bed in the morning. No matter how early she is sent to bed, every Monday morning is still a battle, some worse than others.  We ended up running late in getting her back to her dad’s house but after we’d left, it came to realization that she’d forgotten her notebook of homework so we had to turn around and get it.  

I barely skidded into work on time and no sooner did I sit down at my desk to log into the phone did my team leader come by, “I’m sorry, I have to send you home to change.”  What the?  See, during the summer, the dress code is pretty lax, with shorts and hats allowed in the call center.  Friday however, apparently an e-mail had gone out notifying staff that we had corporate company coming this week and were on a “business casual” dress code – no shorts, jeans, hats, etc.  This notice went out at 4:45 p.m. on Friday – my shift ends at 4:30.  Brilliant.  Trying not to miss *too* much time, I lead-footed it home and ended up getting stuck waiting for one of the Tropicana trains that snakes slowly across several intersections in the neighborhood, leaving no way around it.  I get home, I change, RUSH back to work, log in 32 minutes late and start having trouble breathing.

Rummaging through my purse, I cannot find my inhaler (I have chronic asthma) – Ok, I’m thinking, I’m going to drop dead at my desk.  Calls are pouring in, I’m trying not to sound like a pervert breathing heavily on the phone and trying to basically meditate myself out of this asthma attack between calls.  I make it through to lunch and call the pharmacy who has been trying to reach my doctor for an inhaler refill for two weeks now.  They still haven’t gotten a response but the pharmacist offers to try calling her directly to get an emergency refill.  I only made it until 2:30 when I could no longer talk on the phone and had to flag down my team leader to tell her I needed to go get a breathing treatment.  She said I could leave but would have one “occurrence” against me.  This is essentially their writing me up.  We are not allowed any time off for anything, period.  Screw it.  Breathing is kind of important.  I drive myself to the hospital and decide to take one last look through my purse, dumping the entire contents out onto the passenger seat.  Wouldn’t you know it, there stuck in the *lining* of my bag is my inhaler.  I contemplated going in for a treatment anyway because by then the asthma attack was so bad the inhaler wasn’t working fast enough but I eventually did get it under control.  As I was pulling out of the hospital parking lot, I get a call from the pharmacy that my prescription is in.  Of course, the price of it ended up being too much for me to afford this week so I would have been screwed anyway.  

The majority of my bad day ended there thankfully. I did leave out one bit that I didn’t think needed to be aired here, but still… yesterday was one of those, “Enough already!” moments when I just wanted to break down and cry and be held.  But of course crying would only give me a headache and there is no one to hold me anyway, so I just kept pushing through it all begging for it to end.  Anyway… signing it off here, writing off yesterday as just another day in hell and waiting to see what kind of mood the roommate is in once he wakes up.  Then again, with him just staggering out of the bedroom, my asking him, “How you feeling?” and his response being a sinister, “Don’t. Talk….” I can see how this night is going to go.