A New Year

Happy New Year to all my friends and readers, which are probably completely overlapping sets.

Here's wishing everyone a healthy, happy, successful 2012, in which you conquer your Lizard Brain, achieve wonderful things, and the Maya calendar quietly rolls over.

For myself, I've just come out of a nasty colitis flareup, and I need to make sure I get it to quiet down. One of the major ways in which I kept it under wraps for the two years since my previous one (which just happened to coincide with a period of major stress, including my oldest son's Bar Mitzvah and two transatlantic flights) was by reasonably strict adherence to the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD). This is a 90s version of what we would call a low-carb diet - a complete reversal of the low-fat, high-carbohydrate paradigm we were all brainwashed with in the 70s, 80s and 90s. When it came out I thought it was completely crackpot and paid no attention to it. For some reason I seemed to think that low-dose chemotherapy (6-MP) would be better for me. Of course I spent most of the latter part of the 90s either pregnant or breastfeeding, which not only kept me partially immunosuppressed (and therefore mostly flareup-free), but also mercifully kept me off the 6-MP. Alas, it has been almost five years since I regretfully weaned my youngest child, so I really cannot claim any more benefits from that.

After my latest flareup, I really did not want to go back on the bad stuff. I'd been reading about how it increases your chance of leukemia, for example. I spoke with a friend whose ex-husband is now dying of liver failure brought on by many years of taking it. It just doesn't seem worth it. So, how to keep the colitis under control? It could kill me a lot more quickly if I just left it. Short-term prednisone was pretty reliable in the perpetual game of whack-a-mole, but doing it too often is not healthy, either.

A providential meeting with a friend at the gym was the turning point. She told me about her cousin, whose daughter had been desperately ill and who had found great benefit in the SCD. The cousin generously corresponded with me and encouraged me to take the plunge. I did it. I cut all grains and sugar from my diet, and that made a huge difference. For two years, I was completely symptom-free. I started running, and even ran a 5K.

Then I fell off the wagon. How do these things happen? Is it the Lizard Brain? Or just stupidity? Regardless, I suddenly found myself getting into the kids' cookies. Staying up too late at night and feeding my face with all the stuff that I KNEW was bad for me. How surprising is it that I flared up again? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

As of now, I have done my whack-a-mole again, and I need to keep things quiet. I have lots of things I want to do this year, including more 5Ks and maybe even a 10K. I want to teach and write and have energy to do things with my kids. I've got my second son's Bar Mitzvah coming up this year. I don't have time to mess around with stupid processed junk that causes my innards to explode. I don't want to keep myself immunosuppressed, with whatever chemical means. I want to be healthy.

So, I am going to use this blog to keep myself honest. Along with the other things I like to natter on about, I'm going to bore you to tears with my accountability. Sleep and diet are the main issues that I have identified. I hope you will stick with me on this journey ... and lend me your support when I find myself sliding again.

What are the issues you find yourself wrestling with in this brand-new year?

Goals Change

This time of year people seem to spend a lot of time thinking about their goals. Must be that looming January 1st coming up. A new opportunity, for sure, a fresh year. But also a moment when you need to face what you achieved in the past year, and what you didn't. The Resistance generally has a field day with the latter. We are so good at breaking ourselves down; if anybody else talked to us the way we talk to ourselves we'd run a mile in the opposite direction.

Somebody on Facebook asked whether we were where we thought we would be 10 years ago. Being a young 'un, she is only 10 years out from high school - in my case, it's been over 30 years. Gulp. What were my goals then, and what have I achieved?

There is no question that I have achieved one of my major goals, although I might not have articulated it that well at the time. I have a husband and three lovely children, all of whom are bidding fair to become people I'm going to want to know when they are adults. Not something to be taken lightly, I assure you. I made a couple of false starts on the marriage front, and I'm very glad I didn't make any innocent bystanders in those circumstances.

When I signed up to study physics in 1983 it was a very wrong choice for me, made for all the wrong reasons. I can't believe I made it all the way to a Ph.D. Just because I'm smart and capable of doing something didn't mean I had to do it. My health suffered along the way as all the wrong reasons went straight for my gut. I'm still paying the price for that. I would never have finished it without the support of my wonderful husband. It is also true that I would never have met him if I had not gone through the agony of trying to become a physicist. Maybe that was the purpose of the exercise?

After we came here,  I became a research scientist for a few years. Not the right thing for me, either. Again, I'm smart and capable and I did quite well, but I didn't like it. So I became a university instructor for a few years. I did well, but the university was looking to increase its research profile, so there was no job for a person who didn't want to do physics research. Onwards.

I went back to university and got a Bachelor of Education degree. Now I am a certified teacher, and I do enjoy teaching. I'm also slowly pursuing a certificate in Technical Communication, because writing seems to be one of the things I do best, and is also most compatible with spending time with my children and taking care of my health. Sleep deprivation, in particular, can be problematic for teachers, especially relatively new ones, and my health depends quite crucially on getting enough sleep. It's an issue.

Regardless of where I end up with the teaching, there is no question that the B.Ed., like the Ph.D. before it, was not a waste of time. When I need to advocate for my children, I get a whole different level of respect and cooperation from the teachers, because I speak their language and understand their perspective.

So many twists and turns in the road, and the show ain't over yet. I was talking with a friend today about putting together a resume as a technical writer, and she told me to put in every piece of software I ever worked with. Oh, the memories of using WordPerfect in the 80s, of programming in FORTRAN and C and C++ in the 90s. So many things that had their uses in the past, and may turn out to be unexpectedly useful in the future.

Goals are great to have, but they do tend to shift with time ... how have yours twisted and turned and shook themselves while you weren't looking?