Spinning the Plates, Two Year Reflections

I am really not altogether good at change.  People ask me how it is I manage two businesses, two jobs, five kids and a household.   Well the reality is, I am a scheduler to the enth degree. Each day it's like that woman you see spinning all the plates on the sticks.  Plate to plate, spin and spin, everything according to plan.  Yep, I got this.  In fact, I could probably tell you what a month from Thursday will hold for any given member of my household.  Once I made the decision to lose the weight  I was able to take this skill and finally learn to get healthy with it.  Three years ago, I started scheduling my workouts.  I made that time of equal importance to everything else, and I started losing the weight, finally. 

 Along the line, I was able to schedule more workout time into my week, because you know, if one workout a day was good, surely two were better.  I started adding more proverbial sticks and plates to accommodate more interval training.  Two pounds a week.  I had a plan and I was sticking to it.  Ramping up more and more.  Wait.  My left hip hurts.  Oh well, no harm, I can bike for a while and not run. It was fall anyway.  I really wanted to be able to run a 5k without stopping in the spring.  So, I could bike then.  No big deal.  Besides, at that point I had eight successful months and was only about 30 pounds from the weight I always wanted to be.  I had the calculations done when I would reach that.  Quitting was not an option, rest was not an option.  I was doing it.  For the first time in my life I was doing it.  So, I pressed on, ignoring the pain for three months, and taking high doses of motrin, until a slip on a simple blanket on a hardwood floor right before Christmas.  My already painful leg would go out quickly, and although I never really fell, the pain I felt in the hip was excruciating. I would spend the next six weeks telling myself the next day I would wake up, be walking crutch free and be ready to go back to the gym. After all, it was probably just a hip flexor tear.  This is what us medical providers do.  We diagnose ourselves.   That morning never came.  I finally had it x-ray'd only to learn I would have a full on femoral neck fracture, which apparently had started as a stress fracture months earlier, and had now come apart.  

That was exactly two years ago this week.  I now find myself on the anniversary of the surgery that would repair my hip, reflecting on the months leading into this and the ones that followed.  I remember every single thing about being in the hospital that night.  The nurses asking me if I needed more ice when, in actuality, I didn't even realize I had ice on my hip because it was numb.  To this day, the skin in the area remains that way.  I remember the drug induced haze of watching what seemed like 100 episodes of "Chopped"on Food Network.  The mocking of the crutches in the corner that would be my side kick for the six weeks that followed.  The texting of a friend who worked night shift, who's sole task that night was to simply keep me a little more sane.  

Mostly, though,  I was angry.  I had a plan.  I had built my original plan into an epic workout adventure where I was doing things I had never done before.  I had a weight loss schedule to keep.  I had a 5k to run. In the end,  I had to get my head around that I had attacked my exercise regimen with such vengeance, I had broken the biggest bone in my body.  At the time,  I wondered if I would ever be able to do anything I had planned.  My leg hurt, my plans were dead, I could not even carry a simple cup of coffee to the living room because of the damn crutches, and I had no idea what I was going to do.  This master plate spinner had found herself sitting in a pile of shattered china and broken sticks.  

I had finally begun to realize that my physical endeavors had become as short sighted as my quest for carbohydrates to deal with the life stressors that came before that. Realizing I was sitting in the rubble of the broken plates and sticks was actually as eye opening as the day when I was 30 and ventured onto the scale only to realize I had hit 296 pounds.  I had become so singularly focused on exercise and strict no carb dieting, that I was missing out on the other sides of being healthy.  I had forgotten the part about feeding my own soul to find the happiness that I always thought was associated with being thin and fit.  Ultimately, I was able to put the anger aside and look for other methods to feed my own well being.  I started the day I got home with ordering the greatest pair of pink and white striped Victoria's Secret jammy pants.  Not only was I going to recover, I was going to do it in a brand I always wanted to wear but could never fit in before now.  In fact, as I type this I am wearing those very pants. A simple reminder of a new beginning.

I would attack my diet with new vengeance so as not to fall back into bad habits as I stylishly occupied the couch during that time, and yes, I would even make it back to the gym on post op day 10.  I would crutch my way in and get in line with the little old ladies doing their cardiac rehab on the arm bike to get my tedious ten miles in.  It was not the high intensity training I was used to, but it was not giving up either.  Little by little I would work my way back, but seeing the process with all new eyes.  I learned to train smarter and began to see that the little things I did for myself mattered as much as the scale.  At this point, anyone who knows me will tell you I have now become a huge fan of the badass manicure and have been known to grab my 21 year old son and drive out of my way to Whole Foods just for a green juice, and to spend some time with a kid growing up way too fast.  

As angry as I was at that time for feeling I had lost it all, I can now see it was such a necessary part of my journey.  It taught me I had more than the black and white choice of over indulging with carbs on a bad day or obsessively exercising.  I can incorporate so many other things into being healthy, most of which have nothing to do with food or exercise.  So, yes, once again the plates are spinning, some of the original china had to be glued back together, and the sticks carefully repaired, and they may be spinning a tad slower than they were, but they are spinning, dare I say it, perhaps a little bit more graceful than they started out.  

As for me....have I completely reformed my obsessive ways?  To be honest, I am not sure that is possible entirely.  Not running every single day is a difficult choice, but I don't.  I have had to obsessively schedule my walking days just like I did my two a days in the beginning.  I do take the occasional active recovery day, but an actual recovery day of no exercise admittedly needs to be pushed upon me, and will likely cause some degree of anxiety.  However, I will do it.  Tomorrow is a recovery day for me, the first I have had in several weeks, or so I was gently reminded of by a friend.  I will make the conscious choice to spend one hour feeding my soul with amazing coffee in bed while olympics coverage before taking on a ten hour ER shift.

As to running my first 5k?  Yes, this happened too in the fall of 2016.  Well, if you count the Insane Inflatable 5k with my son, then yes.  My loyal blog readers will tell you I have now turned to Spartan Racing, but being able to do that first one without stopping with my loyal sidekick by my side after my recovery meant a whole lot.  Saturday, the day after my recovery day, I will host 50 others in a virtual 5k.  It will be my turn to watch my Team 1 DOS motivational clients take on this distance, some for the first time, some after years of being unhealthy.  I only hope that they learn from the journey as I have, that sometimes it takes an abrupt halt to the plan to see that sometimes our own short sighted plans are the thing that helps us to miss a much greater bigger picture.  The best is yet to come.

 

 

Travelling Blind

In 2005, I would find myself on a domestic flight from Moscow to Rostov on Don where we were set to adopt our third child.  As glamorous as it sounds, domestic flights in other countries, especially Russia, are not quite the same as domestic flights in the US.  As we boarded the plane in Moscow, we found ourselves on what appeared to be nothing less than the flashy Pan Am flights of the 70's.  There were curtains on the oval windows with mini curtain rods, and the flight attendants even seemed to be wearing the dated suits of the previous era.  However, it wasn't the 70's, it was 30 years later and in actuality one of the ceiling tiles of the plane would simply fall onto the floor prior to take off, exposing the oxygen masks, and the seat back would not hold causing a multi hour exercise in core strength trying not to land in the lap of the guy behind us. 

As the flight took off, I had several hours to think about what had led to this point.  Anyone who is a failure at fertility like I am, will tell you when you get to the place of an adoption, the desperation of a child to call your own comes before any amount of logic. Years of failed attempts and disappointments lead up to this point and you are just ready to have a child.  Any child.  Even more, you want them right now.  Two weeks before this flight, we had received a call from our coordinator.  She had asked how I felt about traveling blind.  This meant showing up in Russia on a certain date with no further information.  No referral ahead of time, no pictures or medical history, just show up and we will take you to an orphanage to meet a boy or girl under the age of three. The other option was to wait several months for an official referral.  To me, after years of waiting, two weeks sounded pretty  good.  So, here I was a couple hours into a flight on what appeared to be a broken plane to unknown parts of Russia, and suddenly a bit anxious about what I may have gotten myself into.

The landing did little to allay my fears. As the plane touched down, I saw no terminal.  No other planes other than a cargo plane in the distance.  It was a vast airfield with many runways, and as we hit the ground I would also notice there were bunkers.  Bunkers with artillery.  My anxiety went into full blown panic as I was suddenly struck with the fact that this was not an airport.  What the hell was this place? We were stopping.  Mid runway we were stopping.  The Pan Am like flight attendants spoke no English.  Wait.  Nobody around us spoke English.  The doors were opening, we were to deplane.  Deplane to what?  We were in the middle of a runway.  There were no buildings around. There was nobody to ask.  Even worse.  I had nobody to call.  Somehow none of the other passengers seemed concerned to be standing in the middle of a runway.  They would light their cigarettes and appear to share stories.  Even when the cargo plane that originally was in the distance, began barreling towards us on the same runway and the right wing would pass directly overhead, they appeared unconcerned and would continue their conversations.  I found myself repeatedly asking my husband,"where are we?  What are we going to do?"  He didn't know either.

Ultimately, two buses would pull up and people were divided into two groups.  The instructions they were giving were all in Russian. How do we choose a group?  Yuri.  That's all I could say over and  over.  Yuri is who we were told we were meeting.  Where is this guy?  He obviously was not on the airfield.  Now we were getting on a bus.  Would he know where we were?  Where were we going?  We ultimately chose a bus and got on. We would drive off the runway and through what ultimately  proved to be a Russian military base and out into the streets of Rostov on Don.  By then, I was nearly hyperventilating with fear.  Clearly traveling blind was a bad idea.  Suddenly, the bus would stop. We were in front of a random apartment building on a busy city street.  Everybody out.  Now I was really lost. Once we got off this bus we would be in the middle of a foreign city with no contacts.  My heart pounded out of my  chest as I came down the stairs until I became aware of a Russian man right there at the door of the bus.  He was looking right at me and laughing.  Flat out laughing.  I started to be offended until he spoke.  "Summers?"

It was Yuri.  My deer in the headlights look of panic had highly amused him.  The only  thing I could say in that moment was,"is it that obvious?"  Through his gales of laughter he admitted it was. Yuri would explain the airport was closed for renovation and they were redirecting flights to the military base.  He would take us to the hotel and have us wait by the phone for a couple hours until he could get our referral.  Ultimately he would call to explain our child was in Taganrog and we would go to the orphanage the next day.  He gave all details of the trip there, pick up times, driver's names and just as he was ready to hang up, I stopped him.  "Yuri?  What are we having?"

He answered with two simple words in a thick Russian accent,"Is boy."  I met that 13 month old boy the very  next day and as I type this, he is now 12 and hard at work playing Minecraft with a buddy on a lazy snow day not really able to grasp the crazy ride it took to get him home. He slipped into the family, a perfect fit, a unique child who continues to surprise me in so many ways each day, far beyond the baby I dreamed about for the years before he got here. 

Looking back, the notion of travelling blind to a foreign country where I didn't speak the language, and putting my simple faith in an adoption system that was tough to navigate, seems a bit crazy when you try to apply logic and reason.  However, It makes me wonder if this isn't the very thing we need to apply  to our own health and wellness.  I look at how many times I was absolutely desperate to be thin and healthy, yet I put that notion into a very small box.  My success was tied to one thing, the number on the scale.  I would pick out the commercial diet of the moment and say to myself,"this time I will try...."  The comment,"this time" indicating this was really more of a temporary path to the desperation fed quick fix, rather than a lifetime commitment.   

Unfortunately, my commitment to usual methods and a number on the scale held me back from seeing a much larger picture of what was truly possible if I was only open to the possibilities. In the beginning,  I was fortunate enough to have a trainer laugh at me just as Yuri had, through the many interchanges I had with him that started with "I can't"as I struggled to hang on to the old way while dreaming of something new.  Ultimately, he taught me the only one saying "can't" was me and that was a self imposed limit, not reality.   Racing was never something I had considered before now with my history of gym class failures, until yet another person, who seemed crazy, suggested a Spartan Race early on my journey, and encouraged me to not let loose of such a foreign idea along my path. As it turns out, he was right too.   I was way more capable than I ever imagined.

I also found I had to face the notion that all good things in my life to that point had been rewarded with food.  Fancy dinners for occasions or achievements, cake, a successful Thursday, yep.  It all required carbs.  I had to open myself up to the possibility that other rewards were out there.  I began scheduling a manicure or a massage every time I reached a small goal.   I now find these things matter just as much to my psyche as any number on the scale or my favorite pair of size 2 tall jeans.  I began to learn so many other things that seemed so foreign were so much more a part of my health and happiness than any number could be.  As I continue three years into this journey, I seem to find new things all the time to feed my soul and control my waistline that exist far beyond commercial diets or a treadmill.

So instead of doing what we have always done, and failing at attempts to see a number, maybe the better thing to do is to take our desperation for good health and travel blindly into a much larger journey into foreign concepts that live far beyond the scale that we originally held so dear.  Maybe it is time to look at bigger goals, with different methods led by people, who in our current state, do not seem to be speaking our language.  Although this seems terrifying at first, I would suggest it is the only way to find the lifelong perfect fit to what we have been missing all along.