Trying to remember to breathe

This has been kind of a crappy week for me, health-wise. I made my big commitment to exercise and healthy eating, and I’ve been doing fine with that. But first, on Monday, I got the news that I have high cholesterol, which I found pretty upsetting. My inner perfectionist is NOT happy. Letting myself get so overweight that my cholesterol gets out of control is definitely against her rules. As I obsessively googled the phrase “high triglycerides”, I discovered that one of the things that can drive up your triglycerides is having high blood sugar, and as we all know, my blood sugar has been acting up. So I called my RE’s office to see if they had gotten the results from my fasting blood sugar retest. Which they got today, and now we’ve gone from “I don’t think you’ve got diabetes” to “you need to go get evaluated for diabetes.”

And that’s the straw that completely freaked me out. Bad enough to have high cholesterol, but diabetes? Isn’t that reserved for the truly obese? Has gaining five pounds (admittedly on top of the extra weight I was already carrying) put me into the realm of being obese? Now, my dad and my grandma both have/had diabetes, so I suppose there could be a genetic factor at work, but this is all so wrong. This is not the way my life is supposed to be.

It also just so happens that I have particularly emotional PMS right now, which is unusual for me and certainly isn’t helping. I would describe my state on Monday as “trainwreck” yesterday, more like “bitchy” and today, I guess, “wobbly.” There is a clerk at Borders who is damn lucky that I have some self control. I had this birthday coupon, see, that expires tomorrow. But when I got up to the register and handed it over, the guy behind the counter said “this isn’t good until tomorrow” all superior-like. And when I protested, ever so mildly, by pointing at the expiration date and saying “no, it’s valid through 3/23, not starting 3/23,” he had the nerve to say “there’s no need to be rude.” I actually said “that wasn’t rude.” I thought “correcting your idiotic mistake isn’t rude” but I didn’t say it. That would have been rude.

So in between not annihilating self-important (and just plain wrong) Borders clerks and trying to focus and get some work done, I’ve been a complete mess. The notion of having a serious medical condition never occurred to me. Now, after two and three quarters years of being focused on getting pregnant, I think I’m going to have to reprioritize. To figure out what is going on with my body, and work to get it in better shape. It’s quite a mental shift. In the end, I’m working hard to convince myself that really, I’ve just got more motivation to do what I was going to do already anyway. And trying to remember to breathe.