STRESS, HEALTH, AND WEIGHT LOSS

I haven't been walking for months. I have lost a lot of weight, but not in a good way. I get this intestinal condition out of the blue, and this time it hit me when I was in Madison, WI after dinner on April 19, 2007 - diarrhea. This isn't particularly good because when I get this, it becomes chronic and takes months to clear up. It's inconvenient and really curtails my activiities because I have to be near a bathroom after I eat, it can even hit sometimes hours after I eat. And when the urge hits, I have to run immediately, which isn't always possible when I'm not at home. So big time annoyance. It came and went for a while, but then just stayed.

It's now June 10 and I still have it. I've been to the doctor twice and he put me on some medicines, but sometimes the medicine causes my system to go overboard the other way and I end up with extremely painful intestinal cramping and that's worse than the diarrhea because I actually have to stay in bed for days before that goes away.
But the good news is that I've lost 12 lbs., almost 13, but of course I haven't been eating much of anything for weeks - and when I do, I end up with painful gas, diarrhea, bloating and really bad stuff, even with the medicines. I now weigh 134 lbs, down from 147. This is significant because I weighed 152 lbs in May 2006. I lost 19 lbs by September 2006 and weighed 133 lbs, but we went to Florida, New Orelans and a few other places over the next six months, and I gained 14 lbs back by the time Dick and Maryanna left after our trip to Charleston in April 2007 and weighed 147 lbs. So that's the yo-yo history. I know it isn't healthy and I always claim to do something about it, but I've being yo-yo-ing like this for 45 years now.

And I have had other things on my mind. There's been a family issue that has been bothering me for the past couple of years, but it kind of hit the fan last month and it's been such a concern that I'm having a hard time sleeping and thinking of much of anything else. We've enjoyed a family life that has been relatively free of drama and I've always wanted it that way. Once we retired in 2001 I decided we didn't need any more stress in our lives and since our jobs were a thing of the past, the only thing we had to worry about was having enough money to last until we died and minor things that might happen around the house. But, no, we couldn't be lucky enough for that.

Right after we retired, my mother had issues that required us to move her and then care for her until she passed away in 2003. Talk about constant stress - that was it for three years! Then 9/11 and we lost $200,000 in the stock market crash. Then one of our sons and wife got pregnant and the twin girls came 11 weeks early and Lauren weighed only 1.13 lbs and talk about worry - WOW! And just to make things more interesting at the time, we were in Paris, France on a 28-day European trip when they were born. We made an unscheduled stop-over in Chicago to visit them and Lauren especially was so tiny it was heartbreaking to look at her. Justine only weighed 2.9 lbs., so she was almost as fragile as Lauren. So stress? You bet. The babies are pictured here at two years old now with Justine on the left and Lauren on the right.
But then I started staying with our son and his new family to help out and began developing some worries that have never gone away. The whole thing came out in the open a month or so ago, but not in a good way. So I am thinking of nothing else right now and am upset. More stress? Yep, and there goes my thoughts of a stress-free retirement!