The Elephant In The Room

This may come as a bit of a suprise but I don’t like talking about my weight.  I know I’m overweight.  I don’t need to be told this.  It’s quite obvious.  I don’t need a dietician to come in and tell me I need to eat well.  I don’t need a doctor to come in EVERY week and tell me I need to lose weight.  It’s impossible to halve my size overnight.  It’s impossible to halve my size on hospital food.  What good is a dietician telling me that I should have my 5 a day and choose brown rice and pasta when the hospitals I’ve been living in don’t offer them?

I understood the need to have a weight.  They had to ensure that the equipment they were ordering was suitable.  What I didn’t understand was why this had to be checked every few weeks.  It was not an enjoyable experience for me or the staff.  They were following orders, doing as told.  But it really pissed me off and they knew it.  They’d wheel in the contraption of a chair, hoist me into it and then wheel me into the ward to be weighed only to then be hoisted back into bed and be told I’d lost or gained a few kilos.  It was soul destroying . 

Through this whole process I’ve had to come up with a number of goals.  It’s been my way or coping and rationalising things.  There are long term and short term goals.  The short terms ones were obvious.  Get to rehab.  Finish rehab.  Get home. Get back to work.  Get my life back.  Some of these goals have been completed.  Some of these short term goals have turned into long term ones.  Weight was never/could never be a short term goal.  I tried to explain this to the dietician and the doctor.  I don’t think they ever understood what I was trying to say.  We’d go round in circles covering the same subjects over and over again.  After some months the dietician stopped coming to see me and the doctor stopped mentioning the obvious.  Either the message finally got through (with, I think some prompting from my physio) or they were sick of banging their heads against a brick wall.

By the time I was leaving hospital I’d put on weight.  It was obvious, I’d even mentioned it at one point to the doctor and she’d been kind enough to try and play it down and ask if I was sure I'd put it on and not just found that my body shape was changing as I was sitting more.  I did have to chuckle at this.  She knew I’d put it on.  I’d put it on as it had gotten to the point that I couldn’t eat hospital food anymore.  I’d eaten it for more than a year and was sick to the back teeth of it.  I was ordering takeaways or going out for meals to local restaurants.  I wasn’t worried because I knew that once home I’d be in control of what I was eating.  Losing weight was never a short term goal and now that I’m home I think I’m doing ok.