Upde Designs

Happy Friday  ~  231

Actually yesterday was Friday for me as I am on an 8 day vacation (staycation) and do not return to work until next Friday.  🙂

These last few days have been amazing.  First and foremost is the love and support of my family, especially my best friend and soul mate Jeanne.  She has always been there to support and cheer me on even when she probably knew that I shouldn’t be doing that.  She has always believed in me and I honestly thank God every single day for her.

Next my dear friends some of whom I’ve known most of my life and thanks to Facebook I have been able to reconnect to them.  What a joy that has been these last couple of years to reconnect with the people who really truly know me “warts” and all and still call me friend.  I am truly blessed.

One of my lifelong dear friends, Melinda wrote me an email and I won’t share the whole email but there is one sentence that I found salient.

“When I think how many people read your blog, I can’t help but think you may help others along the way. Still, this isn’t easy, I know, but many of us will be keeping you in our prayers & wishing you well! You can do this, my friend!”

I have to tell you that meant a lot to me and as the day wore on yesterday I felt compelled to express my feelings about this challenge I am facing.  I truly do look at it as a blessing.  I was 65 pounds over weight, low on energy, self-esteem, tired all the time, and the worst thing was I didn’t have a clear vision of the future, at least not a positive one.

Then last Friday the voice on the other end of the phone said, “You have diabetes.”  There was no empathy in her voice, no concern, no emotion what-so-ever.  Not her fault, she probably has to deliver messages like that several times a day.  But when she hung up her voice reverberated in my mind.    I got up and closed the door to my office and sat there looking at the two pictures I have on my desk of Angie and Mark.  They are the greatest gift God could give me.  Then I started thinking about what this meant.  I could only at first see the negatives.  Crap, no wine, no drinks, no pasta, no bread, what the hell, all the things I like are now off limit.   What’s the point?

A little time passed and then I started (thankfully) thinking rationally again.  There is a story and I probably won’t get it right but it goes something like this.  If you put a frog in a skillet and slowly increase the temperature under the skillet the frog will eventually die from the heat.  I was headed on a path of self-destruction.  I had been on diets so many times in my life and lost so much weight before only to put it right back on.  I think I actually figured that I had lost (conservatively) over 800 pounds over my adult life.  I have also gained over 800 pounds over my adult life.  I had become cynical thinking, I now weigh exactly what I did when I graduated high school almost to the pound.   So what’s the point of losing weight again and exercising.

Little by little it sneaks up on you and you actually begin to accept where you are in life.  Like the commercial says “A body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion.  I had become so accustomed to carrying around all that weight and being tired all the time and having zero energy that it actually became the norm.  I ate what ever I wanted and sat in a chair all day and most of the evening and my weight didn’t vary more than + or – 5 pounds.  That became the heat that I could tolerate and I didn’t realize the heat was continuing to go up.

One of the “great” benefits of the disease was that I lost 30 pounds over a period of several months.  I was unaware of it because I had adopted the mindset of not weighing myself.  I noticed at first my watch band was lose and then I finally got to the last hole in my belt buckle.  Okay, now it’s time to weigh myself.   That is when Jeanne, Angie, and Ben said, call your doctor.  🙂

Well now I have no choice but to start eating good and to exercise.  That is the mindset that I left the office with Friday.  Sunday I started taking the medication and Jeanne and I both changed our eating habits.  I slept most of Sunday and most of Monday (I took a sick day.)  Tuesday I woke up feeling okay but a little wobbly.  As the day wore on and I became more engaged in my work I started feeling good.  I haven’t felt good in recent memory.  In fact the longer the day went the better I felt.

Wednesday was absolutely amazing.  I cannot honestly remember feeling as good as I did Wednesday.    Yesterday, the same thing.  I cut the grass, did a bike ride (yes I finally got the bike out of the storage room and up to the garage.  I only got 5 miles in and some of the little hills I use to take without even touching the gears I struggled with but I did remembered how much I love riding a bike.  🙂

So all of this rambling comes down to a couple of things.  I have been faced with a challenge.  How I deal with it will determine the outcome, not the challenge itself.  It is the principle of the 90 / 10.  10% of what life deals us we have no control over, it’s the other 90% including our attitude that will determine the outcome.

I will be better off in the long run because of this disease than I would have been without it.

Thanks for listening.  From time to time I will talk about the events of living with diabetes but I assure you it will not dominate this blog. My blog is predominately about two things.  My PASSION for photography and what ever is on my mind at the time that happens to spill out.  That’s it.  🙂

Now about the images:  First one is of the Decker Hotel in Maquoketa.  Jeanne and I went there last night for dinner as part of our excursion plans for our stay at home vacation, (that and I had a couple of Phantom parts at the office that were delivered yesterday.)   🙂

The next image requires no comment other than to say that I shot this handheld in the Decker House at 24,000 ISO and I was amazed how little noise there really was.  That last image is of the sunset Jeanne and I saw on our way home. It was way more spectacular at one point but nowhere to pull over and photograph it.

Okay, that’s it for today.  Thank you for supporting the blog.  Enjoy this beautiful Friday and be careful.