Good Morning

I was starting to get a little worried/anxious/depressed about the fact that for the last three weeks, I've been losing the same 5 pounds over and over and... well, you get the idea.  Part of it was the holiday - I stayed vegan, but may have played a little fast and loose with the "low fat" part of it - but even on days when I stuck to the straight and (very) narrow, I still kept bouncing back and forth between 430 and 435.  This morning, however, I finally reached the promised land of the sub-430 (428, to be precise.)

I'm conflicted as hell about this weight loss.  I know it's a necessary thing - I've got to get Hank out of here (for those of you who never read my other blog, Hank is formally known as Henry the VIII, the Tudor tumor.  He's my uterine leiomyosarcoma - I was diagnosed last April with what is currently an inoperable rare cancer.  Unfortunately, it's rare enough that it's an orphan cancer with a really lousy survival rate even if they could do a hysterectomy, which at my BMI is not a possibility.  Fortunately, it's the myxoid variant, which is a slow-growing but aggressive version.  So, I'm in a race to lose the weight so that I can get a hysterectomy before Hank starts spreading - I've lost 139 lbs so far, and have about 100 to go.  End of parenthetical explanation.)  So, yeah - have to do this, am doing it, will continue to do it.

But... there's this Spider Robinson quote - "... in our society, big, lush women and small slight men go through life wrapped around a softball-sized chunk of pain.  Some it destroys, others it makes magnificent."  I've spent my adult life refusing to accept that I am less of a human being than any woman a quarter my size, despite a metabolism that was obviously developed to laugh off famines.  I've worked to make myself essential to my office, so that I don't need to worry about weight discrimination in the workplace.  I've found a good man who loves me for who I am, not what I look like.  Hell, I've even scoped out which restaurants have chairs without arms and learned to deal with arcane airline rules.  Losing weight feels a little like giving in... like turning my back on the fight for fat equality.  Not that I'm trying to get all revolutionary (except when I make the mistake of reading comments on any article that mentions weight in any capacity whatsoever.   The trolls that come out there definitely make me long for a pitchfork) but I do feel like I'm letting the side down, some.

On the other, other hand, I'm feeling a certain amount of pride with every pound that drops.  I'm working for this weight loss (god, do I miss cheese), and it feels like a bit of a "take that" to my gynocological oncologist - I'm pretty certain that she didn't have a clue that I would actually be able to do this.  It was very much a "come back once you cut down the tallest tree in the forest with a herring" kind of feel. So... for that alone, it's worth it.  Anything I can do to disprove the medical establishment is a positive.  (Although, I have to say that the rest of my medical team have been nothing but encouraging.  It's been great to know that I'll walk in and not have their first words be "you know you have to lose weight, don't you?")