Miss Magpie's musings

This is not the next post I was planning to write, that will follow shortly full of the usual photo’s and silliness I promise. It’s just I have all this going round in my head and decided to put it on paper so to speak. 

The end of last week I went to visit a friend in Rehab and not the sort of rehab that immediately springs to mind!

On the very same day that I had posted on Twitter ‘How can anyone be this tired and still be awake/alive’ as it turns out. Now the reason I was so damn tired was because I have been going to bed way too late, not getting any exercise at all, and eating crap. Same old same old.

My friend on the other hand is currently in a rehabilitation centre or ‘Enablement centre’ as they are now called for the foreseeable future because she caught something called Guillain–Barré Syndrome. She had a nasty cold that didn’t want to go away and then woke up to find she couldn’t move her legs. I can’t even begin to imagine how terrifying that must have been. She was rushed to hospital and there the paralysis spread throughout her whole body over the course of the day. When I saw her 3 weeks later, she was in a wheelchair with movement coming back to her arms and face but hardly any in her legs. In fact after 2 hours she couldn’t sit in the wheelchair any longer because it was too much effort to even sit up.

Now that gave me things to ponder over as I walked home:

a, Taking my general good health for granted.

b,The fact that I don’t look after myself better, in fact on the whole I actually abuse my system instead.

I know I need to lose weight. I have gone on about it  for a LONG while now but have I actually done anything about it? Have I bollocks! I am the lazy queen of excuses. I sit on my lardy arse in front of the TV eating, and thinking tomorrow/next week I shall start to eat better and exercise. I go to bed much too late and again every week I think this week I shall go to bed earlier but I never do, so yes I am bloody tired and 2 stone overweight but it’s my own fault.

On Saturday I got home to find my American friend Jennifer’s Mum had died. I have known and  loved her Mum for over 20 years. She used to greet me with the words ‘Here she is, my second daughter’ when I went to visit and give me a huge bear hug. She was a wonderful woman and she will be sorely missed. This dreadful sad news was not entirely unexpected though, for she was chronically & morbidly obese. This caused ulcerated legs that wouldn’t heal, made any kind of activity a painful exhausting effort and lead to 2 massive heart attacks and emergency heart bypass surgery. 

 Here was an otherwise ordinary woman who abused her body to the point that it gave out on her. In her case she suffered from chronic depression which was never treated because she couldn't afford the right medical insurance (good old U.S healthcare system) and eating became everything to her. She once said after being pleaded with to think of her health and the family she might leave behind, 

‘Don’t ask me to stop eating, it’s the only thing that makes me happy.’ How desperately heartbreaking. 

Whenever I see  people like that, be it on one of those shock value TV shows or out in the street. I think ‘how they can do that to themselves?, 'how they can let go so far?’ or ‘I would never let that happen to me’ but is that really so? Am I really so far away from it as I think I am? I have been steadily gaining weight for years now, I am lazy, I make all the same excuses. When do you get to the point where enough is enough? I also do take my body for granted. It gets me too and from work every day and where ever I might want to go at the weekend and I have never really thought beyond that. So no I don’t really look after it as I should. I love to eat and drink things that are bad for me and I don’t like to exercise, who’s to say I might not get to that point where I too just give up on any pretence of getting fit and slim and then it could be the case that my body just might give up on me too. 

Serious food for thought.