Weekly update, 1/27/09

Well, I'm back! My mom is still at the hospital. While her surgery was successful, she is still not quite stable enough to go home, although we considered her stable enough for me to come home. We thought she *might* get to go home yesterday, but she had a rough night on Sunday night and all day yesterday (extreme nausea, not eating) and so she's still there. I'm now second guessing whether I came home too early.

One thing I found really interesting, from my perspective as someone with diabetes: doctors at her hospital follow very strict blood glucose management guidelines. Surgery puts stress on the body, which in turn tends to elevate blood glucose levels; however, they have found that having blood glucose levels at normal levels promotes healing. Her doctor's range is 70-125, and even in the intensive care unit, the nurses did blood glucose checks and administered insulin regularly to keep her in that range, and now that she's out of there, they have her on a diabetes-specific menu and still monitor several times a day.

Oh, but it's good to be home. "I don't know how single parents DO it!" exclaimed Mr. Handsome-and-Handy, even though he is the at-home parent/home manager and has excelled at the job for the past 3 years. (But I know what he meant; I was in a similar role when his dad passed away a couple of years ago, and it is harder to be "on duty" 24x7.) I played with Things 1&2, and unpacked, and tried to feel settled back in. Later--probably more to put off bedtime than to impress a recently-returned Mom--they started cleaning up their rooms. I walked into Thing 1's room as he was making the bed, and I got shooed out, as he wanted it to be a surprise. "Can't a 7-year-old man get a little privacy?" he growled.

Some observations:
- I find it easier to keep to an eating plan than to an exercise plan during times of upheaval. Does anyone have any tips for improving this?
- I felt tired and sad at times during the trip, and it was *hard* to feel like exercising. But when I did get moving, it helped ease that achy feeling inside.
- I'm still finding it hard to keep exercising sometimes, even when I *know* it will make me feel better. I did my run today, but I didn't feel like it before or at all during. I was nearly a minute slower than my slowest time on my usual run...I just didn't feel like pushing for a better time today, but I felt a little discouraged all the same. "Well, when did you last run?" asked the Mr. "Well, there was Santa Barbara...just about a week ago...before that...wow, the previous Friday? No wonder!" I had done other exercise, but yep, not much running going on during the past couple of weeks. I've got a race in a few weeks; presuming things stay stable, gotta get back to hitting the running goals.

Monthly Measure:
Bust: -.5" past month (-9" total) <-See? My findings are holding up nicely...
Waist: -1.5" past month (-7.5" total)
Hips: -1" past month (-7.5" total)
Thighs: +.5" past month? go figure! (-2" total)

Progress last week:
7-day blood glucose average: 100 (met goal of <120)
7-day fasting: 98 average, all days <120 (met goal of <120 every day)
Weight goal: Same weight as last week (met goal of maintain or lose)
Food goals: Consumed 6 meatless, low-fat meals and 3 fish meals. (met goals of 4/2 respectively)
Exercise goals: Exercised 4/5 days, and not all were 30 minutes of cardio. Wednesday was a 45-minute run; Thursday was 45 minutes' of exercise DVDs; Saturday was 15 minutes of dance exercise DVD and 10 minutes each of arm toning and abdominal exercise DVDs (and this was after I had nearly convinced myself to not do anything, so I'll take it...I think the only thing that convinced me was that I'd have felt really silly dragging my weights on my trip with me and never using them); Monday was a 30-minute walk at lunch. I fit in some "extras" here and there that I'm not counting, such as taking the stairs in the hospital when possible and pacing while talking on the phone with relatives...did a fair bit of that, so as to save my mom and step-dad the trouble of having to update everyone. (Didn't meet my usual goals, but will call it "good enough" for an out-of-the-ordinary week.)
Misc. goals: Got adequate sleep overall, although there were a couple of nights when I didn't get 7 hours of sleep.

Goals for this week:
7-day blood glucose average goal and fasting numbers: below 120.
Weight goal: Maintain or lose.
Food goals: 4 or more meatless, low-fat meals and 2 or more fish meals.
Exercise goals: At least 30 minutes of cardio 5 days plus 2 days of arms & abs strength training workouts; do at least 3 runs, weather permitting (Weather-permitting=not raining and temperature over 40 degrees). Back to Body Pump class this week; yeay!
Misc. goals: 7 or more hours sleep/night.