Heavy. Heavy, What Hangs Over?

Alright, I'm going to delve where maybe I shouldn't go. Some may think I have a lot of nerve spouting off about folks who are way too fat. After all, what right do I have, being a person of normal weight, to complain about the obese?

Bariatrics is a branch of medicine that deals with the control and treatment of obesity and allied diseases. I won't even bother to address why obesity and chronic illness are married to each other. This is insight into the obvious. Okay, I'll bother a little a bit: Obesity and overweight pose a major risk for serious diet-related chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and certain forms of cancer. The health consequences range from increased risk of premature death, to serious chronic conditions that reduce the overall quality of life.

I know that life is hard when you’re fat. Getting out of bed is hard. Standing up is hard.(This where I come in when you're in hospital). Bending over to tie your shoes, taking the trash to the curb, shaving your legs, having sex, getting in and out of your car is all significantly more difficult when you’re fat. Wiping your ass may not be possible. (I come in here too.) If you’re not a naturally lazy person, being fat will make you lazy as every gesture, every action, every bit of movement will tire you out that much quicker.


Recently, I was dismayed by the following ad:
"Please see our large selection of bariatric hospital beds below. We have capacities ranging from 600 pounds to 1000 pounds in our bariatric adjustable beds."

I don't want my patients to weigh this much. I lift these people every day at hospital. We simply don't have enough staff to do it. A healthy nurse can lift 100lbs. A nurse who is pregnant or on lifting restrictions can not lift at all. That often leaves me and and a nurse tech trying to move people who have become cubic tonnage. It isn't safe or possible. We don't have the funding for these groovy bariatric beds in Espanola.( Hell, I'm still trying to get enough bandage supplies to make it through a shift!)

Although my perspective flies in the face of those from the fat acceptance movement I'm annoyed that the expectation is that because I'm a nurse it is my job to find the penises of those patients who can't find them either! I have to move, get out of bed, and ambulate people who have only managed to hoist a fork for the past half century.

Some fat folks flinch at the thought of me using an assistive device like a Hoyer lift to move them. One woman said: "What's the matter with you?" I would have reflected the comment back to her, but I didn't have a big enough mirror.

turning points or things we don't talk about

I learned from an early age that no one really wants to hear the truth or have me speak it. For years, I felt like the child in the Emperor's New Clothes trying to tell people that the king was naked and being shushed for my efforts.

I was sexually abused by my mother's sister from age six until I was able to thwart her at around age thirteen. I confided in my mother and sought protection from her. She refused to believe me, and accused me of wanting to destroy our family. The abuse continued. I found it hard to forgive my mother. (A psychiatrist who should have known better.) She died during the summer of 1971; and something in me shifted in such a way that I would no longer accept my role as the slated victim of my aunt's desires. I rose up and found myself and the courage to tell her that she would never touch me again.

My father, whose well being I accepted as my responsibility, was mentally unstable. He became even more so after my mother's death. I was the "hero" in the family. I literally filled my mother's shoes. I cooked, cleaned, and became my father's intellectual companion. Eventually I became his Friday night date, his choice for dinner, drinks, and discussion.

One evening when he came home from work he greeted me with a french kiss. His probing tongue changed everything for me. I knew I couldn't stay there. That I could not make the ultimate sacrifice for my father's happiness. And that if I did continue to live with him, I probably would feel compelled to do so.

For me the trick was to find a way to spare him humiliation, to help him save face and avoid public scandal. I was already attending college at 16. I was bright ( A Who's Who Among American High School Student's) and told him I wanted to live off campus and attend university full time. I pushed to have this happen. This seemed like a plausible excuse. Everyone almost bought it. But we all knew we were naked under our garments: that the truth looked really different. It hung in the air like stagnant smoke.

I get so weary in this life of having to cover everything up, sanitize it , make it clean and acceptable for others. After my father's death (I was barely 21) I tried to speak to his brother about the complexity of my relationship with my dad. When my uncle began to figure out what I was trying to say he also shushed me. "We don't speak ill of the dead." I was corrected and silenced.

Incest, is rarely talked about. I have often worn the coat of incestuous shame, and currently am thankful to be fairly free of it. I want to believe that in telling my naked truth I can be liberated. But more than that, I want to believe that by telling my own truth, I become more whole, more genuine, more myself.

addiction - Down in Valley

I won't pretend that I'm fascinated by my work with junkies and alcoholics. It's part of my job as a nurse and I'm called upon to work with those in the struggle on a weekly basis. Here in the Pojoaque/Espanola Valley drinking and drugging starts early, elementary school children start smoking and drinking as a means to cope with family and school pressure and at times a pervasive despair that colors everything. It's not uncommon to find teenage alcoholics and heroin addicts, equally prevalent are senior citizens overdosing on prescription painkillers. (What I consider the new face of drug addiction)

Cheap black-tar heroin poured into the Espanola Valley from the Mexican state of Sinaloa in the years following World War II. The heroin epidemic has become an inter-generational problem, with children often following the example set by addicted parents rather than steering clear of the misery to which they've been exposed. Addiction almost always begins with a traumatized childhood. Life is difficult and impossible to face, punctuated with violence, poverty and dependence. So one strategy is to be out of yourself. Addiction is the road that takes my patients into failure over and over again.

While heroin sullies the Espanola community in unwelcome media attention,(Espanola is the black tar heroin capital of the USA), crack cocaine, crystal meth, and prescription painkillers have also made major inroads among young drug users. Forty years ago addicts gradually developed their addictions over decades, young people today are taking heroin in higher quantities, and in deadly combination with prescription drugs such as Oxycontin and Lortab.

Additionally, drug addiction is a family thing. Families that get high together get by together.In other cases the addiction of family members brings great shame and paralysis of other members to say anything about it. Family relationships are the web of familiarity that enforces the code of silence. Family ties are strong in Northern New Mexico. If you talk, you risk incriminating a niece or a cousin. Or one of your family members might be harmed in retaliation for your candor. The scandal that someone in your family is mixed up in drugs also reinforces the silence. Parents often state they can't understand how the addiction has happened, and they don't know how to help the son or brother who is caught in the trap of addiction. So it's easier pretend it's not happening.

That's until they come to me. Though denial has a stronghold even in the hospital, it tends to lose its grip rather rapidly there. A few eventually find their way out of addiction's labyrinth and into lives of sobriety, but every year those I zip into body bags get younger and younger. Last summer I sent someone home on pass to have a birthday party so they could come back and die in hospital at age 30.

As my zen nurse friend says: "Better luck next lifetime."

Unconditional Love

This afternoon, I finished Kathryn Harrison's memoir (The Kiss ), of her incestuous relationship with her father. I share with Kathryn the weighted mantle of incest, the problems of family complicity, and ultimately the quest for the self separate from what ensnares and defines us through sorrow and shame. I intend to speak to the topic of incest in future posts, but now I would rather examine unconditional vs conditional love; sparked by the following quote from The Kiss.

We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents,
but i think it is more the gift our children give us.
It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.

So few children are loved unconditionally. Giving or withholding acceptance based on another person's behavior is the essence of conditional love, and nearly all of us were loved that way as children. Conditional love is "I like how you make me feel." Conditional love is what people give to us when we do what they want, and it's the only kind of love that most of us have ever known. People have liked us more when we made them feel good, or at least when we did nothing to inconvenience them. In other words, we have to buy conditional love from the people around us.

Although it is given unintentionally, conditional acceptance has an unspeakably disastrous effect, because it fails to form the bonds of human connection created by unconditional love. As a result, no matter how much conditional love we receive, we often feel empty, alone, and miserable. And although we like to believe otherwise, because we have received conditional love from others all our lives, that's what we tend to give to those around us. We naturally pass on what we were given.

We like to believe we're unconditionally loving, but in many cases we're not. We prove that each time we're disappointed or irritated with another person. We like to think we unconditionally love our spouse or children, but then we become annoyed when they don't do what we want, or when they're not grateful for the things we do for them.

Kathryn Harrison speaks to the child as being able to love unconditionally. But this may not be the case. I think children are able to love more freely and with fewer contaminates and prohibitions than adults manifest. But by their very nature children are narcissistic and rarely capable of stating "I care how you feel," the hallmark of unconditional love.

Additionally Harrison refers to children as loving their parents helplessly. Though it is possible that children love helplessly, it is unlikely. Perhaps if children knew better they wouldn't love in such an unconditional way.

And it is the right and privilege of the parent to love their child(ren) in the most real way possible and that is with unconditional love. In contrast to Kathryn's experience, I found redemptive relief when Iwas able to love my son unconditionally. I so doing I discovered that that I wasn't crippled by my past and that Iwas capable of giving what hadn't been bestowed on me.......