Seven to Twenty-three

Of all the ailments of error my sorry excuse for a Christian-Science raised youngun self has experienced in my lifetime, I can honestly say I miss hyperthyroidism the most. Gawd, yes. In my teens  I slept a few hours an afternoon in the newspaper room up at school, a few hours at home, and ate at least four thousand calories a day while maintaining the figure of a praying mantis. That actually continued until college, when a bout with some unlimited Jersey milk brought on an extra fifteen pounds and the most enjoyed bout of anorexia any girl ever exercised her way into. I have a picture of myself at that time, thinking how fat I looked, and the wind blowing my hair was more substantial. Until my foot surgery two years ago, there's never really been a time that I couldn't just limit my portions and exercise off any extra weight, usually as an adjunct to the celebration surrounding the release of yet another significant other into the wild. Last summer changed that pretty dramatically. I'd been going to pain management, trying to keep plugging along at work, and the Lyrica she gave me for my horrendous foot pain gave me a sudden extra ten pounds on top of the eight I'd gained lying around with both feet in the air all winter and the ten I'd put on with feeding the boyfriend some fine-ass vittles. All of a sudden I was hugely fat, like at the pre-eclampsia delivery weight but without a baby, and then, boom. Colitis to cut me off at the knees.
Here is the thing. Diarrhea does not make you lose weight. Your metabolism changes and you store fat around the middle. Even at its worst, when I was unable to eat more than six hundred calories a day, I didn't lose much: I got down to 165, still ten or fifteen pounds too heavy for my frame, and the steroids put it all back on in two weeks.
Right before the trip to New York, I had another flare. The trip was, okay, horrible physically. I got back and showed my docs my bloated belly and how my hair came off in my hand; they shook their heads, again, and said, well, at least this time it wasn't caused by a CT. I had gained another 5 pounds right before the trip all in my belly and that is the most I have ever weighed. I could feel how the inflammation was making the guts all big in there, but I was not even going back on the steroids. Just back in the pool.
Right  around the time after I got back from New York, the weight started coming back off. My belly still hurts, the famous poop is still presenting itself at its usual intervals, but the weight is finally coming back off. Today it was seven pounds down. Now I have 23 to go; maybe if I can get the pressure off my guts they will stop punishing me all day, every day. My GI doc doesn't think so, he's never seen somebody get colitis from being fat, but he hasn't come up with anything better so far. Come on size 10 jeans size eight dresses, mama wants to not poop all morning and hurt all day long.