Simply Flabulous!

The one major advantage to lung disease was that I was able to keep my girlish figure. For most of my life, I have eaten whatever I want and whenever I want. I could out eat teenage boys. I paid no attention to exercise. My metabolism was always in high gear and I breathed off most of what I ate. My sisters hated me for it, though I would try to point out that there WERE downsides to chronic respiratory distress. I retained some weight after bearing the boy, but nothing too crazy. At the point of what I call the downturn in 2005 when my poor overwrought lungs decided to seriously malfunction and began to give out, I was about 118 pounds and probably at my perfect middle-age weight. The aftermath got ugly and I was too thin--scary looking, but before that, girth-wise at least, all was well.

When I walked out of Presbyterian Hospital after my lung transplant in 2007, I weighed 98 pounds. It was a beautiful start to a new life. An ability to breathe and a NEED to gain weight--does it get any better than that? But every party has a pooper and that's why we invited prednisone.

The doctors do warn you that prednisone makes you hungry. And I had some experience of prednisone tapers through the years, so I foolishly thought I knew what to expect. I had no idea. Hungry isn't the word for it. I was consumed by the need to throw food down my throat. A half-hour after a big meal, I'd be peckish again. You can stave off peckish and sometimes (rarely) I would, but it bloomed into starving lightning fast and my life lessons all told me to go ahead and feed it. Had I possessed ANY foresight whatsoever, I might have recognized a bad pattern and looked for better foods, but that wasn't my mindset. Entenmanns, Dunkin' Donuts, Dairy Queen, in short, sugar--became my addiction. An addiction, admittedly I probably always had, but one that had never been pharmaceutically encouraged before.

Of course, I realized the error of my ways far too late. Now I weigh more than I did when I was carrying the boy and look and feel pretty bad. I actually wondered and embarrassingly asked to doctors to check if I had a large tumor or something that could account for my belly. My whole identity as a thin (albeit never particularly fit) person is trashed. I am physically uncomfortable. I buy the wrong clothes and look bad in them. Things I used to love--clothes shopping, eating out, chocolate, even taking a nice bath--are now disturbing events that I avoid. I have to accept the fact that the only way I am ever going to turn heads again is if I wear horizontal stripes or forget my spanx.

Before you get down on me, like everybody does when I express any of this, let me state that I DO have a perspective. I am immeasurably thankful to be alive. The prednisone dose is low now, so I have achieved a stable if yet unacceptable level of heft. I am attempting exercise, though it forces me to enter the arena of labored breathing which, as you might imagine, is somewhat fraught for me. And as they cheerfully inform me at the lung transplant center, my BMI indicates that I am not yet considered obese. How fab.

Now I've entered the world many people have always inhabited. I bargain with myself over everything I eat. I've joined a gym and actually go sometimes. I've declared war on my old friend sugar and am making peace with my new chins. I'm attempting to embrace vegetables. I think I'm on the right track now, but there isn't a lot of hope for results. That is not being negative, but realistic. The doctor at Presbyterian who administers the yearly pulmonary stress test told me last year that if you wanted to sabotage another country's Olympic team, the best way is to give them the drugs I take every day. In other words, I'd have to become obsessed with exercise to overcome the chemicals I put into my body just to stay alive. The mayor thought it was wrong of him to tell me that, but I was grateful. It made the fact that I don't get very far with body modification less of a personal failure and more of an inevitability. And I think I have a good read on where inevitability becomes an excuse and personal failure takes over. That's where the hope comes in!