Silver Linings

Update: This post accidentally published itself before I was finished with it so, sorry for the duplicates in your feed reader.

I'm sure that my mother would have preferred not having a stroke, and I would definitely have preferred a different way but, as it turns out, participating in my mother's recovery has caused me to lose a great deal of unwanted weight. In fact, it's been tailor made for me.

When she first had the stroke, I was at my heaviest and needed to burn up a lot of calories to make a noticeable difference. Since she was pretty much dead weight on her right side, I was expending a lot of energy helping her to move around. Now that I've lost quite a lot of weight, I don't need to be quite so active...and I'm not. Because my mother is doing so much for herself now, I'm not needing to do nearly as much.

But I've still got a good 15 pounds left, at least, that I'd like to drop. And I do still have to do a lot of bending, lifting and supporting. So I'm hoping several more will be gone by the time she leaves in a month.

On the same topic, I hate the floors in the house we're renting. They are like dirt magnets and I have to deep clean them almost every day by going over them at least 2 or 3 times. And that is a very sweaty workout. So, more burning of calories.

And this one seems like it should be filed under the Mysterious Ways category. My mother went into the hospital today for a fairly routine outpatient procedure but, due to a snafu on the doctor's office's part, she couldn't have it done today. So we rescheduled for next week and then went upstairs to see my nephew, who was supposed to have been discharged yesterday but was waiting on bureaucracy. This was a very good thing, because she had been very worried about him since hearing he had pneumonia, and it helped a lot for her to see him looking so good.

So, major problems to minor inconveniences, it seems like we've been fortunate in our difficulties. There area worse things.