A test of character

As we confront ourselves each day in the mirror we begin the daily testing of the character that we are, and what we hope to be. It is not a simple matter of doing something. It is the matter of doing the right thing. The reasons we give ourselves tests our honesty and personal integrity; and above all else we have to be honest with ourselves. Every day we pick the path we will walk that day. Sometimes it is the same path we were on yesterday and the day before; sometimes it is a new path with unknown pitfalls, hazards and potential rewards. Do the satisfactions from walking the same path you have been on still make your life a good one? Or is truly time for a change?


When I decided to have my weight loss surgery in 2006, I had been involved with the process for 24 years with my first wife, and truly understood the limits that would be placed upon me after my surgery. There were many elements that had to be considered. The most important was my overall health and its attendant risk factors. At 300 pounds on a 5’9” frame I was entirely too heavy. I was on daily insulin support (four injections daily), and I was hypertensive and could not effectively bring my blood pressure down. I had a family history of high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. My father died of a heart attack, significantly influenced by his diabetes. My mother died from a sudden heart attack at the age of 83, when she developed congestive heart failure. Many of my siblings were overweight, and were experiencing many of the same medical issues faced by our parents.

So the primary reason I had the weight loss surgery was to gain some semblance of control over my health, my life and to some degree in my own longevity. It retrospect it was a good decision. I have lost the weight I needed. I have eliminated the diabetes that scared me so with its long term prognoses of neuropathy, blindness, circulation problems, and cardiac risks. But my blood pressure was still higher than I wanted it to be. I was still taking medications for control, and while they were at lower dosages, they were apparently still needed. In 2006 I had a heart attack and double bypass surgery and in general, my heart was in pretty good shape. There is always a bit of paranoia about the artificially altered circulation in your heart after bypass surgery. You want the bypasses to last forever and most of the time they do. But the paranoia still is there.

Last summer I started having some tightness in my chest when I carried heavy loads to and from the houses where we catered meals in Italy. The tightness went away quickly but it did cause me some concern. It was not constant and didn’t always occur when I worked; but it did occur often enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck and start that paranoia again. After leaving Italy, and returning to California (and being eligible for Medicare) I decided to have a stress test to see if the bypasses were still okay and functioning. So on my 65th birthday I went in for that test. They injected, probed, prodded, and I walked faster and faster. Then I felt that twinge of pain and tightness again. But it was apparently not the bypasses, it was something new.

Tomorrow I will go into the hospital for a cardiac catheterization with three possible outcomes. First they may find nothing of significance and I will go home with new medications. Or they will find some minor blockages and put in a balloon stent to open up the artery. Or they might find that I need another bypass. The doctor felt that the need for a bypass was a 1% probability, while the stent was about 99%. At first I was angry after all the work I had done to lose the weight, but that quickly went away as I realized that a lifetime lived heavy was the likely cause of this issue. I reconciled my actions taken to improve my health with the retained potential for problems into the future. So this has been the test of my character for today. As I looked in the mirror this morning I saw a changed man, who has taken charge of his life and yet still suffered the consequences of what he was before.

How does this fit into Eight Bites today?  The combined effects of our past health issues, what we do about them, and where we go has to be considered in our decisions. Weight is the most easily changed of the risk factors that we have had. Doing something about that brought me a great deal of personal satisfaction and eliminated my diabetes. Two factors have been reduced to relative insignificance.  But the heart is another factor. The weight loss has helped but it has not solved the long term problems. Now I must deal with those issues and move on. The path beckons. It is still into an unknown future, it still may be difficult and include new problems, but I have done something to change it. Do not expect the weight loss surgery to solve everything in your life. Take responsibility for changing the things you can, deal with the things you can’t change intelligently and calmly, and continue to live. Eight Bites at a time. Live on!