Ach, it’s a Bonnie life!!

My husband is ambitious.  Not work-ambitious (he’s been a stay at home dad for the past 8 1/2 years), but life-ambitious.

A few months ago he entered a contest where he had to write a 100 or less word essay on why he needed to improve his cardiovascular health, with the prize being a trip for two to the Gray Cup in Montreal.  Little did I know that this action was going to impact ME …

As many of you know, he “won” that contest and we are now one of eight couples across Canada competing to reduce our cardiovascular risks and win that trip to Montreal.  It’s been a lot of fun, a lot of pain and a lot of effort so far and the organizers have asked us to blog our experiences so far with the Making the Connection / Pairs Edition - CFL Challenge.   I’m going to post my “draft blogs” here and hope that you guys will tell me what works, what’s interesting and what isn’t — the “final” blog entries will (eventually) be posted at http://5stepmtc.wordpress.com/about/

So….

This has been quite an eye-opening journey for us so far. We thought we were in pretty okay shape – Stewart is a stay-at-home dad. He tries to be active playing with the kids – taking them for bike rides, etc.; he plays soccer when his knees allow, coaches an Under-8 soccer team, and also volunteers in our community as a baseball umpire. I work full-time and I have a 2-hour commute in each direction, so I knew that I was getting quite out of shape – my daily exercise consisted of walking the equivalent of about 5 blocks a day. The first week we worked out with personal trainer Fabian Rayne, and Argo Running Back Jeff Johnson was fun but surprisingly exhausting. Then there was the next 3 days of pain and stiffness. Clearly we were not in such “pretty okay” shape after all!

In the ensuing 3 weeks, we’ve met with Fabian weekly for increasingly tough workouts, and we’ve had a program to follow at home on our own. There’s a lot of work with weights, and a lot of cardio work – walking, jogging, whatever we can do. We started a “walk to school” program – our oldest son walks to the high school, and we walk our youngest child to elementary school and back, so that was an easy way to get out and get moving a little and to start to form good habits with the kids. We’re now almost 3 weeks into the program and I’m very pleased that we’re now able to do the circuit training workouts without too much pain afterwards. It had been an embarrassingly long time since we’ve done much of anything in the fitness area and we both found that there have been a lot of changes in the “conventional thinking” since then. Remember “no pain – no gain”? Well, not anymore. Remember “stay away from carbohydrates and anything white (rice, potatoes, bread etc.)”? Not anymore. Remember granola and sunflower seeds as good snack choices? Not so much anymore. This was a larger re-education than we thought it would be.

We also thought that we ate very well, especially after Stewart’s 2 heart attacks about 3

½ years ago; we tried to be very conscious of what we ate and what we fed our children. Then we got the guidelines in the package for the program. Uh oh! So much for cheese, Caesar salads, liver, pepperoni, bacon and popcorn!! In tracking the foods we eat for the program we discovered that we drink much more wine and beer than we had thought, so we’ve made a conscious effort to scale that back and to make sure that we drink as much water as possible every day. We have talked at length with the kids about making healthy choices and taught them that vegetables are not the enemy. In fact, one of their favourite dinner “sides” is broccoli pancakes! We have discovered some wonderful ways to make spinach, brussels sprouts, and squash. We have signed up for the monthly box of “fresh local produce” that a local group puts together. We have also tried not to skip so many meals anymore. Stewart has even started to discuss heart-healthy choices with other shoppers in the grocery store and I’m pretty sure that sales of butter have declined and sales of non-hydrogenated margarine and low-fat cheese have increased in our town because of it.

I had quit smoking before the start of the program, but going through this has made it pretty easy to stick to that decision. Using the Daily Activity log on the Making the Connection web site has also helped keep me on track. It’s helped me to see the positive pattern and to make sure that I keep on working hard. I started out in week 1 (September 10^th) averaging about 51 minutes of exercise per day. Week 2 saw that increase slightly to 53 minutes/day; and then 78 minutes/day last week. Hopefully I can keep this from falling back again!

So, I guess at Week #3 we’re making good progress — I’m only down 3 pounds but on the positive side I am seeing a lot of muscle and stamina development, if not a lot of weight loss … yet.

I was going to try to stick to the topic here, but I have a huge urge to just skip ahead… I haven’t blogged in the last few weeks because I’ve been having a lot of difficulty with depression.

I’ve suffered from depression for a long time - since my first pregnancy (14 years ago now, isn’t that scary??). It was a terrific pregnancy right up until the end. My husband and I were extremely excited about the birth of our first child. We were fairly recently married (just over 2 years), we’d just bought our first home and a new vehicle and life was wonderful. (Isn’t that always about the time when life decides to kick you in the teeth?) We were sitting around at his parent’s cottage after a day of skiing (or for those of us too pregnant to ski, we relaxed in front of the fire and practiced the fine art of “chalet skiing”), and I noticed a birthmark on top of his head. I didn’t recall seeing it before, so I asked him about it and he insisted it had always been there. His brother (the Doctor) happened to be beside me and he looked at it and told us that whether or not it had always been there we needed to have it looked at and removed right away. So he reluctantly went in to have it removed, only to be told a week later that it was cancerous. What followed was 7 weeks of pure torture. We were told that we had caught it so early there was nothing at all to worry about. He went into the hospital a week later for chemo, and it made him so sick that he ended up staying in the hospital most of the time. By the end of 2 rounds of chemo and 1 bout of radiation therapy he had been feeling well enough to be home for 4 whole days (not in a row). Okay, maybe I should say 3 days, because I did end up having him taken to ER by ambulance for severe dehydration and then transferred back to the cancer hospital on one of those days. Both of our families were extremely supportive. The doctors were wonderful - my OB even offered to do a C-section “on demand” if there came a point where he was well enough to be transferred to “my” hospital for a few hours (part of the point being that we could increase his insurance coverage on a “life event” like the birth of a child without answering medical questions, but given the situation we couldn’t increase it otherwise…).

In any case, after 7 very exhausting weeks, he passed away in my arms in the wee hours one night. And precisely 10 days and 1 hour later, my son was born. It was a rather eventful birth - the family had been hovering horribly, to the point where I wasn’t even allowed to drive myself anywhere. It made me crazy. A girlfriend came from Vancouver to stay with me for a few days (a less “obvious” babysitter than the rest of the family I suppose…) In any case, while she was visiting we were listening to the radio and we entered a contest they had on. Figures I’d win - I never win anything. And of course I didn’t think I could use the prize (2 front row, centre tickets to the Eagles concert … this was in 1994 - 1st time they’d toured in 16 years….). Anyway I had my regular OB appointment that day and after she had examined me, I casually mentioned the tickets. She said “Go!! You’re not going to have the baby today — go!” Well she was right, the baby wasn’t born until the wee hours of the next morning… But in any case I still got to see most of that wonderful concert!! And being front row, means you have easy access to security when your water breaks all over everywhere in the middle of a concert. They lifted my friend and I over the barriers, took us backstage, called an ambulance and even loaned me a cell phone to call my brother-in-law (last minute labour coach) to swing by my house, pick up my suitcase and meet me at the hospital. After that a quick bit of “fast talking” with the EMTs to get them to take me to “my” hospital and not the closest one … (aw, c’mon guys … if you drive that extra 15 minutes, then you just have to dump me on the 4th floor because I’m pre-admitted - no triage, no waiting, no nothing … whaddya say???)

So I welcomed my son to the world on July 12, 1994 at about 5:45 in the morning. It was a very emotional time. Then the next morning, I was supposed to call the radio station to tell them about the concert (part of the “deal” of winning the tickets). Well, did I ever have a story for them … The next thing I knew, I was getting calls from every morning radio show I could imagine - of course, “baby brain” has erased a lot, but I do remember Calgary, Ottawa, Halifax, London & Toronto. There were others I just don’t remember them. Then the TV crews started showing up at the hospital (2 of them), and then the President of the hospital came to tell me that they were keeping me for 4 days (instead of the regular 24 hours) - partly because they wanted to try to “filter” the inundation of press and just people who heard the story and wanted to offer help, baby clothes, toys, food, whatever; and partly because they were probably worried about the state of my mental health with two “huge” events happening so closely together.

Well they were probably right about the mental health thing. I had a pretty bad case of baby blues, although I tried very hard to ignore it and be there for my son. I ended up running away to Germany and Vienna for a month with him to visit with my friends there and it was probably the best thing I could have done.  But in retrospect, I know that I really had a bad case of depression, not just the “baby blues”.   So, fast forward a couple of years and I’ve started dating DH#2 by then. After having the “other half” of my semi-detached house go up in flames one night, we got engaged. Fast forward another couple of years and baby #2 brings another bout of a very deep depression. This time I saw a doctor about it and ended up on meds. They helped. A lot! I could function. I wasn’t angry/irritated at the entire universe all the time anymore …

Well the past 3 or 4 months have brought that crashing back down. Stress at work. Stress at home. Stress, stress, stress. It’s very bad for you, let me tell you!