Regret, Redefine, Reborn

I never meant to be a fat man. But I ignored me. Yes, I paid attention to myself by putting unhealthy food into my body for years. For years, I bullshitted myself into believing that I could change on my own terms. My own terms were just a mask to cover the reality that I was angry at my body. I was angry at my past. I was angry at all the voices in grade school, junior high, and high school who made me feel like the outsider I really was. I kept hearing voices of disgust and teasing as I was in the locker room or shower. These were the voices that held my attention for almost 25 years. Today, they are dead. The people that own those voices are very much alive, but their voices are muted and pushed off my shoulders into the past where they should be. These are the voices who were mean with their words and their presence. Forgiveness you ask? How do you forgive voices? Voices have hurt and compressed my anger to the point that I was eating myself into their expectations and musings. These were the people who made me feel worthless and excluded. It's not easy to forgive the voices much less the people who own them.

I was becoming something more than that though. I was becoming a dead man. I was eating myself into an early grave. My doctor recently said, “If you continue to eat the way you do, and not exercise or do anything about it, you will die in ten years.” I was eating to make me feel good when deep inside I was nothing but miserable. I was hurt by my past and my present wasn’t any better. Yes, we all feel some sense of alienation when growing up, but I had and continue to have a very sensitive heart for people. All I wanted was to be included by people. And I experienced this at times. There were some good moments of feeling included. Yet even within the profession of being a pastor, parishioners who claim to be friends, are not really, because they do not include, offer words of care, and more or less exclude by their silence. They have preference and it hurts. I thought as adults, we would stop such behavior. I was wrong. This is why I am sensitive to those who find themselves on the periphery of existence. I want to include those who are seen as disposable and expendable. When humanity is responsible for slicing and dicing people into those who fit and those who do not, it makes me sad. I do not see people through eyes of preference or false claims.

I am saddened by how society treats people of size. I am one of them. Yes, I chose to be here. But I no longer am going to be held down by such a category. I am worth more than words of category or words held deaf to the past. I am worth more than eating myself into feelings of hurt, betrayal, and frustration of those left behind who seek to make sense of my death. I am worth living a long life. I am worth living a life on my terms. I am worth living a life without the voices of the past cornering me into a place of self-hate and self-disgust. I am worth giving myself respect and dignity when I have denied myself those very things. I am ashamed by how a lack of love, control, and worth equals excessive weight. I am tired of living without concern or care.

I am going to love myself enough to treat my body as a beautiful creation. I am going to love myself so that I can love others even more. I am going to love myself because I respect myself. Food no longer has control over me. I have gripped food around its greasy neck and squeezed the hell out of it. No longer will I be held captive to the choices I have made and the fast food nightmares my body has endured. No longer will I eat without thought. I will eat to see tomorrow, next year, ten years, fifty years. I want to survive and live. For years, my body was screaming for attention, and now it has it. I am watching it, and watching what I put into it. I have no choice anymore. I want to live and I am going to do it, because life is a gift that I choose each day. I am doing it. I am living for the first time. I am reborn and it feels damn good.

God Is Done Whispering...

I realize that I have not blogged in a while. Simply because I lost interest. I had a great call to a great church. I did not feel the need to really air my hurt and disgust at the church anymore simply because I was in a place of healing and repair. It was a reciprocal process. The church needed me as I needed it. I can honestly say that if my ministry ended completely, at least I served a church that was indeed, trying to BE the church. So, to bring you up to speed. I left that call to pursue my passion of professional chaplaincy. It has been a wonderful, eye opening, and self-revealing process and experience. One that I am forever thankful and grateful for, as I feel I am being reborn all over again. It is at once, a beautiful and painful process of self-discovery in terms of knowing who the hell I am, where I come from, how I behave, what motivations are there, understanding teaming, etc. It is full of parallel process. I see patients everyday who make me think of something in my own life. This has been one of the most challenging aspects of this experience for me. No one really likes to look into a mirror to see what's really revealed. In this case, when I see others, it is at times, like looking into a mirror to see a reflection of who I am, and what I am.

Not long ago, I was paged to a Code Blue. A code blue is when a patient is all of a sudden unresponsive meaning the heart has stopped, the patient is not breathing, no pulse, etc. I arrived to the room, only to see around 18 people working as hard as they could to revive this man. I stood outside the room as I was told only medical people were allowed in the room. This was the first time I felt "out of place" by an MD. But I respected the situation and chose to be a presence on the side. When all was said and done, I accompanied the patient down to ICU with the cardiologist and RN. The patient was wheeled into a room, medical people did what they had to do to settle him into the surroundings, and I was there alone with him. This is where I looked into the mirror. The patient was a large man, pushing at least 450. He was in his mid-50's, not married, no children or family present. Here he was hooked to tubes and wires, was intubated, and all I could see was myself. I thought to myself, "If I continue to eat and not exercise the way I have been doing all these years, I will end up like this guy." This is the purest definition of parallel process as it gets. Although he really didn't have family, I felt so much compassion for this man. It is the sad part that when the MD tried to contact the one emergency contact, he could not be found.

The next day, my colleague was on call and was paged to come to ICU. The patient that I had prayed for and saw myself in, died. The heart attack was so severe that the only was he was kept alive was through machines. Once family had been contacted and brought in the patient's advanced medical directive, it was found that he did not want to be in his present state of being kept artificially alive. This man was extubated, wires and tubes removed, IV gone, and left to die a natural death where his heart would just stop. The next week, I found his obituary online and it was fairly small, no back story or family mentioned. Name, age, time of death, funeral and burial information were the only bits of information offered. I was sad to see such a few words to speak about this man who obviously had a story, but perhaps someone did not feel it was important that it be at least mentioned to celebrate his life.

Last Wednesday morning, I woke up at about 0430 with chest pains. They were severe enough to get me out of bed. I got dressed, packed the man-child and dropped him off, and went north thinking I was heading into work. Instead I took a detour into St. Mary's. By this time, my chest was hurting. When you go to the ER and say you have chest pains, it does not take long for people to surround you and get you on telemetry and take an EKG. I was also given some meds to open blood vessels and oh yeah, calm me down. They moved me into a heart observation area by the ER where I am fairly sure RNs play cards to see who will be on shift for these rooms. I still have no clue who my nurse was for the night I was there. Long story short, I took a physical stress test which did not last too long. I was then given a nuclear test (chemical test) to stress my heart that way. Let's say it was one of the worst feelings I have ever experienced. They then took pics of my heart under stress, and the plan was to keep me overnight and take pics of my heart in the AM of my heart at rest. They did both. In the morning the MD came in and I quote, "Well, the bad news is that the cardiologist thinks he may have found something on your heart. He cannot say for sure because it might be what's called an artifact (a blur) or it could be a blockage." I immediately stopped listening to what the MD said next. It was like listening to the Charlie Brown teacher. She left and I sat on the bed and cried. I was scared. My mind immediately went to, "On my God, I am going to die." I was all alone in that moment and all I could think about was my wife and kids. It was a moment I will never forget. I am going to see a cardiologist to talk about options. I might need to have an exploratory procedure done to see if there is a blockage. If there is, they can stent it. I am still scared and yet this has forced me to change my lifestyle right NOW.

You know, this whole experience of being in a clinical residency where I get to be a student of the soul is both revealing and affirming who God is making me to be. There are moments of revelation that are not pleasant because then I have to confront my growth areas. These are the moments that as painful as they are, I am thankful for them. It means that I am changing, I am evolving, and I am transforming into a better man of God. I work in a place that reminds me that life is a gift. Life is precious. Death can occur at any moment of our lives. If there is a reminder I see at the hospital weekly, is that there is a fine line between life and death. People who continue to smoke, eat anything and everything they want, remain addicted to substances, or continue to ignore the MD's orders to simply take their medications; these are ones who ride that fine line. I want to expand that line from life to death as far as I can because I am worth it. My friends are worth it. My family is worth it. I have more life I want to live. And by God, I am going to be conscious of being a healthy person who takes care of himself because from here, new life is possible.