What Do You Believe?

One of my favorite websites is Belief.net It's a treasure trove of information about all the major worlds religions. It's an especially good place to go if one is searching for others who may fall within their same belief system.

My favorite part of Belief.net is the Belief-O-Matic. It's a fun test to take in which you answer a series of questions about your beliefs. Once done, the Belief-O-Matic will provide a list of approx 25 religions or belief systems and will give you a percentage which shows how closely your beliefs are in line with those. Here's the top five that were on my list:

1.	Mahayana Buddhism (100%)
2.	Liberal Quakers (94%)
3.	Unitarian Universalism (92%)
4.	Taoism (90%)
5.	Theravada Buddhism (90%)

As you can see, Belief.net also provides links to each all the religions you match so you can read and understand what their belief system is. My results aren't surprising because I am a Unitarian Universalist who practices Buddhism and I've always had a huge respect for the Quakers.

Here's a link to Belief-O-Matic.

Go ahead and check it out. It's fun. If you feel up to it, please post your top five list here in the comments. It'd be fun to see the difference we all may or may not have.

Dancin' with Myself

I woke up to the blues this morning. It doesn't happen to me as often these days, but this was a morning where depression hit me again. As in the past I resigned myself to accept it and wait until it passed over, but then something changed about noon.

Just before lunch I was still feeling depressed but I had a sudden burst of energy. This 284 pound man was shaking his booty as he prepared tuna salad for lunch. Guess what? Suddenly I found myself feeling a little better.

After lunch I didn't feel like going out for a walk but I still had some energy in me. I had talked with my pdoc about dancing to lose weight but hadn't really done it much, but this time I put on some old disco music and proceeded to knock all the plaster off the ceiling of my downstairs neighbors.

It was fun, good exercise and I feel much better now. In fact, if it continues I'd rate myself as having a damn good day.

Everyone gets the blues. The difference is that it's easy for people like me to allow the blues to take hold and drag you down into major depression. It's one of the more difficult things to deal with when suffering from depression or bipolar. How do you determine that you have the blues and it's ok as compared to major depression. I now believe one of the differences is whether you can dance with yourself around the apartment or not.

I've decided this will be the way I will monitor my feelings in the future. If I start to feel down I'll get up off my ass and shake my thing and hopefully bring myself up again. If I can't get my ass up or just can't get into it then I probably am in the pits of depression. Still I can try and dance then anyway, but that's easy to say today when I'm feeling up already.

Time to put my dancing shoes back on and shake my bon bon and then get ready for an appointment with my pdoc. Here's a video you may enjoy and may get you a movin' and a shakin' too.

Click Here to find out why Carrie Fisher is my new idol.

Follow the link and then click on the video in the top right corner. It's her interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show. She's amazing.

Back to the Hospital

I've become way to use to emergency rooms. Last year when I was having seizures galore I became a regular. The other day I showed up again but this time it was because of chest pains.

If you ever have an opportunity to have an elephant stand on your chest, I suggest that you decline. I think I have a pretty good idea what it feels like and it ain't pleasant. Every breath was difficult to take and would cause stabbing pain throughout my chest. I refused to accept that anything was wrong so I decided that the pain was cause by Maurice sleeping on my chest all night. Nevermind that his head would have to weigh as much as a bowling ball to cause this much pain. His head on my chest for hours was my diagnosis and that is what I was sticking to. I should have called 911, but I'm a stubborn dumbass.

The pain became less intense on Thursday and Friday and started hurting on only one side of my chest. I still shouldn't have ignored it, but I decided that if it was my heart that I'd be dead already so why bother going to the emergency room. I could live with a little intense pain now and again. Besides, the pain was dissipating. Dr. Bradley determined there was nothing to worry about.

Saturday it got worse again. The pain was still on one side of my chest but was now shooting up to my neck. I didn't think that was a good thing at all, but wanted to wait awhile so that Maurice and I could enjoy a nice picnic on the beach. The beach wasn't a good place to go since the lifeguards are sparse this time of year. It'd be hard for Maurice to get help if I needed it, but a picnic seemed a helluva lot nicer than going to the emergency room. Finally I couldn't take it anymore. We nixed the picnic idea and went to the emergency room instead.

I don't know about the rest of the country, but emergency rooms in California are bursting at the seams. The large number of people who have no health insurance are forced to go to the emergency for non-emergency problems. They can't afford a regular physician. The waiting area was standing room only.

Fortunately for me, chest pains are taken very seriously, so I was immediately escorted from check-in and taken in for some tests. Yippie! I thought. No waiting for me tonight. I was wrong. Jose, the cute guy conducting the tests said that I'd be going back to the waiting area and that I should hope for a long wait. A long wait would show that I wasn't dealing with anything immediately dangerous. That was logical , but I sure didn't feel lucky. I waited for over 20 hours after having my tests done. I was given tests for a second time, including a CT scan and then was taken to the trauma center. Finally a bed and some morphine and I was able to get some sleep. Poor Maurice had to sleep in a chair next to me.

The doctor determined that I wasn't having any heart problems. My tests came back looking good. He had no idea what was causing the pain but my heart was in fit condition. It's just like my seizures. There was never any diagnosis why they occured, they just did. We discussed that it likely was pleurisy, which is a reduction of the lining/fluid around the lungs which prevents them from rubbing against other things in my chest. It can be deadly, but usually goes away after a brief period. For me, the pain was completely gone the next day.

30 hours in ER was no picnic. We should have gone to the beach afterall.

The Hardest Pound I Ever Worked Off

My first week on Weight Watchers has passed. I converted the fats, fiber and calories into points. I logged every point in my tracker. I ate my veggies, ate small servings in general..and so on. I marched up to the scale at the weight watchers meeting with no fear. I was ready to boast about my tremendous weight loss. I hopped on the scale full of excitment when BAM...I was told I lost exactly one pound. ONE POUND???? What the hell? I know so many people who swear by the Weight Watchers plan and boast about how much they lost. Why did I not lose as much as I thought I would? I was told I didn't eat enough. The plan keeps me full all the time and I'm not eating enough? (sigh).

This week I have to ensure I eat all the points available to me daily. That's going to be tough to do. I get 39 points a day, which is meaningless to you if you haven't been to Weight Watchers. For those of you that aren't familiar - 1 cup of beef equals 8 points. If I only ate beef all day then I would have to eat 6 f*****g cups of beef in a day to reach my total points allowance. That's a helluva lot of beef. Imagine trying to reach that while eating mostly fruits and vegetables as expected. It aint easy.

Anyway, I'm going to try and bask in the fact that I'm one pound less and that I didn't gain any weight.

What I Did on my Winter Vacation

It was a good break away from the blog for the last couple of months, but now I'm back.

Somehow during my vacation I lost almost 10 pounds. I can't figure out how. I sure as hell wasn't trying. But, now I'm down to 284 pounds. I've joined Weight Watchers to keep the trend going. It's kind of a pain in the ass tracking points for the food I eat, but I've heard nothing but good feedback from friends of mine who joined. Now I get myself weighed each week and sit in a meeting with a group of women.

Balanced, balanced, balanced. That's how my mental state has been. I've had no wild roller coaster rides with my emotions. No large highs followed by deep lows in awhile. It feels good to feel good. I do still suffer from large anxiety that keeps my body shaking virtually all the time, but at least I'm not suffering crazy manic or depressed stages and major anxiety too.

Thanksgiving was spent with friends, Christmas with Maurice's family and for New Years we celebrated at our church.

Sorry for the uneventful writing but I'm still working on the final tweaks on a website and I need to get back to it now. I should be done this week though.

Vacation is Over

Welcome back to all three of you who realize I'm finally back and are reading this post. I popped on to say nothing fancy, nothing funny, just a little note to say thank you for staying with me during my absence. I'll now be posting regularly again. Check up on me tomorrow.