May 15th 2019
This is where I’m supposed to write a journal entry about what I did on May fifteenth but instead I’m going to give up an update to my life since my last journal entry. I was doing great in my weight training and activity but then I had a pretty major setback. I got a hernia. I tried to relax and take it easy for a few days but those few days did not improve my body so that time turned into almost two months of stopping with the healthy meal preps and getting something to eat from a fast food restaurant during my work lunch break as well as after work. I would go home and just lay around and watch tv until I was tired enough to pass out then after an hour or two of a nap I’d wake up and put my daughter on the school bus and then be up for a few hours before I could relax enough to go back to sleep then I would wake back up and go to work. It was an endless cycle of not getting proper sleep as well as eating like crap combined with zero activity outside of work. That took a pretty big toll on my body. I gained fifteen pounds and went through the worst depression I have ever gone through. I have only had five or six pretty bad cases of depression but this one was refusing to go away. I’d pray about it and tried CBD oil with seemingly no release.
I had to reach out to a do a doctor since I had other physical pain including lower abdomen and testicular pain. I had a CT Scan, blood and urine samples were sent out and I was open about my depression and lack of sleep issues. I found out I had a hernia and multiple kidney stones to go with my weight gain.
My wife has always been an amazingly supportive woman and this time was just another opportunity for her to show why GOD brought her into my life. She agreed to get up earlier for work and take our daughter to “Latchkey” which allowed me to actually get into a deep sleep and not be disturbed. In less than two weeks I had a reverse of emotional feelings. She started meal prepping for me again so I could eat cleaner. I have no begun working out again as the hernia issue is not bad enough to warrant a surgery but since it’s there it’s a mental block for me that I cannot push myself on the weights but I will soon begin walking on the treadmill and playing basketball to get my cardio back. I stopped taking the CBD oil as that also has a potential side effect of depression. All those changes have really made a drastic improvement on my life.
My birthday is on the fourteenth and my wife has a birthday one day later. Since it was during the week my mother in law said she wanted to take my wife and I out for a dinner to celebrate our birthdays on Saturday. We picked a restaurant but they changed it on us last minute. I was nervous because our daughter is not a fav of Porta Vallarta’s so I told her that she needed to be respectful since they were being nice to us. If she was hungry when we left we would get her something else to eat. She was surprisingly easy going about it.
Before heading to the restaurant I called my sister who lives in Marion, Indiana. She was at home and wanted to read me a letter she found that our father wrote his parents from when he was in the military. It was a letter about how a native Thai girl saved his life due to “Buddha” saying my father would die if he got on his plane mission. She was almost shot by soldiers when she ran onto the flight line and deployed my father’s parachute. My sister and mother had recently come back from a trip to Las Vegas where they attended an “Air America Reunion” and she actually met the little girl who now is a grown mother of her own. I got off the phone after the letter because we needed to go to the dinner appointment.
We get to Portas. Then we walked in and saw my mother in law and her husband as was the plan but also my mother and sister who told me they were at home in Marion were there. My wife has other family members such as her grandmother and her boyfriend, her aunt and uncle were there. Also my wife’s best guy friend and his boyfriend, her best female friend and her boyfriend which is one of my best friends was there. Also my best female friend who lives near Chicago drove almost four hours with her husband and daughter just to be there for us. I have never had a surprise birthday party but let me tell you that turning forty was better than any of the last couple decades’ worth of birthday parties. We got tons of joke gifts like adult diapers. I could care less about any of the presents because all of those people making such an effort to surprise us and show us that amount of love was enough for me.
Since then I have tested the waters to see if my daughter may be interested in skateboarding since I loved it for years when I was younger. Also since I have been stuck on second shift for five years with only one opportunity to move to day shift I have put in a resume at another machine shop to see if they want to make an offer that I cannot turn down financially since they only work day shift so I would be afforded the opportunity to be with my family during the week again.
To summarize I started off having a horrible downturn in my physical and emotional state but now I’m back in the saddle and ready to march on with whatever life throws my way.