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Sunday, June 7. 2009
Motivation
Lack of motivation, that’s my problem.Hard to get walking, hard to get on a bike and pedal, hard to sit and write anything. Easier to sit and veg in front of the computer or TV. Easier to be sedentary, the lifestyle that put me in the situation of needing heart surgery in the first place. In the 11 weeks since my surgery my weight still hasn’t cracked 190 pounds. What does that mean? Change of diet.
There you go, sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy eating habits. The exercise part of life has been mastered, mostly. Through the intelligent use of text messaging I’ve tapped friends to help motivate myself to walk and now ride the Trusty Trek. John likes to write back, “to affinity and beyond!” Most people would recognize Buzz Lightyear’s famous tag line, but in our neighborhood it has a far more sinister meaning. Affinity Court is a street that runs from the end of Erma Road up an incredibly steep grade to Scripps Ranch Boulevard.
In the past couple weeks I’ve walked up Affinity Court, but never pedaled. Affinity makes Erma look easy. Erma Road isn’t easy; pedaled it Thursday and Friday and had to stop half way up both times to rest. This might sound dangerous, and the doctors assure me it is, but my heart rate will go as high as 172. The doctors say anything over 120 is dangerous. They have to be joking, Walking up Erma Road gets the heart pounding to 130 and even higher!
Despite the surgery that improved my heart so much, a part of it still doesn’t work causing it to work a little harder than if all four chambers were pumping. If I’m to lead a life of anything other than that of a cardiac invalid, my heart rate is going to be above 120 — a lot. That’s reality.
So, against all logic, it would seem, I put aside the warnings from my doctors and pedal that Trusty Trek and walk. John and I were walking Pacific and Mission Beaches again Saturday and we plan to walk Lake Miramar today. At one point yesterday my heart rate was 132. We walked for an hour and twenty minutes, all flat terrain. So much for keeping the heart rate below 120 bpm.At this stage though, it’s time to get back into the mainstream of life, using the transit system to — and this is the part of life that makes me long for the early days of cardiac recovery — a job. There’s no avoiding it really. No doctor will give me a life time of disability and quite frankly, I probably don’t need it. Damn!
One of my character traits, some might call it a defect, is a penchant to look for ways to scam the system. But, there’s that little thing called “conscience” that always rides in and sets my moral compass straight. After the surgery my dream was to milk disability long enough to enjoy the entire summer free of the confinement of working. That’s not to be apparently.
The nitwit at the V.A. who sat on my disability papers sent the forms to the wrong doctor and she decided I only needed six weeks of disability. Thankfully, a woman from the disability office gave me a courtesy call once she got my forms to A) express her shock at getting only six weeks (she’s sending the forms to apply for an extension) and B) to let me know my disability had been denied. “What,” I nearly shrieked!
Yes, it had been denied. Apparently there is a time limit in which you can apply for disability — 49 days — and because the guy at the V.A. sat on my forms for over two months — 72 days — the paperwork wasn’t sent to the state in time to make the deadline. The woman from the disability office asked why I waited so long to apply. So I told her about the nitwit at the V.A. and how the forms sat on his desk for two months before he sent them — to the wrong person — to be completed.
The woman at the state disability office restored my faith in the California bureaucracy, saying she would fix my paper work so I would be eligible for state disability — all six weeks of if — and she would send the forms to apply for an extension of that disability. The woman says people having open-heart surgery usually get four to five months of disability. I’m down with that!On the other hand it will be another two weeks before the disability check arrives. Light at the end of the tunnel, no doubt, but the tunnel appears to be so damn long!
Of course a major part of the problem is my penchant for grandiose delusions: a summer on disability so I could spend everyday, pedaling up and down the beaches of San Diego County! We’ll see what transpires. I won’t even go into the more extreme visions of my grandiose delusion, many are salacious and all are … err … grandiose fantasies.
Lack of motivation, that is my dilemma.
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