11:40am August 2, 2015

So I’m on a double dose of steroids, and it’s really hot…

…which means yesterday I went up to the convenience store and bought a crapload of ice cream.  It makes it a little harder to burp my g-tube (because anything that goes into my stomach has to come out the tube, otherwise it sits in my stomach until it goes into my lungs), but so hot and so hungry (steroids create a bottomless pit effect even when your stomach isn’t draining properly and even if you’re getting all the nutrition you actually need through a feeding tube going straight to your intestines) that I couldn’t make myself care about that. 

All I had in the house to eat was soup, and hot soup is not something that is remotely appealing in this weather.  (I can pretty much only eat liquids.  Solids stick in the tube.  Even ice cream with nuts is out, because chewed-up nuts make burping the g-tube agonizingly slow and sometimes impossible.  I once tried New York Super Fudge Chunk, and that was an amazingly mistaken mistake.  It took two straight hours to get everything out again, and I got heat exhaustion in the meantime.)

Anyway when I went out to buy four large cartons of ice cream, I expected a reaction.  I’m fat.  Evidence of being fat and about to pig out, in public, tends to provoke people to staring and judging and laughing.

But it’s so hot out these days.

That I got lots of reactions.

And nearly all of them were sheer envy.  :-)

Like, lots of thumbs up, smiling, “Oh my god I wish I was eating ALL of that right now”, that kind of thing. 

I did not get a single negative reaction.

And that was really cool.

I never realize how much I have to armor myself against negative reactions until I get positive reactions and see how different it feels from normal.

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