Determined To Succeed

How many of you went to your 20-year high school reunion? Show of hands…anyone…anyone…Bueller…Bueller… Two years ago in August was my 20th anniversary of graduating high school and I didn’t go primarily because, one, it was expensive, and two, because of Facebook. Yes, that nifty little thing called Facebook connected me with so many wonderful people from those days I thought it would be unnecessary to attend.

Well, that was then and this is now.

Recently I learned that good ‘ol Kenwood Academy was hosting an all-class 40-year reunion today, actually held at the school. You know, just like in the movies. In “Superman III,” “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion,” “Zack and Miri,” and so many more the heroes go back to their respective high schools and the wackiness ensued from there. I always secretly thought that was cool since I was nerdy enough to like certain aspects of my schooling particularly the bricks and mortar that made up my “homes away from home.”

So it was with (mild) reckless abandon that I quickly packed a bag and headed to Chicago today to attend tonight’s festivities. Another thing that is making me happy is the fact that the monies collected actually go to programs at the school, not some cheesy banquet hall, hotel or other facility (and it’s cheaper – God, I am getting old).

Now as you guys know, Chicago food hits you as soon as you get off the plane, but I was good and avoided the temptations of my sweet home Chicago Chicago-style hot dogs (and no offense intended toward my friends in and around Philly. Hot dogs, Italian Beef sandwiches, pizza and Chinese food is all different – and better – here, like when you guys get a cheesesteak from your favorite places). However, I didn’t avoid that temptation for long and had a couple, with everything, fries and (sigh) a Coke.

But it was goooooooooooood!

OK, with the craving for hot dogs out of my system I have to both go for a workout today AND avoid over-indulgence. The latter shouldn’t be too hard, although I do want to eat before I get to the reunion which is tonight because I need to avoid the sweet food temptations of my old neighborhood (Harold’s Chicken or Valois anyone?) as well as the foods being served at the reunion, itself. While I am sure the food will be good, I get in trouble with all-you-could-eat situations like that and want to avoid that if I can.

So where is the middle ground?

Middle ground (and I don’t know why but Middle Earth somehow came to my mind – my PRECIOUS!!!) comes in the form of egg rolls from my favorite place in the world right now for Chinese food. It’s on Michigan Avenue downtown called Sixty-Five Seafood and they have egg rolls, bbq pork noodles, kung pao chicken and pepper steak to die for. They are PRECIOUS!!!!

This means I will be swinging by there later today for a combination late lunch/grab some hometown egg rolls/stave off the other bad foods run. I am so looking forward to it. Then I will be off to the reunion.

I am feeling a bit goofy today. I feel younger. I think about so many things from those many long-put-away days from 1984 – 1988 especially food, when I ate whatever I wanted seemingly without consequence. I think about what I wanted to do in life. I think about where I’d thought I’d be…

…I think about my mom, JoAnn (and you can bet your bottom dollar I will be swinging by the park where I spread her ashes to say HI).

Most of all I think about time and how precious (no reference intended…this time) a gift it is. I may be slightly more than two decades removed from gym period, english class, history, driver’s ed, biology and (ick), trigonometry, but I nowe have a grasp on one thing I didn’t back then – myself and how I eat. I want to be around for a good, long time and losing the weight I did has dramatically helped me prolong my life. It helped me not goive into the self-fulling prophecies of obesity – poor quality of life, immobility and potential sudden medical “episodes” like strokes and heart attacks. It also helped me become more active so I can enjoy things I never could before – like even sitting on a plane, in the middle seat (it was what was available) and not have to worry if I’d be making people uncomfortable on either side, and dancing and bopping to my favorite 80s songs from time to time (I hope they play some tonight).

That is why I am no longer worried about food when I come home. Sure it’s better (it’s always better in your hometown) but nothing – NOTHING – is better than the taste of adding years and quality to your own life.

Now, bring on that reunion and let’s “Wang Chung” tonight, and I will tell Clark Kent, Romy and Michelle, Zack, Miri and Ferris you say HI.

Last night I had the hell scared out of me.

I had the occasion to do some catch-up with a friend of mine over dinner last night. It was a cool and casual dinner, and a few delicious happy hour pineapple martinis and mini-burger and egg roll appetizers were consumed. It was great, that is until my friend told me about a friend of theirs who had recently had a stroke, two of them, in fact…

…and he is only 38.

That news hit me like a ton of bricks. A guy who is ONE YEAR YOUNGER THAN I AM has had two strokes and is now dealing with the realities of recuperation and recovery from them, and he’s only 38.

“A year younger than me,” I thought to myself, ““My God, that guy could have easily been me by now.”

While the evening continued on for at least an hour past that piece of news it never left me. It sat next to me the rest of the night. It made me put down the appetizers and the martinis. It sobered me up and followed me home when the catch-up was over. As I lay in bed I thanked God, my lucky stars, guardian angel, mom, fate, destiny, karma and everyone and everything else I could that I was alive and well enough to be able to do the things I do these days. It is not news to you guys that I firmly believe my quality of life would have suffered severely if I didn’t lose weight and had remained 400 pounds. I had high blood pressure that would have kept going. I had arthritis that would have gotten worse with age. I had sleep apnea causing me to stop breathing during sleep. I might even be dead.

When I got up this morning I was still very troubled by the news I’d heard. I was also curious about obesity and the roll it plays in strokes.

For those of you lucky enough to never have known what a stroke is, a stroke occurs when there’s a problem with the amount of blood in your brain. The cause of the main type of stroke — ischemic stroke — is too little blood in the brain. The cause of the other type of stroke — hemorrhagic stroke — is too much blood within the skull.

About 80 percent of strokes are ischemic strokes. They occur when the arteries to your brain are narrowed or blocked, causing severely reduced blood flow (ischemia). This deprives your brain cells of oxygen and nutrients, and cells may begin to die within minutes. The most common ischemic strokes are:

• Thrombotic stroke. This type of stroke occurs when a blood clot (thrombus) forms in one of the arteries that supply blood to your brain. A clot usually forms in areas damaged by atherosclerosis — a disease in which the arteries are clogged by fatty deposits (plaques).
• Embolic stroke. An embolic stroke occurs when a blood clot or other particle forms in a blood vessel away from your brain — commonly in your heart — and is swept through your bloodstream to lodge in narrower brain arteries. This type of blood clot is called an embolus. It’s often caused by irregular beating in the heart’s two upper chambers (atrial fibrillation). This abnormal heart rhythm can lead to poor blood flow and the formation of a blood clot.

“Hemorrhage” is the medical word for bleeding. Hemorrhagic stroke occurs when a blood vessel in your brain leaks or ruptures. Hemorrhages can result from a number of conditions that affect your blood vessels, including uncontrolled high blood pressure (hypertension) and weak spots in your blood vessel walls (aneurysms). A less common cause of hemorrhage is the rupture of an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) — an abnormal tangle of thin-walled blood vessels, present at birth. There are two types of hemorrhagic stroke:

• Intracerebral hemorrhage. In this type of stroke, a blood vessel in the brain bursts and spills into the surrounding brain tissue, damaging cells. Brain cells beyond the leak are deprived of blood and are also damaged. High blood pressure is the most common cause of this type of hemorrhagic stroke. Over time, high blood pressure can cause small arteries inside your brain to become brittle and susceptible to cracking and rupture.
• Subarachnoid hemorrhage. In this type of stroke, bleeding starts in a large artery on or near the surface of the brain and spills into the space between the surfaces of your brain and your skull. This type of hemorrhage is often signaled by a sudden, severe “thunderclap” headache. This type of stroke is commonly caused by the rupture of an aneurysm, which can develop with age or be genetically inherited. After the hemorrhage, the blood vessels in your brain may widen and narrow erratically (vasospasm), causing brain cell damage by further limiting blood flow to parts of your brain.

A transient ischemic attack (TIA, or ministroke) is a brief episode of symptoms similar to those you’d have in a stroke. The cause of a transient ischemic attack is a temporary decrease in blood supply to part of your brain. Most attacks last just a few minutes. However, in contrast to a stroke which involves a more prolonged lack of blood supply and causes some permanent damage to your brain tissue, a TIA doesn’t leave lasting effects to your brain. Still, if you’ve had a TIA, it means there’s likely a blocked or narrowed artery leading to your brain, putting you at a greater risk of a full-blown stroke that could cause more permanent damage. If you’re having a TIA, get emergency medical treatment and make sure your regular physician knows about it.

Why am I telling you guys this heavy stuff today? Because I want to scare the hell out of you, too. Why? The higher a person’s degree of obesity, the higher their risk of stroke — regardless of race, gender and how obesity is measured, according to a recent study published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association who said the higher a person’s degree of obesity, the higher their risk of stroke – regardless of sex or race.

However, stroke is more likely among obese blacks than obese whites. Hiroshi Yatsuya, M.D., Ph.D., study lead author and visiting associate professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and colleagues followed 13,549 middle-aged black and white men and women in four U.S. communities from 1987 through 2005. Participants started the study free of cancer and cardiovascular disease.

During the follow-up period of about 19 years, 598 ischemic strokes occurred. The researchers calculated incidence rate — the number of new cases per 1,000 people per year — according to groups representing different degrees of obesity, using each obesity measure.

They found that incidence rates differed substantially between whites and blacks. For example, the stroke rate in the lowest BMI category was 1.2 per 1,000 person-years for white women and 4.3 per 1,000 person-years for black women. The rate in the highest BMI category was 2.2 for white men and 8.0 for black men.

“Black women had about three times higher incidence of stroke than white women in the lowest as well as in the highest BMI categories,” Yatsuya said. “But the correlation between increasing stroke incidence and increasing degree of obesity was apparent in both races and genders.”
“Since individuals with higher degrees of obesity tended to have higher blood pressure levels or higher diabetes prevalence, we further examined the relationship between the degree of obesity and ischemic stroke incidence by statistically adjusting for difference in blood pressure of diabetes status attributed to the degree of obesity,” Yatsuya said. “That significantly weakened the associations, suggesting these major risk factors explain much of the obesity-stroke association.”

My friends, strokes remain among the top five leading causes of death. The Archives of Internal Medicine published a study showing that people who are overweight by 20% or less carry a 50% increased probability of suffering a stroke. The study also explained that being more than 20 percent overweight carried a risk that was twice as high. Because of these statistics, it’s important to know how weight and strokes are related. The tell-tale effect is that extra weight affects arteries by narrowing them. With narrowed arteries, it becomes easier for blood clots to form, which could cause a stroke later on. The narrowing of the arteries can be compounded by hypertension, low exercise level and a diet that contains a lot of cholesterol. Unfortunately, some (but certainly not all) overweight people don’t exercise regularly and eat high-cholesterol diets, which increases their stroke risk dramatically. On the flip side, healthy eating habits and exercise can decrease your risk of a stroke later on.

As I sit here and type I am looking out of the stop sign-shaped window next to my desk. I am looking at the blue sky above (which has, at most, a very few whispy clouds floating through it) and I feel as though I’ve woken up from a nightmare. Losing weight has had a dramatic effect on my life to say the least. However, I realize I have been concentrating on the effects you mostly see and feel, not necessarily on the effects you DON’T see: like how much I’ve prolonged my life and like how much I’ve dramatically reduced the chances of strokes, heart attacks and diabetes all by losing the weight I did. Sometimes good can happen when you cannot see it and these positive effects are there the more you see your numbers come down on the scale.

Having the hell scared out of you may add grey hairs to your head, but sometimes being scared is a good way to avoid being scared to death. Know what I mean?