My Fat is Pissed Off

So I've got these bumps on my legs. They're the result of something called erythema nodosum. Don't ask me to pronounce it. I can barely spell it. Suffice it to say the bumps are inflamed fat.

I have no idea what I did to piss off my fat. Maybe it was that diet last year ... otherwise known as The Year of the Carrot.

Yeah. I know. Fat is bad enough at its regular size. It's really bad when fat swells and gets fatter.

The bumps, which are all over my legs below the knees, and are about the size of ping pong balls, are tender and sore. Them I can deal with – what's a few bumps on legs that are already elephantine, criss-crossed with varicose veins, and hairy? The other stuff that goes with them isn't so nice. I have a low grade fever, all my joints are achy, I have an annoying dry cough and I'm short of breath. Like, so short of breath that I can't walk to the bathroom without wheezing. Most of all, I don't have the energy to do anything. I've pretty much given up finishing Nanowrimo. Dave does most of the cooking and it's all I can do to make the bed in the morning and have a bath. Blogging, Facebook – even my beloved Candy Crush – the fate of my books, reading, none of it holds any appeal. And I'm weepy, crying at the stupidest things.

Erythema nodosum, which is relatively rare, is a common by-product of Crohn's disease, and I've had it a few times. Generally my Crohn's medication, Remicade, sends it packing, but I've never had it this bad before. There's not much that can be done about it that I'm not already doing, and the good news is, it doesn't usually last longer than six weeks. In the meantime, I'm lazier than your great Uncle Fred, and spend my days lolling about the sick couch, wheezing and whining.

I am tempted to stick a sewing needle in one of the bumps to see what comes out. I'm thinking they're either volcanoes of goo, or those pods in Cocoon, full of tiny, fat-inflamed aliens.

By the way, the only reason I'm posting today is because I was just downstairs watching Dave paint the family room and I accidentally spilled a cup of paint. Dave was not impressed. I helped clean up, apologized profusely, and ran like the wind ... bumps and all.

P.S. - Yes, that's my smelly foot in the photo. I didn't want to steal someone else's bumps from the internet so I took a photo of one of my own, at the risk of grossing you out. But hey, don't my toenails look pretty? :)

Big people have feelings too

I was all in a big huff yesterday afternoon because of a letter to the editor.

Some local woman had written in to complain about the upcoming demise of the Ontario Northlander, a train that links Toronto to North Bay. Hey, I'm not happy about it either. In fact I wrote my own opinion piece for the North Bay Nipissing Life blog, here. (By the way, I'm really trying to stir up interest in this blog – it's for a magazine I work on, and it's new, and it's hard up for comments and followers - hint, hint.)

But I really took offence to the her comment about a "very large woman" on a bus whose flesh overflowed onto her own seat, who ate garlic meat pies and belched continuously.

In retrospect, I can see that the smell of garlic, of someone else's leg touching my own, and continual burping would be gross. I would probably move.

Still, my first reaction to the letter was to get pissed off. Being a fat person myself, I am very sensitive to crude remarks of any kind directed to overweight people and it seems to me that it's OK to make fun of them, it's socially acceptable. It's not OK to point out the colour of someone's skin or their accent but it's still apparently all right to comment on their size.

It was the tone of the woman's letter that upset me the most. It was so derogatory. In the next paragraph she commented on someone's kid sitting in the seat behind her. Instead of calling him a child or a kid she called him a little "brat" who repeatedly kicked the back of her seat even after she told the mother to keep control of him.

So what I get from that scenario is an angry, skinny kid-hater who generally can't stand to be around other people and should probably fork over some cashola for a bubble-wrapped car so she doesn't have to ever take public transportation again.

I remember reading a short story a few years back about a person who worked in a retail store and had an obese woman as a customer. The woman paid for whatever she bought with coins from her pocket and the main character was repulsed by the warmth of the coins. The writer made it clear that the cashier didn't even want to touch the coins because they were warm from the fat woman's grotesque body.

I don't care how fat you are or how skinny you are, if you have money in your pocket it is going to be warm! Obviously the cashier wouldn't be offended at all if the warm cash was coming from the pocket of some stud-muffin.

I went off on a rant about that story and, honestly, I shouldn't have. The writer was being honest about the situation. If the cashier wasn't grossed out, I guess it would have been less realistic. The writer was doing her job and the story was actually pretty good.

I guess I just don't like to see people being discriminated because of their size. I know a woman who told me she would never hire a fat person because they're lazy. She said this to my face. I felt like smacking her.

Yup, we've come a long way in the fight against racial stereotypes but unless you're skinny you're still feeling the rage that comes your way when you're not.

A to Z Honesty - C is for Cathy

When I was in Grade Nine, back in the days when platform-shoe-wearing dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were five Cathys in my gym class. Obviously a popular name in 1960, when I was hatched. The Tiffany of its time.

Imagine a whole gymnasium filled with Cathys, flabbily running around sweating up the joint whilst colouring the landscape with their gym rompers. Remember gym rompers? Even the cutest girls in school looked terrible in gym rompers. It was those puffy elasticized bottoms, squeezing into the equally puffy flesh of the top of the thigh, showing off every fish-belly-white nuance of pudge as it jiggled through its gymnastics-basketball-field hockey heroin-like haze. And if the cutest girls looked rancid in those rompers, imagine how the rest of us dorky shiner niners looked. I tell ya, it was like Blue Suicide just waiting to happen.

Anyway, we all had to have our names embroidered on the back of our rompers. It Was A Rule. And I remember thinking, back then, because I would think of anything to take my mind off the horrors of gym class (reminds me of the woodsplitter - gak), that if your name was Kathy with a K, you were inclined to be slender and, if you were Cathy with a C, you were inclined the other way. Which was porkified.

I developed a theory about this. Notice the letter C. All round, like a pregnant belly, or a coffee cup. I believe its natural shape holds all the fat in. Notice the letter K - there is no bottom to the letter. All the fat just falls out.

Think about all the Cathys or Kathys you know. Who are the fatties? Huh? Huh?

I know. You are blown away by my brilliance. I should win a Nobel prize for this.

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By the way, C is for Cathy is also today's A to Z theme for Denise Covey, my dear Aussie colleague who has generously featured me on her blog today. Big hugs your way, Denise dahling! Thank you so much! You can check out her feature here.