And the hits just keep coming!

Two women sparring with a speed bag [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

We found out today that my dad needs to have another surgery soon.  This time to repair the damage done to his abdominal wall when he had a softball-sized abdominal aneurysm removed about 18 or so years ago.  They need to remove some scar tissue and reenforce the muscle so as to avoid more hernias.  He has one currently, and apparently has had for some time (we're talking years here people) now, but didn't really feel the need to tell anyone about it.  Now, I guess, it's starting to cause some issues, and his doctors want to avoid strangulation–which is exactly as disgusting as it sounds: a piece of an organ gets trapped inside the hernia and is cut off from the rest of it's blood supply, so it dies.  It's relatively rare for this to happen, but my father has an unnatural aptitude for obtaining the rarest of diseases and conditions.  Yay!

My father's surgery will be a much larger surgery than a normal hernia operation because of the need to repair all the scar tissue he has in his abdomen.  He has a scar that runs from just below his sternum to his groin.  It's a messy, ragged scar because the stitches from his abdominal aneurysm surgery were removed before the wound had completely healed and he tore the barely healed flesh open when we brought him home and he sat down.  The man has literally been falling apart since I was a child.  Seriously, it's been a heart attack, some sort of aneurysm (small brain or large belly), a joint replacement (knee, shoulder, and he'll soon need new hips), some weird bone spur thing, a disintegrating spinal column, blood poisoning from an unknown infection, an infected pancreas, a defective gallbladder, or some other such nonsense since I was 11 years old.  And I remember him having to get knee surgery before that too.

I'm 35 now.  He's had at least as many surgeries as I've had years.

Now, I wouldn't be the self-absorbed millennial the media tells me I am if I didn't tie this all back around to me, so:

I have GOT to start taking better care of myself.  I need to lose weight, get in shape, and do all the other things that doctors tell people to do.  I do NOT want to end up like my father.

I've been eating less and better lately, so I've got to start with the exercising again.  I've also got to find a way to manage my stress levels and get. More. Sleep.  Or better sleep or something.  I've a tendency to go completely nocturnal when left to myself, and when I'm not, I'll alternate between getting 3 hours of sleep a night to crashing completely for 14-16 hours.  That does me no go, and probably adds to my stress.  I've really got to get all that under control.

And I've got to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.  Not referring to the future her, but the other stuff in my life: my physical and emotional junk.  I need to straighten it all out.  Tiny steps to a better tomorrow and all that.

Still, even with working on my life junk I need a way to make a living.  I've got to figure that out too.