15 years

15 years ago today Jonthon and Richard died. We were only 14. I remember it was a Tuesday. (or at least i think it was a Tuesday) We had just been to freshman orientation that morning. That evening i went to marching band practice with my sisters. I remember walking up to the high school gym and thought it was strange that there was no one there but a teacher. Then we were told the awful news. There had been a bad car accident that afternoon. Jonathon and Richard were in it. Richard had already been pronounced dead. Jonathon was on life support. I immediately started praying that Jonathon would be okay. But by the time i had found out about it he was already gone. I mean we were only 14 how could this be happening? This wasn't supposed to happen. We were supposed to start high school next week. I had been in school with them since kindergarden. My locker was between them for a lot of grade school. Richard was only 1 week younger than me. We spent lots of recesses playing kickball. They were really good at it. I sucked but i didn't care. I was in shock. Their funeral was in the middle school gym. I went in shock. I don't even remember crying. i just kept thinking how could this happen? i had just seen them a few hours before. I heard the sirens of the ambulance and police coming for them. How could they be gone.

15 years later and it still hurts that they are gone. I thought of them the day that we started high school. Everyday that i walked by their lockers and saw the signs of how we missed them. The memorial in our year book for them. I thought of them the day we graduated from high school and at our 10 year high school reunion in November. And lots of days in between. It was so strange not to see them at school. I mean i had seen them every day from kindergarden through 8th grade. I can't believe that they have been gone 15 years.

Miss you tons jonathon and richard.

Cupcake Hat

Crocheting has always been a favorite activity of mine. Especially when i am anxious like i have been lately. There is nothing like seeing a skein of yarn take shape into a creation. Crocheting is quite relaxing for me. It is soothing to make the same movements over and over. And I love the softness of the yarn. So tonight after work i made a cupcake hat. My friend Brooke was telling me about a cupcake hat she had seen yesterday and i thought it would be fun to make.

Summertime Happenings

To be honest i can not believe we are in August already. It doesn't seem possible. So my dear friends this is what i have been up to this incredible summer. May Started out with the Susan G Komen Walk for the Cure. It was an amazing walk with my mom, Alicia, Jean, Sara, and Curt. It was made very special that all 4 of us kids were able to do this with my mom who is a breast cancer survivor! We also walked in memory of 3 incredible fighters Sue Voges, Katie Voges and Marilyn Walters. Sue was definately on my mind the entire day. We love and miss you so much Sue!

There was approximately 20,000 people who turned out for this walk. It was a very emotional day. Mom had made us t-shirts with butterflies flying to heaven in honor of Sue. Sue had picked out butterflies for the covers of her programs for her funeral. Sue had also picked the music for her funeral and one of the songs she chose was Melissa Etheridge Run for life. Every year at the run walk they chose a song to dedicate to all the survivors and this year they chose Run for Life. I almost lost it at that moment.

This summer also brought a new record for me in my recovery from eating disorders. I made it 5 1/2 months without using symptoms before i had bump in the road. I am slowly getting myself back on the road. Which has not been easy. I was quite upset with myself for going back to using symptoms. And every time i go back it just makes it alot harder to stop. But i am stopping. I will fight this and win. The eating disorder won't win. My anxiety has been awful. I feel anxious pretty much every time i eat for a couple of hours afterwards. And sometimes i wonder if all this anxiety will ever stop. I also haven't been able to sleep through the night in months. Most of the time i fall asleep pretty easily. i just can't stay asleep. i will sleep 2-3 hours and then wake up toss and turn fall back asleep and repeat in an hour or 2. I have had some really bad nights of waking up every hour. and feeling yep you guessed it anxious.

This summer has brought a new job for me!!! I am finishing up my last week of orientation as a Lactation Consultant!!! I will work one day a week in the breastfeeding clinic and then work the other 2 days a week in postpartum and newborn nursery. So far i absolutely love the clinic. I love being able to continue helping the moms i see in the hospital. I also love seeing how much the babies continue to change in their first few weeks of life. It is truly an amazing job in helping these new mamas gain confidence in feeding their new baby.

The summer has also brought my favorite activity of swimming and summertime BBQs with good friends. We are all so busy that we definately don't get together as much as we should. And when we do it is wonderful. i just wish it lasted longer.

Hope you all are having a wonderful summer!

Breast Cancer - An Inspiring Video

Happy Nurses Day!!!!

Its Nurses day 2011. Tomorrow is the 5 year anniversary of me graduating from nursing school. Being a nurse is the hardest job in the world. It is the most amazing job in the world. A job i absolutely love. As it is nurses day i am thinking about all the people that i have taken care of and how they have touched me and made me who i am today. I consider it a privelage that they allowed me to be there in the first days of their child's life. I consider it a privelage to be there when a patient dies. 12 years i began my career in nursing passing ice water and making beds in a little nursing home. In these 12 years i have worked in ob, psych and med-surg. Learning everything i possibly can and applying it in my everyday life. i think each and everyone of them for allowing me to have the privelage to be in their life for that short little bit.

hormones, emotions, and assertiveness oh my!

first i have to say apologize to everyone who has been around me the last week. wow. A warning should come with when you start hormone therapy. I have always heard people talk about pmsing and the emotional roller coaster that comes with monthly cycles. But damn i never knew how intense they could be! As if that wasn't intense enough by itself add not being numbed out by an eating disorder and learning to be assertive.... Insert one snappy katie.

But the good news is my crazy body is responding to everything!!! The progesterone replacement therapy is working yippee!!! Trust me there have been times this week that i was questioning myself and wondering why i had even asked for this. lol. I think we are finally on a good combination of meds to control the anxiety, depression and ocd. The eating disorder thoughts are finally tolerable enough that i am not acting on them. 3.5 months since i last restricted or purged. Pretty proud of that record :) And i actually have been enjoying some easter candy. Totally forgot how yummy caramel cadburry eggs are and reces peanut butter eggs.

I had to work Easter so i decided to make bunny ear hats for the babies in the nursery. I ended up making 8 of them. And luckily that was how many babies we had in the nursery that morning. Next year i will have to have extras for the babies that decide to be born on easter. Especially since they were a huge hit.

NEDA 2011 Its time to talk about it

Every year during the last week of february there is eating disorder awareness week. Most of the time it is overshadowed by black history month and heart health. To me this is sad that a very fatal disease is pushed to the backburner because it is taboo to be a girl or woman or even a male and have an eating disorder.

So i thought i would share my story. My eating disorder started when i was really young. As i look back on my life i can see different signs and symtpoms starting back when i was 6. I remember sneaking food like whole bags of marshmallows, boxes of cake mixes, boxes of brownie mixes, cans of icing. My parents would clean my room every so often and find all of this. I would steal food out of the fridge and hide the evidence under my bed, i would steal cans of pepsi and hide tem under the bed also. I would also be the one kid to offer to clear the table and scrape the plates so i could eat what the others didnt. I remember going to the pediatrician and my mom would mention what i was doing. But they never said anything. You see i had gone through puberty already at the age of 6. And the eating was how i comforted myself. My eating disorder had already became my best friend. By the time I was 8 i was already overweight and mom and dad were getting really concerned about the weight gain. So began the dieting. During grade school i came to hate being weighed in p.e. I was already embarassed by how much i weighed. Mom would always know when i would be weighed and would start having me doing sit ups every night after supper. I came to absolutely hate exercise cause i knew exercising meant i was supposed to be losing weight and i never seemed to be able to lose the weight. I felt like i was never good enough. I couldn't ride a bike fast enough, i couldn't run, i couldn't walk fast enough. Which meant i was disappointing my parents even more. They didn't want a fat daughter. They wanted a healthy daughter. Fast forward to high school and came even more dieting and more exercise. Every morning i would get up early before school and did aerobics before school. I would drive to school early in the winter and walk and run the halls all in the name of losing weight. Fast forward to college. And i let my sisters talk me into joing weight watchers. BIG mistake. The eating disorders got even worst. Now there were even more bad foods that i wouldn't let myself eat. Skipping meals every single day. Granted i never ate breakfast when i was growing up. To me eating breakfast was for thin people who could afford those calories that wasn't me. But now i would go a couple of days without eating before the weigh in. The obscession become even more. I wouldn't let myself drink anything before the weigh in, i couldn't eat, i had to wear the lightest clothes possible. And then after the weigh in was a trip to the grocery store and i would spend the day eating anything and everything i wanted. And so started a horrible cycle of bulim ia. Pretty soon i would binge the entire next day also. Once again my family would see the signs of me hoarding food in my room. They would joke and say i had a grocery store in there. Not only was food hidden in my room it was in my car also. The a ha moment was when i was in mental health class and one of the assignments that i was given was to attend 25 hours of support groups. The one that i chose was eating disorders. I was interested in eating disorders and thought maybe i had one. At the end of the group. I was shock. I saw myself in so many of the girls in the group. The group leader got me to talk and at the she told me i needed to get help that if i didn't i would die. Eating disorders kill. Fast forward again to october 2006. I called a therapist who was known to helping people with eating disorders and started seeing michelle. I didn't know if i had an eating disorder or if there was something mentally wrong with me that i couldn't lose weight. After 6 months of seeing michelle i was diagnosed with bulimia. It was a shock. A year later i started seeing a dietician at OSF. i had no idea what i was supposed to eat or how much. Come to find out i was severly restricting my calories most days it was an average of 800 instead of the 1600-2000 my body needed. Especially being a nurse on a busy med-surg floor. and began the horrible and painful process of learning what a body needs. Who would have ever thought that you were supposed to eat every 3-4 hours ?! Fast forward again and there is a new job and insurance that won't cover me seeing michelle. And i started seeing Sabra at OSF. And attending a support group on Wednesday evenings led by jill then and now melinda Suddenly i had an entire team who specialized in eating disorders and saw through all my execuses and challenged and still challenge all my crazy irrational thinking. God help them with that one : ) After being in recovery for 3 hard years. Having relapse after relapse. There is still some hope that i can get rid of this forever. I still have a lot of work ahead of me. But one day i want to become an advocate. I don't want anyone to go though what i have been through. One day i hope the medical professionals will be able to spot eating disorders quicker and get patients into treatment sooner that what i did. I sometimes think how my life would be different if the signs had been recognized sooner.

Happy birthday Chloe!!!

I am posting this a day early since it is my weekend to work. But tomorrow is my Chloe girl's 4th birthday! I wish i could be at home to celebrate it with her chloe style. Meaning a long walk since it will actually be warm here and her favorite game of fetch.

I know she is just a dog. But to me she is more than that to me. Chloe has been there for me alot. 2010 was not exactly a good year for me. But chloe helped me get through it. There were many days where i would have prefered to have stayed in bed but Chloe had different ideas. Yep it is a little hard to ignore a 90 pound lab jumping on you and kissing your face and crying till you get out of bed. Along with the toys being dropped on your face.

So happy birthday my monster :) i love you you crazy dog. But can i make one request? Pleease stop eating my food. I know you love bread and peanut butter. Oh not to mention why is the trash so fascinating for you to spread everywhere?

Running?!

I have been doing really well with recovery the last month. So my reward was i get to start exercising again. As long as i eat all my meals :) So today i went to the gym and did a piyo class. I love Piyo. For those of you who have never heard of piyo it is pilates and yoga choreographed to faster music than what you would normally do in a yoga class. There was even Lady Gaga. Anyway before the class started we were talking about running. I have been wanting to start running and doing 5ks. However i have never been able to really stick to it. I get frustrated with trying to figure out the whole breathing and running thing. So some of the girls were giving me advice so i do feel like i am fat and out of shape. So after the class i wanted to try to some of the advice. So i found my ear buds in the bottom of my bag plugged them into the tv attached to the treadmill and found House. What better way to run than with House on? One girl told me to count my steps and and every 3rd step to breathe. That was a little difficult. So i did pursed lip breathing for 6 counts. And before i knew it I had run a 1/4 mile. NEW RECORD FOR ME!!!! And i liked it. I thought well lets see if i can run 1/2 mile and i was able to do it!! It was a little difficult. But i did it!!!! Can you tell i am excited?! Hmm maybe i will be able to run a 5k in May for breast cancer. I can not wait to start running outside with Chloe.