The sick-bed roller coaster ride

Ooooh, and what a wild ride it's turning out to have been, for both me and for my lovely hubby.

As a supposedly 'normal' person (i.e. someone without frank diabetes or any recognisable signs of metabolic disease), a combination of sickness, then recovery, adding in a little stress (er, make that a lot!) along the way, now my lovely hubby getting sick, the continuing family tensions and some rather worrysome developments at work have affected my weight to an astonishing degree.

I guess you could say it's hit my much-vaunted 'stability' right out of the ballpark! In the words of those Magnificent Men... when applied to the numbers I've been seeing on the bathroom scales:
They go Up, Tiddly, Up, Up
And They're Down, Tiddly, Down, Down.
Up! Down! Flying Around.

That quite astounding loss I talked about, which happened when I was unwell and had no appetite, did indeed turn around in double-quick time as I got better. Despite not going crazy-mad on the food front as I recovered (after all, I still didn't have all that much of an appetite as most food tasted slightly weird), within the space of just a bit more than a week or so I'd somersaulted around like crazy. Stability? Whoa, not likely chum!

Overall, I descended from my pre-poorly bunny supposedly 'stable' 54kg right down to 51.5kg (actually dipping a little below that, in fact, to not much over eight stone) then galloped all the way back up to a whopping 56 kg (8 stone 11 lbs). Thank heavens I didn't stay there long!

I'm happy to say that I am now back down again to my 'comfortable' 54kg but heck, what changes to to take place within such a short space of time - not much longer than a few days really - and apparently with precious little connection to my actual food intake! Bizarre, eh? I guess it's something the body does in response to a period of physical 'stress' but even after much puzzling I can't figure this out at all. However, it surely did happen.

As to my darling lovely hubby, it's been a similar roller coaster ride, but for quite different reasons. He has been, and indeed is still quite poorly, but his weight has, amazingly enough, remained pretty stable over this whole period of sickness. Good, eh? Well, not entirely as his blood glucose and blood pressure have taken the hit instead.

As those who've put up with my rambles in the past will know, he is Type II diabetic (albeit, usually very tightly controlled). However, whilst he's been poorly, his fasting and after-meals blood glucose levels have been significantly higher than they usually are. Having said that, they haven't hit levels which would prompt a call to the GP... thankfully. Now he's over the worst of the fever (he had a temperature of nearly 39 degrees C) and getting to feel a bit better, the BG levels are dropping back towards his 'normal' levels, thank goodness.

The chart we produce from his daily readings actually indicates when he got sick pretty clearly. He's obviously feeling a bit better now because he has the energy to be a little peed-off, as he says that the recent high numbers 'b**s up' his averages!

The scary change was to his blood pressure though (er, never very high to begin with), which plummeted over the weekend whilst he still had the worst of the fever.

Although he thinks I'm exaggerating (not so, babe!), I was on the verge of calling an ambulance early on Saturday morning when he came within a gnat's-whisker of collapsing on our bathroom floor. He was completely out of it and couldn't even acknowledge me, let alone stand unaided. To be honest, I'm soooo glad he's lost a lot of weight over the last few years - even at his new slinky-self mass he's still a five foot ten inch male (that's a whole lot of man to tote around!) so it took all my strength to support him and get him back to bed.

Thankfully, returning to the horizontal and a rest in bed worked wonders and restored him to something resembling OK once again, but he did have me worried for quite a while afterwards.

What really strikes me is the apparent differences in the way our two bodies respond to a period of illness. It'll be interesting to see if there is any effect on his weight as the days progress, and I do rather wonder if my own BG or BP (untested, sadly) saw any changes while I was ill.

Food for thought, eh? Onwards ever...