"Are You Bored Yet?" - A Novel by Fatstrat

Options
Hi!

My name is Mike. My friends call me Mike. Don't ask, it's a long story and I'd rather be called Mike anyway. :huh: My friend Tami told me to come check out the forum after I was brutally assaulted by a Girl Scout because I refused to accept Trefoils as a substitute for the Thin Mints I had ordered. This was the fourth year in a row, and I swear I think they're messing up my order on purpose now. I had initially tried Karate, at another friend's suggestion, but I had to order it from eBay and all it did was make me smell awful and make women with beehive and Farrah Fawcett haircuts chase me and steal my wallet.

Well, I have decided that cheap cologne is not going to solve my problem and that it's time to just put in some good, old-fashioned hard work and get into shape so I can kick that little girl's rear once and for all and feel like a REAL man, capable of beating up children, once again.

(Cue flashback sounds and blurring vision...)

About 11 years ago, I spent over a month in the ICU fighting an infection after a fairly "routine" stomach surgery to correct issues that had affected me since birth. Forty days and six major surgeries later, I was finally released from the hospital to star in "Night of the Living Dead: Hospital Gown Zombies." I think it went straight to video, but it's hard to be sure because I was on a lot of morphine that month and the little grasshopper I befriended told me videos didn't exist and were merely a figment of my ridiculous imagination, but I digress...

So where was I? Oh yes, I remember now.

Forty days and six major surgeries later, I was finally released from the hospital by my surgeons with a few expensive and very stylish medical accessories and a home health nurse who came to my house three times a day because I'm a big deal. Apparently, the glamour of beeping machines, various feeding and drain tubes, and gauze was too much for me to handle because I misplaced my entire large intestine and pretty much every ounce of my body fat. I had never done that before, how embarrassing! Well, I had remembered the doctors saying I could survive without the large intestine so that didn't worry me too much. Body fat, however, was a different story. I had lost 64 pounds during those six weeks; from 180 pounds to 116 pounds on my 5'11.5" frame. When the body fat in your abdomen is completely depleted, you no longer have anything to keep your organs, blood vessels, and digestive tract where they need to be. This can result in a condition that makes it impossible for the stomach to empty into the small intestine to continue digestion. Eventually, the stomach expels food from the only other opening it can. As you can imagine, after having your abs split six times in as many weeks, vomiting is excruciatingly pleasant. Needless to say, I was not able to eat until the 24 hour feeding pump was able to push enough nutrients and calories through me to replenish enough body fat. This gave my stomach some room to work, just in time (about a week) for Mom to relieve my grandmother and take over fussing over me and putting spit in my hair when I was too weak to run away from such abuses.

Spit styling became more tolerable soon after Mom's arrival as I started to smell her cooking, drifting from my kitchen. She spent most of that week in the kitchen, bringing me tiny saucers of my favorite chicken and rice dish while chanting in her Korean accent, "eat slowly, eat slowly, eat slowly, eat slowly," pausing only to spit in the automatic hair-styling machine she had apparently invented and built for just this occasion. Weird. Anyway, Mom left at the end of the week but she did modify the Spit Styler to say "eat slowly, eat slowly" but was unable to teach it to cook anything more than ramen noodles. Luckily, I was feeling well enough to walk around and start cooking for myself. I ate faster, and faster, mainly to spite Spit Styler but also because I was gaining my appetite back. Spit and I had a falling out soon after, and he left. The last I heard, he was working for college kids and had even expanded his skill set to making baloney sandwiches and tutoring students in Dutch literature. I wish him all the best.

I spent the next couple of years trying to get my weight up. When I had finally recovered to my surgeon's satisfaction, she was ready to take back my last accessory and reconstruct my gut by making a surrogate bowel from pieces of my small intestine and some stuff a cute little hunch-backed guy brought back from the "Cemetery" which I guess was the name of the building they kept the hospital supplies in. A few months later, I was healed up but still underweight and haunted by the desire to build myself a mate using old body parts and high voltage electricity. I'm working on that as soon as I can find a therapist with a sense of humor but no sense of smell.

It took a few years, but I finally got back up to what I guess is my "normal" weight. The problem is that I was never referred for physical therapy and due to chronic exhaustion (probably due to being out of shape, vicious circle, yadda yadda) and an apparent bout of PTSD and associated demotivators, I never reestablished the Atlas-ian muscle tone I had achieved before all the fun started. Much of the new weight is dead weight, added on by eating junk and not moving enough to burn it off.

I've been on exercise programs on and off in the meantime but never stuck to them (I'm pretty sure I've dedicated more time to this giant mess I'm typing right now) and have only accomplished minor improvements. Well, I had an incredible life-changing event over the Christmas holidays and now it's time for me to get back on track and take my pre-ICU life back with a healthy dose of angry determination that will make Tony Robbins crawl into the fetal position amid his falsetto cries for his mommy.

I really don't have too far to go; I mean, I'm pretty darn sexy right now as it is but this time I want to begin a program and make it a lifelong routine. I have already made some big dietary changes and have cut 98% of the fast food I was eating completely out of my diet since January. Fruits and veggies are not kind to my modified digestive tract so I supplement with multivitamins, drink V8 juice (yum) and eat what veggies I can tolerate without ill effects.

I honestly don't watch and won't watch for fats and cholesterol. Never have, never will. I don't really have to. There's always a silver lining no matter what the tragedy, and mine is impaired lipid absorption. Of course, good fats are just as difficult to absorb so I supplement with fish oil and also eat lots of tuna, tilapia and especially salmon. At my last doctor's visit, my combined HDL/LDL was well below 100 and triglycerides were well below "low risk" levels.

Sodium is another factor that I pretty much ignore. My blood pressure has consistently stayed around 127/75 (last check) since I quit smoking over two years ago. I'm happy with that. More importantly, my psycho nurse practitioner is happy with that. She's incredibly smart and better than any MD I've had, hands down. She's also annoyingly thorough due to acute knowledge of my past history of renal, liver and heart failure (during my ICU stay) and some strange desire to keep me alive for a while. If my labs are not raising her eyebrow, then they aren't raising mine. I finally have a medical professional I can trust. I also have an appointment with a nephrologist at the end of the month for what is probably nothing, but if I don't go I'm sure she will hunt me down and part my hair with spit and I just can't have that.

So, basically I'm going to:

1. Start exercising. I'm somewhat limited right now after being attacked by a door jamb and having my pinky toe either broken, fractured or just sprained in a freakishly severe and painful way, but not every exercise involves my wittle pinky winky toe. Hehe, he hates it went I part his two little hairs with spit!

2. Continue my "diet," which is basically free of fast food (98%) and full of a balance of home cooked foods and supplemented with multivitamins and crack. No! Wait, no crack. Scratch that. What the hell?

3. Not bother to order ANY Girl Scout cookies next year! :mad:

4. Wow. Did you actually read this far?!? It's Tami's fault! :glasses:

-Mike
«1

Replies

  • fatstrat
    fatstrat Posts: 216
    Options
    Hi!

    My name is Mike. My friends call me Mike. Don't ask, it's a long story and I'd rather be called Mike anyway. :huh: My friend Tami told me to come check out the forum after I was brutally assaulted by a Girl Scout because I refused to accept Trefoils as a substitute for the Thin Mints I had ordered. This was the fourth year in a row, and I swear I think they're messing up my order on purpose now. I had initially tried Karate, at another friend's suggestion, but I had to order it from eBay and all it did was make me smell awful and make women with beehive and Farrah Fawcett haircuts chase me and steal my wallet.

    Well, I have decided that cheap cologne is not going to solve my problem and that it's time to just put in some good, old-fashioned hard work and get into shape so I can kick that little girl's rear once and for all and feel like a REAL man, capable of beating up children, once again.

    (Cue flashback sounds and blurring vision...)

    About 11 years ago, I spent over a month in the ICU fighting an infection after a fairly "routine" stomach surgery to correct issues that had affected me since birth. Forty days and six major surgeries later, I was finally released from the hospital to star in "Night of the Living Dead: Hospital Gown Zombies." I think it went straight to video, but it's hard to be sure because I was on a lot of morphine that month and the little grasshopper I befriended told me videos didn't exist and were merely a figment of my ridiculous imagination, but I digress...

    So where was I? Oh yes, I remember now.

    Forty days and six major surgeries later, I was finally released from the hospital by my surgeons with a few expensive and very stylish medical accessories and a home health nurse who came to my house three times a day because I'm a big deal. Apparently, the glamour of beeping machines, various feeding and drain tubes, and gauze was too much for me to handle because I misplaced my entire large intestine and pretty much every ounce of my body fat. I had never done that before, how embarrassing! Well, I had remembered the doctors saying I could survive without the large intestine so that didn't worry me too much. Body fat, however, was a different story. I had lost 64 pounds during those six weeks; from 180 pounds to 116 pounds on my 5'11.5" frame. When the body fat in your abdomen is completely depleted, you no longer have anything to keep your organs, blood vessels, and digestive tract where they need to be. This can result in a condition that makes it impossible for the stomach to empty into the small intestine to continue digestion. Eventually, the stomach expels food from the only other opening it can. As you can imagine, after having your abs split six times in as many weeks, vomiting is excruciatingly pleasant. Needless to say, I was not able to eat until the 24 hour feeding pump was able to push enough nutrients and calories through me to replenish enough body fat. This gave my stomach some room to work, just in time (about a week) for Mom to relieve my grandmother and take over fussing over me and putting spit in my hair when I was too weak to run away from such abuses.

    Spit styling became more tolerable soon after Mom's arrival as I started to smell her cooking, drifting from my kitchen. She spent most of that week in the kitchen, bringing me tiny saucers of my favorite chicken and rice dish while chanting in her Korean accent, "eat slowly, eat slowly, eat slowly, eat slowly," pausing only to spit in the automatic hair-styling machine she had apparently invented and built for just this occasion. Weird. Anyway, Mom left at the end of the week but she did modify the Spit Styler to say "eat slowly, eat slowly" but was unable to teach it to cook anything more than ramen noodles. Luckily, I was feeling well enough to walk around and start cooking for myself. I ate faster, and faster, mainly to spite Spit Styler but also because I was gaining my appetite back. Spit and I had a falling out soon after, and he left. The last I heard, he was working for college kids and had even expanded his skill set to making baloney sandwiches and tutoring students in Dutch literature. I wish him all the best.

    I spent the next couple of years trying to get my weight up. When I had finally recovered to my surgeon's satisfaction, she was ready to take back my last accessory and reconstruct my gut by making a surrogate bowel from pieces of my small intestine and some stuff a cute little hunch-backed guy brought back from the "Cemetery" which I guess was the name of the building they kept the hospital supplies in. A few months later, I was healed up but still underweight and haunted by the desire to build myself a mate using old body parts and high voltage electricity. I'm working on that as soon as I can find a therapist with a sense of humor but no sense of smell.

    It took a few years, but I finally got back up to what I guess is my "normal" weight. The problem is that I was never referred for physical therapy and due to chronic exhaustion (probably due to being out of shape, vicious circle, yadda yadda) and an apparent bout of PTSD and associated demotivators, I never reestablished the Atlas-ian muscle tone I had achieved before all the fun started. Much of the new weight is dead weight, added on by eating junk and not moving enough to burn it off.

    I've been on exercise programs on and off in the meantime but never stuck to them (I'm pretty sure I've dedicated more time to this giant mess I'm typing right now) and have only accomplished minor improvements. Well, I had an incredible life-changing event over the Christmas holidays and now it's time for me to get back on track and take my pre-ICU life back with a healthy dose of angry determination that will make Tony Robbins crawl into the fetal position amid his falsetto cries for his mommy.

    I really don't have too far to go; I mean, I'm pretty darn sexy right now as it is but this time I want to begin a program and make it a lifelong routine. I have already made some big dietary changes and have cut 98% of the fast food I was eating completely out of my diet since January. Fruits and veggies are not kind to my modified digestive tract so I supplement with multivitamins, drink V8 juice (yum) and eat what veggies I can tolerate without ill effects.

    I honestly don't watch and won't watch for fats and cholesterol. Never have, never will. I don't really have to. There's always a silver lining no matter what the tragedy, and mine is impaired lipid absorption. Of course, good fats are just as difficult to absorb so I supplement with fish oil and also eat lots of tuna, tilapia and especially salmon. At my last doctor's visit, my combined HDL/LDL was well below 100 and triglycerides were well below "low risk" levels.

    Sodium is another factor that I pretty much ignore. My blood pressure has consistently stayed around 127/75 (last check) since I quit smoking over two years ago. I'm happy with that. More importantly, my psycho nurse practitioner is happy with that. She's incredibly smart and better than any MD I've had, hands down. She's also annoyingly thorough due to acute knowledge of my past history of renal, liver and heart failure (during my ICU stay) and some strange desire to keep me alive for a while. If my labs are not raising her eyebrow, then they aren't raising mine. I finally have a medical professional I can trust. I also have an appointment with a nephrologist at the end of the month for what is probably nothing, but if I don't go I'm sure she will hunt me down and part my hair with spit and I just can't have that.

    So, basically I'm going to:

    1. Start exercising. I'm somewhat limited right now after being attacked by a door jamb and having my pinky toe either broken, fractured or just sprained in a freakishly severe and painful way, but not every exercise involves my wittle pinky winky toe. Hehe, he hates it went I part his two little hairs with spit!

    2. Continue my "diet," which is basically free of fast food (98%) and full of a balance of home cooked foods and supplemented with multivitamins and crack. No! Wait, no crack. Scratch that. What the hell?

    3. Not bother to order ANY Girl Scout cookies next year! :mad:

    4. Wow. Did you actually read this far?!? It's Tami's fault! :glasses:

    -Mike
  • iftcheiaf
    iftcheiaf Posts: 960 Member
    Options
    In reading that, you remind me of my ex-husband. All except for the missing internal organs and sexy part.
  • ladyofivy
    ladyofivy Posts: 648
    Options
    Hi Gertrude. Er.. Mike? Mike. Sorry. (I had thought that it was the other thing that you liked being called.)

    Yes.

    Hi Mike!

    A few points to ponder:

    1. When you tried karate, was it High Karate or Tang Soo Do karate? That makes the difference. That's why Daniel-san got all the tail.

    2. Re Girl Scout manhandling: I find that it's important to make sure that she doesn't have a petty thug that works for her first. Sure, sometimes it's just her 10 year old "big brother", but once in a while it's going to be an older Italian guy who "owns a car wash" and a large bat. Just sayin'.

    3. Why did your mom speak in a Korean accent? Why not just speak Korean or in an American accent? If you don't speak Korean, why not just use subtitles? Also, did the spit styler have a Korean accent? Which would be weird, since it was probably made in America. Or China. Which would explain the lead poisoning. I'm just assuming here.

    4.It's a shame that Spit has moved on... the trick to building yourself a mate is less a factor of used parts, and more a factor of having tall, dark hair with a white streak up the side. I just know that Spit could have made her look fab-u-louuuus.

    5. Did the incredible life-changing event over Christmas have anything to do with a star in the east and a child being born? I'm only asking to save you some future embarrassment... that's a thing they do yearly over here in the US. It's called a re-enactment of the Nativity. Not that you shouldn't get into shape, mind ya.

    Oh. PS, Welcome!
  • jackeh
    jackeh Posts: 1,515 Member
    Options
    welcome:flowerforyou:

    ... you sound like an interesting person:huh:

    but welcome anyways

    Jackie:ohwell:
  • TamTastic
    TamTastic Posts: 19,224 Member
    Options
    Hey Mike!! Welcome to MFP!! :flowerforyou:

    (I am the Tami he knows!! But don't hold that against me!! :laugh: :laugh: , Just kidding!!!)

    Wow and I thought I was a talker!! :glasses: :wink:

    :bigsmile:
  • Losing_It
    Losing_It Posts: 3,271 Member
    Options
    Welcome, Mike!!!!! Love your intro!!!!:flowerforyou: :love:
  • kellch
    kellch Posts: 7,849 Member
    Options
    Hi Mike :flowerforyou: Welcome :drinker:

    And thank you for giving me something to read while I drank my morning cup of coffee :smokin:
  • fatstrat
    fatstrat Posts: 216
    Options
    In reading that, you remind me of my ex-husband. All except for the missing internal organs and sexy part.

    I think I know a certain Girl Scout that could take care of the internal organ part, but you're going to have to go get her yourself.

    :wink:
  • fatstrat
    fatstrat Posts: 216
    Options
    1. When you tried karate, was it High Karate or Tang Soo Do karate? That makes the difference. That's why Daniel-san got all the tail.

    Hai Karate. The self-defense manual didn't really work for me. :cry:
    3. Why did your mom speak in a Korean accent?

    She's Korean. That part of the story is not inspired by morphine-induced hallucinations. The "sexy" part... probably. But it's my story, so I say what's true or not. :tongue:
    5. Did the incredible life-changing event over Christmas have anything to do with a star in the east and a child being born?

    Not that child, mine happened on the 18th. I dont think a child was involved, unless you count my inner child. :happy:
    Oh. PS, Welcome!

    Thank you! :flowerforyou:
  • fatstrat
    fatstrat Posts: 216
    Options
    welcome:flowerforyou:

    ... you sound like an interesting person:huh:

    but welcome anyways

    Jackie:ohwell:

    Thank you, Jackie! :flowerforyou:
  • fatstrat
    fatstrat Posts: 216
    Options

    Wow and I thought I was a talker!! :glasses: :wink:

    :bigsmile:

    There is a lot you don't know about me. For instance, did you happen to see my cleavage? :wink: :laugh:
  • fatstrat
    fatstrat Posts: 216
    Options
    And THANKS!!! To Losing_it and kellch!

    :happy: :laugh: :happy:
  • songbyrdsweet
    songbyrdsweet Posts: 5,691 Member
    Options
    It sounds like you write articles for a men's magazine. The PG ones I mean. :bigsmile:
  • Shannon023
    Shannon023 Posts: 14,529 Member
    Options
    Welcome Mike!

    You have amazing cleavage, :love: I'm resentful. :angry:

    Good luck to you! :smile:
  • WillPillageYourVillageForFood
    Options
    Hi Mike. Love the cleavage, only a true manly man would display that on here. :bigsmile:
  • SoupNazi
    SoupNazi Posts: 4,229 Member
    Options
    Well hello dere Mike!


    I agree! Nice cleavage.:smokin:
  • tashjs21
    tashjs21 Posts: 4,584 Member
    Options
    Hiya Mike! :smile:

    Nice Av! flirtysmile1.gif
  • pettmybunny
    pettmybunny Posts: 1,986 Member
    Options
    Howdy Mike... Everyone's commenting on your cleavage... I'm looking a little lower...

    Wait, not that low!

    Is that duct tape creating your cleavage? lol
  • MOMOFTWO29
    MOMOFTWO29 Posts: 8,276 Member
    Options
    Hello and welcome to MFP. You will love this site if you don't already. I love it here. This site is so motivational, supportive, helpful, and everyone is so nice, helpful and friendly. I just wanted to tell you good luck on your weight loss journey, you can do this.:smile::flowerforyou: :drinker: :bigsmile:
  • Punchy
    Punchy Posts: 4
    Options
    Your post made me feel all tingly inside, like when I saw Obama riding a unicorn over the rainbow