This weblog wouldn’t be complete without a little before and after. I don’t have any photos of me at my lowest weight (115lb / 52kg), but here are some from December ‘08, when I was still around 123lb / 56kg.
Here I’m red-faced from a hot shower, but most of the time I’d get comments from people about how pale I looked. Low blood count, you see, due to slow, constant blood loss.
This second pic gives you a sense of how my increasingly skeletal frame filled out my clothes (poorly), how gaunt I was becoming, and how useless I was. I spent most of the holidays on a single couch filling out crosswords. Occasionally I had to go up and down the stairs, which would wind me immediately.
Here, by contrast, are some shots from July ‘09, a little over 3 months with Sammy Stoma and roughly 145lb / 66kg.
Yes, my shorts are pulled a bit high to cover Sammy’s ostomy bag. This is the best I’ve got in terms of shirtless self-portraits, but hopefully it’s enough to show the return of my upper-body muscles. If not, suffice it to say that the Maui winds would have blown me down the coast if I’d tried to take the outrigger canoe out earlier this year.
Update 9/25/09: So many activities are completely off-limits when the average time from urgency to accident is 2 minutes or less. I was reminded of this yesterday when a friend joined me for several hours at the climbing gym. I’d take a stoma over being home-bound any day…and do!
