Weight, Food, and Me - Part III

I had a difficult pregnancy with our second child.  He was a big baby (born at 9 lbs 15 oz), and the strain of carrying him made me unable to do a lot of physical activity.  We didn't know it at the time, but our son had a neurological disorder & would have hosts of health problems.  We had also just moved away from home for the first time - my husband graduated from medical school and was accepted to a family practice residency program about eight hours away from our home area in southeast South Dakota.  So there I was, in a new town with no friends, a husband whose time was now consumed by residency demands, a precious little toddler girl, heavily pregnant with a baby I would soon find out had major health issues, and far away from any support or help from our parents.  To top it off, my husband soon discovered that family medicine was not what he wanted to do with his medical education.  He wanted to be a surgeon instead.  That meant we would move again, for the second time in two years. 

I don't remember actively trying to lose the weight after our second baby was born.  He cried almost constantly and was seemingly unable to nurse.  (We didn't know then, but he has an oral-motor weakness that prevented him from latching on.  Later, as he became a toddler and did not start talking when he should have, we had him evaluated by a speech therapist and found out about the muscle deficiency.)  DS #1 (Dear Son #1) has an extensive story all his own, which ties in with my weight experience because it affected my mental and emotional state so much, but to tell it all would take fifty more posts and is a little off the subject.  Someday I might delve into it, but suffice it to say that much of the first year of his life is a blur in my memory, and I went into "survival mode."  I was treated for postpartum depression and eventually got off those meds.  We moved again, this time to Wichita, Kansas, where my husband began his 5-year residency in general surgery, and I continued trying my best to raise my preschool-age daughter without the support of parents or husband, all the while suffering the uncertainty of DS#1's health problems, and enduring his frequent doctor appointments and extensive tests.