Barking Mad

Release and Remember...and Some Good News!

I woke up this morning with puffy eyes and a headache.  1:14AM hit me harder than I expected and in the still, small, dark of the night, I cried and cried.   I finally dried my eyes, made sure I knew where the Preparation H was (no, not for 'rhoids, but for puffy and swollen eyes!  Works wonders on getting rid of the evidence of broken hearts and broken souls.), turned the air conditioner off upstairs, grabbed my pillow and slept downstairs nearest to Gaby's room.  I took comfort in being closer to her through the restless hours of the night.

I also awoke with a plan for the day that didn't include staying in bed and mourning my 2 year old son Joshua, on the 20th anniversary of his death.  Instead of the norm, I took the advice of my dear friend Kim D., and got Gaby dressed, went and bought 20 balloons in red, black and yellow (the colors of Joshua's favorite thing in the whole world, Mickey Mouse), and headed for the hills to release the balloons and remember this precious little boy.

I underestimated just how much room 20 balloons would take up in my SUV.  They take up a lot of space.  I also wasn't prepared for how the combination of the hot muggy day outside and the latex balloons would clash and my car would end up smelling like the inside of a rubber glove. Oh well, that's what those little air fresheners in the shape of pine trees are for...although I made a promise to Meaghan before she left that I'd never ever buy them in bulk again, and then open 5 of them (the dog had barfed in the car - and if you think there's nothing worse than that smell, think again!), at once.  Yeah, Cherry Orchard air-freshener, in bulk, tends to smell like one is driving around in a tube of cherry flavored Chapstick!  I may break that promise though because right now, "cherry flavored Chapstick" is preferable to "Rubber Glove."

Despite the smell and several balloons infringing on her personal space, Gaby didn't seem to mind the drive up to Saratoga National Park.  She was bubbling over with excitement and enthusiasm and I couldn't help but remember that very same excitement Josh would show when ever we'd put on his favorite movies...The Little Mermaid or Wizard of Oz.  I've only just recently bought The Little Mermaid for Gaby and she loves it too!  She can sing every song from it and there is rarely a week that goes by that we don't watch it at least twice.   I haven't been able to sit down and watch The Wizard of Oz since Josh died.  His most beloved song was "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."  The daughter of very dear friends of mine sang that song at his funeral service and I've just never been able to handle watching the movie because I know the song is coming up.  Maybe this year?

All the way up the hill to the national park, Gaby sang songs from The Little Mermaid and rarely was there a moment when she wasn't smiling...

When we arrived at the park the thick layer of clouds overhead had begun to burn off to reveal a brilliant light cerulean blue sky dotted here and there by puffy white clouds.  I found a place up high that overlooked the American River and pulled into a parking space and looked around and was grateful that there weren't too many visitors to that area of the park.  A few couples walked their dogs and a family was reading a momument a little distance away.

I was just a tad hesitant about having Gaby release the balloons as I had images of her being lifted off the ground by those 20 helium filled balloons.  I guess I've been watching "Up" a few times too many recently!  In spite of my hesitance I asked Gaby to be the one to let the balloons go, which she was only too happy to do!

And then she told me to tell her, "release"...I counted to three and then through tears and as my voice cracked, I said, "Release..."

Gaby peered into the sky and her little eyes followed those 20 balloons for as long as she could...

"I love you Joshua, and mommy misses you but I'll give her extra hugs for you 'till you see mommy when she gets to Heaven."

Almost completely out of sight...

Gaby and I stood there for a few more minutes.  She hugged my leg and told me she loved me and then told me that I could wipe my nose and eyes on her blouse if I wanted to.  She's real considerate like that.  I looked around and realized we had an audience of people in two cars and the family who had been walking around, reading monuments, had been watching the entire thing.  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and took Gaby and retreated into the car.

**********

I'm still pretty emotional, but I'm in a much better place this year, than I was last year, or previous years before.  It's incredible the change it's made this year when I took the suggestions to use this day to celebrate Joshua's life rather than the way he died.  In future years I hope I can do bigger and better things.  I'd love to set up a scholarship fund in Joshua's name for students who want to pursue a career in writing or journalism.  I'd also love to be able to donate money to VoluntEARS, an outreach of the Disney (Joshua was such a huge Disney fan!), organization that does so many wonderful things in communities around the world.   More than anything, I want my life to exemplify the life I saw when I had the dream about Joshua last year, and once I'm there, I want to pay it forward.

In the spririt of looking forward, I'm bursting at the seams to let you all in on something I've been working on with the wonderful women behind Woman's Day magazine for the last couple of months.

The lovely folks who run Woman's Day magazine asked me if I would mind if they ran a feature on me for their October 2010 issue which is an annual health issue.  I was flattered and of course, accepted.  Over time the feature evolved into me contributing a piece to the article, which showcases two other bloggers/writers as well.  I was asked to write about obesity and how it's affected my life and...well, if you want to find out any more you'll have to pick up a copy of the magazine which hits newsstands at your grocery stores and other retailers on the 31st of this month!  If you happen to subscribe to the magazine, you'll get your copy a week earlier in the mail.

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  Yeah, I'm just a little excited.   I'm also proud of myself.  Why?  Because my writing gets a chance to shine and I was able to take advatange of a great opportunity to talk about what it's like, (to talk about it in another forum other than my blog.), being an obese woman in America.  Something I have written is actually going to be published in a widely circulated magazine!  So yes, YES I AM DAMNED EXCITED ABOUT IT!

I like to think, that as the sun begins it's westward descent on the 20th anniversary of Joshua's death, that he's smiling down on me and proud of me, if for nothing else, than for the fact that for once, in a very long time, I'm proud of myself.

Trying to Look Forward While I Look Backward, 20 Years Ago

As I write this, it's only 11pm on the evening of August 9th, 2010.  Sadly I know exactly where I was, to the minute, on this night 20 years ago.  I was standing in the family waiting room at San Bernardino County Medical Center, in San Bernardino, California waiting for news from the pediatric neuro surgeons who has just taken my  2 year old son, Joshua, into emergency surgery to stop the bleeding from his brain, just mere short hours after he was struck by a pick-up truck in the high desert town of Phelan, CA.

One of my childhood best friends, Kim, had suggested that she and I go walk around outside.  I remember feeling glad for the distraction.  I didn't know how much more I could handle of not knowing exactly what was going on with Joshua, and the constant ringing of the black and silver payphone in the waiting room was almost too much...it was always Joshua's paternal grandparents wanting to know how bad it was, did we know anything else, when would we know anything else...?  Once friends had heard what had happened, they seemed to have come from everywhere to be by our sides.  There were so many people milling around in the waiting room and I was beginning to feel suffocated.

It was a cool night, for August in southern California.  I was wearing a lavendar and white skirt, a lavendar blouse and beige sandals.  I took my shoes off as we walked and told Kim how I'd thrown my sandals into the sagebrush on the side of the road when we arrived the accident scene a few hours earlier, so that I could run as fast as I could toward all the emergency vehicles.  I knew my bare feet would grip the cooling asphalt and despite being 50lbs overweight, there was nothing that was going to stop me from getting to my son.

However there was...it was the Fire Department Captain that saw me running (and I later found out I was screaming and yelling and crying, but I don't remember that), and intercepted me.  I do remember his arms grabbing me and feeling his scratchy protective gear against my arms and his arms meeting my midsection and it feeling like I'd run into a linebacker.  He kept telling me over and over I didn't want to get too close to the men and women doing everything to save my son and that I'd need to stand clear because a MediVac flight was coming in to airlift Joshua to SBCMC.  No one had told me a single thing about how he even came to be in the middle of that road, on what was a pitch black night.  And now here was this man, holding me back with everything he had, and telling me that my son's injuries were so bad that he had to be airlifted to the nearest trauma center.

I continued to walk with Kim and looked down at my sandals in my hand and I told her I wasn't sure who found them but here they were.  I remember thinking it a very odd thing...that I couldn't remember who gave me my sandals or even putting them back on my feet, but I remembered so very vividly, making sure I kicked them off so that I could run as fast as possible to my little boy, who lay dying in the middle of that dark, high-desert road.

To this day I still don't know who was responsible for picking my sandals out of the dirt and sagebrush and tumbleweeds.  It's an odd thing isn't it...the things that stick out in our memories, years after such a painful loss?  Even odder still that twenty damned years later, I still sit here and replay this night in my head...over and over again. Every year.

Despite the fact that I took enough Benadryl to knock out a horse, and capped it off with a Melatonin, earlier this evening, I know that I'll lie awake in bed until 1:14AM strikes and I'll remember the two pediatric neurosurgeons walking into the family waiting room, beads of perspiration spotting their foreheads as they looked down at Joshua's father and me and told us that despite their very best efforts, there was nothing that could be done for Joshua...he died at 1:14AM.  For a moment I looked up at the lady who was seated at the information desk - who had been watching our family drama play out for more than two hours, and I saw the tears running down her face. I looked at my mom, who was standing to the side of the surgeons and I looked at her hands and saw her holding very tightly to her Bible.  Her kncukles were so white and her wedding ring seemed a stark contrast to her white knuckles and the black Bible.  And then I screamed and everything went black.

The tears are present now as they were then, but on this night I sit in my office at my desk and cry in the privacy of my own home.  Gaby and Gareth are asleep.  My friends and family are posting messages of love, support and prayer on my Facebook wall, via email and text messages, and I'm sitting here trying to see through the tears to my screen to make sure what I'm typing is legible.  However, there will be something different about this year...the year that marks 20 since my darling boy left this world and my arms.

Tomorrow morning (this morning, as you're reading this), I'll get out of bed, get dressed and buy twenty balloons; red, yellow and black, in the color of Joshua's favorite thing in the whole entire world, Mickey Mouse.  Then I'll take Gaby and together we'll go someplace high up and we'll send all of those shiny balloons up to Joshua and I'll smile and probably cry a bit as I celebrate his life...his 2 years, 3 months and 10 days.

For so long I have always felt that if I didn't spend this day in solemn, miserable, remembrance of his loss, that I was somehow not being mindful of the tragic and horrific way in which he was taken from me, and from those around him that loved him so very much.   It's not unlike the first time I laughed after his death.  I felt so guilty for actually laughing, that I didn't so much as smile again for weeks after that.   A very good and wise friend of mine, Kim (another one...I seem to find the most beautiful and wonderful "Kims" in the world and I'm so blessed to call them "friend."), suggested that maybe this year, because she knows I'm having a really hard time with the milestone of "20 years", that I celebrate his life rather than mourn the way in which he left this world.

Sometimes the grief and pain that encompasses a parent when their child dies is almost too much to bear and we focus on that pain because really,  It's the only thing we have left to hang onto.  Because the pain is so tangible and real to us, we are hesitant to let it go, if even for the briefest of moments.  We feel as if we are betraying the memory of our child by doing so.   Then when we do smile and remember something beautiful about our child, and maybe even laugh at that memory, the fresh pain that washes over us is just too much at times.

Today?  Today I'm going to try and drown out that pain with something different...I'm going to look back on his life and share with you the things that made him so special to me.  And then, I'm going to look forward and share with you some very exciting news in my own life.  A lot of people on Facebook already know what it is (no, it's not that other thing that I'm in the midst of trying to do! And even if it were, I can't tell you anything else about it! If I disappear from mid-October to January then you'll know it happened!) and I think that Joshua would be proud of me, and will be looking down at me and smiling, when I finally tell you guys about something I've been working on that I'm incredibly proud of! So please watch for a post later this afternoon.

In the meantime, if you're a family member or a friend that has some really special memories about Joshua that you'd like to share, please do.   I want to spend today reveling in the wonderfulness of the beautiful and amazing child he was.  I'd like to also reach out, in love and in the genuine spirit of healing, towards my former in-laws...if there is something special about Josh, a cherished memory or a funny aside that you'd like to share, please do.  He was not only special to me, but to you all as well.  I realize that - despite our many differences and the past 15 years spent in battles of heated words and angry retreats.  I know how much Joshua meant to you all and would hope we could set aside our differences for one day and let others know how deeply he touched all of our lives.

I miss you Joshy...but I love you so much more!

Mommy

On the Eve of 20 Years

"They say that time in heaven is compared to 'the blink of an eye'
for us on this earth. Sometimes it helps me to think of my child
running ahead of me through a beautiful field of wildflowers and
butterflies; so happy and completely caught up in what he is
doing that when he looks behind her, I'll already be there."
~Author Unknown~

"Angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are
gone."
~Author Unknown~

**********

I do this every year.  I wake up and play the day, the last day I saw my 2 year old son, Joshua alive, over and over again in my head.   Exactly twelve hours from now will mark 20 years since Joshua was killed.

Twenty years.  Maybe if I say it over and over enough, my tears will dry up, the two Cokes I've already had in the past 4 hours will magically have never happened and the weight that I've gained over the last 20 years will just disappear.

I hate this time of year with an unfathomable loathing.  It's deep and intense and reaches every single part of my body, mind and soul...and there is nothing I can do to stop it.  This year though, it seems coupled with a sense of self-loathing that I haven't felt in a long time.  Maybe I have?  I don't know.  Maybe for a the past six months I've just been covering it up with all of this positive self-edification talk that shrouded me in a sense of joy and feeling like I was going to actually be OK and make it out of this Hell alive.   Then August hits and I slowly sink down...down...down into a very dark place where the ache never goes away and the pain washes over me in almost suffocating waves.

I want to eat and eat and eat and use that food as so much spongy, crusty French bread to sop up the olive oil of pain and anger and digust that coats everything inside.

There's been a new layer of fresh Hell added this year, involving something I'm not going to talk about (and please know that I hate it when other bloggers do this, but because it's one of my kids, and this kid is a minor, I refuse to discuss it.), but something that has just reinforced the fact that I am an abject failure as a parent.  It makes this annual pain of mind, and especially heart and soul, so much more searing and almost blinding.

The most ironic thing of all is the fact that I have a lot of wonderful things to look forward to...but right now - right at this moment in time, I can't see far enough past the pain and blurred vision from eyes filled with salty bitter tears, to see anything positive.

Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow morning and instead of another morbid post, share one of those wonderful things with you...or maybe I won't get out of bed at all.

 

22

 

last name Photoshopped out for privacy reasons

"Love is stronger than death even though it can't stop death from happening, but no matter how hard death tries it can't separate people from love.  It can't take away our memories either.  In the end, life is stronger than death."

~Unknown~

Happy 22nd Birthday, Joshua! 

I have a hard time believing you'd be 22 today, if you were still here on earth.  I hope you're having a great day with your Heavenly family and your Heavenly Father. 

I know that you already know this, but things are so much better here on mortal ground than they were this time last year.  That's despite the fact that your littlest sister is laying on the floor, tossing a ball into the air and just watching it come straight back down, right at her face.  Luckily, for her, it hasn't hit her in the nose yet. I told her to knock it off or she'd regret it and she just laughed.  It seems that the daring, rebellious spirit runs through all of my children! 

Watching Gaby play, especially the times she plays with her guitar reminds me so much of you.  She has such a love of music, just like you did!  

 

Two years, three months and 10 days seems like such a short time to get to know someone, especially when that someone was the child who grew in my womb and took me on the first step of the journey from teenager to mother. 

I've not felt your embrace, or gazed into those gorgeous brown eyes of yours for close to twenty years now...but hardly a day goes by when I don't feel your presence near me almost all the time.  Maybe it was because your time here on earth with me left such a huge impression that the energy from your life still resonates around me.  Perhaps that's more of a scientific explanation for it, but I prefer to believe that your spirit still lingers nearby.

I haven't dreamed about you again, since last year.  It took some time for the dream to sink in and for me to fully feel the impact of the words exchanged between you and I that night, but I have...I finally have.  Since that sleepy morning, when I sat staring at the words I'd written immediately after waking from that dream, I've come to a point in my life where I have, once and for all decided to stop killing myself and start living...really start living!

I still have moments where the memory of your death feels like a punch in the gut and takes my breath away.  Being that I didn't really let the grief process run it's course, and instead, I ate and ate and ate to insulate myself from the pain of your loss, sometimes the fresh pain is like having daggers if ice plunged deep into my heart and the most tender places in my soul...the places of a mothers soul where she tends her garden of sorrows.  During those times I take a deep breath and become still and allow myself to feel the pain and let the grief wash over me anew.  I submit to ache of missing you and let my tears rain down on those blossoms of sorrow and agony.  

After being exhausted by the tears and longing to see you again, I let myself journey to the other side of this mother's soul...the place where I tend my garden of happy, fun, lovely and cherished memories.  I sit in this springtime garden of my soul and let the warmth of all the wonderful memories of you - your smile, your laugh, your love for your little brother and sister, embrace my soul and warm my heart.  I feel the petals of healing and peace blossom inside of me like a field of awakening poppies; opening their faces to the sun. 

 

 

   

 

So, I'll allow myself these showers of grief and heartache and hours where I wallow in the misery of missing you because I know they'll give way to the warm breezes of hope and healing. 

 

Beautiful beautiful boy of mine, on what would be your 22nd birthday I want you to know that I miss your smile so very much...

 

...but I love you so much more.  Death can never take away the precious gift your place in my life gave me.   Maybe through finally grieving your death, I am starting to learn how to live.   It's in your memory that I begin to take the steps towards living the life I was meant to live.

"The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live." 

~Joan Borysenko~

Mommy

Constructive Destruction - Finding a Phoenix Amongst the Ashes

I Want to be The Biggest Loser

I have applied to be a contestant on NBC's The Biggest Loser. 

I am morbidly obese enough, and to such a degree, to make me an ideal candidate for The Biggest Loser.

OH.MY.GOD.

I don't believe I'm actually putting this out here for my tens of readers - and well OK, the probably one thousand or so more that I emailed and asked for support, encouragement, prayers, and wishes for good luck.

The actual decision to do this was made a while ago; the day I sat on the toilet seat and it broke and ended up breaking open a damn of anger and feelings I have, for too long, buried. 

For those who follow me on Facebook, you already knew that I was going to apply for the show.  For some reason it wasn't as hard to admit it out there (probably because I know that as someone who posts status updates like, "...thinks she could definitely meet her weight loss goal if she had to pedal to use her computer." and "...just read a list of 100 Things to do Before You Die' and was surprised that 'yell for help' wasn't one of them!" that there aren't too many people reading what I have to say anyhow!), but putting the words down here...well it's been difficult, to say the least. 

I've worried almost incessantly about what you'd think of me if you knew there was more to me than just the floating head-shots that I post...that are all I ever post! 

Like this...

 

...and this...

 

Or even this one...

 

I have never, ever, online anywhere, posted a full-length body shot of myself.  Especially not out here in Bloggywood where, on the rare occasion, the catty-ness level surpasses that found on The Real Housewives of New Jersey/Orange County/New York/Atlanta.

Being a photographer, I know how to tilt my head and angle the camera in order to not capture my four bulging chins and my neck encased in so much adipose tissue as to make it barely discernible as neck.  I wear enough make-up to put a clown to shame and I spend a lot of time arranging my hair so that it hides as much of my face-fat, as possible.  I don't PhotoShop pictures of myself, but I certainly don't put enough out there to show how really big I am. 

Living With the Constant Fear of Being Rejected Because of How I Look

Up until now I've been in abject fear of the reaction and the disgust.  It's one of the biggest reasons I became a recluse and refuse to go to any sort of conventions like BlogHer, Blissdom, Mom 2.0 or any of the other ones. It's also the reason I do my grocery shopping as late as possible - so I don't have to deal with the stares of all the people, looking at what the really fat lady put into her shopping cart.  I didn't want to see the shocked and horrified expressions on your face when you finally meet me face to face. Until recently I've been so completely consumed by worry over what everyone would think of me. 

As women, we judge one another so harshly and often times we are so cruel to one another because of how we look.  I didn't want the friendships I've formed out here, some very close, to dissolve because I was not the person you'd built me up, in your head, to be.  Because I've been living through fear-tinted windows for a very long time, I didn't realize how these thoughts did a huge disservice to all of you...the people I'm afraid to meet and interact with.

A Very Heavy Burden

Let's be honest...you all know I've been candid about my issues surrounding my weight, especially the struggles I've had with it since The Very Bad Thing happened more than two years ago.  You know that as a result of that, I developed an eating disorder, bulimia.  Despite being bulimic, I still managed to gain 125+lbs [on an already morbidly obese frame] in less than two years time.  Obviously, bulimia was more of a control tool than what I had insanely thought it could be...a means to lose weight, or at the very least, help keep me from gaining more weight.  In the end, it just made me sicker and helped shove me deeper into the abyss of depression I was drowning in.  The bulimia was controlling me...not the other way around. 

Although The Very Bad Thing was one of the worst, most devastating, humiliating, demeaning and foul things I have ever been through, it opened up wounds that had never really closed and forced me to deal with them.  Going through what I did in the aftermath of TVBT nearly destroyed me in almost every way possible. In dealing with other hurts and issues from my past, I was forced to tear away the veneer of the past twenty years, and really deal with what was eating me and in turn, making me eat. With the help of a wonderful psychiatric team, I have been doing the work of tearing myself down so that I could prepare to build myself up again.

Over the past three years out here, I have laid bare the deepest wounds and scars on my heart and soul...the loss of my two-year-old son, Joshua.  What I haven't told you is that while I was merely overweight after his birth, and then the subsequent birth of my twins (who were only six months old when I lost Joshua), after he died, I went into a tailspin that left me eating nearly everything in sight, rather than grieving for my son.  It was so bad in fact, and started so early after his death, that I remember very vividly driving from Joshua's burial to the wake and thinking about the food that had been catered by good friends of ours; thinking about how I couldn't wait to eat and eat eat...It was far easier to think about food than it was to think about laying that precious little boy in the ground. So I buried myself in food, and in turn, in fat. 

I Insulated myself with mounds and mounds of food.  It was more than comforting.  It was a friend who wouldn't leave me, wouldn't die on me. I wouldn't have to bury it and mourn it's loss or absence in my life. 

I didn't grieve Joshua's death...rather, I ate. And ate, and ate. 

From the moment Joshua died, I blamed myself. I think, on some level, I also thought that all the eating would put an early end to my pain and I'd sooner, rather than later, be with my son again and be there for him the way I obviously had failed to do the night he died. In doing so, I've been dying a slow and horrible death.  Very simply put, for almost twenty years, I have been slowly and methodically burying myself alive under all of this fat. 

However...the old me is under there, dying to be the new me!  She's there...can you see her?

 

I am Giving Myself Permission to Live Again

That's all changing though!  The day I sat down on the toilet seat and it broke under the strain of my weight was the day I began to live again. It was the day I finally got angry and said ENOUGH! 

It was the day I broke, into a million little pieces and cried, and yelled and screamed for everything I've lost.  I broke myself so that I could mend myself.

It was the day I decided I wanted to live, genuinely wanted to live! 

It was the day I told myself that no more were people going to tell me, to my face, that I had such a pretty face but was too fat to be truly beautiful!

It was the day that I saw myself not solely as a morbidly obese woman, but saw the real person I am inside...the wife who adores and loves her husband, the mother who strives to make amends for past mistakes and works very hard to prove that she's worthwhile as a parent!

It was the day that I took all of my clothes off and looked in the mirror...actually looked at myself and saw the woman buried deep inside, begging to be let out in order to live her life and prove that she's more than just a mound of jiggling flesh, packed tightly into unattractive clothing, hidden under hundreds of excess pounds!  

It was the day that I decided hiding from the rest of the world in an effort to avoid the cruel snickers and accusing stares wasn't doing me any good and that in order to live in the world, I needed to start living in the world!

It was the day that I decided to make good on my promise to Gareth that I'd give New York a chance, and the people of our new little town, and start to integrate myself into society once more.

It was the day I finally gave myself permission to love myself again and to live my life and celebrate the person that I am and never ever let another human being make me feel less-than for being more-than what is considered ideal or perfect!

It was the day I decided to love myself enough to take care of myself!

**********

I choose The Biggest Loser because I know it will give me the best chance at reclaiming my life in a manner which I'll find comforting.  Yeah, I know...how can parading around, with my flab hanging out, in a sports bra and bike shorts, on national TV, being weighed weekly in front of millions of viewers, be comforting?   

I'll be there with other people, waging the same war, under similar burdens who have traveled their own roads that led them to the place where they realized they needed to make some intense and extreme changes in order to reclaim ownership of their lives, and stop living to eat and start eating to live! I know I'm up to the challenge and I'm so ready for the hard work.  I also know that I can't do it alone...that I need help, I need to be pushed and I need guidance from people who know what they're doing and have proven it time and time again.  It gives me added incentive to reach out to the folks at The Biggest Loser because our personal health insurance coverage doesn't so much as cover anything remotely connected to weight loss.

All of this brings me full circle...to you, my readers and friends.  I'm asking for your support and encouragement.  I'm asking you to stand behind me as I move forward and reclaim what I've let others take from me, and what I've given away freely...my life.  I fully intend on at least getting in front of the show's producers and going through whatever paces they put me through.  I hope that you'll all be there with me, cheering me on as I work hard to enjoy the life I've been so richly blessed with.  When I first started working on the application for the show and thinking about my video submission, I thought, "What the hell, I've got nothing to lose!"  But see, I do...I have everything to lose - my life if I don't do it, and all this weight if I do, do it.

And yeah...I don't just want to be on The Biggest Loser...I WANT TO BE THE BIGGEST LOSER!

  

P.S. To follow my adventures (keeping my fingers crossed that I get chosen for season 10 of The Biggest Loser), you can follow me on Twitter ... Barking_Mad