green

Oh, I picked up something intestinal in Mexico and my doctor won't prescribe me any meds until she knows what it is. I tried to suggest to her to just prescribe a big bunch of everything because I have a drug plan and something is bound to cure it. And I don't want to have to do the test because it is gross. I have lost a further 15 lbs over the past 5 weeks since I returned to Canada thanx to Montezuma's revenge. BJean knows all about my woes.:paranoid

Green has lost a bunch of weight. I now weigh 155 lbs. And my giant liver is normal sized. I just got the results of the ultrasound. The downside is that my bushy hair is kinda thin at the moment. blehhh!

One cat at the moment, a rather unpleasant orange and white female. She was a stray and was nice to us until she knew that she was here for good. Now she bites, scratches, knocks things off tables, desks, etc, and plays with them until they are broken/lost. She also empties out our garbage cans while we are sleeping. We had a lovely black male who died of kidney failure not long ago. I still miss him. He was a fine companion. Now we live with the kitten from Hell! She is not a picky eater, though.

I would be inclined to let the girl be banded. It sounds as though she has reached her full physical growth and she is certainly carrying a lot of weight. This must be a terrible thing for her emotionally and physically this will lead to a bunch of problems. I guess the test that I might put her through in order to ensure that she is ready for the band is to have her see a dietitian, learn about healthy eating habits, and watch her put these into practice for the next 6 months or so; afterall, this is how she will have to work with her band for the rest of her life if she wants it to be an effective tool. Forcing her to go through years of yo-yo dieting before she gets the band will only mess up her metabolism and make losing weight - even with the band - that much harder.

I got banded because I wanted to lose between 40 and 50 lbs. I was banded last Sept and I was self-pay. I lost 40 lbs and I have seen my liver shrink in size and my cholesterol readings drop. These are added bonuses for me. I am very pleased about my band.

While Canada is officially bilingual - English-French - we did at one time make a concerted attempt to erase the Aboriginal languages. We forced these peoples to send their kids away to residential Christian schools where they were beaten if they were caught speaking in their own mother languages. The kids were brutalised and sometimes sexually abused as well. The end result was a generation of damaged and dysfunctional individuals who have passed along this damage to succeeding generations. This bit of Canadian history is one of our own ugly skeletons.

Thanks, KariK, for your post. It may help a lot of people.

Hey, BJean, that's fantastic news!:clap2: And that info about the downside of an overfill makes news to me. I believe I might need a little fill because I can eat rather a lot of the healthy stuff. The only reason I am losing is because of my Mexican bowels. Yes, I really gotta suck it up :tiredand harvest my poop. Ugh! Oh, gawd! I am such a neurotic princess that I keep choking when it comes to doing this. But, the equipment is now in my bathroom and I have finally read the instructions. This is my big step forward. Dynamo and Denise - the double Ds:) - what you grrls want to do is spend some time around Italian men. They tend to be good looking, love women and love to flirt, and they are often kinda easy if you are in the mood for a crazy fling. Green knows. When she was younger she flung with a few Italian guys and quite enjoyed herself.:girl_hug: She has always been a sucker for a brunette.:girl_hug:

There are reasons, other than homosexuality, why men will have little sex interest in their partners. One reason could be depression and another might be that he is on medication, like I am, which interferes with his sex drive. There are also physical problems which men get which interfere with their ability to perform and then they become ashamed and don't want to talk about it. And men will develop psychological hang-ups, too, and be unable to face these issues. We women find it much easier to talk about things, to visit doctors, to do take steps to solve even the most embarassing of problems. That a man be a stud is a major part of every man's identity. I have read that the numbers of men who have problems in the sexual arena, especially as they age, is higher than one might think. And for you who live in small towns your men may feel that it is impossible for them to the get help they might need: not enough anonymity and not any of the right kind of specialists. In my big city there is at least one men's clinic dedicated to sexual problems. And then there are those guys who are having affairs and getting it from someone else.

And Green likes younger men. In fact her mate is 9 years younger than she is but even if she were single she could never consider performing a sportif act with a laddie young enough to have been her son. Well, maybe she could if the guy was cute and legally blind.... Green doesn't want to put herself in the way of possible humiliation, ya know.

Thanks, grrl. (Green smiling, eh.)

MsDad, you ought to move to Canada. Lousy climate but no legal nor financial discrimination. You can even get married. And this month is Pride month in my town. Yippee!

I was hoping she would become someone's bitch. And grow to enjoy it.

I really appreciated Fuel Man's comments on this issue. It seems to me that the Pro-life lobby is keen to stop abortions but not so interested in investing in the following 20 years after those children are born. Dropping an unwanted infant off for adoption is not always the answer. Some babies are more marketable, more desirable than others. What happens to the duds, eh? For that matter what will happen to all the unwanted babies, even the good ones, once the adoption market is flooded with these children? I guess the orphanages will come back. Generally speaking, it seems to me that the Pro-life lobby is also the far right lobby and these are the folks who are unhappy to see a rise in taxes in order to ensure that the poor and ill-educated will have access to better schools, better health care - something which, by the way, can be done if Americans would agree to get rid of the businessmen which run the health insurance plans and go for universal health care. It is you right to lifers who claim that there are huge numbers of pre-borns being slaughtered every year. Ask yourselves if you are prepared to pony up the cash to pay for these unwanted individuals; are you willing to pay for the schools, the health care, and the judicial/penal system in case these individuals fall between the cracks of society? Or is it indeed the facile crap of, well, "I donate to these pro-life societies which help pregnant girls....? We help them have their babies........! We are saving lives." And then what? What are you going to be doing when that baby is 3, 5, 10 or 15 years old? And if your statistics are correct there are a huge number of these pre-borns for whom you will be both morally and financially (via taxes) responsible if you manage to repeal the legislation allowing women the freedom of choice. And Canada will be harvesting a whole lot of Yanqui tourist dollars for it is unlikely that Canada will ever repeal its pro-choice legislation. My advice to any young sexually active woman will then be to use birth control, and make sure that you have a valid passport just in case, eh.

I cannot understand this desire to artificially sustain life through keeping people hooked up to life support. To do this strikes me as being disrespectful to the once sentient life who is now tethered to a collection of machines and as being wasteful of resources, both medical and environmental. My mum spent the day when she should have been attending the first wedding of a grandchild by her only sister's bedside. It was my mother who pulled the plug.

Green is checking in. I think I need a small fill and I still haven't got the Mexican complaint solved although I am getting closer. :help: I am still blocked about providing those faecal samples - ugh! gross - but I do now have the requisite gear in my bathroom at least. I have tried treating the problem with scotch which may be helping a little. Not so hot for the brain cells, though, and I do need those. I had a funny experience this morning. A guy thought I was hitting on him because I said that Italian men tended to be good looking. (He was part Italian.) I was shocked and told him so, telling him, among other things, that I was way older than him. He seemed surprised to hear this and asked me how old I thought he was. I told him that I thought he was in his 30s and he said that that was right. Then I told him that I was 57 and so "you see, way too old for you!"

Like Marjon, I have taken the trouble to quote the above post in full for this has been my own view of a few of those individuals who post for the pro-life side. They do come across as judgemental, arrogant, hysterical and mean-spirited individuals. I earlier made a post on this thread to that effect. And yes, the effect is entirely alienating. One closes one's ears to this sort of shrill hectoring. The above quoted words are from someone who is both firm in her beliefs and yet has a generous spirit. Thanks, niecyrenee.

Effexor. Ugh! I was on a high dose of that for over a year. I kept pleading with the shrink to find something else. :help: My normally good BP shot up and I had to go on meds for that. And for the first time in my long life I was chronically and severely constipated. This actually worked in my favour when I was travelling in Turkey. I didn't suffer from the problem that travellers usually suffer from even though I was eating a spicy and vegetable and fibre rich diet. Apart from this trip the constipation was a nightmare. Everytime I managed to go to the toilet I thought I needed to be taken to the hospital for surgery. I gained weight on this drug and then they tried me out on anti-psychotic for awhile and I ballooned in size. Now I am banded, off Effexor and on different anti-depressants, off the anti-psychotic, off the BP meds, and I weigh 155 lbs. Yippee! :clap2: I have a different shrink, too.

Thanks, nume. My husband is a real honey and he is fond of hugging and cuddling as well as the main dish. He is an affectionate and loving man and I am one lucky woman! He is also quite content to masturbate, a habit he got into when he was a lonely, acne-ridden teenager. He is one of those guys who turned from an ugly duckling into a swan but who still bears the scars of his teenage loser years. He is even now quite surprised when women hit up on him even though he is a real knock-out. I should mention that he has aged extremely well and that he is 9 years younger than I am. We have been together for 22 years now but we hadn't planned it that way. I thought of him as being merely a fling when we first connected. We were merely work buddies but we both ended up together though our start was careless and ill thought out. Your comment as to what is normal is a good comment, I think. There is an old Ukrainian folk saying which says that if a newly married couple puts one dried bean into a jar each time that they make love during the first year that they are married and then remove one of these Beans each time that they make love during the rest of their life together they will never empty the jar. Brand new sex is wild and crazy and passionate sex, obsessive sex. You just can't get enough of your new beloved. Real life and familiarity do intervene, I find. One's love for the beloved may grow much, much deeper but that crazy obsessional desire for that unfamiliar body lessens. This is why some people like to continue having affairs; they like that junky sexual high. They are unwilling to acknowledge that this is a phase, a prelude to a calmer, deeper and more mature relationship. I think that what you are seeing on TV is television sex and merely that. Sex sells and so it is written into movies and TV. As to what is normal, well, you have done the right thing by posing this question on the internet to real people. And as for me and my chemical castration, yup, this is a very big bummer. The trouble with the new array of anti-depressants, Prozac and the post-Prozac class, is that while they are a giant step forward for us depressed folk they do have an ugly side effect. In the majority of folks who take the meds this classification of drugs tends to render us without sexual interest or ability to follow through. Now, if I were an old maid I would be pretty damn happy about being relieved of the pressure....

Dynamo, dude, I am grief stricken to read the above. You are one of my favourite posters and I hate the notion that you have travelled through points 1 to 5. No one should go through points 1 to 5 and yet this has been or is the life story of not only the individuals who are members of this site but the majority of Americans. The number of individuals who fit the beauty magazine/Hollywood construct of attractiveness is tiny statistically speaking and yet we are presented with this unattainable ideal and told to deal with it. Moreover, these images are especially remote from those of mature adults. In the case of women, the magazine construct is pretty much unattainable for most women but especially so for a mature woman who has had a couple of children. Men also have their own problems with self-image. Mature/ageing males tend to lose hair on their heads, grow more hair on their bodies, and thicken around the waist and hips. Sometimes they develop man-boobs. They notice this just around the time that they are going through their mid-life crises. In this society we are trained to think that we are unlovely, unloveable, and will never, ever measure up. Of course we all know this but we are powerless, it seems, to fight against it. This is why I am looking forward to having my face lift done this fall. Go figure, eh.......

I said "help us pull us the plug" when and if we need this assistance. Dr. K provided a useful and generous service for those people who had requested his assistance.

Wow! She could just show up at your crib with the kiddywinks in tow. Do you have travellers' hostels and YMCAs in your area? :confused:Where does she live? Will she be flying or driving? If they end up muscling their way into your crib you might just want to stay with a friend.:help: She doesn't sound like a very sensitive individual.:tired Indeed she sounds like a grrl who wants what she wants.

I am sorry to hear this, faithmd. In my own case it is my husband who is getting short changed sexually. This is because I am on anti-depressives and they have had the effect of pretty much chemically castrating me. I have zero sex drive and haven't had an orgasm in over a decade. I periodically go through the motions because sex is still important to my mate but this is a mechanical activity for me.:cry This is ironic because I was multi-orgasmic and a real hound for it when I was younger. In fact I used to worry that I wouldn't find anyone to lay me after I hit 40! By the way, I note that you are a fan of Red Green. He is another one of us pesky Canucks, you know.

Nume, a man who was homosexual when you married him still is. His sexual urges have not changed from focussing on men to focussing on women even though he may have desired this outcome. You may have a good, loving, and peaceful marriage with this man but you will never be able to have a sexually passionate one. This has nothing to do with your sexual attractiveness or your loveability; it has to do with his sexual orientation, one which he has no control over. Perhaps you might wish to talk to him in a peaceful and open way about this issue. It might make both of you feel better. By the way, one of my close friends is a gay man who married and fathered two children. He was hoping that his sexual orientation would go away. It didn't. He didn't leave his wife and begin to live his real life until he was in his 50s. He will be turning 70 this year. He and his wife remain very, very close emotionally.

I have always been able to feel mine. It is under my boobs in the centre of my torso. I find myself poking at it while watching TV.