Your Revved Ted has mellowed out quite a bit, I must say.
I know. It’s so weird.
How can others show up for people in their lives after they get a challenging health diagnosis?
I never love when people say “we” when it’s involving me and being sick. Like, “We are going to get through this.” When somebody would text me and ask a question, that felt like work. “How are you?” felt like work to me to respond. But if somebody said, “Hey, Ted, love you. Thinking about you. Here if you need me,” I was so happy to respond to that because it didn’t feel like pressure.
Yeah, you did not like being asked questions, especially when you were in the hospital. That was when you were peak Revved Ted.
Peak Revved Ted was also on steroids.
After you’d just had your surgery and were on steroids, we had to remind each other—your support group—that we were going to get our feelings hurt sometimes. That you wouldn’t always be in a good mood, and steroids can make you feel angry or aggressive. And then I spent the night there, and you woke up and looked at me and said, “What are you still doing here?” And I was like, “I don’t want to be here either, Ted!” I was like, Uh-oh, I’m getting my feelings hurt…
Yet the day before I thought I had solved the Scott Peterson case.
So maybe we should warn people about that—just tell your friends, “I may not be that nice all the time, but I still love you.”
It’s so true. I’ve almost blocked out those types of things that I was doing because some of it I truly don’t remember. In my mind, I was in the hospital for three days. How long was I there? Nineteen days?
It was a long time. It felt like you pretty much lived there.
An amazing thing that you and our friend Jen suggested, that changed a lot for me, was to integrate me back into real life. Instead of going directly from the hospital back to the house, I stayed elsewhere and had the kids come to me. I think if I hadn’t done that, I would’ve gone right back to all of my old habits. I compare it to when I got out of the Big Brother house. I felt so turned around, like, I have to do 1 million things because I haven’t talked to people in four weeks. I needed to slow down, and that forced me to. I’m really grateful for it.
You also were concerned about your kids and parents seeing you while you still had those staples. It was sort of like, Let’s ease them into it and have them visit when you were feeling at your best.
I was worried about my kids seeing me and me not being able to remember certain things or not being able to have the same type of conversations we used to have. And then, I don’t know if it’s vanity or human nature, but there was a part of me that was concerned about my physical appearance in regards to seeing my friends or going out in public. I still work on it, and there’s moments where I feel shame, like, Wow, this is as good as it’s going to get today.
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