Easing the pain.

Let me tell you a story about my dear mother. You can see the picture of her with her grandchildren to the right. Well, it's those grandchildren that have inspired her to better herself. You see, my mother is very overweight, but she has recently decided to change that. She wants to live as healthy as possible so she can stick around to see her grandchildren grow up. Having not succeeded in numerous previous attempts at losing weight herself, she went to the doctor for help. She found that she was an ideal candidate for the lap band. So, earlier this year, she underwent the lap band surgery.

Since undergoing the surgery, she has started losing a lot of weight. She's dropped around 35 pounds so far and still going. Now that she's lost some weight, she wants to step it up and start excersising as well. Of course, we're very happy about this, but there is a hicup in this plan. My mother has some pretty bad athritis. Most of her joints hurt, but her hands, wrists, knees and ankles are the worst. The pain makes it difficult to get any exercise, but she usually doesn't let it stop her. She takes some medicine and puts an ointment on her joints, such as Freeze It Gel. The ointment helps a ton. She massages it into the joints and the pain almost completely goes away. Not only does it help during the exercise, but it helps afterwards as well. She uses the ointment to rub into sore muscles to help recovery as well. It helps all around.

She uses this ointment almost every day. Right now, she exercises three days a week and is doing great. She is thinking about adding another day to her regimin as well. She really is trying hard and we are so proud of her. We keep up the positive motivation so she doesn't give up. I know her grandkids want her around for a long time, and so do we.