Face-on view of a bird grasshopper (Orthoptera: Acrididae, Schistocerca obscura)
Compatibly yours
23 November 2009 at 5:13 (Behaviour management, Parenting)
“Ow!” Exclaimed my daugher, who was playing with her 4-month old son. “He loves standing up, but he’s grabbing my glasses. Or my hair. And that hurts mummy, boo-boo.“
She’d already given up wearing earrings. But it was going to be a while before the lad could be taught “touch gently” for petting cats or family members.
“Well,” I offered, “you could always try Incompatible Behaviors.” In the world of behavior modification, this is usually used in the sense of rewarding the preferred alternative. But I was thinking in the more concrete sense, meaning, if you’re doing one thing, then you can’t do the other (undesired) thing. “If you give him something else to hold onto, then he can’t grab your hair.”
This has proven so useful, she has wisely taken the idea to other situations. At nap time, the lad is still so wound up that he gets agitated from playing with his hands. So she gives him a stuffed animal or blanket to hold onto, and the babe’s able to calm down.
Now she’s discovered the joy that is watching a child learn new skills, especially as he practices sitting up and playing with the extra plastic measuring cups stored in an old plastic ice-cream tub. “Today he learned that if he knocks the cups against the tub, they make noise!”
I chuckled, knowing what was coming up next, and we chorused in dismay, “Today he learned that if he knocks the cups against the tub, THEY MAKE NOISE!”
“And that’s why I never give anyone’s kids toys that make noises,” I nodded sagely.
“I’m going to just pass along some of those things that were handed along to us,” she confided.
As all parents know, if you give your children quiet toys, they will have to work imaginatively to figure out how to make noises with them.
Saved by bureaucracy
22 November 2009 at 5:55 (Advocacy, Auditory Processing Disorder, Deaf / Hard of Hearing, Doctors, Migraine, Ménière's disease, Tinnitus, Work / Employment)
( A follow-up on my shaky employment status, as described in a previous post, The Catch.)
So now I’ve twice seen the ENT (Ear, Nose & Throat doc, not tree-folk), to figure out if the vertigo, worsening tinnitus and hearing difficulties are related to Ménière’s, or “just” migraines. At those visits I also spent time in the audiologist’s booth: “Huh? Sorry, I can’t see what you’re saying.” “Oh,” he replied jovially, “this isn’t a vision test, it’s a hearing test.” Ha, ha. Very funny.
(Have I mentioned that lately one of the cable channels is messed up, and maddenly, we’ve not had any closed-captions on episodes of CSI ? Listening to TV is hard enough with fussy babies who want bouncing, much less auditory processing glitches and tinnitus.)
And then something wonderful happened:
The day after my first ENT visit, it occurred to me that it might be useful to ge an official letter from the doc to give to my various bosses. So I called in my request to the office nurse and picked it up from the receptionist and passed out copies to my supervisors and those got fowarded to Human Resources people and –
SHAZAM!
I was saved by bureaucracy.
(I mean hey, it’s gotta happen sometime, right?)
Because apparently being treated for Ménière’s disease (note the careful legal waffling on diagnostics) falls under the umbrella of an American labor law known as the The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA). Basically, taking care of sick family members, birth, adoption, or one’s own illness (covered by the Act) is protected so the worker can get unpaid sick leave without worrying about job security.
I cannot be dunned for absences related to bouts of vertigo.
My principal was of course very polite and helpful in the process of explanating this unexpected coverage. I was asked about accommodations that might be helpful. Alas, none of the things suggested by the Job Accommodation Network are applicable to my job (but that’s a great site if you need ideas for accommodations for most any sort of affliction or difference).
However, I was giving some 60 days of sick leave for absences related to — and only to — Ménière’s. Despite my initial relief, my job status still feels as wobbly as my gait some days. Stay tuned for further developments.
We live interesting (albeit grungy) lives
15 November 2009 at 21:10 (Home stuff, Random Thoughts)
My daughter just remarked, “Swords, teapots and rubber duckies — wow, that Bon Ami is great stuff!”
Thieves!
13 November 2009 at 0:14 (WTF?!, Work / Employment)
Grocery stockers are well-familiar with the sight: random empty boxes that are the hidden leftovers to stolen goods. Cold medicine. Hair coloring. Condoms. Diapers. Candy.
A couple days ago I found a different wrapper stuffed behind the tidy stacks of soap bars, a small cylinder of fish food, with the plastic lid missing and the foil seal compromised. About a teaspoon of flakes were gone.
I showed it off to my coworker, Becky. “Don’t you just hate it when those damn goldfish come into the store and steal things?!”
What a great combo
30 October 2009 at 3:39 (ADD/ADHD, Family)
ADHD + fussy baby:
“See? There’s Bouncy Lady. We call her Grandma.”
The Catch
24 October 2009 at 22:52 (Injustice, Invisible disabilities, Migraine, OMG, Stress, Teaching/Tutoring, Tinnitus, Work / Employment)
I’ve been having intermittent bouts of vertigo (some severe), along with worsening tinnitus and resulting difficulty understanding what people are saying. My GP said I got poor results on the tympanogram, and is sending me to an ENT, whom I see next week. I’m no longer driving on the highway, and take extra care if I’m carrying my grandson.
Meanwhile, someone at school told the principal that I was “doing the wall thing”, meaning touching the wall to steady myself as I passed down a hallway. This resulted in being called up for a Official Meeting. By the time I left, I was feeling queasy and light-headed for entirely different reasons:
- Being a couple hours late to phone in my absences due to migraine and due to a Emergency Room visit for vertigo, had previously earned me a stern warning for procedural lapses.
- Going to or staying at work if feeling dizzy is prohibited because an educator with vertigo is a liability.
- Leaving work 30 minutes early for a doctor’s appointment must be taken as sick time.
- No “flex time” is allowed for appointments (i.e. leaving a bit early and making up that time by staying later another day).
- Thirty minutes, half a day or a whole day all count equally as an incident of using a sick day.
- Taking 19 sick-day events by October due to viruses, migraines, vertigo or doctor appointments is excessive, and any further such absences can result in termination of employment.
- Which specific number is unmentioned, but up to the Powers That Be in the Human Resources department.
- Any employee who is feverish with a virus must stay home.
Alas, this is all legal, and there seems to be a large limbo of being disabled by irregularly re-occuring conditions without actually being Disabled enough for some kind of accommodation.
Even if I somehow negotiated with H.R., the interpersonal climate with the school admin is too prickly to stay. This is a shame, because I have a great relationship with my classroom staff/faculty.
I’m looking for a different job, hopefully something full-time that also pays well enough so I can have just ONE job in my life. But everything I’ve seen pays fast-food wages, or else is so technically specific that my skills profile is a mis-match.
The free-floating anxiety is just HELL.
What you want
19 October 2009 at 17:48 (Abuse, Advocacy, Autism/Asperger's, inertia)
I still feel queasy when I remember the words.
Children have a certain disempowerment simply because they are young — they are naïve, less learned, and lack perspective. But this transcended childhood. It sank past the boundaries of adult to child, or parent to child, and trampled my self-identity and self-determination.
My mom had found a way to get past what some would have called the “fortress” that isolated me, that natural preoccupation with whatever I was doing and naïve self-centeredness, that self-ism or autism that was greater in me than most anyone else.
“Oh, you don’t want to get grilled cheese again!” she chided me, but her sharp glance to me denied the lightness in her tone. Her expression would then change, as it so often did when she spoke to other adults, with the swiftness of flipping a social light-switch, and she turned to pleasantly address the waitress “She wants the ham sandwich.”
Or: “You don’t either, have a headache. You’re just fine. Now go get your work done.”
And in 9th grade, in a dizzying double-bind: “You don’t want to be a park ranger; quit flapping that survey! You’re going to sign up for bookkeeping and typing, and you’re going to start getting good grades in math class, too.”
Increasingly, I was told how I “really” felt emotionally or physically, or told me that I could not possibly be feeling something, that indeed I actually was feeling. Invalidation is when an emotionally abusive person distorts someone’s perception of the world, or when the abuser undermines their factual processing by casting doubt upon the facts of the events. Denying what happened or the analysis of what happened, minimizing the importance of abusive statements or trivializing the recipient’s responses are also means of invalidation.
Over the years, my inertia increased. I could never tell when I was expected to have a preference, or rather, to just to express a preference, since apparently I wasn’t really allowed to have them. When it wasn’t convenient to others for me to express a preference (to speed up shopping, or to allow my mom to appear generous), I was soundly rebuked and told what I “really wanted”.
My stress and depression increased throughout my teen years. When I should have been learning independence and skills and decision-making, I was thwarted, and then paradoxically, received further insults because of my lack of independence. Never knowing when I was supposed to express an opinion, or what my opinion was “supposed” to be, I frequently gave up and just shrugged, unable to verbally express the “appropriate response”. I frequently did not know what that “appropriate response” was.
Worse, with my lack of being able to perceive all those subtle social cues that pervaded both my warped home environment, and even the subtle social cues that comprise such an overwhelming part of interactions in the “normal” world, I was becoming increasingly fatigued with the burden of shamefully lacking in whatever psychic means would have informed me. It was of course, all my fault, as so many people were quickly willing to inform me.
My mom had found a way to get past my natural self-centeredness, not by inviting me to understand others’ worlds, but by trampling my personal boundaries of selfhood. Although children have a certain disempowerment simply because they are young, they, like all self-conscious organisms, are entitled to — nay, required — that their selfhood be respected. Denying that someone else might have opinions worth considering, much less that they are even allowed to even have opinions, violates that central inalienable right.
~#~
Years later as an adult, I was still running into much the same problem of “reality shifting” (being told by others what my personal reality and preferences were “supposed” to be), even if it wasn’t expressed as blatantly or as frequently. One such event became (in retrospect) a tipping point — not in events, but in perceptual clarity. I finally realized that such events were equally disrespectful, even if they lacked the overt denial and double-binds.
My (now ex-) husband was telling me that I shouldn’t want to do jury duty because it might interfere with my vacation schedule or my work schedule. I shouldn’t want to do jury duty because it didn’t pay as much as my job did.
But I realised in confusion, that this wasn’t about what I wanted to do, to participate as a citizen, to help make a positive difference in justice, and to be able to observe another facet of social functioning.
Ostensibly, it was about what he wanted from me, in terms of convenience in the family schedule, and what he wanted from me in terms of my earnings. (Unbeknownst to me at the time, we were horribly, deeply in debt.) I wasn’t denying that it could make these differences in scheduling and earnings — but really, that wasn’t the issue here. Those “reasons” were just distractors.
Rather, he was trying to enforce my actions based upon his wants, and dismissing my wants as being unimportant. He was trying to convince me that his wants were my wants. We all have wants, but I didn’t think that mine should have been dismissed as being unimportant.
The solutions he proposed were ones compromises between the requirements of the law, and what he said I wanted. But effectively, I was the one being compromised, because his announcement denied my interests and enabled him to get what he wanted, rather than what would have enabled both of us.
I got tired of being told what I should want. I got tired of being told how I should feel. I was suffering from a chronic case of spiritual fatigue. Constantly negotiating to be taken seriously was an exhausting way to live.
I don’t miss those aspects of my life; my whole system twitches when I perceive someone telling me what I “should be feeling” or “really want to do”.
Now if only I could get out of some of these other double binds that infest my work life …
How to tell if
19 October 2009 at 4:43 (Insects & Arachnids, Random Thoughts)
your bee is asleep:
Carpenter bee sitting still on pink sedum flower, golden "fur" soggy and mussed
She still hasn’t groomed off the morning dew.
Sound check
15 October 2009 at 23:33 (Geeks, w00t!)
“Testing, 1, 2, 3 …”
Hooray, I got my MacBook back from the shop! It would completely lose the wireless signal two meters from the router, and kept getting hot. Due to teaching commitments, I wasn’t able to take it in until now, just a couple weeks before the AppleCare programme expired. Lessee … they replaced the main logic board, battery, top case, heatsink, fan, and airport (wireless) card. Essentially, I have a nearly-new computer inside my old case. (Yes, it’s my old case, with the spider sticker on top.) So even though the warranty will expire soon, my computer ought to hang in there for quite a while longer.
Now I can finally get blogging again.
But meanwhile, let’s do a sound check to see if there’s anyone out there still … roll call!
Q.: What’s your least favorite Ohrwurm? (song that gets stuck in your head)
Sugar, Sugar … Billy don’t be a hero … Who let the dogs out … It’s a small world after all … that WHOOMP thing they play at ball games …
Role-Playing
6 October 2009 at 6:35 (Eye contact, Small talk, Work / Employment)
I’ve role-played in various capacities over the years, from the “acting-out student” in a staff safety seminar, to the novice thief in a D&D game. But the other week I was asked to try out a far different rôle:
“If you were Melba Toast, where would you be hiding?”
Melba Toast … gee, were I a small box of cardboardy toast slivers, where would I be hiding? Hmn …
Such queries fill chunks of my life now, as I am working two and three jobs for 65-70 hours a week, which should explain the general lack of bloggery. It’s not a lack of interest, nor a lack of subjects worthy of blathering about. (The sad part is that I still have plants sitting around in pots that I bought back in June. That, and another goal is to finish my grandson’s quilt before winter sets in; he’s nearly three months old already!)
These oddball encounters always hit me out of the blue, when I’m otherwise preoccupied with squinting at the shelf tag UPCs to figure out which peg the -48699 fancy chandelier light bulbs should hang upon, or am trying to line up a stack of shiny toothpaste boxes without knocking over its companion rows. (Why do we have to stack all those wobbly boxes three tiers high? Because the boss like them that way, that’s why. But hell if I’m going to try stacking up some of those styles of maxipads, because even single packs don’t want to stand upright.)
Melba Toast … The problem of course, is that every store has a set of random products that are difficult for customers to find. So there we are, grocery stocker blinking and trying to remember to smile and make eye contact and parse the unexpected conversation from the background noise, and customer trying to find the right person for help.
“Do you work here?”
[No,] says the tired-and-cranky part of my brain, [I just like standing around the local market wearing a dress shirt with the corporate logo, knee pads, compression gloves for my arthritis & Raynaud's, and a box knife holstered to my waistband. I sure as hell better work here, because I'm getting so nearly OCD about "facing" groceries that I'm starting to pull forward and straighten out merchandise even when I'm just shopping for my own groceries.] Working two shifts a day doesn’t make me as cranky as going two weeks at a stretch without a full day off. Damnit, I want a life.
Savvy customers ask me, “Do you work for the store?” because they’ve learned that the burly guy stocking cola works for the cola-distribution company, or the little old lady giving out food samples works for a food conglomerate or a temp agency, and neither of these people knows where our market stocks the sun-dried tomatoes, oat bran, or tiki-torch oil. Actually, we don’t stock tiki-torch oil, which is why that customer couldn’t find it. You’re shocked, I’m sure. Or maybe not; we get all kinds of crazy-ass seasonal shit to sell. Maybe we did have tiki-torch oil once-upon-a-time. By my 13th work-hour of the day, tiki-torch oil sounds perfectly reasonable, and I can just about hallucinate bottles of sunset-gold tiki-torch oil by the tins of cigarette-lighter butane or the blister packs of Tropical Paradise air freshener candles. Blarrrg.
Sometimes the senseless placements are simply accidents of history, like the display of snack cakes that migrated inward from and aisle “end cap” and are now juxtaposed to the tinned soups for no particular reason other than some space existed there once, and no one’s since bothered to move them over to the sweets aisle.
Sometimes the senseless placements are just that, like the forlorn bags of barley that are slumped against the soup powders, instead of with the rest of the dry grains and beans. (Well yeah, people put barley in soup, but people put damn near everything else in soups, too; so what?)
Customers are usually so apologetic when they can’t find something; they don’t want to “be a bother”.
“Oh, now I’m messing up your nice display,” frets the gentleman as he fumbles to remove two packs of liquorices.
“No, no, that’s okay! If you don’t buy it, then I can’t re-stock it, and what would I do for a job? You’re keeping the economy running!” Seriously.
They worry that I’m going to think less of them because they can’t find something that’s staring right back at both of us, which is also silly, because sometimes we’re both staring at the shelf, leaving me mumbling,
“I know I saw it right around here the other day, unless it got moved the day I was off …”
“Oh, here it is!” exclaims the customer, who actually has a “search image” for a product, unlike this store employee who neither stocks the item nor buys it.
“Ayup, I remembered seeing it around here … is there anything else for which you are looking?”
Of course, there’s the person stalking up and down an aisle because they too have that feeling of it’s-right-in-front-of-me, and they finally break down to ask me as I’m passing by with a trolley artfully crammed full of cartons of chocolate bars and thirteen flavors and sizes of toothpaste, or a handtruck heaped high with bags of charcoal. (Nothing says, “Working Hard” like having coal schmutz on your cheek.)
“Um, have you seen the — Oh! Here it is. Sorry,”
“No worries — we do that at home all the time: ‘Hey Mom, where’s-the-nevermind’.”
My canned joke, with its carefully-honed wee bit of wry camaraderie, usually prompts a reciprocating expression of familiarity. Small talk is hard for me, so after I’ve had the same type of experience a few times, I make myself up some scripts to add to my standard lists of “Grocery Stocker Small Talk” or “Grocery Cashier Small Talk”.
But of course, there’s the inevitable ad-libbing.
“Melba Toast … you know, I don’t think I’ve ever role-played bread before,” I replied. Fortunately, my off-beat attempt at levity worked, which bought me some time as I stood there, staring up into space to access my mental store map. “Well, let’s go check Aisle 5,”
We get there, cruising past the peanut butter and jelly selections, in our grocery manager’s dual homage to cheap sandwiches and suggestive product placement. “I already looked in the bread aisle,” volunteers the customer, but we’re both familiar with scenario of missing something right in front of us, so we give it a look-through just to be sure.
“Okay, another likely place would be in the cracker aisle,” I offer, as we pass the end-cap display for the other brand of snack cakes (located in another part of the store, naturally) and make a U-turn to cruise fruitlessly past the chips and crackers. Before my customer gets too dispirited (or embarrassed), I offer an explanation, “The problem is, there are some things for which there are several perfectly logical places to keep them … and every store has its quirks. Well, if it’s not down here, we’ll look in the Import Foods section by the Dutch rusks,”
“I already checked there,” says the unusually diligent shopper.
“Wow, most people usually miss — ah-HA! Here they are, next to cereal and the toaster pastries.” Hooray, this mystery is solved, and I can go back to fighting with the Halloween bags of Twizzlers candies, which are refusing to stack neatly and have taken to suddenly slumping off the shelf and slithering onto the floor as I get halfway down the aisle. It would take no less than five episodes of this before I finally got the heaps stabilised. Such repeated incidents of fruit-carting would be funny later, but there are only so many ways you can stack and re-stack and re-stack and re-stack and re-stack bags of individually-wrapped cherry-flavored twists before getting utterly twisted, too.
Fever dreams
7 September 2009 at 4:13 (Random Thoughts, Sleep)
I remember running around, repeating over and over:
“My conniption doesn’t fit! My conniption doesn’t fit!”
We Mutants
5 September 2009 at 23:54 (Arthritis, Diversity, Hyperacussis, Hypermobility, Prosopagnosia)
“Now remember — you’re special, just like everyone else!”
It seems that classic punch line (for all the jokes on useless self-esteem boosters) was never truer. At the ever-entertaining NeuroLogica Blog, Steven Novella explains recent findings that everyone is a mutant.
Given my numerous neurological quirks, I had long assumed my mutant status to be true, and when finally diagnosed with prosopagnosia (which can result from a single point mutation), I then took it to be a given.
As Novella, points out, not all mutations give one super-powers; in fact, most of mutations are neither beneficial nor detrimental. There’s certainly nothing exciting about hyperacussis, as I’d previously described in Can you sue your Fairy Godmother for malpractice? Some things like the are just annoying; were I graceful, the hypermobility might have enabled me to be a dancer or gymnast. Instead, I’m just arthritic and bruised, for all it’s handy to always be able to reach that itchy spot.
100 – 200 mutations per person may be trivial in the genomic sense, but is far from trivial when considering human diversity. Mutation is normal. It’s ubiquitous. Not only are there no “perfectly average” people, but we’re all mutants. Now, can we finally lay disablism, transphobia, and the rest of the xenophobic rot to rest?
Now ’scuse me while I go for a soak in the tub; maybe I can distract meself from this silly jingle that’s gotten stuck in my head:
I’m a mutant, you’re a mutant, xe’s a mutant, too.
We’re all alike in our differences, so whatcha gonna do?
Betcha I wasn’t the only one absent
21 August 2009 at 4:21 (Pain, Random Thoughts)
I was going to attend the free seminar on chronic pain,
but my backache was too severe that night.
Welcome to the Ivory Tower, Internet
20 August 2009 at 4:59 (College/University, Critical Thinking, OMG, Teaching/Tutoring)
My daughter shares this story:
Research is to English majors what coffee is to the general college student. Essays are ramen and reading material naps, if you’re curious. (Note that literal naps often overlap with these figurative ones.) So caught up in the glee of primary sources and minutia of MLA, we forget that not all of our academic brethren are blessed with this area of education.
Also, people are stupid.
So I’m sitting in my philosophy professor’s office, chatting breezily about feminist interpretations of Aristotle and (conventionally enough) existential crises in modern films. A flustered gentleman comes crashing through the doorway pleading for an audience. She invites him in, and he begins his protestations before I have a chance to vacate and thus offer privacy.
“Why did I get an F on this paper?” he whines, gesturing to the scarlet letter like it were the very knife Brutus plunged into Caesar’s back.
“Because it was a research paper,” she answers, “and you only had one source.”
“And?”
“And it was Wikipedia.”
“And?”
“And that’s not a credible source.”
“Nu-uh!” he cries, despondent in the face of life’s cold injustice. “I know it was! I posted the information myself.”
Seated on the bridge of the Enterprise, Captain Picard does a pained face-palm
Getting there … or, Not.
8 August 2009 at 6:11 (Accessibility, WTF?!, w00t!)
The other day, my daughter sent me a link to this post by Xenakis, which describes the wonderful side of Universal Design. In other words, build something right from the start, and you won’t have to go back and tack on ugly access structures.
plaza in Robson Square, Vancouver, with ramps making diagonal switchbacks across the long flight of stairs up the hill
There are a few problems I can see with this approach. One is that it might be too easy for a wheelie to get off-ramp — perhaps there are guiding impediments that I can’t see in the image. Also, someone commenting on Xenakis’ post, points out that people who walk up ramps often need hand rails, and the rails are only along the stairs. Personally, I would also like to see some kind of contrast striping between the stairs and the ramps; can you imagine going up or down this in a rainy, dark night?
Nonetheless, it’s still a really cool advancement over the traditional Deep Flight of Stairs Up to an Official Building.
Next up in today’s post on accessibility: some pix from the Fail Blog. When access is SO BAD that everyone but the installer can tell that It Sucketh, Big Time:
Stucco building with Female and Male bathroom signs over two doors, and between those, a Handicapped sign over a shuttered window
Escalator with a wall neatly built right at the first moving step up/down
A man in sandals demonstrates the futility of trying to climb up a concrete doorway ramp (marked with Handicapped emblem) that is at least a 30° angle upwards
And last but not least (just for grins), Teh Dumb from a hospital somewhere. I’m not fond of MRI machines from the comfort perspective, for all they can make great pictures. The last time I was in one, I wore ear plugs and they gave me the clam-shell headphones to help block out some of the noise. But I have hyperacussis and tinnitus, and 45 minutes later my head was ringing so badly, I slithered off the padded bench and crumpled to the floor.
Powerful MRI with metal hospital bed pulled off the floor and stuck to opening
12 Days
2 August 2009 at 4:31 (Migraine, OMG, Pain, Sleep, Work / Employment)
Man, but July just oozed by in a protracted mental fog. One of the huge blocks to regular bloggery was the incredible 12-Day Headache. It got slightly better at times, and it got worse at times, but the “Ten Kilos of Lead Atop Me Head” pain just would NOT go away!
It made working the three jobs worse, despite my adamant determination to not miss more than a day’s work from the para or grocery jobs. I couldn’t even consider missing a day from the professor job, because summer semester runs at twice the speed, and we had no wiggle-room in our schedule for covering everything that needed to be covered.
As before, putting thoughts together was like stringing beads while wearing heavy ski mittens. But this time I didn’t have a handy excuse, other than, “I’ve had a headache for over a week now,” Being in pain means not sleeping well, and increases stress, and all three of these factors combine into a viscous circle.
- I tried acetominophen (paracetamol), in addition to my daily naproxen sodium that I take for arthralgia.
- I tried soaking in a hot bath in a dim room.
- I stood under a strong shower and let it beat upon my head.
- I laid down with cold compresses.
- I took two-hour afternoon naps because I could not keep my eyes open.
- I took a vigourous 1-mile walk and gardened, and avoided afternoon naps in hopes of getting better sleep.
- I had a hot toddy at bedtime.
- I ate cold ice cream to the point of “brain-freeze”.
- I massaged my head.
- I vigorously brushed my hair.
- I took Imitrex, my migraine medication.
- I did Tai Chi Chih-like stretches.
- I layed with my feet higher than my head.
- I massaged my feet.
I thought to myself, “This can’t keep going on! I can’t live like this.” But of course it can, and people do.
Initially, I kept saying, “I’ll do that tomorrow when I feel better.” But the mañana list kept getting longer and longer. After a week, I finally came to the grips that for whatever reason, I was going to have to deal with The Damn Leaden Burden of Pain as a chronic issue, whether long-term or short-term. It forced me to pare down my Daily To Do lists to the merest essentials:
- This morning I will shower and shampoo.
- After a nap, I must write at last 75% of an exam.
- I will eat something nutritious for dinner before working tonight.
- I will set out a complete change of clothes before I go to bed.
What hellish demands upon my time and energy! That was of course, a day when I wasn’t teaching a class, just doing the morning para job and a few hours of stocking groceries after tea.
Oh crap, I forgot one:
5. I will refill my daily pill minder.
You know you’re exhausted when dosing out a few bedtime pills is too much of a bother.
Finally I gave up and went to my GP. “I’m exhausted. I’m even falling asleep at work, and at dinner, even though I’m sleeping seven to ten hours a night, with two hours naps during the day. My joints and muscles ache. I keep getting bruises, and cuts heal slowly, and my gums bleed when I brush my teeth. My hands and feet are cold. I’m sensitive to light, my ears ring most of the time, and I’m having dizzy spots. I get disoriented, and have the worst mental fogginess, despite taking my ADHD meds. I have dry mouth, and am thirsty all the time and drinking two or more liters of water a day. AND I’VE HAD THIS HORRIBLE HEADACHE FOR TWELVE DAYS.”
I mentioned a family history of diabetes. The doc sent me down to the lab for blood draws, also checking my thyroid and some other factors. Additionally, he gave me a heavy-duty pain reliever that I took when I went to bed. The next day was much better, although I could still feel headache lurking around the edges, so I took another pill the next night.
The Damn Leaden Burden of Pain finally went away. My blood tests all came back normal, thankfully. I don’t know what caused such an intractible headache, but I sure hope it doesn’t return. Or if it does, I’ll smack it down a lot quicker with the pain med. The pain-exhausted-stress cycle gets so hard to break.
Where P = 0
1 August 2009 at 23:05 (Family, Sleep, Work / Employment, inertia)
Where P is the momentum, and P = mv. v = velocity, naturally. But the m = inertial mass. As in, if something doesn’t act upon and force the m, then there is no v and no P, and certainly no W of work!
I’ve not been blogging much lately due to the Jobs, but even after the education-related Job #1 and Job #2 finished a couple weeks ago, I’m still finding it hard to get back into the blogging groove. I’m still working Job #3, which is only part-time, but grocery stocking is giving me the most inconsistent hours and days, ever. It’s getting to the point where I’m having trouble remembering what day of the week it is.
The Geekling has yet to sleep through the night; I’m not feeding him at nights, but apparently Grandma Ears are the same as Mom Ears, and hunger cries in another part of the house will still awaken me.
Furthermore, my watch battery died, so I can’t even tell when I am, aside from night and day.
But most of all, I have a bad case of Inertia. I have a bazillion things to do, but struggle to complete the most time-sensitive ones. I am working on some posts, but stringing thoughts together is like watching syrup ooze down the bottle.
What do you do to get over Inertia?
That … thing
22 July 2009 at 3:21 (Communication, Random Thoughts)
Dysnomia ‘R’
[ pause ]
the two …
you and me …
er,
“Us.”
Yeah.
But what’s it good for?
8 July 2009 at 3:56 (Cats, Sleep, Work / Employment)
A recent article in the New York Times briefly discusses the utility of cats, and asserts that their lack of usefulness is attributed to the theory that in contrast to other domesticated animals, the cats have domesticated humans, and generally do not let the humans determine their breeding.
Compared to sheepdogs, cats are generally less useful. But most people don’t acquire cats for their utility. We acquire them for their independent nature, for their companionship, for their snuggliness (even for their ease of litter-training).
Of course, there are some cats that are more useful than others — Thunder is my “Alarm-Cat”, an almost-service animal who will diligently nose-bump me as many times as is necessary to get me up on time for work. She’ll even give me a wake-up call when I take a nap. The hard part of course, is convincing her about Daylight Savings Time.
Aside from that, Thunder’s “utility” is limited to lap-warming. Like our other cats, she sheds, sometimes shreds, complains about household arrangements, and consumes kibble.
I own an alarm clock. It’s great for telling time. But I prefer my alarm-cat, whose persistence is much more pleasurable that a mechanical blaaaat.
Do you have a cat for a service animal?
First on the Scene
5 July 2009 at 4:25 (Epidemiology, Insects & Arachnids, Science)
A shiny green fly sponging up nectar from a fennel flower head
The other day I was out in the garden taking pictures when a shiny green fly caught my attention. Green bottle flies (Diptera, family Calliphoridae, genus Lucilia) are a bit larger than the ordinary house fly. The adults feed on nectar and are pollinators, but because of their life histories, they fill some really interesting roles in the realms of human sciences.
One piece of news I found particularly interesting is related to newer use of Lucilia illustris in Maggot Debridement Therapy. This $50 term refers to putting young maggots on a wound because will consume only dead tissue — fear not, they are reared under clean laboratory conditions.
[Pausing for readers to get past the "Eeuw, gross!" moment before moving onto the really interesting stuff.]
The news is that these larvae are exceptionally good at helping patients recover from bad MRSA infections. A University Manchester study found that thirteen diabetic patients with nasty foot sores were able to heal up in an average of just 3 weeks, instead of the usual 28 weeks! Not only do they clean up the dead cells that would just fester and decay, but they also get rid of the bacteria directly, and help stimulate the healing process. As the article points out, this means that patients don’t have to deal with some of the side effects of strong antibiotics. My daughter has dealt with several staph infections, including an episode of MRSA, so this ranks a big w00t!
Yes, these are the same sort of fly larvae, AKA blow flies, that help clean up dead animals in the environment. Not only do the larvae need the nutrients from dead animal tissue to grow and mature, but the females need the extra maternal protein for egg production. (Unfortunately, they are also pests in the world of sheep ranching.)
Which leads us to another famous use of flies, forensic entomology. Calliphorid flies are attracted to blood or other fluids, and are the first to colonize a corpse. The rates of maturation for various species of flies have been extensively studied. By examining the age of the larvae, comparing this with the conditions where the body was found, and the known temperature data to calculate the Accumulated Degree Days, the Post Mortem Interval or PMI can be determined. The PMI is how long it has been since the person died.
Blow flies may be “icky”, but the smallest of details can make great differences in the affairs of humans.
Hanging around the Web
4 July 2009 at 0:22 (ADD/ADHD, Accessibility, Architecture/Universal Design, Arthritis, Circus of the Spineless, Disability Blog Carnival, Family, Geeks, Home stuff, Humor/ Fun Stuff, Insects & Arachnids, Migraine, Ooh, shiny!, Pain, Sleep, w00t!)
A shiny robot spider hangs upside-down from a metal mesh
My son and I recently hauled a long dresser+mirror up two flights of stairs, and I cleaned up the master bedroom in preparation for the return of the new baby & parents from the hospital. The downside of course is that after a day of labor, I must spend a couple-three days recuperating. (In other words, I used up all my “spoons”, down to the last demitasse.)
I’m also on Day 2 of one of those low-grade-three-day migraines. Right now it’s manifesting as misreads, which when I catch myself is kind of entertaining:
- a post on wheelchair “fails” [falls] at Wheelchair Dancer
- “Disability Studs” instead of Disability Studies
- “Autism Hug” instead of Autism Hub
- “Crack Wicks” instead of Cake Wrecks
In light of all that, I thought I’d share some interesting reads/cool finds on the Web recently:
My sleep-deprived daughter would be envious of ant queens, who spend nine hours a day sleeping, while the workers must squeeze in micro-naps.
From the world of delightful architecture, an adult tree[less] house shaped like a bee skep, made of recycled lumber (wheelie adaptation not included).
The CitizenM hotels have the most amazing showers, which look like Star Trek transporter pads. To start the shower, you simply shut the door. I don’t know if they’re large enough for a wheelchair transfer to a shower seat, but with the zero-clearance there’s a chance of it (maybe Dave knows). Want! (Or at least the trés geek LED shower head that changes from blue to red when your water’s hot.)
Reimer Reason posted It’s a Family Reunion! for the most recent Disability Blog Carnival.
In further hexapod news: while I was distracted by our little geekling, Bug Girl has been faithfully covering Pollinator Week, including important information about CHOCOLATE. For more funs, Cheshire has teh latest Circus of the Spineless up.
And of course, what would a list of fun be without a LOLcat?
Six white kittens lined up and looking at the camera, while a seventh is distracted with a play ball. The photo caption reads, "PUZZLE PICTURE Find the kitten who has ADD."
What she said was, “Aquacise”
3 July 2009 at 15:33 (ADD/ADHD, Arthritis, Coping strategies, Pain, Random Thoughts)
Random thought:
When my rheumatologist said to get more exercise,
I’m not sure she really meant
that I should be hauling meself up & down stairs
over and over because of my ADHD forgetfulness.
Congratulations
1 July 2009 at 3:40 (Family, w00t!)
to my daughter and her honey, on the arrival of their little geekling. The boy is healthy and beautiful. We’re all so proud and excited!
Periods
25 June 2009 at 11:58 (Arthritis, Eye contact, Hypermobility, Migraine, Pain)
Every now and then someone asks a question that helps you define an issue in life. Recently a nurse asked me, “Do you have days when you’re not in pain?”
I considered this for a few seconds and replied, “I have periods during the day when I’m not in pain. Usually because of my meds. But I haven’t had any days without pain for a long time. Since … I can’t remember when.”
I fidgeted thoughtfully for a moment, then remembered to make some conversational eye contact and added, “The thing that’s hard to explain about ‘pain management’ is that it’s not that I ‘get used to the pain’, but that I get used to ‘being in pain’. It makes it too easy to overwork, and not get enough rest, and get sick easier.”
We chatted a bit more about other stuff in life, and bid our farewells. Alas, she had nothing to offer by way of remedy for the situation, aside from reminding me to get some sleep. She’s not my medic; she’s my student.
But she did me a favour anyway by asking me a question that gave me the opportunity to re-assess and get a better perspective on my life.
