Hmm….

Well, I am shocked.   Or maybe not.

The e-mail finally arrived.

A listing of maybe five eating disorders hospitals.  These are the biggies, the ritzy ones.  I’ve heard of all of them of course, scattered around the country, that don’t take public insurance, including the one at McLean, FOR GIRLS ONLY AGE 23 AND UNDER.

Next time I get rich and famous or jump down in age and hit the college dorms again, I’ll try these out.  It would help to have this thing called loving family, to send me to these places, from one place to another if the first one didn’t work.

Okay, the list also contained private therapists.  One in Connecticut.  Now, I know our New England states are teased and called “little” by your western states.  True.  But we’re not that little.  The other therapist was in Massachusetts, but a three-hour drive away, on highways, in Williamstown.  Do a Google Map.  No, just take my word for it.  Picture a rectangle and put two dots on it on opposite ends and write “Three Hour Drive” between these two dots.  Should I grab Puzzle, stick out my thumb, and hitch-hike once or twice a week?  Jesus.

That was the result of calling NEDA.  Hmm…maybe they need to be educated about the size of Massachusetts and the way public transportation works around here, what buses and subways are, and what it’s like to be on public assistance.  I can’t afford the price of gas to drive to Williamstown, and if I could, I’d be stuck there till next month’s check came so that I could fill the tank to drive back home.  That’s one helluva long therapy session.  Maybe I’d be cured by then.

 

 

What’s on my Post-Its

I get all these writing ideas.  Too many of them.  It’s a curse.  I live in a shoe-sized apartment and these Post-Its are going to fill and overflow my two rooms very soon.  It will be so crowded with Post-Its in here that Puzzle will have to eat her way out.  Puzzle sometimes eats paper.  She’s funny that way.

So I have been home for a few days with this headache and generally feeling very yucky and sick.  I have never had headaches, migraines, or chronic pain in any part of my body and I’m not one to run around complaining about this sort of stuff and go from doctor to doctor about it either.  So I have been spared that.  This with the exception of the Mysterious Unexplained Knee Injury of 2005.

Let me insert a bit of an aside here.  There is this weird association with chronic pain.  Or shall I say covert assumption in the medical profession and maybe in society that maybe it happens to hysterical females.  Have you noticed this?  Have you noticed that doctors tend to dismiss women’s complaints of pain more quickly as “attention-seeking” or “medication-seeking” or “marital problems” or “needs therapy” or “midlife crisis”?  Let me go a step further.  When an overweight person is in pain, it is up to, say, a competent specialist in body structure (such as orthopedist) and the patient together to determine if the pain is caused by stress on the joints due to excess weight.  It is not up to a person on the street to look upon this person, judge this person, and without even asking, state that this person suffers pain because he or she is overweight and “it’s his/her own fault.”

Let me go a step further (off-topic?  Heck, it’s a topic, isn’t it?) and say that when a person who is on public assistance or impoverished seeks medical or dental attention for pain, often the professional assumes that the patient is lying about the degree of pain just to leave with a prescription.  For myself, I have not lied to doctors.  I can see how a person on Medicaid might, in desperation, lie about pain to get to see a dentist.  Why?  In some situations, you don’t get covered by Medicaid unless you are in pain.  If you have an abscess, and you don’t get something done about it, you can die.  There have been cases of people, children even, who have died because of non-coverage.

I don’t really remember.  It has been a long time since I read the article about this kid.  Did he know he might die of this infection?  He looked and looked for a dentist that would take him.  They couldn’t interview the kid after he died.  They never found out.  It is a lost story.

Many of us get lost.  Many of us get forgotten.  There are people in the state hospitals right now that have been forgotten by their families.  Even people with eating disorders.  There are people with eating disorders who have died in state hospitals.  There are people with eating disorders who never got treatment and died and were forgotten.

There are people with eating disorders who kept these disorders secret all their lives.  Are you one of these people?  Are you reading this right now?  I am writing this for you.  I am thinking of you.   Tonight when I go to sleep I will remember writing this for you and you are not forgotten today.  You are not forgotten today or tomorrow and you can walk proud today and tomorrow and always knowing that I am right here.

I was one of you.  I kept it secret for a while.  A year, actually.  I went into therapy.  I told my therapist.  For a long time, therapists were the only ones that knew.  I would say it was only recently that I have “come out” very, very publicly as a person with an eating disorder.  I’d say four years ago, only a few people knew, though many, many people knew I had a “mental illness.”

The heck with it.  Come out, come out, wherever you are.

Anyway, my Post-Its are coming out of the woodwork here.

I have some kind of note about “Throwing the first stone” but I don’t understand the note.  It’s too vague so I don’t remember what the idea was.

I am going to write a brief fiction piece, meant to be spoken aloud, about a person with an ED.  That’s all I’ll say about that because I plan to use this piece as introductory at a reading if it comes out the way I want it to.

I want to do a piece on publishing, whether to seek publication, reasons for publication, ins and outs, and a new view on it (or so I’d like to think), and things I’ve done.

A piece on body acceptance

A piece on what I have seen of the body acceptance movement.  These last two may be combined, but they are on separate Post-Its right now.  Both Post-Its are blue, for what it’s worth.  The packet of blue Post-Its happened to be on the top of the pile.

A piece on money and downsizing

I wrote a piece called “Poops and Roses” the other day that I want to copy over and put in here.  It’s about dog poop.  I like the piece.

Oh yes, I want to write a piece about getting rid of my breasts.  I Googled “Breast Donation” and ended up with Breast Cancer Donation” and where to donate money.  Not quite.  Then I found “Breast Tissue Donation” but I meant the entire breast, not a teensy piece.  I Googled “Breast Transplant” and found out about how they take a piece of hip tissue and make breast tissue out of it.  Nope.  I want to give these to someone else.  I never wanted them in the first place.  I guess they don’t do this.  Well, I’m starting to write the piece now, which was not my intention, just wanted to say what it was about, just a hint of what I will write.

Is there no end to the Post-Its?  Is there no end to the posts?  Will I ever get around to doing something useful, like feeding the dog, or will she resort to eating my words?  Or, as I mentioned previously, will she eat the Post-Its themselves?  Will I end up eating the Post-Its, too?  How will I ever burn off the calories?  Can you burn a Post-It at both ends?

The End.

It is necessary to do this wicked bad rant about stupid trivia to get rid of my headache so that I can start writing today

Listen: I’ve got to let this out.  I’m sitting here at the library.  I came here to work on my new book.  It’s a start, and a very positive one.  Yes, I’m motivated.  Day #2.  But I had to get on here first and tell you something, a couple of things, actually, get this off my chest.

I wasn’t even going to include this, but let me begin by saying that it reeks of garbage in here.  Yes, garbage.  Rotting veggies.  I’m considering packing up and going home.  Like, if I didn’t know better, I’d say I was going to be sick or something from the fumes.  But I’ve mentioned here before that I haven’t actually puked since 1997.  I can probably count the number of times I’ve puked in my lifetime, period, with the exception of this weird “phase” I went through sometime when I was in my 30′s that lasted, say, a couple of weeks.  Every time I smelled something the least bit offensive, like the tiniest fart, I’d throw up.  A “phase,” I guess.  It ended.  Let’s just say the library smells damn pukey right now.  Okay, enough.  Subject dropped.

I woke up this morning with a weird combination of a bad mood and a positive attitude.  I feel this sense of renewal over the new book, like awake and alive finally, a sense of purpose and future that I didn’t have before, a real reason for going on, a feeling of drive.  By bad mood I don’t mean clinically bad mood, that is, I don’t mean I was depressed, nothing like that.  I mean I was bitchy and annoyed.  I had a screamer headache.   Actually, I still have that screamer headache.  It’s very rare that I have one that hangs on, and in fact if I ever get a headache it lasts a few minutes, fifteen maybe at most, and then goes away.  I get them for a variety of reasons and they are never a big deal.  Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep, or too much sleep.  I take a couple of aspirins and drink a cup of coffee and that cures it, and if I don’t have time to make and drink coffee, I ingest a caffeine pill instead.  Today, it’s a genuine tension bitchy annoyed headache and that’s why it won’t quit.

My reasons for bitchy-annoyed: My DMH person is back from her six-week vacation.  Yes, six weeks.  I am aware that she is due back, of course, and expected her at 11.  I was very annoyed that I had to deal with all this today, knowing that she is chronically late.  I don’t mean just late, I mean very, very late, without notifying me.  Ever.  Like, I am a mental patient and therefore have nothing better to do but sit around on my ass, so it makes no difference when she shows up?  I’d been up late, way too late, my fault, didn’t want to drag my butt out of bed, was thinking of all kinds of ways to blow this whole thing off in case this was one of those rare occasions that she showed up anything like on time or within a half hour of on time.  I decided that I had a flu bug, but then, I didn’t need the flu bug at all, because noon came, and then 1pm…no show…I left the house and came here to the library.

Okay, something else completely unrelated I want to mention.  Yesterday.  I left the house in disgust.  Aw man, my headache is starting to pound just thinking about this.  I walk into my apartment with Puzzle.  We’ve just been out for a walk.  I’m planning to go out, and then suddenly I can hardly wait to bolt out to the library, because there is screaming, I mean screaming right outside my door.  What the fuck?  It’s the neighbors.  Again.  My fucking neighbors.  You wouldn’t believe these people.  This time, the shopping cart lady and someone that I think is her daughter.  The shopping cart lady is making her rounds in the hallway, and her daughter is strolling around with her, and they are having an argument.  They are screaming and yelling at each other while walking up and down the hallway.  Just tell me the logic in this.  Why the fuck can’t they have their screaming fight inside the shopping cart lady’s apartment instead of out there in the hallway where everyone has to hear it?  I’m not talking one or two minutes.  By the time I got my stuff into my knapsack and organized and my jacket on and Puzzle squared away, ten minutes had passed and those two were still screaming in the hall.

This has been a wicked bad rant about stupid trivial shit.  Thanks for listening.  Now I can get to work.

My evening so far

The DMH guy, it turns out, did remember to show up.  I figured there was a 50/50 chance.  I don’t recall if he was on time.  I didn’t look at the clock or anything.  I just made sure, when the buzzer rang, that nothing incriminating was exposed, no weird websites or anything.  Just Windows Media Player.

And I really, really, really don’t want anyone snooping around in my e-mail.  Really.  I don’t get any strange junk mail and I don’t order from any oddball companies or anything.  It’s my correspondence I don’t want anyone reading.  Personal information.  You wouldn’t believe how people will eagerly look over your shoulder and read what you’re writing.

So right before he showed up, like a half hour before, I opened my snail mail, and discovered that three, I mean not one, not two, but three of my Dr. P appointments have been canceled.  One this month, one in February, and one in May.  That leaves the one in April still standing.  Or did they forget to cancel that one?  I didn’t have one set up for March.  Is she no longer working on Wednesdays?  She stopped working Thursdays a while back, leaving only Wednesdays and no other day.  Weird.  Maybe she now works on the eighth day of the week.

So the DMH guy came.  I knew right away that it wasn’t going to be much of a big deal.  Why?  He never took off his jacket.  Not only that, he didn’t even put his briefcase down.  Not only that, but he had it in his lap, cradling it in his arms the whole time.  I wonder now why he chose my wood chair instead of my desk chair.  Last time, he wanted the bigger padded desk chair.  I guess the wood chair is more temporary, and closer to the door so he could bolt out of here.  He asked me about the ER, and I told him honestly that it was a total waste of time and that I wanted to forget about it.  Yep.  The truth is, if you are a mental patient seeking medical care, you will be discriminated against by emergency personnel.  It is a given.  Have I learned my lesson?  I seem to forget it, over and over and over.  How long have I been a mental patient now?  And I still haven’t learned?  Anyway, the ER topic took up about three sentences of the conversation.  Then he mentioned having found my blog.

Oops.

Well, oops for just a second.  It was clear that he didn’t really read much of anything on here, or didn’t read very carefully.  I tried to hide my uneasiness, and started talking about This Hunger Is Secret, and talked some about e-books versus hard copy books, and we got on the subject of Kindles, and everything was cool.  Naw, he didn’t even know which one of my books got published.  He didn’t read.  He just clicked on a couple of pages.  That’s nice.

Then I cooked up a sizzling steak dinner.

Only kidding.  I made myself a cup of tea and went browsing around the Internet for some music.  I like international music, stuff from other countries in other languages, stuff that you don’t hear all the time.  Actually, I don’t have a radio that works.  Nor do I have a TV.  When I put up the Christmas tree, I moved the broken radio to the bedroom.  I don’t know what to do with the radio.  I guess I’ll just toss it.  I haven’t watched the Grammies since maybe 1985.  I don’t think I’ve seen a soap opera since then, either.  I don’t find sit-coms funny.  Some of them make me cry.  Or I’ve gone over to other people’s homes, and I’ve had to ask, “What does that mean?” and I’ve had to ask them to explain the sit-coms to me, and they just roll their eyes around and get impatient with me, and I just give up and lose interest real fast.  Last time I was on a psych ward, which would be September 2011, I got real pissy when they turned the TV up too loud.  I was trying to write and the damn thing was blasting all day long.  I could hardly wait to get home and find peace and quiet.

So I came home.  The neighbor lady wheeling that damn shopping cart back and forth, back and forth in the hall at nine, ten, eleven, midnight.  I am not kidding you.  Midnight!  Every time she passes my apartment, the shopping cart wheels squeak.  I am talking about a huge supermarket carriage in our nice quiet apartment building.

Okay, then there are the grandchildren, screaming down the hallway.  Not just at ten in the morning.  I mean at all times of day and night.  Pound, pound pound pound!  Wheee!  Is our hallway a playground?

And the whistler.  This maintenance guy that whistles.  I always know when he’s around.  He can be a hundred feet away, a thousand feet away.  I know him by his whistle.  It is piercing.  It cuts through concrete walls.  Does he have to announce his presence that way?  All day long?  The maintenance guys are in the hall shouting and cussing at each other all day long anyway, and I always know when he is among them.

Then there is what is the name of that show…Dialing for Dollars?  No.  That was back when I was a kid.  Wheel of Fortune!  I hear that damn wheel turning, turning, turning, blasting from every TV in the hall, coming through my paper-thin walls all afternoon long.  They repeat this show hour after hour you see.  The beeps get slower, slower, slower until finally this stopper thingy stops on some number, and then a bunch of people shout and cheer, and you can hear the people screaming over some car or some vacation package or furniture set.  Oh my god!  See how rich!

But!  But!  The absolute worst!  The Sneezer!  Yes, the Sneezer!  My next-door neighbor.  A little harmless old lady.  You would never know.  It is all behind closed doors.  She is tiny.  She is insidious.  She is quiet.  She doesn’t say a word.  But when you least expect it…

Ah-choo!

Ah-choo!

So, so loud, it is unbearable. Over and over.  All day.  I cannot get away from her incessant sneezing.  You would think that the walls would be thick enough to block out sneezing?  I am not kidding you.  I can hear her sneeze.  It has been this way since September 3, 2008, the day I moved in.

Ah-choo!

Okay, I have bitched and moaned enough.  Actually, I really enjoyed that.

My double vision–as it turns out

As it turns out, my double vision problem isn’t serious, and it doesn’t come from malnutrition.  Rather, it is a consequence of having a high degree of myopia (nearsightedness).  I have what’s known as vertical diplopia.  This means that I see one image on top of the other.  Sometimes people who are very nearsighted, as I am, experience their eyes turning outward.  It is a weird muscle thing.  This is what’s causing the double vision.  My eye doctor said it’s not dangerous because it isn’t happening all the time, just some of the time, and not when I’m out walking.  I don’t drive or have a driver’s license or ride a road bicycle.  I told him that if I had to drive, I would certainly be unable to do so because of this problem.  One thing he said he could do would be to give me glasses with prisms in them to correct the double vision, but this, he felt, was not a good idea.  Why?  He said that my eyes would adjust, and turn outward again, and I would need more and more prisms.

So I see double sometimes.  A lot of the time.  When I was in therapy today, I had two therapists.  Imagine that.  I was being observed by a team.   Two people both talking at once.  Not only that, but they both had the same name.  Try going through psychological testing with double vision, and you’ll get twice the diagnoses, and then some.

When I go to therapy, I am required to bring a snack and eat it there.  Today, I did something different: I brought lunch with me.  Well, a small lunch.  Or should I say, it appeared to be two lunches, so I guess it was an awful lot of food, with two spoons in fact.  I ate it all.   Twice.   I’m sure both my therapists were equally thrilled.  Actually, if one had been thrilled and one hadn’t been, it would have been one hell of an optical illusion.

Thoughts on Size Zero Needles and Other Musings on Knitting

2/18/2010

Thoughts on Size Zero Needles and Other Musings on Knitting

As you may recall, I always knit something when I travel by airplane.  Well, I just traveled to Washington State to my school reunion.  I had an adventure with knitting needles right before I left on my trip, which was as follows:

Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT, use size zero needles.  You will age faster.  Your hair will turn very gray.  Your kids will start taking drugs.  Your cats will run away from home.  Your husbands will have ejaculations so premature that you will both be very, very sorry you ever even looked at size zero needles.  Now, aren’t you glad there are no negative one needles?

Size one needles are a joy by comparison.  They actually have tips that don’t happen to slice you up every time you look at them.  I dig size one.  Ditto size two.  I actually bought some “spare” size zero needles in case my other size zero needles got lost on the plane.  Then I had lotsa toothpicks for my trip.  I changed my mind and switched needle size after I knitted about two inches, disgusted with the toothpicks.  It actually made no difference cuz my stitching was tighter on the size ones, at least twice as fast, and neater, too.  Plus, I could SEE.

Now, it took approximately 2-1/2 minutes to do a row, and there were four rows to a round.  But if there was a difficult or stubborn stitch, the row took 2:45.  This included moving the hair elastic from one needle to the other.  I used those to keep the stitches on the needles and not somewhere else.  Then I found some wonderful Clover brand caps for the needles.  You will need eight for a double-pointed needle project.  These are silicone and they do stay on.

Six rounds will make a half inch of sock.  That means it takes ten+ minutes  to do a round, 120+ minutes to do an inch, which is two to four hours, not including breaks.  Including breaks, it takes at maybe eight hours to do an inch of sock.  I have done four and a half inches or so now.  On four plane rides, I did only about an inch to an inch and a half.  The pattern recommends six inches of sock before turning the heel.  Arrgghh!!!  And this is only sock #1!

Do you know just how hard it is to knit socks with tiny needles on a plane?  First of all, you have to keep your overhead light turned on.  Undoubtedly, you’ll be stuck sitting next to some arsehole who wants to sleep for the entire ride and is gravely offended by the light, and bothered by your periodic elbow jabbings (from dealing with runaway yarn) and swearing at stitches you nearly drop.  Secondly, the light does no good, because your head forms a shadow over your knitting.  This is remedied by leaning the seat back, but not without offending the person behind you and knocking over his coffee, spilling it all over his business suit.  Then there is the well-meaning looker-on, who wants to tell you you are knitting all wrong, that you are too slow, too sloppy, that you don’t know what you are doing, and really, you don’t, do you?  YOU’RE KNITTING SOCKS, AFTER ALL!  THIS ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE FUN!

So what did I do?  When I got home, I decided to quit cursing, and put the project aside in favor of yet another hat, this one from Merino wool, bulky.  I dig size 9 needles.  Besides, when I bought the spare size zero and spare size 1 and 2 needles, I purchased more wool bulky yarn (couldn’t resist) for a new dog sweater, this from the Windsor Button Shop in Boston.

If you haven’t been to the Windsor Button Shop, I’d suggest going there.  It is magnificent.  What a gold mine.  You are guaranteed to go home with something you love, but with a few dollars missing from your wallet.  It’s worth the sweater you’ll make.  Go there.

If you love knitting as much as I do, you will put up with the eyestrain, the dropped stitches, the frustration, the expense, the tangled yarn, the lost needles, the yarn that runs out at the last minute.  You will put up with the fact that you’ve got three or four projects going at once.  You know something?  Knitting makes sense.  And eventually, our projects–dog sweaters, hats, socks, mittens, scarves–do indeed get finished.