Can’t find the manual? Don’t panic. Here’s a cell phone remedy a crazy lady with a dog knows about, and it’s free!

I’m not sure that this will work with those fancy iphones and things like that, phones that people shell out an arm and a leg for each month, but it may.  This remedy also will also occasionally cure some laptops and other electronic devices when they are not working right.

I am telling you this just to save you a call to 611 only to be told to call back on a landline, and then a long, long wait to get a real human being, only to be told to take your cell phone to a shop.  Then, you travel far and wide to get to the shop, wait in line, maybe you get charged and maybe you get talked into buying a new cell phone.  Or you Google and Google to find the manual, finally find the .pdf, open it, and if you find your answer at all, it’s probably, “Get your phone serviced.” Or all you find is a “Quick start guide” that tell you how to turn the phone on and off, and then buy ringtones and spend more money.

Now, I want you to avoid all this hassle.

Here’s what to do if, say, someone calls and instead of ringing, the phone just sits there and maybe lights up for a sec or maybe does nothing at all.   Super annoying, right?  This is 2013 and we no longer have clunker ancient cell phones that fail and drop calls all the time.  Or rings weirdly or does or does not do anything else incorrectly.  If your cell phone does it once, forgive it.  Twice is completely unpardonable.  Here’s what to do.

1. Don’t panic.

2. Sit down in a well-lit place that’s free of clutter.  You don’t want to do this, for example, in an extremely messy car because something will get lost.  You’re already frustrated, and misplacing something is going to make you doubly frustrated.

3. Shut off your cell phone.

4. Remove the battery cover.  Most cell phones have some sort of back cover that is removable.  You may need a coin to get the back cover off.  Dimes work well.  I don’t recommend using your fingernail, although sometimes these work fine, too.  Don’t be violent with the cover no matter how pissed off you are, because many of these covers are quite delicate.  Remember which way the cover fit on, because you are going to have to put it back.  Now above all, once you’ve got the cover off, put it someplace safe.  Do not lose it or step on it, or let your three-year-old use it for a teething ring.

5. Carefully remove the battery.  This may in fact not be so easy.  Don’t drop it and don’t lose it and don’t get it wet.  Once you’ve got it out, keep it out for a few seconds and then put it back in exactly how it was before.  You have now “reset” your phone.

6. Put your cover back on.  Gently.

Of course, if your phone or device does not have a battery you can remove yourself, none of this applies, but this little trick will often restore your phone to life and will save you a length call to tech support or a trip to the shop, and maybe even some dough.

 

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My two cents on marriage equality

Of course, two cents won’t buy you much these days, it being 2013, so whatever I say, if you find it worthless crap, just click on the little x on the side of your browser tab, and poof! I’ll be gone from your life.  My name is Julie Greene and if you keep reading this, you’re stuck with me for a few minutes.  Take your pick.

I own a calculator.  I also kept my old slide rule from the 1960’s and have it tucked away in a drawer.  When my dad gave me the slide rule for Hanukkah and taught me to use it, he beamed with pride watching me learn.  When calculators came out (I really have no clue what year this was, I think in the 1970’s) it was considered “cheating” even to own one, in fact, very few teachers even allowed us to use slide rules during tests.

Actually, I own more than one calculator.  You can find pop-up ones in cell phones and Kindles and the like these days.   When I design knitting patterns, a calculator is indispensable.  I can’t do math in my head like I could when I was a kid, being out of practice, so I whip out my calculator (bought for a few bucks at CVS), and figure out stitches per inch and what size needles I need, or how I will need to increase or decrease, or any other kind of planning I need to do for my self-designed patterns.  That plus I’ll clue you in on something: folks with eating disorders, at least once in their eating disorder lives, go through some “counting” phase, like maybe adding up calories or whatever, so that calculator’s gonna come in handy.   A lot of people without eating disorders count calories, too.  But they claim it’s justified, and we’re sinners.

So speaking from the sinner’s point of view (meaning that maybe, maybe, I ain’t perfect), today I pulled out my calculator, which never gets used for anything but figuring the budget anymore, and subtracted 18 from 55.  The result?  The number of years I’ve been a legal voter, that is, 37.

Now that’s a long, long, long time.  It must be, because that’s even longer than I’ve had my eating disorder.

And they still haven’t figured out the marriage equality thing?  Yet?  I mean, isn’t it a no-brainer?

I swear I popped out of my mother’s womb believing in equality, knowing it was right and good and just, and have never budged.  It’s just plain obvious.

I can count calories all I want, or not, I can even pull out the old slide rule and try to remember how to use it.  But these won’t affirm or deny what I’m saying.  I know what I have always known.  Love partnership has little to do with whether you are a man or a woman.

It’s just plain obvious, a given.

News about eatingdisordersrescue.com, my new site

from the site:

“I have finished filming Lesson One at last and it is in the editing stages.  As expected, it is taking me lots of time to get the movie just the way I want it. The writing part took about a week.  Reading it in front of the camera in fact went quite smoothly.   I am rather clumsy with the “effects” part of putting it all together, but am slowly learning.  I expect to have the entire Lesson One up here on the site by Saturday night, that is, the 30th of March, 2013.  I will also be providing a link that you can click on, which will be supplementary reading.  It goes along with the movie, to read afterward if you want to learn more.  You will see.

Till then,

Julie and Puzzle”

PS: the film will be posted on Vimeo rather than You-Tube due to time constraints.  I’ll get all this figured out by tomorrow night.  Boy do I love being a techie.

The results of my medical appointment

Bear with me, I feel really, really nauseous right now.  I don’t know why.  No, I’m not about to puke because I’ve got one of those bodies that refuses to puke no matter what, so I’m gonna sit here with the nausea, write this, and go to bed ASAP.  I been in bed all day, not due to nausea,  but just plain worn out.

So I show up at this doctor’s place.  It’s at a big hospital.  Everyone’s very nice and there’s no paperwork ahead of time.  They get me into the office and do my vitals and no surprises there.  I’ve got a blood pressure that’ll be normal no matter what even the day I’m dying.  Unless, of course, I’m on some stupid medication that raises it to the roof.  They weighed me with my clothes, shoes, and jacket on and I said nothing. I mean, why should they do otherwise?  They know nothing about me and I have yet to say a word.

So in comes the doc and we start right away talking.  I get right away to the issue.  He’s pretty decent.  He claims he’s gonna be honest with me, but I’ve heard that line a thousand times before,  It’s hardly ever the case.  I’m waiting for some bullshit line to come out of his mouth, and yeah, I get one.

“At least you don’t throw up.  That would be worse.”

But I have come prepared.  I pulled out the photo I have saved for a couple of years off the Internet of a 19 year old girl who binged and then her stomach ruptured.  Yeah, right down the front.  She died almost instantly.  I had the whole autopsy report printed out, and the fact that the contents of what was in her stomach filled her body cavity, including her chest area and all around her brain.  The reason the HAD to do the autopsy was because her stomach fluid filled her pubic area and they had to rule out sexual assault.  God bless this 19-year-old girl, who died by the toilet, maybe she was trying to throw up but for whatever reason, her body would not do it.

Now I was trying to explain to him, but by this time, I don’t think he was listening, that bulimics hold this food in them for maybe ten minutes.  A binge eater like me is forced (because I am unable to puke) to hold the food in all day.  The stomach muscles get overstretched and pushed by the force the food, and more and more and more stomach cells die each time we binge.  Dead cells do not stretch.  They are brittle, so they snap, and that’s why as we age, the risk becomes greater.   This girl was 19.  I am 55.

Last spring, I was very scared of dying of stomach rupture.  But my own doctor, the one I used to have, would not listen.  No one was listening.

Another serious risk is suicide. In my case, not in the heat of a binge, but out of sheer hopelessness because as I found out when I finally landed at Alcott last summer, the staff, the nutritionists. the doctors, nobody knew a darned thing about binge eating.  Only one nurse knew anything.  She had no time to talk to me.  I’d wait all day and then her shift would end…nothing.

That’s why, back when I was 26 years old,  I took a serious overdose and afterward really wished I had not survived, because the docs threw their arms up in the air, saying, “We don’t know what to do with you.”  Never mind that my best friend, Clare, dumped me as soon as she found out what I did.  Clare is now an eating disorders therapist.  Oh yeah, I’m sure she’s a great therapist.  Someday, I’ll write to her and remind her that she did me no favor.  I did not tell the doc any of this, of course.

Well, back to the doctor appointment.  He was sorta listening and sorta not.   I don’t think he believed me about the bogus therapist I saw, not one word of it, cuz I did not give enough examples.  He did run a blood test and talked about getting a colonoscpy and pap smear amd booby squish.  Honestly, I don’t care about that shit.  I figure my ED will kill me a lot sooner at this rate.

Also, I asked for a referral to a therapist.

Then, he leaves the room.  Well, get this.  He’s talking to his supervisor. And probably looking up my records.  Medicare shares records.  This is supposedly for efficiency.  The supervisor comes in and says, “We don’t know if this is really gonna work out.”

No, she’s not taking about insurance.  I’m covered.  They looked up my records and saw that human rights case sitting there.  And maybe all of Dr. P’s shit saying how psychotic I am.

My next plan is to go to Dr. P (they said not to give up my current care until I am established at BMC) and tell her all about the therapist I had in 2008.  Guess what you never knew, Dr. P?  This therapist told me all the dirt on all her other patients, spent an entire session sitting sideways in her chair crying over a patient of hers who had died of cancer (who’s the therapist here?), told me all about her nieces, told me about a top-secret legal case she was involved in involving a local hospital suicide case (the hospital lost, and I got the dirt), and complained non-stop about her hurting knee and how much trouble she had losing weight.  Oh, and she fell asleep on me during every session.  So when I fired this therapist, what did Dr. P do?  Yelled at me.  Literally.  Dr. P, we have ceased to communicate long ago. I will do this to prove a point, and again tell her I refuse to take a drug that will raise my blood pressure and turn my damn D cups into triple D’s.  Never mind the weight gain.  Then, I will walk outa there.

Do I really need this thing “care”?  I”m beginning to wonder if I’m  better off on my own.

Food for Puzzle

Liver!  Liver!  Puzzle does a dance and jumps all over me every time I go near the beef liver.  I am this stuff in the crook pot.  Humans eat it with onions, but Puzzle can’t, because dogs can’t have onions.  Beef liver is dark brown and kinda slimy.  I normally get chicken liver, but the supermarket was out of chicken liver last night.

Puzzle gobbles up some pork, cooked up fresh, too.  I have no idea what the name of the cut was.  There are all kinds of names of cuts of pork.  I don’t get her ham, or any other salty kind.

Puzzle doesn’t know it yet, but I have a whole fresh chicken for her in the fridge.  This was 99 cents a pound.  Sometimes, you can get poultry for even less.  Sometimes, I get poultry for free for her at the food pantry.

Puzzle adores canned green beans.  I don’t know why dogs love them so much.  I get them without salt.  You can freeze these, and give them as treats.

I always put a little rice or grain in Puzzle’s food. Not too much, though.  Some dogs eat grain and some do not.

When I open up Puzzle’s vitamins, she wiggles around and gets all excited.  That sounds kinda weird, now doesn’t it, getting excited over vitamins?  Those powder doggie vitamins must be yummy.  Wow, how great it must be to be a dog.

No wonder they don’t end up with eating disorders like us humans.  If only  life could be so yummy and terrific like this.  And uncomplicated.  I must say, I got a bunch of late aunts who would roll over in their graves knowing I had these sorts of meats in the house.  According to Jewish law, if you keep Kosher, do you have to feed your dog Kosher, too?  Actually, I doubt it.  Oh, I could get very funky talking about the food chain right now.  Or just go to sleep while the liver cooks in the crock pot.

Yesterday I wrote about the funniest thing ever

Our church talent show is coming up, and I thought I was too exhausted and sick this year to participate.  Well, no, ain’t true at all.  I plan to show up.  Of course I will.  I started writing yesterday, got a bad case of writer’s high, and went with it.  Almost died laughing.

I think the thing’s funny.  Or I hope it is.

Meanwhile, Lesson One is all written and I didn’t video it yesterday cuz I had to go grocery shopping.  I figured out that I can use my Vimeo membership and upload Lesson One there, and then embed it onto the eatingdisordersrescue.com site, or use html, so I won’t have to split the film into two parts.  If I use You-Tube, I’ll have to split it into two due to time restrictions.  If I split it up, folks might just give up after the first part or not be able to find the sequel, or just get bored. I sure don’t want to be boring or stupid.

After all, they’re watching some 55-year-old not-so-great-looking-anymore hippie nut, not Oprah after all.  She’s more fascinating.  Nor are they watching some doctor with credentials and statistics and a lab coat.  Or someone young and pretty and skinny showing us just how skinny they ended up and how they “recovered”…or died…or whatever.   Many of these films are very well done, of course, I’m not knocking them.

But anyway, I’ll do my thing and hopefully it will be helpful to someone.  That’s the point.

Gee, I love being a memoirist

I have spent forever and ever writing Lesson One for my new site and I will spend forever and ever filming it.  I wonder if the writing gods will kill me for committing some writing sins when I wrote it.

I love breaking rules.  I love that I was born a rebel.  I ain’t stopped yet.

My dad will be proud of me.  First of all, I’m damn good with computers and such.  Well, I have phoned tech support and asked some my share of very, very dumb questions.  Haven’t we all?  But never mind that.

What if there were a tech support line to God?  Now, what kinds of stupid questions would God get?

Can you imagine all the stupid questions the writing gods would get?

Oh yeah, I can hear all the questions now about submissions deadlines.

Probably the writing gods sleep on the job, just like the night staff at psych hospitals, right?  That’s why they apply for the job in the first place, so they can sleep all night.  We used to watch them at McLean every night.  This lady, right at the beginning of the shift, she’d get two chairs together, get her pillows and blankets, and lay the blankets on the chair and her pillows just so.   The three staff would order all of us into our rooms and tell us we had to stay in there and not get out until 6am.

Whenever I’d peek outside my room, that lady would be asleep there in her chair, with her pillows and blankets.  What was she dreaming about all night long?  She was asleep just like the writing gods, just doing the job she was hired for, so ask them.

The trap (a message to all you folks labeled “mental patient” and anyone else who cares to read)

I don’t go to movies.  I’d rather read a book, read a really, really beautifully crafted paragraph and cry or going to church and cry or hug my dog and cry.  I love crying, actually.  Crying is cleansing.  When you’re in a hospital, as soon as you start crying, the staff come running and shove a pill at you, and that’s the absolute wrongest thing I’ve ever seen.  It starts the patient thinking every time they cry, they should go running for the pill bottle.  Or they tell you to do some dumb coping skill.  Like telling you that if you cry, you should go to staff.  Now that’s dumb.  That sets up dependency.  Or they coddle you and until suddenly their pager goes off and they abruptly walk out of the room.  It’s their job, see?

 

You end up falling into the trap, and that’s how you end up “mentally ill.”  But really, it’s mostly the “system” made you that way.  You CAN get out of the trap, and I’m gonna talk about this in my lessons.

 

I’ve said I was born quirky.  This world needs more, not fewer quirky people.  Stand up and be proud, folks.  We shall overcome someday.

I had a funny dream

I so rarely have dreams, cuz I don’t sleep much.  In fact, I think I’ve had only one or two dreams since the beginning of the year.  But today during the day while I was sleeping I had a dream that was absolutely screamingly funny.   It ended as a nightmare, which was not so good, but then, after I got done with the waking up scared part I burst into laughter realizing that the dream was in fact ridiculously long.  I said to myself that there must be a story in this somewhere.  Or a joke.

Or no, just something to share with other folks to get them to laugh along with me.  Cuz if you rarely dream, it’s truly terrific to get a decent one when you do get one, right?

So here’s the dream: I get a knock on the door.  Uh-oh.  Who is this jerk knocking on my door?  I open it up.  Puzzle’s barking her fool head off cuz here’s a stranger at my door.  I tell her relax, it isn’t an ambulance to come take me away, and I’m not being “sectioned,” so not to worry.  But would you believe it’s a doctor?  Yeah, a male doctor with an ID badge and a stethoscope around his neck.  I don’t recall a lab coat and I don’t recall what the ID badge said except it did indicate he was a doctor, an MD.  Of course, anyone can have a badge made up and anyone can buy a stethoscope and pretend to be a doctor, but never mind that, it’s irrelevant.  He had “that look” of someone that had sat through way, way too many lectures at medical school, seen a few too many cadavers, but what the hell was he doing at my house?  I don’t have any money.  If he’s a drug dealer on the side, I’m not interested.  But I let him in.

“What’s up, doc?”

“I’m here to take your blood pressure.”

Now this is gonna be weird, like it often is for us folks with anorexia, cuz (in case you don’t know) we are skinny and we got skinny arms, so the blood pressure thing is often an ordeal and a half cuz they need to use a child-size cuff.  It’s also a huge deal if you are anorexic and then gain weight and you don’t got those skinny arms anymore.  It’s like you mourn the loss.  You mourn the loss of that identity.  It’s incredibly painful.  Hard to explain unless you’ve been there.  Some people think my skinny arms are gross.  I always put something over me when I walk out in the hall so my neighbors don’t start talking (trust me, they are elderly and clueless and I don’t even know their names), especially right now cuz my weight is down.

So anyway, he whips out the blood pressure cuff.  I’m about to slip off the little jacket I have on, but then he stops me, cuz now, he’s not gonna put the cuff around my arm, he’s gonna put it around my waist.

Yep, he’s taking my blood pressure by putting the blood pressure cuff around my waist.

I warned you this was a weird dream.  It gets weirder.

So now, he plugs the other end of the tube into a cell phone.  So the cuff is around my waist and then there’s a long tube and the tube is plugged into a cell phone.

But then I stop him.  “Wait,” I say.  “Doc, you got the wrong cell phone.  That’s my cell phone.  It won’t work.  It’s a welfare cell phone.  You know, the budget type.  Use your own.”

But no, he insists that he’s got the right cell phone and he uses mine.  Suddenly, my cell phone lights up all sorts of fancy pictures that no welfare cell phone is capable of doing.  There’s no way Assurance Wireless is gonna give us welfare cases all that for free.

Really, folks, this must be the space age.

But it’s all a trick on me.  This doctor has in fact put the cuff around my waist as a ploy.  He really intended to do it so that he could find out how much I weighed.  So what does he do?  He lifts up the tube, which then lifts me up by the cuff around my waist.  He’s weighing me!  Oh my god!  There’s no actual scale, he just lifts me up and my weight shows up on the cell phone somehow.  My only consolation is the fact that he’s able to lift me with one arm.  So really, I tell myself, I couldn’t be that fat, right?

Then, he takes off.  But he leaves his own cell phone behind.  I tell myself I gotta do something about this.  I try to dial his cell phone but the buttons disappear right while I’m pushing them.  Especially the SEND button.  Even when I try to dial the suicide hotline, all the buttons on his cell phone disappear.

Never mind that my own cell phone is safely in my pocket, where it always is, and is back to normal, no longer space agey.  That’s irrelevant.  My object now is to go to church and bring the doctor’s cell phone with me and give this cell phone to someone.  I have no clue who should get the cell phone, but I gotta get it to church.  So suddenly it’s automatically Sunday and off I go.

And there I am.  In a room with a group of people.  It must be social hour, which happens after the church service.  My brother the atheist says that’s the good thing about the Unitarian Universalists, they have coffee and food after the service, and lots of potlucks.

So there are a lot of people in the room.  I have this doctor’s weird, weird cell phone in  my hand.  But then, there’s this guy I’ve seen before there, or maybe I haven’t seen him before, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to him or not, and suddenly he’s got his hand on me, never mind where on me, but he’s got his hand on my naked skin, and his shirt is up and his belly is exposed.  And then he reaches and he’s about to grab me with his other hand, his hand is looming above me, coming closer and closer.

I wake up with my heart pounding like mad.  I’m in a crazy sweat, too.  It’s light out.  I realize I’ve had a nightmare, or shall I say daymare, cuz it sure ain’t night.  It takes forever for my heart to stop its pounding.

I open the window wide.  Tear my shirt off cuz I’m still sweating and overheated.  Puzzle has jumped off the bed, startled, but I call her back and hold her tight and we lay together for a while.

At first, all I can recall about the dream is the part about the man and his hands.  Then, all the rest comes back to me.  I laugh and laugh and laugh.  I cry, too, and laugh some more.  I tell myself that my friends with ED especially are gonna get a good kick outa this one.

 

Time to heal

Recently, I have done some good and bad things and some strange things and also sent a bunch of e-mails that got no response and also made phone calls that got no response and I laughed and cried and lay in bed a lot and all that’s okay, cuz I hereby give myself permission to be a strange and quirky person.

Yeah, like I didn’t already know that and haven’t known that for years.  Even my parents knew I was a rather odd kid.  They even told me they were proud of me cuz I wasn’t the same as all the other kids at school.  Imagine that.

No, I wasn’t special needs.  Back then, they didn’t even call it that, they called it retarded.  (There was no such thing as learning disabilities, which I didn’t have, anyway.)   In fact, I was exceptionally bright.  That kinda bugged me cuz my intelligence did not make me any friends.   I learned to act dumb so that other kids would like me more.

The teachers poked fun at me an awful lot.  For everything under the sun.  Cuz I didn’t fit in.  They even teased me cuz I wore glasses.  Back then, it’s true that teachers made fun of loser kids.

Should anything be any different now?  Should I expect the world to be any different?  No.  And I should be damn proud of the quirky person I am.

Let me repeat that: I should be damn proud of the quirky person I am.

So here are a few things I did, not in any particular order, but in the order I feel like mentioning them.  And I’m tired so I’m gonna be selective about what I talk about so I won’t go on and on forever.

I went off my antipsychotic medication, Abilify.  I went off cold turkey and I think the last day of it was something like the 16th of February.  Why cold turkey?  It takes 150 hours to get out of your system, that is, it has a 75 hour half life.  So I had been up to 10 mgs Abilify.  I knew that after 75 hours, it would be like I was taking 5 mgs Abilify a day.  Then after 150 hours after the last dose, the drug would be completely out of my system.  Now is this logical and scientific?  Probably not, but on 10 mgs Abilify I was getting absolutely no sleep whatsoever, so how could I possibly think logically and scientifically if I wasn’t sleeping?  I wasn’t going to ask Dr. P cuz Dr. P would say no, don’t go off the drug, and I wanted off.  Also, after meeting with me the first time, the abusive therapist said I didn’t need Abilify and encouraged me to go off it.  He said it was a bad drug.  But I discount everything that therapist said cuz as we all know, he was bogus and cannot be trusted.

After a few days, I began to notice effects.  There were a few hours one morning when it was a little difficult to put a sentence together, but other than that, I got through withdrawal okay.  I do appear psychotic sometimes, but it’s due to my severe nutritional status, and has nothing to do with “lack of medicine.”  Is there such thing as Abilify deficiency?  I have anorexia nervosa which means severe malnutrition, and have had it for a long, long time, but Dr. P seems to forget that fact.  It doesn’t take just a few days of eating right to correct this.  It takes literally years, especially considering I’m not a kid anymore.

I’ve found there are advantages to not taking Abilify.  For one thing, sleep.  I went from no sleep at all to some sleep.  I never sleep like a normal person, but I can now sleep for a couple of hours at a time, which is an immense improvement. If I’m very, very lucky, I sleep three hours, but that’s rather rare.

And another thing that happened when I stopped the Abilify was that after a few weeks, I stopped getting edema all the time.  That awful curse that plagued me since mid-2011 was over.  There were no other changes that I can think of (or anything I feel like mentioning) so I think it was stopping the Abilify that finally ended that nightmare.  If you are dropping in out of cyberspace and wondering what the heck edema is, it means (in layman’s terms)….well, let me put it this way: it meant to me that out of the blue, for absolutely no reason, my whole body, in particular my ankles and feet and calves, blew up like balloons.  I am short so for me, this meant waking up about six to ten pounds heavier than I was the previous day for absolutely no reason.  For a tall person with an eating disorder, this might mean waking up in the morning up to 25 pounds heavier.  Now picture this on a skinny person with an anorexic mind, and you’ve got a living nightmare.  I would wake up to my anorexic living nightmare and go on a rampage every time I got edema.  Raising my feet did nothing, those stupid socks for elderly people made me look elderly and did nothing, and laying down?  Guess what that did.  The water shifted, and I got a “fat face.”

Not that I’d encourage anyone to go off their antipsychotic to end edema, but I’m just sharing my experience.  I’m not saying the two are connected, but I’ll bet they are.   I’m damn happy I don’t get edema anymore.

Dr. P insisted on giving me sleeping pills and benzos to make me sleep.  Now I have a big collection of these benzos and sleeping pills cuz at first, I filled the scripts but didn’t take them.  They are enough to knock out a horse, the pharmacist tells me.  So I do wish I was a horse, cuz maybe I’d get properly knocked out.  I have no desire to be “calm,” I only want to be completely unconscious.  While awake, I wish to be as undrugged as possible. I took them a few times.  I slept no more than the usual amount of time, and no more deeply.  So basically they made no difference.

I don’t need anxiety pills or something to “calm my nerves” which is why the few times I’ve tried, I couldn’t turn myself into an alcoholic.  I guess I don’t have it in my constitution.  I don’t get all nervous and reach for a pill or the bottle.  I’m not scared to tell part of my life story to a complete stranger and make them laugh and smile on the bus and I’m not afraid to get up in front of a huge group of people and speak.  In fact, that’s something I love to do.  I’m just not one of those anxious people that has panic attacks or the sweats or the shakes or anything like that.  I can relate to people who have had hard lives, cuz I’ve had one too, but calming myself with chemicals and getting addicted doesn’t seem the route to go.

Okay, what else have I done………

You guys know, or maybe you don’t know, that I dislike asking folks for favors.  Why? When I do, the answer is “NO.”  So I don’t ask.  The reason people say no is because I’m not Miss Popularity, first of all, and I’m not sweet and kind like I used to be, and everyone’s a little bit afraid of me these days.  Well, that’s fine.  Be scared, and I’ll be scary.  But no, what I’m saying is, everyone’s got their family, and family comes way, way before me.

So even making a phone call, I pretty much expect that the person, if they know it’s me, they aren’t going to pick up, or they won’t bother returning the call.  Except for my minister, but he goes into “minister mode,” as he puts it jokingly.  And yes, the suicide hotline picks up when I call.  I’m glad of that.  I’ve even had people tell me not to call them, but “e-mail only” because they are “too busy.”  Let met tell you, that line gets old very fast.

But I accept that people are gonna be this way.  I accept that I am way, way too quirky and weird for people and that’s fine.  I am proud of who I am.  I think I was born this way.  I think my dad would be proud, too.

So I asked a huge favor and so far, I’ve had no response and I don’t expect one.  I have a doctor appointment next Tuesday and I asked at a few folks at church if someone could come with me to the appointment.  No, I don’t need a ride.  I do our public transit just fine.  I need someone to be with me at the appointment.  See, I was alone with that abusive therapist and no one else was there.  This is a male doctor I’m seeing and it’s not so much that, but what if he doesn’t “get it”?  Most doctors don’t understand eating disorders.  Some barely know what eating disorders are.  What if he only asks about my periods and nothing else?  I am going to this new doctor mainly so I can get a referral to a therapist.  Maybe even a referral to a nutritionist and since it’ll be at a big hospital, it might be covered on insurance if they make some exception for me down the line but of course the nutritionist might not know about eating disorders, many only know about diabetes.  So I asked for this favor but I guess it’s way too much to ask.  So I’m hereby giving up on this plea and have accepted that I’m gonna be going to this appointment by myself.

Well, no, I’ll have Puzzle with me.  Did I tell you Puzzle can count?  I’ll have her count how many questions this doctor asks about my periods.  After three, she’ll bite him.

Now, furthermore, all you folks out there with eating disorders, what’s the worst most nightmarish thing you’ve ever heard come out of a doctor’s mouth?  I’ve heard some pretty bad stuff.  Now I’ve got Puzzle trained on cue.  I’m just imagining this:

“So, you’re anorexic and you binge occasionally, too?  I think if you shove in three extra large pizzas all at once, it’s a good thing, and you should do it more often, cuz you could stand to gain a few pounds.”

Now as soon as Puzzle hears that line, she’s gonna maul the doctor to bits, and enjoy all the pizza, too.