Any techies out there? I have a complaint about my server people and don’t know where to go

My e-mail keeps going out. By “out,” I mean, I am unable to log in with any device here at home and not only that, I am unable, right at the same time, to log in with my cell phone.

I can easily access other sites such as weather dot com, nextbus, or whatever I need.  I can get Facebook. I can get into other e-mail accounts just fine.  But this IMAP account won’t log in.

I phoned my server people. I’m kind of straddling between two servers right now because juliegreene.name is a site that not all servers do.

So once a week, my e-mail goes down. Not for five minutes, not for ten minutes, but for just about the entire day. Then, guess what. Poof!  It’s back.

At this very momnent, my cell phone starts e-mail working like magic.

They tried to tell me it was a compatability problem. Then they said it was my firewall settings.  I turned off my firewall entirely and STILL couldn’t log in. They claim nothing’s wrong on their end

And they claim I am crazy.

Today, my e-mail works.  By magic.

Is there some administration I can turn to, telling them I get a different answer each time I call, depending on which tech support person  reach?

I have received e-mails from them days later with an apology, saying the problem was on their end.  Gee, after they called me crazy. This blows.

Go on with it, and be brave, Julie

Yes, my blog has become central in my life.  I didn’t even realize it.  People are telling me to keep on writing and doing what I am doing.  Yes, it is the reason I have lost friends.  Yes, my big mouth (well, they call it “liability”) is the reason I am being refused care at the big hospital over there in Boston, never mind that I am telling the truth, I am not paranoid, I am doing nothing illegal, and folks all around me are doing nothing but cheering me on.

If I do pursue a legal case against the hospital, it will be lengthy…maybe over a year of digging into all kinds of paperwork and records and maybe a lot of people that were involved don’t even work there anymore.  What’s keeping this powerful hospital from fudging their records?  Who holds onto them?  After I concluded my inpatient stay in 2011, the nurses or one of the doctors could have “edited” a page or two about my “care.”

I mean, sending security guards up to “contain” an emaciated patient who has asked to bring an 8-oz bottle of water with her to sustain herself while she rides the bus home following discharge…the trip will be will be over 45 minutes…claiming this patient is not allowed to bring the water home, claiming carrying a bottle of water home is “stealing from the hospital.”

Of course, my fellow patients were laughing their asses off while I handed the very small bottle of water to the security guard.  Honestly, I didn’t know what to think.  I just shrugged, figuring I’d have to buy something very soon to drink after I left, because the water bottle I’d been carrying when I’d been admitted had probably gotten moldy sitting in my knapsack.

Well, life goes on.  I still don’t know what to think.

They told me while I was there, “We’re afraid of your writing.  We’re afraid you will expose the hospital.”  Oh yes, those exact words, no kidding.

I have 50 subscribers as of today.

Folks tell me to go on with it no matter what anyone says, and be brave.

 

July…Nano project title…

Well, who knew it.  As I’ve said, I’ve been thinking of doing a July Nano.   I was just about to go to bed. Presto….my title came to me.  Never mind what it is.  I’m rather excited about it.  Weird how these things happen.

Funny, though…now I kinda know what the book is gonna be about….Hmm…Like a sneak preview, sorta.  I suppose that’s the way the end of June is.  You’re doomed, Julie.

Advantage to health care in larger cities…many “systems” to choose from

It depends on your “insurance” but this is what I’ve found….

Whereas you might get excellent health care in a small town, you really don’t have much to choose from.  I’ve had health care in a small town, and when I’ve bombed out with what they had to offer, my only option was to drive out of town to get my care, or finally, to relocate elsewhere or give up entirely, which I decided wasn’t an option at that time.

My parents would not let me give up.  I thought of them as rather nagging and annoying, but finally, they took me in.  I moved to the Big City and I’ve been here ever since.

I’ve found that with health care in a Big City, you can bomb out real bad here, too.  You can feel like you have exhausted your options.  Just like that small town.

But no, the good thing is, this place is huge.  It’s a metropolis.  There’s not just the one small health care system operating here and no other system.  There are many systems.

So hopefully, if you bomb out of one, you can, if you are in a big city, get into another.

Now here’s the real good thing: You can start afresh. They don’t know you in the new system.  You are starting afresh and you don’t have the damn “reputation” hanging around your neck.

I keep reminding myself to lay low.  Keep the guns uncocked.  Oh, by the way, that was a metaphor, assholes.

Can dogs eat peel and seeds? My experience….

I am not a vet and I am sure no expert.  So that’s my disclaimer.  I am 55 years old and I have lived with dogs all my  life and watched them eat since maybe the age of 12.

For the most part, what we humans consider “disgusting” doesn’t register as “disgusting” with dogs.  They don’t think that way.  They don’t need table manners.  They don’t make a food budget.  They don’t worry about what is good for them, or are concerned about their weight or body image.  The few that do see their own reflection  in the mirror tilt their heads to the side with mild curiosity.  I suspect the last thing they are thinking is, “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?”  What I am saying is that they are on a different spectrum from us when it comes to food.

For years, I struggled to teach my dog to lose interest in nibbling on her own poops.  Years ago, the vet gave me stuff to put in her food to stop this “puppy habit.”  We tried vitamins, too.  There are all kinds of theories as to why dogs do this.  Lately, I’ve chosen to take an anthropological view of this and see it as one in the many list of things that separates dog from human.  She has four legs and I have two and this is a radical difference from the start.

So the other day I was cutting up an eggplant and a few very small pieces fell on the floor.  Anything on the floor is up for grabs unless I say it isn’t.  Puzzle must have heard that I was cutting something up and figured, “Hey, mama always drops a morsel for me,” and came in all curious or whatever.

Now eggplant is something interesting.  Peel and seeds.  Stuff that dogs can’t digest.  You look at a piece of eggplant and it’s rather unavoidable.   Even if you peel the skin off, just about every bit of it has some seeds in it….teensy seeds.  Not that I was even thinking.  I wasn’t.  It didn’t even register.  I tried to recall if eggplant was okay for dogs and I couldn’t remember it being on any warning list anywhere.

You can find a list of poisons by using Google or any search engine…do not use this as a substitute for veterinary care PLEASE… (so in that saying, I hesitate to provide too much info and do say the disclaimer above) however, I mean to say be careful what you give your dog and perhaps these lists that are posted could be used as basic guidelines because they are based on scientific evidence. You can google your local humane society and find guidelines there as well, or call your vet.

If you want to get a houseplant, and your dog is the type that takes a bite out of something to make sure it is okay to have around, you might want to make sure your houseplant isn’t going to make your dog sick.  I don’t keep plants cuz I tend to kill them.

Dogs vary in what they can eat.  I’ve had some with “iron stomachs” and I’ve had dogs that were more sensitive.  I don’t think Puzzle’s stomach was very happy about that little bit of raw eggplant and I am going to be careful from now on.

Ever since we switched to homemade food, Puzzle has been able to eat a wide variety of foods.  I’ve read about the trouble dogs have with peel and seeds.  Puzzle mostly eats meat, but I add some grain and veggies in very small quantities.  My experience is that she can occasionally eat some peel and seeds and digest it just fine, and other peel and seeds is quite difficult for her.

Puzzle eats very small quantities of everything, anyway.  Compared to any human, her meals are just snippets.  So as I figure it, a few spoonfuls of something will make a big difference in her little tummy.

Lesson learned.

 

Thoughts on binge eating, more

I am thinking along the lines of pairing binge eating and pica in one vein at this point, in terms of “substance.”

What I found was that there are incredibly few studies done on binge eating.   I studied the studies.  Why is a study done is 2011 on binge eating considered “pioneering”?  Now?  Thirty years too late, in my opinion.  Science was talking about bulimia, I believe, or at least made it a diagnosis for “adolescent college girls” and I recall the small amount of publicity about it in the 1980’s and I don’t recall myself seeing anything at all earlier than that.  So if they knew binge eating existed, I think they were doing all the studies on the dangers of throwing up, and no studies on the first half, the binge eating behavior.

So science thought, I guess, that it would be essential to stop these adolescent girls from this dangerous purging, and I wonder what they thought about the bingeing?  It was not on the map. Just ignored.  No treatment, nothing.  In treatment, they don’t care, either. They have no clue.  They will tell you binge eating is natural and normal?  No, baby, it is not.  Binge eating is disturbing and dangerous.

I repeat, binge eating is disturbing and dangerous for anyone that experiences it first-hand.  I applaud the researchers that have painstakingly whacked away trying to find out the cause of this bizarre behavior.

You have to do some really strange distorted and extreme things to an animal to turn it into a binge eater.  You really have to work at it.  And it doesn’t happen overnight.  Rats have been made into rats that did binge eating.  They ate copious amounts of food.  My heart broke for these tiny creatures.  I wanted to tear my hair out.  Their lives were now…I don’t know…they don’t think the same way we do but I imagine it was no picnic.

Maybe medical science’s little party of getting away with this gap in research and treatment, that is, treating purging behavior and not treating bingeing behavior, well, that’s just plain sinful, isn’t it?  I mean, now what, you dudes in lab coats?

Binge eating, more clarification

I thought I’d clarify a few things I said in a previous post.  As far as binge eating goes, I guess my argument there was that it makes no difference what weight the person is or what their background is I think the behavior should be treated as it is and for what it is, especially if it is severe it should be taken very, very seriously.  By severe I mean on any spectrum, how it impacts the person’s life, quantity, frequency, time spent at it, how it has affected their family, whether it has caused them to shoplift or caused chronic binge eating while driving or even once caused an accident, and other things.  And of course, if it causes severe overweight this is a consideration as well, but one of the many “axes,” which I guess is a term clinicians use.  I wonder if I was clear enough about this.

And I think I totally left out the #1 thing that binge eating totally destroys.

Self esteem.

I think that says a million.  Because if you have rotten self esteem from binge eating and binge eating BEHAVIOR is not in the DSM-5…..

Now, yes, bulimia is in the DSM-5, but it’s up to the clinicians and treatment places to treat binge eating behavior.  Are they indeed treating this behavior?  Do they really truly know how to treat it?

My experience is gross negligence and ignorance, never mind the prejudices and put-downs and the clinicians telling you how you need to gain self-control, to shut up and quit having crises, maybe follow your meal plan better, maybe listen better to them, throw out the damn scale, quit caffeine, take meds, quit taking meds, on and on and on and on.  Do they really know?  I mean, with so little research at their fingertips?

Are they, on the other hand, trying to tell you, after you have made yourself miserable, to “accept” how miserable you feel after you have binged, how stretched your belly is, and go on with your life? Now I ask you: how many times have they told you this and how many times has this cycle gone on and on?  Has this clinician ever eaten this much and does this clinician know how YOU feel right now?  Probably not.  This clinician isn’t going to go through the grief of your full belly for the next few hours.  Or the next day of feeling yucky and guilty and horribly full.

Accept this?  I say this is unacceptable and I say YOU don’t deserve this grief and misery. YOU didn’t ask for it.  No, YOU didn’t pick this binge eating behavior out of a vending machine and say to yourself, “I’m going to have this habit for the next 20 years or so” and then have to live with it.

You go to the treatment centers and guess what?  They don’t have any clue how to treat it and guess what?  Now, binge eating disorder is in the DSM-5.  Folks, this is huge, because the ONLY BEHAVIOR in binge eating disorder, in fact, is binge eating!  So guess what?  They are now forced to treat binge eating! They are forced to research the damned evasive miserable thing they don’t even want to face.

Cuz it’s ugly.  Binge eating is an ugly truth.  We shove stuff into our mouths and it’s not pretty, is it.  Think of everything ugly you’ve done, and know what I’m saying is true.  Hope lies ahead.

It’ll be a bit, maybe a bit of waiting, but there will be research.  Studies you’ll be able to get into for no money at all.  Places you can go that are covered by many insurances or even possibly if you are uninsured I’ll bet.

But we, us folk, we gotta do our part too.  We gotta keep speaking up.  Each of us do our part.  Keep writing and doing everything we can and I will too.  Just don’t shut up about it folks.

Oops, correction….

I goofed when I was talking about Thorazine doses in the last article.

Back then, yep, they were giving people 1800 of Thorazine (no, I was not given that much) but not higher.  I meant to say, “higher than 100.”

I will go back and correct that.

Incredible revelation while showering: Why I got kicked out of nursing schoool approx 30 years ago…I was way, way too smart for those ladies that gave me the ax

So this came up while I was showering.  Washing my hair, actually.  It felt damn good to be thinking this.  I said to myself, “Julie, you are not crazy.  You are just too damn smart.  And you gotta talk on people’s level.  Those women who ran the nursing school were nurses, not writers.  You forgot, you idiot.  That’s what got you kicked out.”

Not that nurses aren’t smart.  But they took blood pressure and taught young girls to extract numbers from machines.  We spent hours at this task.  Lots and lots of number-type stuff.   We learned to obtain statistics from people’s bodies, and take measurements, all sorts of measurements, and to correct what was wrong in a patient’s surroundings.

So if a patient was crooked in a bed, we learned to make a patient straight.  That was a huge part of LPN school.

And so, I, Julie Greene, got kicked out of of LPN school because they “found out” I had a history of mental illness.  These nursie boss people decided rather arbitrarily (I do know, as fact, that what they did was illegal) that I was on “too much medication” and “too doped up” to be in their school.

Is four 300 mg pills a day of Lithium too much Lithium? I think my last Lithium level that was drawn was 1.0, back in the summer.  This was what was considered ideal back then, ladies, not overmedicating.   Is 100 mgs a day of Thorazine overmedicating?  Back then, they were giving 1800 to folks with mania, and often maintained people on much higher doses than 100 of the drug.  Clearly, this boss lady (never mind her name) at the nursing school thought 100 was  a high-sounding number, so any “100” of anything was “a high dose.”

So, I was in this room arguing with these ladies, and I guess I made a huge fatal mistake.  I, Julie Greene, not realizing that I was a future memoirist MFA, made some metaphor.  Yes, some abstract meaning about mental illness being like…and I was off on this thing that they, who could only speak and understand and see the world in terms of the concrete, blasted off the face of the planet.  Oh yes, they said Julie Greene was talking crazy.

I wish I could recall the brilliant metaphor I came up with, but folks, we’re talking 1984 before half of you were born and my memory isn’t remembering it right now.  The boss ladies at the nursing school, well, if they remember now, they probably still don’t “get” the meaning of the metaphor, though, heck, all I was doing was doing what I do best, thinking up yet another brilliant writing idea.  Problem was, I said it out loud in front of the wrong people.  People who nabbed me.

It was yet to be written down.

Future writers, don’t say your brilliant writing ideas in front of people who don’t “get” metaphor.  Don’t say them in emergency rooms or you will end up with a security guard slapped in the doorway.  Don’t say them to your shrink or you might be called psychotic.  Don’t tell your nutritionist, who probably only “gets” food and portions.

When you get a writing idea, like I just did in just now in the shower, write the damn thing down.  Keep writing.  Don’t stop till you’re done.

I don’t mean to knock LPN’s because I have known brilliant LPN’s.  The LPN degree has evolved since I was in school and in some states has been swallowed up by the associates degree…but then again, I’m not really sure.  Some use the LPN degree as a stepping stone, some go on to alternative medicine, many go on to specialties, many quit.  Many work tirelessly all their lives.  Many earn a very good paycheck.  Many don’t.  Some can’t find a job.  I guess a lot depends on where you live.

And yes, many are extremely intelligent.  Many do indeed save lives every day.  As a whole, they are far more intelligent than the nurses that kicked me out that day, the ladies that did not understand that 26-year-old future writer.

Well, I stand here before you, after my shower, not exactly dressed properly for going out yet.   I say “stand” because I have written this entire entry not seated in a chair, that is, while standing up bent over, thinking I wasn’t going to spend as long as I did with you this morning.

It goes to show you something about writing and memory and meaning and having life really be okay.  Julie Greene, you are not crazy.  You are just too damn smart.

Advantage to the DSM-5’s inclusion of Binge Eating Disorder as an actual diagnosis

Okay, having just read an excellent dispute of this….Well put….

Of course, there are subsets and different mindsets of binge eaters.  I have no clue what it’s like to have been overweight since early on, and be fighting a lifelong weight issue and of course, perhaps the worst of it, the bullying and horrible weight bias from I mean like day one that goes along with being the least bit chubby or accused of having even one part of you that’s even imagined as chubby.

This is another world and it’s a world I’ve stepped into very briefly in my adult life.  Let’s say I tested the waters, then quickly yanked my big toe out as if the pool was filled with sharks.  I was fucking terrified.

Oh yeah, I do remember struggling with my weight, begging my doctor to take me off the darned pill that had gotten me to that point.  In other words, this is a trait that never really happened to me except by artificially-induced means, I’m talking true extremes.  Like you had to force me into that mold.

Okay, so if a person is of that mold, then, is it a different disorder than if they are my type that is the restrictive type, that started their disorder because of a diet?

See, so many people I know of with ED started with a diet, maybe schemed to get skinny, then developed further bad habits such as binge eating cuz their bodies were so starved.  Then, say, they panicked, saying, WTF? what’s this? and purged out of terror for what they had done.  Then maybe they looked up “laxatives” online and said, “hmm, maybe this will work,” and decided to go that route. Or whatever.  By then, the whole thing is incredibly unstoppable.

Okay, what of this diet…why go on a diet to begin with?  Low self esteem?  I mean, most of us weren’t even fat to begin with, right?  Most of gained “the freshman 10” maybe, or something very, very negligible and were still within range and could very well have exercised it off during summer break instead of going on that 300 calories a day crash diet we went on.

Agreeably, this is not the same as the pattern of the person who has been overweight since childhood.  I am wondering to what extent the dining commons, the Freshman Ten, or any of this…none of this means the same to the entering freshman who comes in say, already clinically obese and most likely the instant target of bullying.  Or maybe not.  You hear about the stereotypes.  The “fat kid” who is the “life of the party.”  Or, the “fat kid” who is, conversely, the “depressed loner.”  Either may be a secret binge eater.  Or maybe the kid never does have what we now will know, officially, as this painful disorder, Binge Eating Disorder, but the kid overeats at many, many meals, enough to sustain a larger body than he or she should have.

And folks, are we ever, ever going to find out?  For freaking years and years and years?  Sure, the presentation is that this is the fat kid.  Sure, the other young college folk assume maybe the kid “likes” to eat.  They dismiss this.  No one wants to talk about it and it ends up an uncomfortable subject.  Like, forever.  This is a painful path to walk on.   Even doctors don’t tread this ground.

Well, folks, they should.  And now, they will.  Binge eating is real and it’s serious.  Just as serious for someone overweight as it is for me who has anorexia with binge eating and does not and is unable to throw up, or someone with anorexia who does throw up, which is the one written up somewhere, the “binge-purge” type.  Do we have to talk about these stereotypes even?

Binge eating is serious for anyone who does binge eating and should be treated seriously, as seriously as is the behavior.

Binge eating itself causes massive damage in our society and of course to each and every individual sufferer. 

And yes, you can indeed die directly from the act of binge eating alone.

Never mind the suicides, car accidents, financial ruin, wrecked marriages, night after night of lost sleep, shattered sex lives, multitude of health concerns, legal issues, and troubled children.

Yep.  I’d say BED is right up there with severe alcoholism.

I’ll throw homelessness in there, too.

And yes, you CAN smell it on a person.  Not all the time, but some of the time.  Try a whiff of donuts or chocolate or the smell of dangerously high blood sugar on a person’s breath.  Or the scary drop in blood sugar some folks experience afterward.

I’m going to put out a poll and I hope it posts related to binge eating.  I believe these polls are anonymous.  Or I hope so.  I myself that I know of will be unable to track folks who answer.  (Don’t panic yet…no obligation to answer but it will help change the world…well, maybe.  I hope in my own little delusion of grandeur over here that everything I do makes its footprint on the world.  Well, everything we do, sorry, does a carbon footprint thing, they say, right?)

If you don’t want to answer the poll, and I’ll bet most of you won’t, or if you have never or generally don’t engage in binge eating, then just think about the questions and what your answers are or what someone else’s answers might be.  And think about tomorrow.  Goodnight.

Okay, see ya later, done with polls…I hope, again, I did this right.  Best of luck answering them.