bugs.crawling.on.my.body

Well, looks like the mr fulfilled the last ever husbandly duty of his career as my husband tonight. No, not that one. Though he did ask. But anyway, I digress.
I was looking forward to a nice, warm shower to ease my poor strained shoulder muscles and some lathering, rinsing and repeating action when I came face to face with the mother of all centipedes. Or was it a milipede? I wasn't about to count the legs to find out.

All I know is that it was without a doubt the most vile of all God's living things (and God really does have some vile living things!) and it was just hanging out on my loofah. I knew I could not bathe knowing it was there and I was there and all naked and everything, so I picked up the loofah, with the intention of holding the hideous beast under some hot scalding water. Except the little bugger got the upper hand and ran up my arm while I yelped in horror and propelled myself out of the shower, in a fit of hysteria meant to shake the thing off me.

After I'd had a few minutes to collect myself and taken a lorazepam, I decided that my hair really needed to be washed today and that the bug must have gone down the drain... so I could bathe in peace. Still, this little nagging voice kept telling me that it was still somewhere in my midst, lurking, waiting to infect me with Morgellons or some other equally heinous disease, and that I should wash myself very thoroughly...

Well, I was half right. When I stepped out of the shower, guess who was perched on my towel? You guessed it. I know that from now on I am going to have to do the killing of really icky bugs and will have to do so without falling apart and I really believe that I will be able to. But I decided to take advantage of my one last night of co-dependence.

disease du jour

Another week, another devastating disease. Welcome to my world.

I've been feeling remarkably sane lately. I managed to spend a whole entire weekend with my anxiety-wrought mother and I must say that driving home on Sunday, I felt like I was on top of the world. Fast-forward to today, Monday. And this particular Monday is a paradox - beginning and end all unto itself. Not only is it the last day of June, it is also the last day that the three of us will be living together as the happy family we once wanted to be but never really managed to become. The happy family that is so dysfunctional that even people who don't know us see right through the façade. Yep, that kind of happy. Tomorrow he is moving out.

And I am wracked with fear. Not about being a single parent. No. That doesn't matter because I will most likely be dead in a few months. I have either advanced-stage lung cancer or cancer of the pancreas. Let me explain.

The day started much like any other. My daughter had a nasty case of hives, so I gave her some Benadryl and took her to daycare, and made my way to the clinic where I had an appointment with my family md to get a mole checked. Turns out, the mole was looking far less suspicious this morning than it had last week when I had called to make the appointment, but I kept the appointment anyway, just to be on the safe side. The doctor went through the whole spiel, measuring it, examining it, asking me questions about it, and then , of course, telling me that it didn't look at all suspicious.

I was fine until this evening, when I decided to take my daughter to Macy's and, well, to make a long story short, the shopping trip culminated with her draping a towel over her head and running down an aisle screeching as loud as she could, and then me carrying her, squirming and writhing about, under my left arm while I pushed the childless stroller with my right. And then, it started. As I sat down in the driver's seat and started the car, I noticed a funny pain in the upper left quadrant of my back.

I stopped for a moment to analyze the pain, taking mental notes along the way:
Breathing makes it worse, not aleviated by leaning forward, burping makes it go away for a few seconds... Meanwhile, the simultaneous Mind MD search triggered by the pain sensors in my brain had suggested several possible causes for the pain:

pancreatic cancer: no, can't be that. leaning forward is supposed to ease the pain. breathing should have no effect. Whew! What a relief!
lung cancer: a.k.a. a long, painful, humiliating death. Hmm. It's very possible, given
my history and all.
anxiety: No! Because that doesn't cause death.

pulled muscle from lugging child lugging
oversized doll while dancing the
lambada in my arms: Ya think?

Needless to say, looking back now, after taking a lorazepam, drowning my sorrows in a nice, thick, chocolate malt, and making 3 phone calls to my mother, I finally resigned myself to the fact that it is most definitely a pulled muscle.

But that doesn't explain the unrelentless itching in my left boob, now, does it?

attachment disorder

I just received a letter from my primary care doc informing me that she will be moving to another practice as of August 1st, one that does not take my insurance plan. This is quite a problem for me, seeing as I suffer from an attachment disorder - I tend to get extremely attached to certain persons who occupy certain positions of authority, especially health care professionals who treat me as a person and not a label - i.e. - hypochondriac/bi-polar/insomniac/co-dependent hott mess. Doctors should not be able to abandon their patients like this!

when I interviewed myself...

Given the extent of my neuroses, I thought interviewing myself might be therapeutic in some form. I realize it takes one hell of a hott mess to attempt something like this, but I'm glad to be that girl. Besides, it's much more interesting for the 5 people who read my blog to learn about me this way than to sit through yet another monologue. Enjoy.*

*For clarity's sake, I will refer to the question-posing facet of my being as the interviewer, and the answering facet as lulu.

Interviewer: So , I hear you've started a blog recently. Is this your first time blogging? If so, you were a little late to jump on the bandwagon, weren't you?

lulu: No, this is not my first attempt at blogging. I blogged semi-successfully several years ago, but outgrew the blog. Then, when I was pregnant, back in spring-summer-fall of '06, I started another blog, and it drew an ok readership, I mean, I had some regular readers and commenters...

Interviewer: What happened?

lulu: Well, after my daughter was born, I decided to be a "mommy blogger" but that didn't go so well. It was like being back in middle school again. All the other mommybloggers ignored me. And suddenly, there I was, back in the cafeteria with nowhere to sit, and no one to sit with. It roused all sorts of repressed traumas that I have spent the past 15 years trying to forget and needless to say, it was not a pleasant experience. (pulls paper bag from pocket, places up to mouth and begins to inhale and exhale deeply)

Interviewer: I'm sorry. Am I upsetting you?

lulu: No, no, that's ok. You may continue.

Interviewer: Thank you. So, getting back to the blogging, what makes you think this blogging experience will be any different, and why do you want to blog so badly in the first place?

lulu: Well, blogging caters to my inner exhibitionist. I think we all have one lurking somewhere in our depths. And, to answer your first question, I believe that this time will be different, because I'm letting the real me do the blogging and not trying to hide behind the facade of some cartoon girl. With the other blogs, I made my identity known - I never gave my last name, but I did use my first name and I posted lots of pictures of myself and my daughter... and while a part of me really enjoyed posting the pictures, I also felt like I really had to censor what I said then, because I believe in blogging with dignity and tact. I want this to be a forum where I can be open and not have to keep turning on the auto-censors, but I also don't want to catch any flack in real life because of something I said in my blog. 'Cause God knows I don't need any more problems.

Interviewer: So, what exactly do you plan on sharing here?

lulu: Reflections. Whatever comes into my mind, whatever I feel I need to work through. I guess that part of what I'm looking for is anonymous feedback. I mean, if I'm completely barking up the wrong tree with something, I would hope that maybe someone would comment and tell me that.

Interviewer: So, how do you feel about comments?

lulu: I welcome them. Even the negative, critical ones. But if you leave one of those, just be prepared for me to write an entry about it, linked to your blog.

Interviewer: Getting back to what you said about pictures, does this mean that you won't be posting a self pic here?

lulu: That would be correct.

Interviewer: Then maybe you could at least give us a description of what you look like. You know, people are curious beings.

lulu: Ok, picture the love child of Leonard Cohen and Tina Fey. That is exactly what I look like.

Interviewer: Yes, that is quite an accurate description. What do you feel is your best asset?

lulu: My acerbic wit.

Interviewer: And your worst?

lulu: My acerbic wit.

Interviewer: Interesting.

Interviewer: Well, I do believe that's all the time we have for today. Thank you.

lulu: Thank you.

hump day haiku # 2: Existentialist edition

today is wednesday
why do I even care? I'd
rather stay in bed.

fiber of my being

As you know, my hypochondria is clearly traceable to two separate, but equally traumatic, events:

1. The discovery that what had previously been believed to be a benign ovarian cyst was actually a rare form of not-quite-malignant- enough -to -kill- ya but pretty serious nonetheless form of ovarian cancer, a.k.a. Borderline Ovarian Cancer, low malignancy potential, or LMP. (Thank God for those 3 little letters!) And, might I add that this discovery happened literally minutes after I had just birthed the most beautiful little creature ever?

2. The discovery of a 2-cm mass in my father's brain, later diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiforme, the most vile of all brain tumors, following a rather violent seizure that came out of nowhere and that was witnessed by me and me alone.

Actually, in the months leading up to my father's diagnosis, hypochondria was already reaching out its nasty little fingers to grab a hold of me and pull me under. I had begun doing the breast self-check weekly, and then daily, and then hourly... feeling my body up and down for swollen lymph nodes or other nodules, and looking up symptoms at WebMD, my favorite site, in the more ambivalent sense of the word.

And then I discovered Morgellons. I still remember, it was a warm July night. I couldn't sleep.
So, I did what I do whenever I can't sleep, and surfed the net in search of the most terrifying illness known to mankind. And just my luck, msn.com had as a featured story "The Top Ten Mysterious Diseases" , or something along those lines. Coming in at number 10 was the aforementioned, a disgustingly fascinating ailment, perhaps parasitic in nature, or perhaps a form of alien bio-terrorism (the jury is still out, more research is needed) causing severe itching and other odd sensations such as the feeling that bugs are crawling beneath one's skin and biting, stinging or pricking them, accompanied by gross skin lesions that produce red, white, blue and black fibers along with white and black granules, like grains of sand.

Immediatley I started itching. I felt the bugs. They were stinging me up and down my legs, o nmy torso, on my behind, everywhere! And the pimples on the back of my neck were surely bound to turn into open, festering, oozing wounds that would excrete fibers and flecks of an undeterminable origin at any moment... I just knew it.

I spent 4 days convinved I was infected with Morgellons. I began preparing for the psychological implications to start: the depression, the brain fog, the fatigue. The constipation. Oh, what a hott, itchy mess I was. Turns out it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Or shall I say thread.
Anyway, I finally made an appointment with my family doctor. I tried to keep my cool while I explained to her about my late-night reading habits and my belief that at any moment now there would be fiber-bearing lesions breaking out all over my body. She also tried to keep her cool, which I so appreciated! (I should mention that I have a wonderful doc who has helped me with huge doses of compassion and has never dismissed me as "that patient" or "the crazy one")
And then she called in a social worker. And I was referred to a therapist and began my treatment.

I would like to say that the story ends there and that the ending was happy. But I think this is going to be a never-ending story. A process. A journey. Turns out that referral was only the beginning. But I do believe that it's because of that that my story has not yet ended.

tuesday top 10

In case you just tuned in, I am a hypochondriac. Not in the glamorized, satirized, insert-verb-that-ends-in-ized-here way, but in the clinical sense. Yeah baby, this is serious. I am not messing around here. You name it, I've thought I had it. But all diseases were not created equal, at least not in my neurotic mind. Some conditions terrify me more than others. So, here they are. (cue drum roll, please!) The TOP 10 Most Feared Diseases:

10. Ovarian cancer.
9. Anaplastic thyroid cancer (but only the anaplastic variety, I hear the other forms have high cure rates...)
8. Pancreatic Cancer
7. Morgellons Disease
6. Lymphoma
5. Lou Gehrig's Disease
4. Merkel Cell Carcinoma
3. Late-stage lung cancer which has metastasized to every organ in my body - twice!
2. Colon cancer

And.... ready? Da-da-DA!
1. Inflammatory Breast Cancer with comorbid cancer of the colon, pancreas and lymphatic system.

as if I didn't already worry enough...

about diseases, calamaties, catastrophes and gruesome accidents, I now have to worry that my shampoo might be trying to kill me. Do you worry about that, too?

Well, now you don't have to sit around wondering how likely your favorite shampoo/conditioner/nail polish/soap is to give you cancer, hamper your reproductive ability or otherwise harm you. Go to this website, type in the brand of your fave hygiene or grooming product, and voila! It gives you a nice little table highlighting all the toxins it contains.

I'm lucky I don't use much in the way of beauty products. I use them to decorate my bathroom and there they sit. But, I was rather astounded to learn that my favorite exfoliating face wash is nothing but bad news!

I always bought St. Ives products because, for some reason, I was under the impression that it was somehow more natural than the other crap out there, though I really don't know what would have made me think that. Maybe because it has fruit on the label. Or because it's named after a town in France. Who knows.

Anyway, it turns out that 99% of the other facial cleansers on the market would have been a better bet. No wonder it's so economical. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being the least toxic and 10 being just short of radioactive, the folks at the cosmetics database gave my facial cleanser a whopping 8. In layman's terms, I've been washing my face with an invigorating concoction of carcinogens, neurotoxins and pollutants.

I think my beauty regimen may need some serious reconsidering.

Let's face it, I have a lot more to worry about than beauty any way.

sticks and stones and other comeback cliches

Everyone is familiar with the old cliche: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me."
In may case, it was taught to me by my father when I was a kindergartner, upset because some "big kids" had called me names on the bus. I know my father meant well, just as every parent who teaches it to their own distraught kindergartner as some sort of mantra to help them cope with the harsh realities of recess, school bus rides and summer camp.

However, recently I have began to question its utility. The truth is, words do hurt. A lot. And unlike a pummeling with sticks and stones, or even a good flogging, their pain never quite goes away. Bruises fade. Scratches heal. Broken bones set. But hurtful words stick in the memory and assault us repeatedly until they've damaged us to the point that we will never fully heal.

Last night my (soon to be) ex said some things that hurt. I mean really hurt. In fact, to use another cliche, like the trite metaphor says, they cut like a knife. They stung like salt rubbed in a deep, festering wound. Because, in reality, he was rubbing metaphorical salt in proverbial wounds. I won't go into detail here about what was said, because it's irrelevant. What matters is that he knew exactly what my weak points were and used them against me. And seemed to derive pleasure from that.

And today, it's stinging. Those words are resounding in my ears, even at this moment, and nothing, not the clack-clack-clack of the keyboard, not the drone of the air conditioner, not even my personal mantra chanted over and over again can silence them.

If they had come from someone else, I would be able to blow it off. But then again, someone else would not be able to push those buttons because they wouldn't be able to find them. Over the course of our marriage, I had confided things in him that I needed him to know. And he had listened, offered words of comfort, care, and love... only to suddenly throw them back at me like a weapon, trying to destroy me.

So, I will deal with the pain in a constructive way - countering it with yet another cliche: "I'm made of rubber, you're made of glue. The words bounce off me and stick onto you." Because he must be feeling really low to feel that he needs to hurt me in the first place. I get it.

I will turn the other cheek. I am woman enough for that.
But next time, may he just pelt me with pebbles instead.

making a river in egypt out of spilt milk

We all have our own coping mechanisms for dealing with stress.
Some people eat their emotions. Others choose to drink them, while still others prefer to smoke them, inject them or sniff them. And then there are those who, instead of consuming them, choose to spend them or gamble them away. I, for one, like to distract myself, or fool myself into thinking that I have other, more important things to worry about.

Take the recent stress caused by an impending Masters comp exam compounded by an impending divorce. But don't worry about me. I'm dealing with it just fine. I mean, how can I wallow in self-pity and plummet to the depths of despair if I have to check my breasts hourly for lumps and examine them in the mirror for signs of inflammatory breast cancer?

Because, let's face it, if I'm gonna get breast cancer, it can't just be your old run-of-the mill breast cancer. No. It must be IBC, often misdiagnosed and much more deadly than your average breast malignancy. I think that imagining myself sick brings me solice because it's something I can control. Can't control the exam. Can't control this hell I'm living in at home. But I can control my symptoms, because the disease is all in my mind. Deep down I know that I'm not sick. I do. But sometimes I just let myself believe that I am.

for your viewing pleasure....

Props to:

http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/Paxil%20road.png

pulling the plug

It's official. We're separated
Pulling the plug on a marriage that has been on life-support for quite some time is surprisingly difficult, but surprisingly relieving.

Part of me died with the marriage. But that's not necessarily bad. It could actually be positive.

Death can be liberating sometimes.

One more thing to worry about...

I like to think that all the hours I have spent researching illnesses and symptoms online are far superior to the time I would have needed to dedicate to a medical degree, and therefore, believe that some prestigious university should bestow upon me an honorary medical license, and, who knows, maybe invite me in as a guest lecturer from time to time...

But it turns out that there is a disease that I was thus far unaware of. I just read this, which caused me to search for more information, which led me to this... and somehow to this, which caused me to do this! And then I took two of these and some of this and checked myself over for any suspicious bumps or growths. For the fourth time today.

The good news is that I think that, in my expert opinion, I am free from Merkel Cell Cancer.

The bad news? I think I may, just may, be coming down with a case of this.

Because I like to practice what I preach...

I've spent the past 6 months researching the therapeutic value of art, music and writing and after struggling with various neuroses, which include, but are not limited to, depression, anxiety, hypochondria, sick father, (f)ailing marriage, stressful professional life, and a tendency to wallow and ruminate in the muck of despair, I am going to make a guinea pig of myself and see if writing about my problems will somehow help me work through them - or at least understand them.

So, let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start... (yes, I really was quoting "The Sound of Music" and I know what you're thinking... "Wow, she really does need help!") I have always been a little on the neurotic side. Ruminating. Obsessing. Occasionally engaging in ritualistic behavior.

Then, in college, I began experiencing periods of deep depression alternating with periods of extreme elation... which went unchecked for quite some time. In 2000 I rang in the new milennium in a deep depression and had my first encounter with therapy. Therapist considered me cured and I moved abroad, thinking that it was the midwestern monotony that I was living in that was somehow to blame for my funk. Well, things didn't quite work out there... long story... and a month and a half after I ended a 4-year relationship, I married suddenly and unexpectedly and moved back stateside to begin a new life.

This new life involved grad school and a rocky marriage. Several months later I ended up getting pregnant and at this time doctors discovered a mass on my right ovary during a routine ultrasound. 7 months later, it was discovered that I had a form of borderline ovarian cancer. None of this phased me at the time...

Several months later I started with the mood swings again, and my marriage began to deteriorate slowly. I also spent hours researching imaginary symptoms online, crying uncontrollably, convinced that I had every rare form of cancer imaginable. I imagined my daughter growing up motherless. I imagined myself dying a horrible, painful death. I pictured many a horrible ending to a troubled life.

But turns out that at that time, I hadn't a clue what horrible was. This past August my father suffered a seizure and was later diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. Two days before his seizure, he had been backpacking though Asia with my 23-year-old brother and now here he was, with a horrible illness. I began fear my body, certain it was out to betray me. So, I sought help. And the diagnosis was (drumroll...)

Bipolar type II
Hypochondria
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (because of my brush with illness myself)
Depression

And now I am trying to deal. Some days are better than others. I have recently decided to end my marriage and am on another emotional roller-coaster ride because of that, but I am working my way through it the best way I know how. I hope that blogging through my ups and downs here will help me gain insight into myself and why I am the way I am... And I hope that it may also help others gain insight into their own neuroses.

I don't know where this journey will lead, but I welcome anyone who wants to accompany me on the ride...