rumors of the heart

My heart is beating so hard right now that I can see it through my t-shirt. Cold drops of sweat are running down my forehead and my breathing is getting more and more erratic.

I just discovered that there is such a thing as heart cancer. It's rare, and it strikes people in the prime of life, between the ages of 20 and 40. I am almost right smack dab in the middle of my prime - I'll be 29 this coming October. Average prognosis at diagnosis is 2 years. There are very few effective treatments, since it's so rare. There is very little information available on it. That makes it the perfect disease for me to fear.

A lot of things frighten me, but cancer is at the top of my list, along with centipedes, sex offenders and anything made in China. So, needless to say, discovering a new kind of cancer that I did not yet know existed did not make my day.

ups and downs

Most of my posts thus far have centered around my battle with hypochondriasis and irrational fears of diseases that cause a slow, painful, humiliating death. But that's not my only problem. I also suffer from bipolar disorder and debilitating depression. And it sucks. Most of the time I'm dealing with mania: the drugs keep it in check so that I don't fall too deeply in love with life, but even so, most of the time I am fighting tooth and nail to keep myself at a managable level somewhere between the stratosphere and outer space. The slightest thing can set me on a manic rampage that can last for weeks at a time: this episode that I'm going through right now, for example, was triggered by a song that I liked on the radio. Stupid, isn't it? But that's my life.

When I come down from my high I will quickly plummet, without warning, to somewhere between the center of the Earth and hell. Once again, mood stabilizers save me from damnation.
The hardest thing about it all is the inconsistencies it brings to life. I make plans deep in the throws of mania, then swing into depression and cannot possibly carry them out. I feel like I don't know myself. I feel like I'm NOT myself. I feel like I have demons. This can't be me.

I'm in therapy. I'm on meds. I cry a lot. I can't sleep. I laugh a lot. What saves me is my humor. I find great comfort in my friends, especially the ones who understand my roller-coaster because they're riding it, too. We talk about therapy, meds, mania, the blues, and joke about how it makes up better writers, artists, and scholars. After all, the most creative minds are often the most disturbed. We try to convince ourselves that it makes us more interesting, attractive and intelligent because there's a depth to our being that others lack. Still, in all honesty, there's really nothing hott or glamorous about being a mess.

What do Amy Winehouse and fingers have in common?

...Neither one should be clubbing.

According to People.com, Amy Winehouse, 24, is in the initial phase of emphysema from, as her father, Mitch Winehouse so eloquently puts it, ""With smoking the crack cocaine and the cigarettes her lungs are all gunked up." I guess that'll do it.

Emphysema doesn't particularly frighten me, though. I don't know why. Maybe because I'm too busy worrying about lung cancer and inflammatory breast cancer and Morgellons and everything else under the sun to worry about emphysema. And, because I'm really not concerned about emphysema, I know relatively little about it. So, I decided to remedy that and do a little research. Emphysema is basically a condition that destroys the lung tissue, making it harder and harder to breathe. And its symptoms range from the obvious - shortness of breath, dizziness, fainting - to the bizarre and perplexing. Finger clubbing?
Is that some new trend, like the early-90s rave phenomenon that I'm thankful to have been just a little too young to partake in.
No. It's not a party. It's actually a grotesque symptom of emphysema that will bring me nightmares for days to come.
I do not want to post the image on my blog, but if you feel so inclined, you can catch a glimpse here.

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.