Tag Archives: anxiety

Plans & Provisions

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Ever have a UTI?

Yeah, this is a great way to kick off a post, I know. Bear with me.

I used to get them a lot in my twenties. They’re horrible. They’re painful, and they can absolutely ruin your day, for days.

I also have to accept that as I get older, they’re going to make a return. They’re common in the elderly.

And when an elderly person with Alzheimer’s gets a UTI, it’s a whole other level of awful.

My mother-in-law is back in the hospital recovering from a UTI. We’d dealt with this before, when she was living with us, but we’d never seen her this wiped out from it. On Sunday, we honestly thought this was the end. As of today, she’s doing remarkably better.

This is yet another layer of the reality that is Alzheimer’s. And this is, yet again, why I’ve come to have ZERO patience with people making jokes about it (“Lost my keys again! Damn Alzheimer’s! Eh heh heh heh HEH…”). You don’t just forget where you put stuff. You don’t just blank out on names. You forget people entirely. You forget how to use utensils. You forget how to speak. You no longer have the means to communicate when something is wrong. And once all the cognitive stuff is wiped out, the disease attacks the rest of the brain, the parts that regulate things like swallowing, breathing, and fending off illness. I could break it down further, and paint quite a vivid picture of just how fucking horrible this disease is, but I’ll spare you. Just – THINK before you make an Alzheimer’s joke. Please.

And so while my mother-in-law is bouncing back from this infection, these emergencies will become more and more a part of our reality. Eventually, Aviv is not going to be able to accommodate her. Eventually, she is going to require around-the-clock nursing care. Thus, we start our next round of plans and provisions. She no longer lives with us, but the caregiving continues.

I’m tired. I’m sad. I know in my heart that this is not the life she would have wanted for herself, even as I still struggle to remember who she was before the diagnosis. The IV fluids and antibiotics have roused her. She’s sitting up, she’s cheerful, she even ate a little pasta last night. In all probability, she’ll be back at Aviv by the end of the week, having her nails done and watching Family Feud in the dayroom. I’m relieved that this wasn’t more serious, and yet I know I have to gird myself for the battles which most certainly lay ahead. Because “more serious” IS coming. Maybe not tomorrow, or next month. But it’s coming, boy howdy.

Natch, this isn’t exactly helping with my depression. But I’m managing. Trying to give myself a break here and there, by not clobbering myself over my weight gain, my periodically wanting to retreat into hours of crap television, my not being at Aviv 24/7 to make sure Marcia doesn’t get another UTI. I’m wired to feel guilty for just about everything. I can still rattle off an Act Of Contrition like nobody’s business. Your candidate doesn’t make the ballot? Hell, that’s my fault, too. Working on that.

More than ever, I’ve got to lean on that “one day at a time” thing. Because while drinking is not anywhere on the agenda today, I’ve got to do the thing that I’m constantly telling other people in recovery to do, and that’s to look down and see where my feet are. Because when I don’t do that, I’m mentally living in moments that haven’t even happened, and they’re mostly pretty grim. And they FEEL 100% real. I’m not sure that people who don’t experience anxiety like this entirely understand that last point. I can be utterly convinced the horror show in my head is totally going to happen.

In the meantime, I’m staying hydrated. *I* don’t need a UTI on top of all of this.

Limping along…

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Well, I haven’t written anything here since November. That’s pretty terrible.

I have been entirely too much in my feelings since October. I’m still putting on a good show on Facebook, where it’s fairly easy to compartmentalize and show only what you want people to see. The fact is that I have been battling a pretty ugly bout of depression for the last 3+ months.

Depression lives deep inside me at all times, kind of the way the chicken pox virus camps out near your spinal column. It never totally goes away. Like Churchill’s “black dog,” it slumbers until something rousts it, and it lurches out, yowling and slobbering, and right now it’s taking massive amounts of my energy to take it for a walk and put it back in its crate.

It’s situational, for the most part, and while the circumstances that brought it on are largely resolving themselves, I still have days where I feel like a discarded Dunkin’ Donuts cup in a dirty snowbank.

That’s about as much analogy as I can muster right now. But that was pretty good, right?

So, since the developments last fall which left me emotionally upended, I’m slowly but surely doing everything I’m supposed to. Reaching out, cultivating some really solid friendships with amazing women, staying sober, checking in with the therapist and the psych nurse…and mmmaybe buying crap I don’t need here and there. Fuck it – I spent my bonus this year on totally responsible, adult purchases (a winter coat that practically doubles as a sleeping bag, and Bean boots); I can buy this utterly ridiculous dress that I fully intend to wear at my band’s next gig:

boom

Even though it’s a sweater dress, and sweater dresses look good on NO ONE, I am going to wear the shit out of this. I DON’T CARE.

And I suppose I need to start writing again.

A Requiem For “Cute”

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I had a hot flash on the Green Line a couple of nights ago.

I say this because I need to own it. A hot flash. Like – sweat pouring down my back, face on fire, felt like I was gonna hurl – hot flash.

I don’t get them often. I’m not full-blown menopausal…yet. But I’m pushing it, you know? I’m 45. Things are dropping, drooping, and drying out. Also, now, evidently, heating up, although not in a way that I at all enjoy.

I’ve been joking about the chin hairs for a while now. I have a pair of tweezers in every handbag I own. But with the introduction of hot flashes into my world, it’s time to admit that I am not a young, cute thing anymore.

And when I say this, folks, it’s not to invite an outcry of “BUT YOU *ARE* CUTE OMG STOP!” Because listen – I am 45 years old and I left “cute” somewhere back in 2007, and even then it was getting a little threadbare. “Cute” is no longer in my wheelhouse.

When I say I’m not “cute,” I mean that I am making a conscious decision to leave it back in the early 2000s or whatever. Maybe even back in ’95, truth be told, around the time I was still wearing, like, mini-kilts and carrying a Hello Kitty backpack….to GRADUATE SCHOOL.

I was faced with my not-cuteness not too long ago, when I was introduced to one of my husband’s coworkers. She was cute. I was….well, I won’t go so far as to say “matronly,” but I was rocking a semi-mature look that day. Big comfy sweater, stacked heels, tasteful jewelry. And I was feeling moderately okay about myself up until that introduction. Then I immediately felt like a dowdy, dumpy she-beast. I looked at her calf-high boots and her sassy little dress (Size 4, maybe? 6, tops?) and suddenly felt as if I’d outfitted myself in a pup tent purchased for half-off because it was the display model. And I wanted to slink away muttering “Bargon wanchi kox paa, Solo! Hoo hoo hoo hoo…”

I had to ask myself WHY – when I am ordinarily so pro-body-positivity and adamant that I should not be comparing myself to other women (particularly women who are a good 10 years younger than I am, because that shit is just not fair) – I immediately start in on the self-hate. Yeah – I know it’s conditioning. It’s practically hard-wired and/or arguably some kind of Paleolithic instinct to size up another woman as “competition.” Or something.

And this is when I have to remember AAALLLLLLLLL of the times I’ve looked back at pictures of myself at various ages and remember that, at every age, I thought of myself as a monster. 13. 15. 18. 25. 36. 40. And when I look at those pictures now, I don’t see what I saw then. And it’s like, I don’t want to have to be 60, looking back on myself at 45, and doing this EXACT SAME THING ALL OVER AGAIN. I’ve spent entirely too much time saying things to myself that I would never dream of saying to my closest friends. That has to stop.

But let’s get back to “cute.” I am not claiming it for myself anymore. I am not going to feel BAD because this isn’t what, or who, I am these days.

There’s a poem by Louis de Paor in which there’s a line (an cailín a bhfuil áilleacht an bhróin ina gnúis) that translates roughly to: “the girl in whose face is sorrow’s beauty.” This is something that I have claimed for myself, as DRAMATIC as I know it sounds to some people. But fuck it; this is what has replaced “cute” for me. It has rung particularly truthful in the past few years, as crisis after crisis has knocked me on my ass. For a time I was looking at myself in the mirror and thinking how HAGGARD I looked. I’m not haggard; I am goddamned beautiful from sorrow and stress and uncertainty. Radiant, even.

But cute? No. And that’s okay.

Semi-manageable funk gonna give it to ya.

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I’ve spent the last couple of months in what I can only call a “semi-manageable funk.” Depression and anxiety have been my lifelong companions, and yet it’s always such an unpleasant surprise when they suddenly team up and give me a beatdown behind the school. They’ve taken my lunch money AND my Game Boy, psychologically speaking.

A large part of it is situational. But the situation has unleashed the neurochemical beasties that I mostly try to keep padlocked in the cellar, kind of like Deadite Henrietta in “Evil Dead II.”

ed2-henriettamonster1I’m managing. I’m taking my medication dutifully and as prescribed. I’m seeing my therapist a bit more often, and staying away from the garbage food as best I can. But I’m living in a sort of perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s just that at this point, so many fucking shoes have dropped I may as well be living in a DSW.

I have this recurring dream when I’m in this state. I’m in college, there’s like one day left before I go home for the summer, and I haven’t packed up my shit. My roommate has everything organized and ready to go into storage, and my stuff is EVERYWHERE. I have no boxes. I’m sitting in the middle of piles of clothes and records and I KNOW that I’ve got to deal with this, but instead I just sort of poke around, getting more and more panicked.

I had the dream again last night, only this time I was also coloring my hair and was walking around the room with a glopped-up head, wondering why I’d done this since I only just went to the salon the day before (which was true, in my waking life) and thinking that Daryl, my colorist, was going to be RIPSHIT. And then the fire alarm went off, and I started frantically searching for a shower cap amidst all of my CRAP so I wouldn’t have to face everyone in the dorm looking like I had a freshly-slaughtered bunny rabbit on my head. Then I woke up.

So, yeah, you can maybe sort of comprehend my mental state right now.

Understand – I’m posting this as a way of “checking in.” I’m not looking for pity, sympathy, or platitudes. ESPECIALLY that last one. I’m doing what I can, and what I need to do, to navigate through this, rather than around. It’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before; it’s just that I’m allowing myself to NOT pretend I’m Miss Jolly Rancher, impervious to the slings and arrows my own brain is producing as some kind of back-asswards means of coping with what’s going on around me. I was the class clown long enough to know that while this is a marvelous means of getting people to want to be around you, it leaves you high and dry when the jokes can’t write themselves.

Here’s what I’d like – for the Universe or whatever to cool its jets for at least a week and stop dropping these suckass bombs in my lap so I can at least enjoy the fact that it’s almost Halloween. That’s probably a tall and unrealistic order. Things will happen as they happen, with no regard for me, my feelings, or my pesky little control issues.

But it’s almost Halloween. There’s that.

So if I can’t remember the name of the kid that was in those commercials, now you know why.

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I had my quarterly check-in with my psych nurse yesterday.  I basically sat there on her giant couch, surrounded by vaguely-Pier-1-looking pillows, and said:  “I am a raging lunatic.  I am in a more or less constant state of anxiety.  I don’t remember what it’s like to NOT be this way.  I have thought about it, and thought about it.  And the thing is, I KNOW you’re not going to put me on an SSRI.  Or a benzo.”

“Nope. Absolutely not.”

“Right.  Because that was our agreement.  I can’t be on anything that I’m going to particularly ENJOY.  I don’t GET to take anything that I’m going to use as a mental vacation.”

“Mmhmm.”

“So I need to know – is what I’m on, like, the MAXIMUM of what I can take?  Because this is situational.  I get that.  I am going through something that – I don’t know – TENS OF THOUSANDS of people are dealing with right this second, right?”

“Yes…”

“So why am I like this?  A couple of weeks ago I had a total meltdown on the porch in front of our next door neighbor, Andy, who’s super nice and was very polite to me, but I’m sure he thinks I’m completely insane now.  He’s having new siding put on his house, and when I go out to get the paper in the morning, the contractors all kind of smile and wave and look away.  And maybe that’s just the way they are, but I’m thinking maybe Andy said, ‘DON’T TALK TO THE CRAZY WOMAN NEXT DOOR.'”

“I really don’t think Andy said anything like that.”

“I guess I need to stay on what I’m on, but I’ve got….a…an ANVIL on my chest.  What do I do?  I’m going to meetings.  I’m talking to other caregivers.  I never – EVER – lose my shit in front of my mother-in-law, even when she spends 40 minutes drying the sink.  DRYING THE SINK.  Did you know that’s apparently a THING?”

“Drying the sink?”

“Yeah.  It turns out that nearly every insane thing that she does is not unique.  She hoards paper towels.  I find them EVERYWHERE.  She folds them in thirds and puts them in drawers, in cabinets, in the dishwasher…”

“Uh huh.”

“…and it turns out that at least 10 other caregivers say the same thing.  Paper towels.  Kleenex.  But I really thought I was onto something new and extraordinary with the sink drying thing.  I mean she will wipe down every inch of that sink until it’s dry as a bone.  And then the other day this woman Rhonda from my group mentioned that her mother won’t stop drying the sinks, and BOOM!  My head completely exploded.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.  God.  I’m so tired.  But I’m wired.  Tired and wired.”

“Well, I’m going to keep you on what you’re on, okay?  Only I’m going to tweak it a little so you can take 300mg more a day, if you need it.  And you probably need it.  For now.”

“Is that cool, though?  I mean, that’s not going to do anything weird?”

“Well, this would put you at 1,200mg max, which is still fine, although you MIGHT have some issues with word recall.”

“Really? Huh.  Is that why it’s called MORONtin?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”