Monthly Archives: February 2010

Let's add another specialist to my doctor soup

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An inch of snow on even the most fragile tree branches

When I saw Pam — my PA-C — on Friday, my mission was to make sure that she looked into Crohn’s Disease. With all of the symptoms together, knowing that my aunt has Crohn’s, and knowing that my symptoms are cyclic as opposed to occurring all of the time, Pam decided to send me to a gastroenterologist. (Whom I forgot to call today and yesterday.) It also turns out, interestingly enough, that the doctor Pam referred me to is also my aunt’s gastroenterologist. My aunt said that he was the first doctor to say to her, “I don’t know what’s wrong, but your problem is real, and I’m going to figure it out,” sort of like how Pam is to me. My aunt also said that he was the one to diagnose her.

I’m probably getting my hopes up here, but maybe he will be the one to diagnose me — even if it isn’t Crohn’s.

Pam also bumped me up to 300mg of Seroquel XR. I’d been on 250. So far, I’m still not seeing any difference — at least, I don’t think so. I think it may be helping a little, but she said that if it were working, I would notice it. If I haven’t noticed a difference by Friday, I’m supposed to call her so she can bump me up again. Luckily, she’s been really cool and has given me tons of samples so that I don’t have to keep buying different prescriptions as she changes my dosage.

I have noticed that it makes me pretty fatigued. I think today wasn’t as bad as the previous weeks, and Pam said that it is supposed to ebb as my body gets used to it, but damn it sucks. I’m tired enough, you know? Between all of the hours I work, barely sleeping, whatever this autoimmune disease is, and now this med, I’m beat.

Still, I’ve been accomplishing a lot lately. Letters of Love now has a community for pen pals. It’s doing pretty well. I’d like to see more interaction between everyone, but it’s still early. Right now, my focus is building up a readership for the myLOL blog.

I’ve also been reading a lot. Right now I’m reading On the Road, and before that I read The Lovely Bones.

As soon as I finish the big client project I’ve been working on throughout the last few months, I’m going to give this place a makeover, finish my design for Freaking Bookworm, and do something about Letters of Love and myLOL so that they match (right now myLOL has a generic theme). Being a designer, I can’t stand not making them look unique. It’s time to make my digital homes look like home.

Maybe the Seroquel is working. I feel a lot more positive. Then again, my mood is like a roller coaster; I never know when it is going to change and how long it is going to remain the same.

I guess we’ll see what things look like on Friday.

Big news, bloody noses, and pants

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I don’t even know where to begin with this one, so I apologize in advance if I jump all over the place like a bunny on speed.

Both Mike and I may have very exciting career advancements available to us very soon, which puts us in a position to move in together sooner than we would have been able to without the new opportunities. I feel like I am a little kid and it is my birthday. I have to wait all morning and all early afternoon until the first guests start arriving. Then I have to wait until everyone has arrived and we’ve all munched on chips and had cake so that I can open my presents. And then I have to wait until they all go home so that I can play with all of my new toys. (Yes, Mepsipax, most of these toys were Barbies.) It’s very, very exciting, and neither of us want to get our hopes too high lest we end up disappointed. But I have this feeling that we will not be disappointed, and that we’ll soon be taking the next step in our relationship toward our future together.

Okay, okay, sorry about the wishy-washy.

Before either of us knew about these opportunities, I bought a small coffee maker at Target, so that I can make my Starbucks coffee at my house (my parents drink Maxwell House or something like that, and somewhere along the line I became a Starbucks snobjunkie). It was on sale for $12.99, and even though it’s just a Black & Decker, it’s not bad at all. (Although, my dad warned me that Black & Deckers don’t really last that long, so we’ll see.) I bought the coffee pot also thinking that Mike and I could use it in our future apartment, since a five-cup coffee pot is just perfect for us.

I thought it was pretty interesting that, the very next day, we both got news of possible advancements that would be huge for each of us. This is probably why I’m fairly confident that we will be getting confirmation of these advancements very, very soon.

The same day, Aunt Rikki told me that she has a complete set of dishes that were her and my mom’s grandparents’ that she wants to give Mike and I. I never met my mom’s grandparents. I was still a baby when my mom’s grandfather passed away, and my mom’s grandmother passed before I was born. My dad’s grandfather also passed away before I was born. Biz Noni — his wife, my dad’s grandmother — gave me his typewriter a month ago. Grandpa Frank was also a writer. I’ve read some of his poems, and it’s really cool to know that we share the same gift.

All of this history being passed down to me makes me wish that I’d met these people, and also makes me afraid that my own children won’t meet Noni, Popi, or Biz Noni.

Popi just came home a couple of days ago from his fourth round of chemo up at the VA hospital. I hung out with him and the rest of the family tonight. This morning he had a bloody nose that hadn’t stopped an hour later. Because he’s on blood thinners, Noni was concerned and brought him to the ER here in Waterbury — the VA is in New Haven — where they cauterized his nose. He said that his nose bled for a good three hours. My poor Popi can’t seem to get a break. However, I should note that I learned tonight that he typically has a bloody nose at least twice a week — and this has been going on since before the chemo. The blood thinning aspirin that he is on and the chemo made it even worse this morning.

Other than that, he is doing well. He looked pretty good tonight. You almost can’t tell that he is fighting such a vicious disease. He didn’t feel too well on Saturday (probably from the chemo), so he didn’t go to my sister’s birthday party. I’ve been feeling guilty, because I’ve been doing pretty much nothing but working and haven’t made any time to stop down and visit with my grandparents (I count my great-grandmother, Biz Noni, in with “grandparents”). It felt nice to hang out with everyone tonight.

Two of the people from my writers’ group, Chick and my old professor, have agreed to help me edit Secondhand Mom when I finish it. My goal is to finish it by the end of this month. Here we are, on the 15th, and I haven’t written anything for it in over a week. I did do some workshopping with Chick last week, working on a little character development, but I’d rather work on character development during my first edit. I think that will be my biggest focus. I’ll count on my readers — Chick, Professor Harding, Mom, Aunt Rikki, and Jess — to help me with the other stuff.

I’m so close to done. I just need to wrap up this big client project, and then I’ll have more free time during the last couple of weeks of the month to finish the first draft of my manuscript. And then I’ll be able to say, “I just wrote a novel. I actually finished it!” (I technically have finished another one, but it was only about 49,000 words and I am ignoring it forever because I’m pretty sure it sucked. I attempted to edit it once, then completely forgot about it.)

Other than that, I am now on 300mg of Seroquel. This stuff seems to make me even more fatigued than normal, and I think it has also made me gain a few pounds, so I am thinking of signing up for a gym membership. I despise exercising, and I have a hard time sticking to things, but I cannot afford to keep replacing parts of my wardrobe. I just recently grew out of my size 5 pants and am a size 7 right now only because I am wearing my only pair of stretch pants. All of my other pants are very uncomfortable, unless you count my sweats, leggings, and pajama bottoms. This is also slightly messing with my self-esteem, although I think the Seroquel is keeping me from completely going off the deep end over it; in the past, I would have freaked out and would have started eating less and less. Then again, I would like to think that I have fully moved past that behavior.

I have a lot to tell you about my last appointment with my PA-C and the next steps we’re taking, but I think I’ve rambled on enough today. Leave me a comment and tell me how YOU are doing, huh? (:

I love myself because…

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Today is Self-Love day, created by Hilly! What exactly is Self-Love Day? It’s today — also known as Valentine’s Day — and it’s a day to celebrate what you love about yourself.

Please go see what I love about myself over at the Letters of Love blog, and leave a comment over there to share what YOU love about yourself.

Review | The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

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I cannot count how many times I had to look away from the page I was on, drawing in breath sharply as Susie’s pain and the pain of her family and friends burned into me. Alice Sebold‘s prose is powerful; if you’re not careful, The Lovely Bones will knock you flat on your back.

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

There were parts where I could not bear to mark the page and put the book down, which led to me spending a couple of nights reading until four in the morning. I greedily took in page after page, desperate to know whether Susie’s killer would be caught or if her body would be found.

However, there were also long stretches of nearly nothing happening, contributing to making this novel hard to read. While Susie’s thoughts about her heaven and the trains she rode on Earth and the Evensong were interesting, there was little action during these parts. It was during these stretches that I would mark my place and go back to work or whatever I was doing before the siren call of the book made me pick it up.

There were a few things that really jumped out at me throughout reading, and I’d like to share them with you.

On page 249, Ruth writes in her journal that “booze affects material as it does people,” after observing that alcohol stained her black clothing an even deeper black. I thought this was an incredibly interesting perception, adding even more depth to the novel itself and to Ruth’s character.

I liked how Sebold tied together Susie’s and Lindsey’s childhood game of knight and widow with the dynamics of the relationship between Susie’s parents. Susie muses over Lindsey’s favorite line from their game — “How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?” — on page 276.

I did not like Ruth’s out-of-body experience and temporary trade with Susie. I thought it added an ethereal feel to a novel that had, up until then, been mostly rooted outside of fantasy and focused more on what happened to a family after the loss of a child.

I was not at all impressed with the ending. In fact, I was very disappointed by it. I felt that I had stuck with the book through some very painful parts, and that it was a miracle that I had been able to get through those parts. I thought that I deserved a much better conclusion for being so loyal through such grievous subject matter. Susie’s subtle revenge and the final lines of the novel itself were highly anticlimactic for a novel that — for the most part — kept me turning page after page.

Still, it was a great book. Sebold is an amazing writer, evoking your emotions even if you haven’t experienced losing a child. The Lovely Bones is actually Sebold’s first novel, which is surprising because I would have thought — from the expertly paramount writing — that she had written dozens before sitting down to make The Lovely Bones come to life.

Now I know why Mike hates Tyra so much

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I just got home. I changed into sweats and plopped down into a chair in the living room. Mom was watching the Tyra show. I should have known what I was getting myself into.

A young woman with Alopecia was talking about how commercials about hair made her sad.

“Okay, I can understand it being hard living with Alopecia, but don’t make it into a sob story and whine about commercials. That would be like me saying that commercials about sitting make me sad, since the invisible rash is on my butt today. Fuck, man,” I said, rolling my eyes.

Then the next girl came on. Tyra said something about how today’s show is about people living with debilitating issues, which sort of piqued my interest. And then the girl opened her mouth to tell her story.

“I don’t like my smile,” she said, as if the fact that she had a couple of crooked teeth was the most horrible thing in the world, as if she just couldn’t go on living with an imperfect smile.

I thought I might throw up. Seriously. How can you possibly sit there and dramatize living without smiling because you don’t like your smile, when there are so many people out there who actually have problems?

Now, don’t get me wrong. My little sister felt self-conscious for years about her smile, because she had an extra tooth and a few crooked teeth. But she sucked it up, got braces, and grew up to be the confident eighteen-year-old that she is today. (Her birthday was yesterday. Happy birthday again, little sis!)

I don’t exactly love my smile, either, but I don’t sit there and whine about it.

“What did you expect? It’s the Tyra show,” Dad said.

“Yeah, I know. I should have known better.”

We all dislike or even hate some things about ourselves. But demonizing these trivial things makes you look like an egotistic airhead. Hello, EVERYONE has imperfections. It’s what makes us human. Now, talk to me when you can’t walk because you have a degenerative disease, like Lou Gehrig’s or an especially aggressive form of Cerebral Palsy. Then, sure, go on TV in front of millions of people and talk about living with something that is debilitating. But don’t dramatize something that most people just deal with.