pronoia

General Update

It's t-minus-19-hours until Ms. P gets her sleep machine. Technically, she's "working from home" tomorrow, but I suspect that's going to turn into "napping from home." All hail the sleep machine!

Soon I'll stop talking about sleep, I promise.

In the meantime, as I was getting in to work this morning I noticed how different it felt. I mean, I wasn't wildly excited to be at work, but I was looking forward to it with the kind of satisfied, cheerful, can-do attitude that I remember about myself. Sure, sometimes I don't quite feel like I have enough to do, and I'm trying to learn more (and will do better at that once I've slept!) so I can do some writing, but I love my colleagues and I feel good about the work that I do and the value I bring, and so work feels like just the thing I do, instead of something I have to force myself to do.

And until I find the thing that is mine to do, well, this is a lovely thing to do in the meantime.

When the Cat's Away, the Mouse Will Sing Karaoke

R is picking me up in about half an hour so we can go to a new queer bar he found, a queer bar that has karaoke on Wednesdays and Sundays. We were bemoaning the fact that we'd never go, because I'm not so good with school-night outings that don't start until 9, but hey! it's a holiday weekend!

Ms. P is laughing at me and saying I'm really living up the bachelor life. Given that I only got dressed ten minutes ago and I've ordered in pizza, well, she has a point.

R and I have both already downloaded and read the songlist. I'm looking forward to high cheese in the form of drunk singing, maybe a pool game or two, and a gin and tonic. My tastes, they are very pedestrian.

Kicked in the Teeth: An Update

So, I'm missing my nephew's first birthday party this weekend in GradSchoolTown because of my sister's surgery. I remember well what I felt like after my surgery: days of being unable to get up and down from the upholstered chairs because of the stress on my abdominal muscles,eating soft foods that wouldn't stress out my newly lasered system, still taking percocet a week later, wearing overalls to work a week after the surgery because I still couldn't stand the pressure of a waistband on my belly.

My sister, on the other hand, called me after the surgery to say she felt fine and that she and her best friend were now going to figure out how they were going to spend the rest of their day.

Now, the doctor didn't actually find any disease in her abdomen, so she didn't experience getting her insides lasered, and I'm happy for her that it was so, but it's only going to add to her belief that I'm just a wuss and that's why surgery was so hard on me. Stupid sisters.

I'm pretty upset that I'm missing my nephew's birthday for no apparent reason, but there's nothing to do at this point but make the best of it. I intend to bake cookies and paint the back hallway. And maybe clean and definitely sit around and watch bad movies. It wasn't the plan, it's not my preference, but a weekend at home by myself isn't such a bad deal.

Especially since R is taking me grocery shopping, lovely man that he is.

And, just to keep the sleep-and-surgery theme going, Ms. P has an appointment with the medical supply place on Wednesday, and her insurance pays for the equipment 100%, no copay. We aren't sure whether she'll walk out with equipment or whether they'll send it to us, but either way, it looks like we'll have resolution to that issue in another week or 10 days at the outside.

Finally

Ms. P finally got the results of her sleep study. Clinically significant apnea is 5 breathing stoppages an hour. She had over 60, so more than one a minute. No wonder she's been sleepy all the time!

She's got to call the doctor back and get hooked up with the home medical equipment company that works with her insuance, but the doctor wants that to happen as soon as possible, so we've got our fingers crossed that we can get this taken care of pretty quickly.

Meanwhile, my sister's surgery was scheduled for three hours ago, so I'm waiting to hear how she is. I'm not looking forward to spending three days tending to her, but three nights sleeping by myself (and thus without Ms. P's apnea!) will probably perk me right up.

Sleep, Glorious Sleep

We have a lot riding on this sleep machine.

To hear us tell it, it'll fix our housework woes, save us loads of money, help us lose weight, and make us nicer, kinder, gentler people.

And I'm only slightly kidding.

We know that we're starting to sound like a late-night infomercial -- this will change your life! -- but everything we're reading and everyone Ms. P has talked to who's gone through it themselves suggests that it's actually true. Oh, sure, it's not going to help Ms. P actually notice and think about the dishwasher (the bane of her existence), but not being completely sleep-deprived is likely to make her more able to tolerate doing housework even if she doesn't like it. She's not likely to suddenly become supermodel-thin, but getting actual sleep is going to have an effect on her metabolism and her appetite and thus her weight. If she's got energy when we come home from work, she'll cook dinner, and we won't eat out as much and we'll save a lot of money.

The thing is, none of these are outrageous desires and none are even outrageous expectations. If we can eat at home during the week, if Ms. P has a little energy to spare, if she's feeling less hungry and more able to move around in the world, all of these things are likely to happen.

But it's also humbling to see just how many things in our lives have been affected by this problem. Her moods have been pretty well controlled by her meds, but it's a shallow control -- missing even one dose can sink her a little bit, and any stress at all makes her voices act up. Because she expends so much energy holding it together out there, she tends to fall asleep on me during time we spend together, which makes me feel kind of abandoned and taken for granted. If she's sleeping, she's not likely to be wrecked by a day trip or even a weekend at the Farm, not like she has been, which will make me less cranky about the whole thing.

It's not a magic bullet, not quite, but it's close.

And it means that, right now, we're in a holding pattern. What's the point of struggling around housework right now when we could just wait and get sleep and try again? What's the point of going grocery shopping and trying to eat at home when we know just how exhausted we're going to be?

That's not to say I don't have some fears around this, too. If Ms. P is sleeping more and having actual energy, will she use it to be with me, or will she spiral off into increased overcommitment? If this doesn't help the housework problem, what the hell are we going to do?

But for the moment, we're spending a fair amount of time fantasizing about what it will be like when we're actually getting sleep. And after what appears to be years on end of being woken up many times an hour, we can probably handle someone's infancy.

Because No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

I found out tonight that my sister has been trying for a year to get pregnant, that she's had two positive pregnancy tests that didn't make it long enough for a beta, and that's why she's having this surgery, so she can proceed to IUIs under a doctor's supervision with insurance coverage.

Oh, and not only had she not told me or our mother (which was definitely the right move), she only recently told her best friend, the woman she's been best friends with since they were nine, the woman who lives down the street from her and whom she talks to every day. She told no one. How crazy is that? How is that even possible?

So once again, I'm sitting here feeling kicked in the gut. I'm simultaneously marveling at the cuckoo-craziness of my family of origin because wow, there's some fucked-up shit going down. Getting lapped on both sides of the family is going to suck something awful.

Lazy

It's a beautiful day outside, and the only obligation I have today is dinner with my sister. Part of me thinks I should tidy the yard, clean the kitchen, pick up the house, or otherwise do something virtuous. But really, I'm laying around watching X-Files episodes and playing solitaire and wishing it weren't already so late in the day, because there isn't enough laying-around time left.

For Once, It's Not Me

Apparently, Ms. P has been getting no REM sleep. At all. She went for a sleep study last night, and while the tech couldn't tell her anything about her results, as he put it, if she registered a certain number of apneas in a given period of time, they'd switch her over in the middle of the night to the CPAP machine to see if it helped, and she could draw her own conclusions. But she didn't hear it from him.

So yeah, no REM. Serious, chronic sleep deprivation of this order is associated with everything from weight gain to ADHD-like symptoms to bipolar to type II diabetes. Scary stuff.

Of course, now we have to wait for a week for the official conversation with the doctor and then there's another delay until she gets the CPAP itself, but this is really good news.

In less good news, my sister is having surgery next Friday to see if she has endometriosis. There's only three women in my generation on any side of my family, and two of us had already been diagnosed, so this is troubling, to say the least. Even more troubling was that my sister was planning to spend the long weekend entirely alone, without help of any kind, and no one thought this was a problem worth doing anything about. Having had that surgery, I know that plan is total crap. Maybe she'll recover more easily than I did, but it was days before I could make lunch for myself, much less do anything more complicated.

But yeah, lots of health issues, none of them mine this time.

Insides, Insides

My food restrictions and I haven't been on the best of terms lately. There are lots of "practical" reasons why  (prepared food at the company retreat, camping with communal cooking, lack of groceries, unbelieveable exhaustion, etc.), but in each of these cases I could have, with just a little bit of effort, worked my way around.

And let's review: I'm supposed to be staying away from wheat and dairy, and, if possible, HFCS. This isn't all that complicated. I don't much like bread or pasta, but I love rice. I adore really good ice cream and fresh mozarella, but I don't miss most cheese and actually think it's kind of gross. I love cookies, but I can be made happy with really good dark chocolate, which generally has neither dairy nor wheat nor HFCS. I like my veggies to taste like veggies, so I'm not used to butter or cheese toppings on everything. I have a small Coke addiction, but I'm assiduously replacing it with Honest Tea. In theory, none of this is that hard for me to do.

In reality, though, it can be challenging, especially if we're eating out a lot, as we have been lately. (See "exhaustion," "lack of groceries," above.) With the exception of broccoli, green beans, carrots, and lettuce, restaurants don't serve much in the way of veggies because they're harder to keep stocked. So I'm left with meat and maybe some rice unless the place has really good salads, and for some reason this area is not so hip on the really good salads. Enter Thai food, sushi, and Indian food, most of which fits the bill, but these, too, get old. And if, as is happening frequently these days, I'm feeling squeamish about industrialized meat, I tend to want to avoid meat when I'm eating out. In other words, as long as we're eating out, I'm screwed one way or another.

Eating at home isn't a whole lot better in many ways, because while the selection of food is more appropriate to my system, it involves us having to actually plan, cook, and clean up, and even when we manage the first, the second trips us up. Worse, it ends up feeding into the housework crisis we're in the middle of, and it's easier to just throw up our hands and get something else.

See how well I can rationalize the calzones, the tzatziki, the bruschetta, the buffalo mozzarella? It's not that any of the above is untrue. Far from it! But the difficulty and the inconvenience is not the whole story, since I managed to avoid wheat, dairy, and HFCS for months at a time when I was single in graduate school, and friends, I don't really cook.

Walking to Whole Foods today to buy iced tea (and thereby break a $20 so I could pay for my $5 massage), I realized that part of what's going on is that, in this culture, especially if you're female, a "treat" is anything that is "bad" for you. This is usually defined as ice cream, chocolate, sweets, celebrity magazines, bad television. What's hard about food restrictions is not that I'm actually deprived. It's that the foods I'm restricted from shift over into the land of "bad for me" and therefore into the land of "treat."

And so, when I'm already feeling alone and vulnerable, as I am right now (see Mother's Day, writing the adoption letter for L&S, confronting the first birthdays of everyone else's kids, housework conflict, feeling isolated from my friends, lack of real downtime, BFF's emotional crisis, dog fight residuals, hosting V, trying to figure out vacation plans when the dogsitter can't come, etc.), food is one of the ways I comfort myself. I "deserve" a "treat," when the real issue is that I'm feeling sad or anxious or depleted or frustrated or defeated or hopeless or exhausted or whatever. And just to make it harder, when I'm feeling alone and vulnerable, mustering the extra energy it takes to ask for what I need at a restaurant or help spearhead cooking at home is more than I have to provide.

I don't miss bread, but suddenly I'm eating toast at breakfast. We don't eat pizza for months, and suddenly we're having pizza or calzones at least once a week. We're getting up too late to eat breakfast at home, so I'm getting bagels next door to work. It's a bodily version of the pathetic fallacy: my metaphorical insides feel crappy, so I make my literal insides feel crappy, too.

None of this is rocket science, and neither is the repair: take better care of myself emotionally. But I'm struck again by how interconnected it all is, how subtle and fine the tendrils are, how it all comes back to the same thing: tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.

Reason #1,326,428 Why Heather Corinna Rocks

Her explanation for how she does the sex ed she does. If you don't know Heather and her work, she's a sex educator, activist, artist, Buddhist, and all-around amazing person.

I clearly need to go read some Maria Montessori, not only for sex ed, but for rearing kids and educating adults and everyone in between, on any subject.