Poop on a Hot Tin Slide Park, Revisited. Also, Some Other Bullcrap.

So today my mom called up and said that she had a break from work from 11 am - 2:30 pm, and would I like to meet her at the park.

The park. THEE park. The one, the only, Poop on a Hot Tin Slide Park.

I said OK, because I am batshit crazy a masochist a fun-lovin' gal, and parks, ain't they just the funnest.

So first of all, just getting out of the house was bananas. Feed the baby burp the baby wipe up puke feed the kid put kid into play clothes change the baby's diaper put the baby in suitable clothes help my older daughter wipe her bum-bum and dump the poo-poo and MF sterilize the potty chair change baby's clothes again because she puked again and give older kid a snack get my own clothes on pack snack and juicebox and baby's bottle and sunscreen and hand sani but baby's hungry again so feed her, and on and on. Oh, and at one point, during one of the multiple diaper changes, Naomi decided to have a massive blowout...out both ends. Diarrhea shot out her bum-bum just as huge quantities of milk gushed out her mouth AND NOSE. And she was choking, but how was I supposed to turn her on her side with poop everywhere? Oh my God why.

THEN, when we were finally set, I couldn't find the Got. Damn. Baby Bjorn. Which I need, when we are at the park. I'm not going to lug around my huge heavy hulk baby all day, nor am I going to tote her about in her 289347-pound Graco seat. So I needed the Got. Damn. Baby Bjorn. And I knew my husband had something to do with the fact that I couldn't find it.

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Let us pause for this interlude. My husband, he is a purger. And I don't mean he's got an eating disorder. He can't stand things lying about the house, so he "gets rid" of things, and by things I mean clutter, and by clutter I mean objects that I STILL OMFG USE!! JC FUUUUCCKKK!!!*

*Sorry, I'm still a little upset [raging] over the time five or six years ago that he "donated" a bag of clothing to charity, without even looking inside. Had he looked inside, he would have seen that it contained all my most lovely, and very expensive, clothes. Beautiful dresses, including the one I wore to my brother's wedding. All kinds of other dresses, fancy skirts, gorgeous sweaters, etc. All my best things, hundreds and hundreds of dollars' worth of fancies. They were in the bag because we had only recently married, and thus I had only recently moved in, and I hadn't had the need to wear anything fancy since then, so hey, "my bad," they were still left in a bag in the garage. But come on. You don't expect your husband to look at a Mystery Hefty Sack and think, "I think I'll put that there bag of unknown origins containing unknown contents on the curbside during donation pickups, without even looking inside, because why the shit not?" /rage

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So OK. This morning after all the nonsense of trying to get both kids ready to go at the same time, then at the last minute not being able to find the Bjorn, I tore apart the house, trying to find where my saintly husband might have stored it, thinking it was just clutter lying about. I called his cell phone no fewer than 344 times, and of course it went to voicemail every time (like it always does when I need him, but I'm not bitter), and I left messages saying "WHERE. ARE. YOU. I. NEED. YOU."

I was breaking a sweat and I hadn't even gone out into the hot sunshine yet. Running so late, I had to sprint to my neighbor's house and say, "Can I borrow your Baby Bjorn?" Bless her heart, she let me use it. But holy crap MY heart[palpitations], because her Bjorn carrier was covered in a largely bit of baby pukage. OK. OK. I'll be OK. I can deal with this. She's doing me a favor. I love her. We'll just hang blankets over the Bjorn. OK. Let's get this show on the road.

Finally we arrived at Poop Slide Park and found my mom. Well, see, actually, I don't even know how I managed to find her, because there were approximately exactly 654,992,001 kids there. At noon-thirty on a weekday. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, it was "Take Your Entire Fucking Daycare/Summer Camp/Cub Scouts/Village/Bridge Club/Junior AA Meeting/Soccer Camp/Crocheting Camp/Fat Camp/Preschool Reunion To Poop-Park Day," and the place was positively swarming. It's a huuuuuge park, but it was full to the brim, and mostly of exceptionally rowdy, filthy boys age 8-11. The worst kind. I nearly perished.

So not only was it difficult for me to get out of the house, and obviously difficult for me to even agree to take the kids to Germville Happy Shiny Playland in the first place, but I'd had no idea what I was getting into and was just shocked and horrified and the sheer numbers of kids, surely carrying everything from malaria to mad cow disease to the black lung. And with so many kids covering every inch of the play toys at every second, there was no time for God's Disinfectant (sunshine) to do its job.

And the kids were all being so rough. They were practically knocking down my wee girl, and they were shoving ahead of her just as she'd get ready to slide (down a hopefully non-pooped-on slide), and they'd ram past me and knock into little Naomi, and they'd climb up the slides just as Maya was going down. I have no problem being THAT MOM who says, "Hey, take it easy, pal!" or "Slow down, dude, there's little ones here," or, "EVERYONE OUT OF THE SLIDE NOW, SOMEONE'S COMING DOWN." I am usually an extremely reserved person, and don't talk to people I don't know, and don't parent other people's kids, but when some 11-year-old monster is knocking down my kid, I will be that mom, because I am sick of kids that act like bullies at parks. So, just more stress on an already ridiculous day.

Also, I was a little pissed at my mom, who had been at the park long before I got there, and she didn't call to warn me and say, "Um, you might want to take a raincheck. This park is standing room only today, and veins will pop out on the side of your head and you will hyperventilate when you see this place."

Oh, and the borrowed Bjorn was still freaking me out, just a little, in the back of my brain.

But we played. My daughter had a great time, climbing and swinging and balance-beaming and sliding, though not sliding over any fossilized phantom dukes this time, praise Jesus hisownelf. But of course Maya kept touching her face and pushing wisps of hair out of her eyes and sticking her pinkie in her mouth (I swear as if to mock me), yea though I screamed as quietly as I could, "HANDS OUT!"

Then my mom brought up the idea of snack time. I'd brought some just in case, in the car, but my mom had them there at the ready, and they were the juicy sticky kind, like apple slices. (My snacks were dry and in wrappers you could hold as you ate them.) So I cleaned off Maya's hands (and, um, arms and elbows) with Kids' Sani-Hands the best I could--twice--then let her have some apples and carrots and such. My tension was so high it was ridiculous. Normally I'd never let her eat after playing at the park until we'd come home, washed, and then used hand sanitizer (unless it was Emergency Hunger, in which case I'd use 8 mile of hand-sani GEL and then give her a NutriGrain to hold by the wrapper).

So I'm sitting there, sweating from stress and from holding a hot Naomi in a borrowed barfy Bjorn, praying to the Patron Saint of Poop-Parks to just get me out of there. At last my mom had to return to work, and I had to get to work too, sterilizing the kids.

All told, and I'm sorry Mom, but I had an absolutely positively terrifically bad time.  Fuckin OCD. So unfair.

We got home, we stripped nekked, we washed, we hand sanied. Fed the kids, put them down for naps, and then got on my elliptical to manically burn off some of the intense, agonizing anxiety I had felt for the last couple of hours.

So that was the "Poop on a Hot Tin Slide Park, Revisited" part. 

What follows is the "Other Bullcrap" section.

Instead of trying to kill my fear with exercise, I would have just taken some of my prescription Xanax, but guess what? They don't work for me. Nothing does. Medications do not work in my body like they work in yours. Vicodin? Pssh. Percocet? I laugh in its face. Codeine? Nothing I've ever taken has ever touched my pain. Valium?

...Klonopin?? Let me tell you a tale about Klonopin.

Back when I was seeing the shrink, he thought Klonopin was just the thing I needed. I said, "Well shit, that's kind of rad!" I had told him of how prescription narcotics have no effect on me (NONE WHATEVER), and he said, "All right, now, I usually start my patients off with one-quarter of one pill. But with your history, I'm going to let you start with one full pill, and we'll go from there."

Throughout my time seeing him, I rapidly had increased my dose to six. Bish I said six. Six motherfucking Klonopin. Six, all at once. Do you understand the words that are coming outta my mouf?

And do you think they had any effect on me?

Because we were increasing my dose so immensely (he had only ever had one patient take this much Klonopin, in all his years of being a Mr. Dr. PhD Shrinkydink), Mr. Dr. had me go in for a blood test, just to make sure we weren't about to kill me. When the results came back, he said, with a bit of confusion and hesitation in his voice, "For patients taking Klonopin, the range of the amount of medicine in their bodies should be between 20 and 90. I like to see them at the upper end. Your results...well...they came back at 21."

AND THAT WAS AFTER TAKING SIX OF THEM. Six. Not one-quarter of one tablet.

I felt kind of vindicated. All my life I've been saying, "Pharmaceutical shit don't work for me, son." Not ibuprofen, not harder stuff. Percocet not only doesn't touch the pain, but it doesn't give me "a good time," either. Just zero effect. Alcohol doesn't affect me. (Well, I'm either unaffected, or puking, nothing in between. No fun stuff.) Caffeine doesn't affect me. Sleep aids don't affect me, whether OTC or prescription (and that sucks, because I've had terrible insomnia for 10 years).

I've always said that painkillers don't work and that surely there's got to be something more, and I've always felt like people think I'm just drug-seeking and that I want to get my hands on some oxycontin or something, but I'm so serious about meds not working that when I go see the doctor for something painful and they offer me percocet, I say no thank you. I say don't even bother. I don't want them. They don't work. So doctors can take their vicodin and just place it up their bum-bum for all I care.

Years ago, after having my tonsils out and my broken nose surgically repaired simultaneously, and the pain was so immense, my mom finally got my doctor to try something else. It was an intramuscular injection.* I was to take it alongside two percocets, AND two prescription strength Motrin.

*I can't remember the name of it, but it's the kind that is supposedly so strong and gives you a "spectacular sense of euphoria" (according to the doc) that addicts all across the land go to the ER and feign headaches or something, just to get this shit. And here my doctor prescribed it, ALONG with percs and huge amounts of Motrin. And do you think it did anything to touch the pain? Do you think it even gave me this highly-desired and highly-sought-after sense of eufrickinphoria?

So anyway, back to my Klonopin tale. After this very vindicating blood test, my doctor said, "Your levels of Klonopin are nowhere near I'd like them, and nowhere near where they should be. Your body obviously just metabolizes meds at an incredible rate."  No shit doc, I knew that ten years ago, now here's $300 for your time.

As for Xanax...I almost fear even admitting this. (Will the Feds lock me away?) But I have tried taking seven of them at once. SEVEN! And do you think I felt anything? Calmer, happier, more content, less anxiety, even just plain old sleepiness?

If I were the criminal type, I should just be selling this shit. Instead of swallowing millions of percs, vics, klons, and xans, in the hopes that they will somehow MAGICALLY work this time, I should just be selling this nonsense and making thousands of dollars off it. But of course I am not the criminal type. lol.

But on that note, and I'm just curious...see, I'm not exactly street-drug-savvy, but what the hell do hardened drug criminals take? Like, how much do they buy on the street? What is a typical "fix" for someone who wants some Xanax? Because surely they're not out there popping seven. Are they??

I have a couple friends who, every now and again, post on Facebook, "Ugh, worst day EVER. So stressed. I just had to take half a Xanax." And my only reply to that:

It's just unreal. I have severe anxiety, and the best anxiety meds out there don't do anything for me. What am I to do?

Oh, and my antidepressant? I literally don't absorb it. I won't tell you how I know, but I think you can figure it out. Oh don't give me that look, come on. This is a blog about poop.

So no small fucking wonder I'm not "better" yet. Meds slide through me like a greased hog through Farmer Jedediah's eager hands, and my Super Liver processes things out so quickly that there's not a chance anything could work.



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Sooooooooooo...I'm not entirely sure what the point of this post was. I just kinda sat here and vented about my day, my purge-happy husband, and the crappy way my body doesn't respond to meds. Today sucked, and while there was no Raw Chicken a la King, I was paralyzed by fear at times.

All because I was at a park. :(

...Well, but I mean, it was the Poop on a Hot Tin Slide Park.

'Least my kid had a good time.