The Acid Test.

This is a hard one to blog about, because it involves a dear friend of mine. She doesn't know about this blog, though, so don't worry your pretty little heads or wring your grimy little hands.


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So lately I've been wondering if I'm "getting better." See, I was seeing a shrink for awhile, not for talk therapy but for hardcore meds, because this has gone on too long and there are parts of it that are too much for me to bear. The weight of this can be crushing. And none of it, I feel, is something I can "talk through." So off to Mr. PhD it was, at $300 an hour. It's cool, we gots mad insurance though my husband's badass job, right?*


*I discovered a month later that Mr. Dr. is not a preferred provider, so we owe the $300 deductible and 20% of every other visit I had, whereas usually every medical visit of any kind is completely, 100% covered. Surprise!deductible.  Shitballs.

Anyway, at first Mr. Dr. was aiiiight, starting me off on a regimen of meds that he felt would work. He also quite literally prescribed, on a prescription pad, one hour of pure alone-time, each and every day, where I could do whatever I wanted, in total peace. I straight-up laughed in his face. Do you have children, Mister Doctor? I wanted to inquire.


I liked him a lot at first, but then he started rubbing me the wrong way. After a few less than stellar visits, one time I showed up at the bum-bum crack of 4 pm, my precise appointment time, and I waited in the office, alone, no receptionist in sight, for 25 minutes. Eventually Mr. Dr. emerged from his office with his previous patient, unapologetic, and soon after, we set about having our session. Our session had been scheduled as a 30-minute block that time. At the end of the appointment, he said to me, clearly irritated, "We got a little off track today. This went on for almost an hour, so next time we need to stick to the timeframe." I was struck dumb and just stood there and nodded, then waddled off with my tail twixt my legs like a dog what doesn't even know that it did something wrong.

When I got in my car, 1.5 minutes later, my car clock verified that it was 5 pm on the nose. Our appointment had run 35 minutes, max. More like 32.5. Not one hour. I was like, "Is HE the one who needs meds? Did he not realize his previous patient ran 25 bloody minutes over?!" It actually really upset me, for days and days, and kept me up at night! (I couldn't let go of it, for some reason, and actually considered emailing him to say, "Kind Sir, are you not aware that it was the extreme tardiness  your previous patient which caused our 30-minute session to end at such a late hour? I demand an apology within the fortnight.") So that kind of put the last nail in the coffin. I didn't want to see him anymore, and certainly not at $300 a MF hour.


So instead I started seeing my general practitioner, whom I generally love anyway. I figured, if this was all about brain meds, and the psychiatrist got me started, she could continue from there. She ended up disagreeing with some of his thoughts and choices of meds (what's so wrong with taking large doses of benzos? o hai five klonopin and 6 xanax!! Er, never mind), and we worked out a slightly different med situation. I have been and will be continuing to work with her. I've been feeling better at times, and when the moment came where I thought to myself, "OSHITZ, Maya picked a crayon off the floor of the restaurant and then continued to use it, eh, fuck it, who cares!!!", I thought, "Hey! I'm getting better!!"

Well, then came the Acid Test. 

A couple months ago, I hung out with a friend and her kids at their house. Both her kids are often sick. They are a family that just doesn't put the same importance on handwashing as I do, and it seems that everyone almost always has some illness or another. But because I know how often their kids get sick, every time I see one of them grab Maya's hand and trot off to go play their room, that vise inside me tightens. My brain sweats. My heart races. I want to scream out "NO! DON'T TOUCH HER!!" This sounds irrational, and yes, I GET THAT IT IS TO YOU, but it is not irrational to ME.* And I cannot stress enough to you how often and how badly these children and their parents get sick. It is one fever after one snotty nose after one deep hacking cough after another. Rinse, repeat. So every time I get invited over, or my friend wants to get all the kids together to play, I die a little.


And every time I visit them, almost without fail, the very. next. day, my friend Facebooks that her kids have fallen ill. And I think to myself, "Fuckshit!! I'mone die of teh plague." 


*No, you don't have to tell me that this is my brain making excuses for my behaviors. I am aware that I have a disorder. However, many if not most of my behaviors and actions (handwashing, affinity for Lysol wipes, etc.), I will stand firmly by, disorder or not. There is right and there is wrong, and while I can be "extreme," I am also most assuredly right. pthtbhtbhb. 

So a couple months ago, this friend (whom, honestly, I dearly love, despite her differing ideas and opinions on hygiene) invited us over to graciously cook us up a chicken dinner. After welcoming us into her home, she wanted to hold the baby, and she knows me well enough to understand that the Hot Tin Slider House Rules state in no uncertain terms that if you want to hold the baby, you wash your hands first. So God bless her, she washed her hands. After she held little Naomi, we all went into the kitchen to help with the meal. She started the chicken.


And listen. I don't mean to throw my friend under the bus. I am only here to report on what I saw, what I as someone who has OCD sees and notices. That is what this blog is about. What do I see, through my eyes? What do I notice, as someone who is obsessed with noticing germs? 


And here is what I saw and noticed: chickin-drippins, they was getting everwhere. And her chicken-hands were mixing up the salad I brought, and touching the counter, and opening doorknobs, and all over the refrigerator, and so forth. She would use her hands to open the lid of the garbage can that literally had streaming ribbons of wet God-knows-what on it, and then shove something deep inside said garbage receptacle, and then carry on with food prep. The chicken sat out a good two hours before being cooked. She also kept using utensils (spatulas, fork-prongs, grabby-things, etc.), that she had dug out of the sink. The sink, FFS, where other dirty dishes lie, where raw meat has dripped, where hands have been washed overtop (well, OUR hands anyway), where all manner of epic, epic germs live. The sink, where an estimated 500,000 bacteria per square inch wriggle and writhe and mock me. Jesus mother of Mary. So, our chicken dinner got cooked up with a filthy sink spatula. Awesome. My soul cried.


Occasionally, she'd exit the kitchen to go help her daughter blow her nose, or help her son wipe his bum-bum after he screeched out, "Mom, I poooooped in the potttttty!!"


Not to mention, there was a pet turtle. GOD IN HEAVEN A TURTLE.* Kid #1 was touching it and letting it crawl all about. I kept trying to quietly get Kid #1 to wash his hands, but he wouldn't. 


*Salmonella central.

In addition, my friend's boyfriend/babydaddy was sneezing, and both the children were looking feverish. The boyfriend actually asked his listless son at one point, "Are you feeling sick?" Cue my total mental meltdown. My heart shrunk ten sizes that day.


Then Kid #2 wanted to play with the baby. If you remember the Slider House Rules, you'll know that I make no bones about it, and I told her that she had to wash before doing so. But she'd wash, then come over and yank at the baby's hands for a few minutes, then go roll all over the carpet, yank a boogin out her nose, scratch at her wee bum-bum, shove a hand down her crotch, possibly even go pat Turkey the Turtle, and then come back for more baby touching. I didn't know how to stop her, without looking like a paranoid mental patient having heart palpitations and a severe case of dry-mouth. Which I am and was.


Now listen again. None of this makes my friend or her family BAD. It means they don't see what I see. My friend was raised differently, and she does not suffer my disorder, and she just plain and simple doesn't worry about the things I do. And again, none of this is to say "Wow, what a terrible person she is." It is to try to share MY experience, to show it to you through the eyes of someone suffering from intense germ anxiety. To show you how my eyes act as a Crimestopper Chopper 4 helicopter pilot with infrared night goggles, where germs are the hot-blooded robbers on the getaway. I see them. I see the germs, I feel the germs. I see everything, and it causes horrible anxiety.  


And that anxiety can ruin everything. Even lovely evenings with true friends, whom I love regardless of sink germs, and who love me regardless of the fact that they see me as totally apeshit bananas crazy in the noggin. My beautiful friend, she can be a saint to put up with me sometimes, I swear. This doesn't mean I don't wish she would take care with the chickin-drippins though. 

So the day was full of all the things I fear most. Raw-meat germs. Bum-bum germs. Escherichia coli germs. Sea-creature germs. BOY GERMS! Just kidding, I'm not six. And most of all, cold and flu germs. Sigh.


Alas, what should have been a pleasant dinner with a favorite couple and their darling children turned out to be something that caused me to panic. I played along, joked, laughed, talked, even forced down a few bites of Chicken Con Staphylococcus Aureus (an exotic recipe she picked up during her travels) (I kid, I kid), but inside I felt miserable. 


And I was just waiting, waiting for the next day, when I knew that my friend would be Facebooking, "My poor darlings have come down with 103-degree fever, Roseola, purple spots, Dengue fever, black hairy tongue, severe food poisoning, cold sores, pink-eye, swine flu, and The Grippe!"


Finally we made our exit. I make light of it, but all the way home I sobbed. I cried. I cried from the pressure that had been building up inside me. I cried because I was afraid. I cried because I'd wanted to have a good time and my disorder simply wouldn't let me. I cried because I feel helpless and hopeless. I cried because my friends are so generous and beautiful, and yet I can't always be comfortable around them. I cried because I don't want my infant to get black hairy tongue.


Now, granted, I don't usually feel THIS much anxiety when visiting other people. (So if you're my friend and you're reading this, honestly, my OCD-meter is not turned up this high when I am with you. Because you are not this particular couple with their particular couple-o-kids.) But it's still not fair that I couldn't enjoy myself. It's not fair that I spent the entire time panicked. It's not fair that I can't let Maya play with her two little best friends without wanting to scream, "OK, BUT DON'T TOUCH EACH OTHER!!"

And it's not fair that nothing's going to fix this. There is no pill I can take that will make me forget that there are germs on things. There is no pill I can take that will let me dreamily lounge around on my dear friend's deep, cozy velour couch (OMFG LICE) with an icy bev in hand, happily chatting away whilst her children are hacking and snotting seven feet away and playing Ring Around the Rosie with my daughters, hand in hand. There is, it always seems, no hope.


Because that day was the Acid Test. Are all my pills working? AM I GETTING BETTER? AM I??










No.

Origins, Part Deux: The Sequel.

And now on to the next origin of some of my bizarre-to-you phobias:

ORIGIN #2: WHY I AM ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED 

OF THE FUCKING COMMON COLD.

When I was pregnant with my first baby (actually, my second; I lost the first baby, but that is yet another story for yet another place. Well, no, same place, but...never mind.)...OK. So when I was pregnant with this baby, I had a terribly difficult pregnancy. Fear of another miscarriage (which was decidedly UNHELPED when I fell down the stairs at 6 weeks pregnant), intense 24/7 all-day "morning" sickness, early-labor scares (contractions, cervical changes, the whole nine), terrific pain caused by as-of-then undiagnosed Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, etc. So pregnancy sucked anyway. I was my usual careful handwasher throughout, but I worked in a place where almost no one washed their hands, and people always came to work when sick.*


*There is a special place in hell reserved for people who come to work sick, especially when they work closely with pregnant women.


If I may digress for a moment, the reason I knew that almost no one there washed their hands was because we worked in a building where for nine years I was lucky enough to have the office directly adjacent to the bathroom. The thin-walled bathroom. I could hear many things I never want to hear again. And of course, there was the lovely wafting of bathroom odors every time someone exited and strolled, 8 ounces lighter, past my open office door. So not only could I hear those sounds, along with the toilet and urinal flushing, but I could hear water running, the soap dispenser being pressed (seriously, I could), and I could hear the sound of our ancient, loud paper-towel crankyyankythinger. It was the kind with a lever that you pressed down over and over again to get your scroll of paper towels out. As I recall, about 12 depressions of the crankyyanky lever were sufficient to get the proper amount of paper towel.


Well. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Someone would pass my office, enter the adjacent bathroom, do their bidness. I and my keen ear (finely attuned to these particular sounds) would wait anxiously, so anxiously...but I'd say about 89% of the time, the person would exit without the precious sounds of water running nor the crankyyankythinger making its sound. Thus, absolute proof that they did not wash. And even worse was when that rank scent of bidness, that cloud of putrefaction, wafted after them. So not only did I know that they had not washed after doing their bidness, they had not washed after doing their NUMBER TWO bidness. Fuckers, all. You can see why I Lysoled the hell out of my keyboard and mouse on a regular basis, both because people sometimes used my computer and because I had to touch things around the office building that Nonwashers had touched. I also Lysoled the hell out of every touchable surface in the bathroom every day, and frequently had to refill the soap dispenser that had remained empty for God knows how long. I should have gotten janitorial pay.


I think one person caught on to the fact that I could hear the paper towel dispenser through the walls. My boss. He was always a Nonwasher, but at some point the following started happening: He would enter the bathroom; 20 seconds later I would hear the flush of the urinal; and then I would IMMEDIATELY hear the paper towel dispenser lever being yankcrankered. TWO TIMES. Two yanks. Two cranks. Halfheartedly, to boot. The thing is? Two yanks would expel approximately 2 centimeters of paper towel. This is of no use to anyone. Then the door would open 0.5 seconds later. So I know he was doing the yankycranky for my benefit, to try to fool me into thinking he washed. But Mister Bossman Sir, I am no fool.


OK, back to our regularly scheduled phobia.


Toward the end of my pregnancy, which was in October (hello flu season!!), everyone in the office was sick.* In overlapping schedules. First it was Christy and Sam and Lisa who were sick for a week. Halfway through that week, Bridgette and Ramona and Sara were sick for a week. Halfway through that week, Rachel and Danni and Theresa were sick. And so forth. And they all came into my office every 2.5 seconds for some godforsaken reason or another. After they left, I would spray Lysol into the air in the meek hopes that it would kill the breath they had breathed toward me. And I went through a vat of Purell weekly.


*Assholes.

Alas. My attempts at good health hygiene were no match for 8998347543 colds and influenzas running rampant. My drastically lowered immune system (thanks, pregnancy!), gave up the ghost. I got sick.


I had gotten my flu shot on Tuesday. It didn't have enough time to work. I was already feeling kind of crappy, but then again, I always felt crappy (thanks, pregnancy!). Late the following Thursday (well, actually in the wee hours of Friday morning), I called work and left a message that I was sick and would not be coming (because I am not an asshole). I always hated to call in sick, especially on a Friday, lest they think I just wanted a long weekend. But I was DEFinitely sick by now. I had spent all of Thursday evening and night coughing my lungs out. This was a quickly worsening cold/flu, and it pounded me hard and fast (twss).


Friday morning at about 10:15 am, I woke up sick like the dog. As I went potty for the zillionth time since the night before, I sat there and coughed and coughed. I coughed so hard I thought I would break my brain or rupture my eyeballs.


Well, I didn't rupture my eyeballs, but I did rupture my amniotic sac. As I stood up, I found that my water had broken. From coughing that hard. What's amusing (?) is that, had I opted to go in to work that day (like an asshole), my water would have broken on the drive over, since every day I was in the car driving to work from 10-10:30 am. Instead, it broke and leaked all over my bathroom floor. Gallons and gallons, I swear.


I was early, only 37 weeks along, but thank God I could be considered basically full-term. Still, that baby should have baked for three more weeks, and here we were, with premature rupture of membranes (PROM).


The coughing so hard led to this spontaneous PROM, but since my water hadn't broken because I was, y'know, READY to have a baby, I did not go into labor. Instead, I had to immediately go to the hospital (instead of going into labor naturally, then laboring at home for a long time, like I wanted) for antibiotics, since I was GBS+. Once there, I tried everything I could to get labor started. Walking endlessly, rocking in a chair, nipple stimulation *tweak tweak!!*, but nothing got contractions going. They gave me several hours to try, but since my water had already broken, there was a window in which I had to deliver: 24 hours. Not everyone agrees with this window, but I did, so I was OK with that assessment. The doctors knew that even if labor HAD begun, it could still take many many hours to actually deliver, but since labor hadn't even begun whatsoever, we needed to resort to pitocin to get shit up and moving. I had never wanted pitocin. I had never wanted interventions. I never wanted drugs. I wanted as natural a birth as possible. I had also wanted to NOT HAVE THE FUCKING FLU. Bygones.


The pitocin ended up working, thank God, and contractions happened and dilation happened and all that shit, but the added pain from the pitocin made labor unbearable. After eleven hours of hard labor (hard anyway, but made harder by pitocin, and made hardest by having the worst cold of my life), and only being 4 cm dilated with 6 to go, that was it. Epidural time. Another thing I never, ever wanted. 


Eventually the time came to deliver. And guess what I got to do? Deliver a baby while coughing my brains out. Sick, sick, sick like the dog, and trying to push a human being out my vaj. Good times. Good times.


And here's more TMI, since you are at the edge of your chair begging, "Jo, please, tell me more about your crotch!!" I had an awful second-degree perineal tear, and my cold lasted another month (I kid you not), so every time I felt my lungs tickle, I had to cross my legs and press them together as tightly as I could, say a prayer to the Patron Saint of Torn Vajayjays, and hope for the best as I coughed my soul out. Needless to say, I had one sore crotch. YOU try coughing with stitches in your whatnot.


Anyway, back to the birth. When the baby was born, she had trouble breathing. Thirty-seven weeks may be full-term, but it isn't full enough term for a lot of babies. She was chalky, a little listless, and full of fluid in her lungs. Her Apgars were only 7 and 7. The plan was for them to place the baby on my tummy and do all the standard observations there, and let me hold and nurse her, but instead they had to take her away for deep lung suctioning. I didn't get to have her back for almost an HOUR. (And as a sidenote, I am convinced that this lung suctioning was so traumatic to my minutes-old infant daughter that it gave her an oral aversion for life. She has always had issues with eating, with gagging, etc. As a baby, she hated and tried to refuse the bottle because I think the nipple deeply in her mouth practically gave her PTSS. Flashbacks to when they shoved a plastic tube miles down her throat.) Can you blame her?


She also never nursed well--couldn't latch correctly, was wildly jaundiced and therefore incredibly sleepy, among other things. Yet another side effect of being born not-quite-ready. So we were never able to establish a breastfeeding relationship, and I ended up pumping exclusively for seven months. Pumping was the bane of my existence. The failure to nurse caused me deep depression, as did the getting-up-round-the-clock-to-pump-even-when-my-child-was-sleeping-through-the-night. My relationship with my baby was affected, because I couldn't hold her or play with her as much as I wanted, since I always had to pump.


ALL THIS, because some fucker had come to work sick and given me a cold.


...


How is it that I constantly digress so deeply?


OK, so. Phobia:


Three years later I got pregnant again with little Naomi. And now, in addition to the myriad fears I already separately dealt with (miscarriage, birth defects, listeria poisoning, umbilical cord accidents, oh I could go on and on), I had to contend with a brand-new (or  at least drastically worsened) phobia: Colds. Why? Because I was afraid I would catch one and cough and my water would break. It was that simple. It wasn't an unfounded fear, because that did happen to me before.


I was afraid my water would break at 10 weeks and I would miscarry. I was afraid my water would break at 22 weeks, juuuust before the baby was viable and the baby would die. I was afraid my water would break at 24 weeks, the point of viability but at which point your surviving baby will likely have incredibly severe health and mental problems. I was afraid my water would break at 30 weeks. I was afraid it would break at 33 weeks. I was even afraid it would break at 37 weeks, "full term," lest we go through more issues like last time. I was afraid. I was just so afraid.


On top of it all, I was pregnant once again during and throughout flu season, and everyone around me was sick with horrible flus. Not only was I afraid of catching the common cold and coughing my baby out too early, but I was terrified of the flu. Inside my head, a battle raged: to get the flu shot or not?


Because I had contacted Dr. Google a few too many times, I'd read way too many horror stories of women who insist the flu shot was directly responsible for their miscarriage or fetal demise. Now, I understand--I understand--the huge number of women who get the flu shot while pregnant, and they and their child are just. fine. I get this. And the flu shot can, duh, prevent the flu, and the flu can be incredibly dangerous to pregnant women and their babies. So this was one half of the internal battle that raged. The flu shot could save me from catching swine flu and (1) getting ridiculously sick, far sicker than most people, because of a lowered immune system (thanks, pregnancy); (2) not being able to use any effective medications to achieve symptom relief, since almost nothing is safe to take during pregnancy; or (3) uh, dying.


The other half the battle was all the information I had gathered on how unsafe the flu shot was. I read through all the personal stories, even found medical information on respectable websites that recommended against it. Not to mention, I couldn't help but wonder why the flu shot is not recommended for babies under 6 months of age, but it is OK for fetuses to get? I was just too scared. 


One day, I'd wake up thinking, "Listen, this isn't worth the risk of catching the flu. Flu is srs bsns for preggos. Flu can kill me and thus my baby. Or at least leave me devastatingly ill and thus threaten the health of my baby as well. I'm going in first thing tomorrow for my shot." Then like half an hour later, I'd be all, "FUCK THE FLU SHOT, there is no way in hell I am risking even the remotest of possibilities that it could cause miscarriage." I just could not do it. I just could not inject something into my body where, if something happened to Naomi, I'd never forgive myself. Back and forth, back and forth my decisions went. I was so torn you cannot believe it. Torn like my poor poor perineum.


I eventually decided on NO FLU SHOT (or rather, the debate kept raging and I kept chickening out of it, up until I delivered in March, when it became a non-issue). But during the pregnancy, I protected myself the best I could--my husband got his shot, my daughter got hers, and my mom got hers as well. We employed an EXTREME REGIMEN of germ-avoidance practices (too embarrassing to detail as of yet). And somehow, no flu. I say somehow, but it was likely due to our excessive handwashing and other such OCD behaviors.


But, friends and worshipers, my point is, this was the origin of my extreme fear of catching even just a cold. I was terrified my water would break. I was terrified to lose my baby. It was incredibly hard to live with that kind of fear, to live in a constant state of anxiety. 


And I was constantly around sick people. Every single time I went to a family gathering, at least one asshole showed up sick. And at my husband's family gatherings, the SAME asshole showed up sick, every.single.time. Birthday parties. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Coughing her brains out. I was not only furious (she knows exactly how phobic I am, not to mention, hello, COMMON SENSE, GET YOU SOME, pregnant woman in the hizzay, don't come over if you're sick like the dog)...not only was I furious, but I was petrified. All I could do was pray to God to keep my unborn safe...and wash my hands.


And BY the grace of God, and the Patron Saint of Pregnant OCDers, I never did get sick. Thank you, dear 8 pounds 6 ounces newborn infant Jesus, don't even know a word yet, learning about His shapes and colors. Thank you. My second daughter was born at a much healthier 39 weeks on the dot. My water broke spontaneously again this time, but not due to being ravaged by sickness. And I DID go into labor on my own, and I did NOT need pitocin, and things were all around just dandy. Except for the excruciating pain. But whatever.


Still. The phobia remains. I don't entirely know why, since I'm not pregnant anymore and thus not afraid of losing my baby (although I AM afraid of my baby getting sick, since Dr. Google yet again has provided me with more horror stories, this time of babies choking to death on their phlegm in the middle of the night). But even now, in the middle of summer, with a healthy, bouncing 4-month-old and healthy, bratty almost 4-year-old, I am afraid. I still live with extreme anxiety. I am still on high alert. If my aforementioned keen ears so much as hear someone cough a mile away, every muscle in my body tenses and I want to hold my breath and run away forever. I still live afraid. Because no one ever said phobias make sense.


...Although, I like to think that mine at least DID make sense, because now you know why, where, and how it began: I just didn't want to lose my precious baby Naomi.