Survivors.

So the time has come to post again. I am still FRESH OUT, SON, of ideas. I mean, you can only blog about Purell and new Advanced Purell ("takes less to do the job"(TM)) so many times. So what now?

I think I'll free-associate here.

So my most recent meeting with Dr. P

As I was saying, my most recent meeting with DR MOTHERFUCKING P, went poorly. We kind of have nothing to talk about anymore. Kind of like me, and this blog. Nothing to talk about. He asked questions, but my answers to those questions we vague and were almost always "I don't know." Or, "I feel like, I don't know, it's complicated, I don't know."

So now what? He seems unwilling to delve deeper, like delve into the sources of my OCD (which I could easily explain to him, since I KNOW how they started). He seems unwilling to talk about much at all, except for my meds.

Now, I feel a certain, how do you say, oh yes, kinship with this man. 

I've been seeing him for at least a year and a half. So it would be traumatic to attempt to start seeing a new therapist, and having to explain the SAME SHIT ALL OVER AGAIN. So on one hand, I feel sort of bound to him. On the other, he's not really doing much for me. Other than carefully monitoring my medication--I can give him that much. (PS: Awesome sidenote--the meds I'm on, combined with a less-than-stellar diet, have caused me to gain approximately 2387438 pounds exactly. I am positively rotund. Bygones.)

So anyway, Dr. P. He seems to want to farm me out to another therapist--he's constantly on my case about seeing someone who specializes in CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy)--which is a whole lot of "be present in the moment, acknowledge your pain, feel grounded, put your feet on the fucking floor, know that this too shall pass." Good advice for normal people. But I'm not normal.

I will continue this later, because as heretofore mentioned, I have nothing to say. A lot of words to say nothing I have to say, but still. I must go wash bottle nipples. Yes my two-year-old child still uses and loves her bottle. What of it?

More later.

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It's later. I've currently got cupcakes burning in the oven, where my five-year-old drizzle-dripped that batter right the hell into those cupcake papers, or near enough. And then she licked her fingers. Salmon-to-the-ella, what what? Oh well, I survived, she will too. Maybe that's my Luvox talking, but we'll be OK. After a small bout of diarrhea.

The other day, we went to a birthday party at, get this, CHUCK E. FUCKING CHEESE. As if anything could be any grosser. So my kids touched tokens, and went on rides, and climbed climbers, and then ate horrible pizza, and yet survived. So far with no ill effects. Except for the E. Coli. Bygones.

---

Today I plan to take the kids to the park. I'm only doing it because I promised last night I would, so I can't get out of it.

Edit: Mission accomplished! We actually went to two parks. Go me! The kids had an absolute blast. Here are a bazillion pictures of the cutest chitlins ever:

Lots of fun, right? I even let them play in the dirt and gravel. Although I did periodically Purell them and when we came home I made them strip naked and wash their hands for four hours.

Love,

Jo

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.

---

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

---

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.

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.


---


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.