sueeeus

Still coughing.  How long has it been   Today is May 13th.  I complained about it on May 1st, and at that point, had already been in to it several days, or even a week.  So that makes it nearly 3 weeks now.  Just when I think about making a doctor’s appointment, things seem to be clearing up, so I change my mind.  Why get unnecessary meds   And then they don’t actually clear up.  Now I’m at the point of considering making an appointment, but again, this time, it seems like things are clearing up.  It’s no longer a dry cough.  It’s moved up to the throat region, and there was the old familiar post nasal drip, followed by full blown miserable cold again, and that’s nearly subsided and I’m left with some congestion, a cough, and that nasty disgusting phlegm.  Yuck.  Hate it.  But the thing is, my Boo boy is still a bundle of energy, even though he has a runny nose.  He doesn’t have a fever, and I’ve been successful at sneaking cough syrup into pudding to get him to take it.  I run the humidifier with eucalyptus oil at night for him.  He only coughs a few times, here and there.  But I go into fits. 

I think there’s something going on in the blogosphere.  A loss of energy.  A boredom.   A lethargy.  It seems like several of the bloggers I follow are going through this, as am I.  blah.  blah, blah, blah.

I’m very frustrated with my medical insurance company.  With our most recent contract, we supposedly don’t need referrals from our primary care providers any more, but I went ahead and got one, just in case.  Then, I called my insurance company when I got the referral letter, and inquired about coverages, should I be prescribed medical equipment (cpap for the sleep apnea).  I went through the questions in great detail, making sure my ducks were all lined up.  I called the clinic to ask if they’ve had any trouble billing my insurance plan before, and they assured me they had not.  I took a copy of my referral letter with me to my appointment (and left it there, I think, with the packet of information they had asked me to provide).  I think nothing of it, go on my merry way (not so merry, but that’s another story), have a sleep study (which probably cost a fortune, but I’ve not received the statement yet), have a follow-up sleep study (which also didn’t go well, although better than the first), and returned home to the first of the medical statements from the specialist.  And the insurance says…  Not covered.  Reason   No referral letter on file.  WTH   Of course I don’t have the referral letter in my hot little hands any more, but it exists.  It exists!  Arrrggggh, it’s so frustrating.  I got this news on a Friday evening, so I have to wait until Monday to straighten it out.  I don’t like waiting!  It makes me crazy, all these annoying thoughts milling about in my head about incompetence and general frustration.  Meanwhile, since the first claim got denied, if it doesn’t get cleared up, so will the second, and the third.  And those sleep studies probably cost a bundle, what with dedicated lab and technician time, for two entire nights.  I should be bigger than this and not let it bother me.  I should be calm and peaceful and just wait until Monday and straighten it out.  I tangle myself up in the stupid what ifs.  What if they deny the claim   Then I have to pay a bucketload of money.  Why would they deny it, when it should be covered   It should be.  It’s my right!  I followed the rules.  I turn myself into a victim at the mercy of an evil bureaucracy.  All these wasted emotions that I should rise above.  Mind, I’m not letting them get the complete better of me.  I’m blogging it out, to get it off my chest.  Perhaps then I can dismiss it from my active thought until later. 

Anyhooo.  Did I mention that I’m feeling blah lately   I have friends in the blogosphere who are going through frustrations of their own, stresses of their own, blues and blahs of their own, sorrows of their own.  I wish I could send some sunshine and fortune to rain down on them all, and brighten things up for everyone.

Prompted by several factors, not the least of which was an interrogation from my sister after observing that I clasped my hands to my belly as though I were ‘holding something precious’, I opted to take a pregnancy test.  Sure, I haven’t had a cycle since April.  Okay.  Well.  That is, umm, April of 2004.  Because it’s one of those quirky things about me.  I’m ovulatorily challenged.  Oh, I suppose the odd feelings of nausea and heartburn might have had something to do with it.  The only time I’ve ever had heartburn was when I was pregnant with my Boo boy.  And again, the frequent trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night might have sparked the faintest sneaking suspicion.  That, and the extreme fatigue I experience daily.  Plus, I’m no longer protected by any means of birth control.  As of April 3^rd (2006).  If it were possible, it would be another almost immaculate conception.  Considering schedules, bouts of sickness, and general exhaustion from keeping a 16 month old curious little boy busy and happy, there’s not a whole lot of lovin’ going on.  Ahem.

So.  The test.  Not just any test.  A Mr. Gadget approved digital test.  The one that is so easy, anyone can do it.  The one that is so accurate, there’s no way to honk it up.  The one that says you can take it any time of day or night, not first thing in the morning, like the other sub-standard low-tech tests.  The one that has a digital display that shows ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant’.  Because looking for two lines vs. one line is just too hard.  Or something.  Yeah.  Well.  Right.  So, when I take the test, I wait the requisite 3 minutes.  The display doesn’t show ‘pregnant’.  Neither does it show ‘not pregnant’.  No, that would be too easy.  It says, ‘see pamphlet’.  Great.  So I look through the pamphlet and find the troubleshooting section.  Yes, when you have a state of the art digital test, you need a section on troubleshooting and error codes.  Let’s see, what could be wrong.  Hmmm.  It’s very helpful.  It says, either too much or too little urine.  Yes, that clears it up.  I pulled the thing apart and what do you know, it’s one of those strips with one or two lines, hiding inside a fancy housing that detects (tries to detect) something, and then displays the results.  Looking closely at that strip, I see the faintest faintest hint of a second line.  I’ve played these games before, trying to will that second line to appear, but in general, in all my failed tests of days gone by, there wasn’t even the faintest whisper of a line, so I couldn’t even try to fool myself or get my hopes up.  This time   I don’t know.  The two positives I’ve had in the past were both faint.  Barely perceptible.

I’m not quite sure what to think.  I want to have another child.  Sooner than later.  Especially given my fertility challenges.  But the thing is, I had a mammogram on April 14^th.  With no lead jacket.  The technician asked me if there was any chance I could be pregnant, when I inquired about the lack of lead shielding, and I said no.  No!  (So freshly unencumbered by b.c.)  But what if   I have absolutely no idea when an egg might have been making its journey.  No idea at all.  So I have mixed feelings.  Exposure to radiation.  Ibuprofen.  Cough meds.  Aspirin.  Vitamin E.  I’ve taken quite a few things that shouldn’t be taken during pregnancy.  Especially early term pregnancy. I will take a follow up test in a week or so.  And pray pray pray that if it really is true, that I haven’t hurt my new baby.

All I had to do was sleep.  Sleep.  My modus operandi is to be snoring soundly within 3 minutes of lying down.  Out for the count.  Regardless of caffeine or sugar or other stimuli.  But this time, when I needed to sleep, sans stimulants, the land of slumber could not be found.  I tossed.  I turned.  My thoughts raced.  I tensed.  I prayed.  I pondered.  I meditated.  I imagined my body was filled with sand and visualized the sand seeping out, out, out, leaving me deflated, relaxed, and asleep.  To no avail.  I tried the technique again, imagining I was filled with water and let it flow slowly out.  Again, to no avail, other than needing another trip to the vay-say (WC).  I counted.  I tried deep breathing.  I planned.  I went through my to-do list.  I designed some landscaping features.  I contemplated my dream home.  I imagined Mr. Gadget next to me.  I imagined Mr. Snazzy Pants in my arms, or down the hall, or reaching for me, or simply sleeping soundly in his bed.  All to no avail. 

I’ve been going through some mid-life maintenance of late.  I’ve had my first mammogram (results ‘benign/normal’).  I’ve had a pap.  Oh joy.  I’ve been to the dentist.  I’m going to an allergist next week.  And I’ve been to a sleep specialist.  Because I snore.  And possibly choke.  I was to undergo a sleep study for obstructive sleep apnea.  All I had to do was sleep.

Eventually the nurse came in and said they needed 6 hours of data for a valid study, and there were only 1.5 hours left before ‘wake-up’ time, and I hadn’t slept yet.  I apparently have anxiety issues that I wasn’t aware of.  That, and I still had a nasty cough, and about 30 electrodes attached to my body in various and sundry places.  But most of all, it was my first night away from Mr. Snazzy Pants.  I couldn’t get him out of my mind.  I felt like such a failure.  I’d hate to have to repeat such an experience, but it looks like that is in order, as I have only about an hour and a half of sleep under my belt.  I left the hospital, sat in my car, and sobbed like a baby.  Missing my baby.  Hating the feeling of failure and inadequacy.

I called Mr. Gadget and sobbed some more.  Of course Mr. Snazzy Pants is fine, he said. 

Mr. Snazzy Pants (new nick name) is sick again.  (Consequently, so am I.)  Although I don’t care much for the sensation of rattling brains and oxygen deprivation during a coughing fit, I don’t so much mind, in the sense that this ailment isn’t painful or annoying apart from the coughing.  The head and sinuses are generally clear.  There’s no aching.  No fever.  No lethargy.  There is just this deep deep cough that is mostly unproductive.  It starts from a tickle and can easily end up in a fit if one doesn’t attempt to suppress the convulsions.  My son has had all of his shots, including 4 out of 5 installments of his Pertussis vaccine.  If a coughin fit does takes place, and goes unsuppressed, it gets unpleasant, with rattled brains and oxygen deprivation, or, with my son, the inability to keep one’s dinner down.  My fits seem worse than his, because I tend to try to cough something up, and that makes it worse.  When he starts to cough, he usually stops after a few coughs, but he did get caught in a gag reflex a couple of times and ended up losing the contents of his stomach.  I haven’t seen him have any trouble breathing.  We’re waiting it out.  The medicines we’ve tried are thus far ineffective.  I’m somewhat comforted in the knowledge that we are sharing the same malady, so I know that this particular bout doesn’t physically hurt as much as other maladies we’ve contended with recently.  But I am at a loss and wracked with anxiety over the helpless and concerned feelings I have for my boy when I hear him cough.  So much so that my anxieties surface in my dreams, and I dream unpleasant and frightening dreams that make we wake up in tears. 

When I have disturbing dreams, I try to explain why I’m so upset and describe the dreams to Mr. Gadget, but rather than comfort me, he tends to get angry or annoyed with me for letting the dream, which was so vivid, shake me up.  How can you even for a moment think it’s true, he’ll say.   True to form, he responded negatively to my mumbled description of the most recent dream.  He was angry with me for sharing the unpleasantries or even suggesting the possiblity of such.  Because in this dream, our boy was hurt.  It was convoluted, as dreams so often are, because the characters morphed back and forth and forth and back.  The gist of it was we entrusted him to somebody else’s care for a period of time and he ended up being hurt in a violated kind of way during that time, and I learned of it and it was too late for me to stop it, so all I could do was be horrified that this had happened to him, and hold him and try to comfort him.  I don’t know how to describe those feelings.  I woke up in tears at the moment of awareness, when the horror hit, and before the mama bear surfaced to demand retribution of the one who had harmed my child.  Mr. Gadget, on the other hand, was awake for a few hours after that, and angry as all get out, wanting to exact retribution right then and there.  The power of suggestion.  It was just a dream, and it was horrible.  It’s comforting, in a sense, that his papa bear surfaces immediately.  It tells me he would be swift to take action should anything ever happen.  God forbid.  It’s disheartening, also, that he’s not there for me, to give me comfort.  Comfort is what I seek when I wake up sobbing from a bad dream.  It’s also disheartening that the anguish cripples me enough to wake me, so that I don’t continue with the dream and perhaps do something constructive to remedy the situation like extinguish the bad guy(s) or conquer the evil.  I don’t get to learn what I might do if the situation was not fictional.  I don’t get to find out if I would be a hero.

I can point to various aspects of any given dream and correlate them to anxieties that I harbor.  Last night I put my sweet sleepy little boy in his bed, and stayed there with him as he fell asleep.  As I was caressing his face and hair, I was thinking of how much I wanted him to be well, all well, to stop coughing, to get over this silly bug.  Do we go to the doctor, do we not go to the doctor   We just went to the doctor.  Do we go back   We’re getting better.  There’s no fever.  He’s eating.  He’s drinking.  Things are moving through fine.  He’s playing.  He’s laughing.   I’m pretty sure the doctor would say we’re doing the right thing and all we can do now is let it run its course.  I thought all these things, and I also wondered if letting this run its course would actually strengthen him somewhat and build his immune system up so that it will be stronger in the future.  I’ve heard so many times and tales of people who have compromised their immune systems by overmedicating.

Anxiety!  There’s so much at play here.  Guilt.  Guilt for not going to the doctor.  We never went as children, and sometimes perhaps we should have.  Sometimes we definitely should have.  Am I like my mother   Ack, God forbid!  It doesn’t help that Mr. Gadget will invariably make some comment in a displeased tone about me not taking him to the doctor.  It’s all on me.  Why is that  

…or in my case, keeps the doctor employed. 

Of all the allergies to have, I get the one where I can’t eat fresh fruits and vegetables.  It’s an adult onset thing.  I’ve had pollen allergies for most of my life, and somewhere in my thirties I developed some food allergies.  The reaction is most intense with a few certain foods, but is present in many many foods.  It’s very annoying.  I’ve googled it before, trying to find out what the problem is, but didn’t find anything definitive.  At first I thought it might be pesticides, so I tried organics.  It wasn’t pesticides.  I found that apples, cherries, and hazelnuts cause the most severe reaction.  But I love apples!  I proceeded to torture myself by trying different varieties of apples and learned that some bothered me less than others.  Or so it seemed.  I could eat Braeburns for a while.  And then not.  I discovered Cameo recently, and had three successfully, with no reaction.  Last night I tried one, and ended up with blisters on my lips and tongue and swelling and itching in my throat/pharynx.  Very.Annoying.  I haven’t had such a severe reaction since I tried to eat cherries a few years ago.  The list of offending foods is long.  Apples, cherries, hazelnuts, celery, lettuce, carrots, peaches, pears, nectarines, apricots, plums.  Some of these things I eat anyway, because how am I supposed to live without salad   I’m not so heartbroken about the fruits because they’re sugar rich and I need to be careful about diabetes.  I have now discovered there is a name for this syndrome.  Yes, I have a syndrome.  OAS.  Oral Allergy Syndrome.  My self diagnosis is that I have birch and alder pollen allergies with cross reactivity OAS.  At least now I know.

I wish I could eat apples, though.

I’ve been feeling stressed out lately.  Like that’s anything new.  But this is a bit more so than the usual level of stressed outedness.  I’m seeing a tax accountant for the first time in my life, and the appointment is Sunday.  In order to prepare for this, I’ve spent hours and hours trying to capture expenditures, itemize deductions, find old receipts, figure out the basis for some property that I sold, and with that the slew of emotions that swirl to the surface when that whole chapter in my life gets revisited.  It’s a chapter that I don’t like to revisit, what with the ex, the lies, the deceit, the violations, the traumas, the shattered hopes and dreams.  There is that.  And there is the -deleted whinge on more financial matters-.  And another -deleted whinge on another financial matter-.  It’s our wedding anniversary tomorrow.  Not that that is stressful, but it’s one more thing in the current window.  He wanted to go visit his mother in the morning, two hours away, and we have a dinner reservation in the evening, and any time we go visit her, we never get back at any kind of a reasonable hour, no matter how hard we try.  I told him “No!  Absolutely no!”  This particular dinner is on a train, and there is no leeway for being late.  Also this weekend is daylight savings time.  Normally no big deal, but if I forget, then the appointment with the tax accountant will be impacted, and that would not be good for me at all, as it would add to everything else that I’ve already blown way out of proportion.  Then.  Monday.  Two doctor appointments.  One for the gp regarding a lump in one side of my throat, and no other symptoms.  What causes asymmetrical lumps   It’s been nearly three weeks and it’s getting better, or else I’m getting used to it.  The other appointment is with the ob-gyn.  That’s always fun.  This one will be even more so.  But I won’t go into detail.  Suffice it to say that I’m fairly certain there will be more than a little discomfort involved.  Oh yes.  I nearly forgot.  I am also resigned to the mortification that accompanies the process of standing on that damned scale at the doctor’s office, to which I will be subjected twice in close succession. I guess that’s about it.  My weekend forecast.

My little crumb cruncher tends to get these bug bite looking bumps on his face now and then, and I’ve been noticing them around meal times.  I have been meaning to try and find out what could be biting him.  Last night I was getting him ready for bed and noticed a couple of these bumps on one of his legs.  I looked closer to try and determine if they were bug bites.  Maybe we have bedbugs.  I don’t know.  It was a thought.  I moved my hand and his leg was covered with red spots where my hand had been.  I gently rubbed them to see what kind of bumps they were, and they seemed to get worse, before my eyes.  I asked Mr. Gadget what he thought, if it looked like chicken pox or not.  It sort of did.  I asked if chicken pox develops so quickly.  He didn’t know, and neither did I.  I decided to check the other leg, and saw three faint bumps, so I looked closer to try and determine if they were old or new.  As I touched them, it seemed as though they got more pronounced.  I told Mr. Gadget that it seemed like he was reacting to me, so I took my hands off and waited a few minutes to see if they’d fade (they did).  Meanwhile, I tried to think of what he could be reacting to.  I used a hand lotion that day which was out of the ordinary, but had since washed my hands at least a dozen times, so I didn’t think it could be the lotion.  I’d washed and dried the bedding and put an extra fabric softener sheet in the dryer, which was out of the ordinary as well.   He was on the bedding and not breaking out everywhere, so that left me.  We had a fabulous tossed green salad for dinner, with red, yellow, and green bell peppers, radish, green onion, cucumber, tomatoes, mixed organic greens, and leafy green lettuce.  (Big boy Boo had lentils and rice and green beans.)  I was done in the sense that I’d put my dishes in the sink, but I was still snacking away at what was left in the salad bowl, using my fingers to pick up pieces of salad and munch happily away.  It’s the most plausible explanation I can find at this point.  My baby is allergic to fresh vegetables.  At least one of the mix, anyway.  Now I will have to try and isolate the culprit.

There is a specific moment during the course of a cold where the post nasal drip has stopped its irritation and morphed into something else, where the nose has stopped running, if only temporarily, where the sneezes are at bay, where the sinus pressure is causing a sensation closer to dizziness than pain, a dizziness that is similar to that feeling one might get after a glass of wine, when you realize that your mouth is closed and you can breathe through your nostrils. A complete breath of air. It’s a moment of clarity. It feels like nothing else. It feels like bliss. It feels like zen. Like nirvana. It is peace. It is calm. At least, to someone who has a lifelong history of respiratory issues of one sort or another (though, thankfully, nothing serious). You exclaim to yourself, Oh! So this is what it feels like to breathe! Your mind races with excitement as you dream of how good it would feel to be able to breathe this way all the time. How energizing, to have that much oxygen at one’s disposal! And then the moment passes.

Okay. I’m back. And I’m feeling much better. A thank you to all the people who post such warm and nice things.

I find that one of the hazards of blogging is that it’s so in the moment. That’s all fine and good when the moment is good. But when the moment is dark. Well. Not so good.

I will first say that I like myself. Whew! I tried to ponder it more fully last night, and the night before, but I fell asleep. I wanted to ask myself to try and put together a mental list of why I liked myself, in that moment, so I could make those thoughts more concrete and perhaps file them away for times of darkness when the goodness escapes me. But I fell asleep.

I know that I mentioned earlier that it’s probably hormones, and in the moment when I was writing that, I was in a dark place and commented that it’s such a copout to say that. I have to say, now that I’m in a more positive place, that there is some truth to that. Hormones are these crazy little brain chemicals that wreak utter chaos if something disturbs their fragile balance. I know this. I know this. I lost a brother to the imbalance. And I’ve spent a lifetime drifting in and out of darkness, and when I get stuck there, it feels like deja vu and I get disgusted with myself for getting stuck there again and not being able to find my way out and only recognizing enough to know that I’ve been there before, thus giving myself more reason to despise myself. Magnifying silly superficial things beyond all reason. It’s that broken record sensation I spoke of earlier. If we were talking classical control systems theory, it would be called positive feedback, which leads to instability and ultimate destruction. Now I have a visual of Galloping Gerty, which fell victim to harmonic frequency. (Umm, nerd alert. So I majored in Control Systems. Woop. Dee. Doo. I even actually used a teensy weensy bit of it in my professional life. But anyway, I digress. I was just attempting to express an analogy.)

So anyway. Hormones. A cacophony of hormones. That, and a yawn of excuses.

I could just delete the posts of darkness, but it wouldn’t be altogether honest, so I think I’ll leave them be. It sort of fits the SPT All of Me theme.

But right now The sound of exploding glass has just interrupted all other trains of thought. That, and somebody wants his mommy.

It’s been that kind of a morning…

Where the head is pounding so hard that it wakes you up at 3 am and you lie as still as you can hoping you can relax enough to go back to sleep and pray that the headache will be gone when you wake up, but you finally give up and stumble downstairs to take 4 ibuprofen, yes, 800 milligrams, then lie as still as possible waiting for them to take effect, knowing it will be at least 20 minutes, all the while wondering if you should perhaps go try and throw up because possibly if might make you feel better, and you actually nearly talk yourself into trying it when you hear the baby crying and need to get him a bottle and hopefully get him to go back to sleep so that you yourself can go back to sleep and hopefully, oh hopefully, wake up without the headache.

Where, two hours later, you get up because the baby is up again, and you are blissfully happy that the headache has receded, even though you can feel it lingering and you keep on hoping that it won’t return as you try to calculate through the fog that is in your brain how many hours you will have to wait before you can subject your body to any more ibuprofen.

Where you call in sick to the office, but you have to keep the baby home all day too, because, after all, he started all of this, with the pink eye and germs he brought home from daycare, and he can’t go back for 24 hours.

Where he feels fine and wants to play and you’re miserable with aches and pains and congestion and phlegm, all on the way to a full blown sinus infection, so you barricade him into the living room with the sofa making most of the barricade and you lie down so that your body spans the rest so that he is fully enclosed and can play with a pile of toys while you try to sleep a little bit more, just a little bit more.

Where he plays with the lid to his drum and decides to bang it on your head. Oops, says his expression, but not really.

Where he thinks it is not much fun at all to be confined to a play space with his mama when there is a whole house to explore beyond her.

Where you finally think you are ready to handle some coffee and toast, because your tummy is grumbling and your head is starting to pound again, but you’re not sure whether it will help or hurt, but you don’t dare anyway, because you don’t want to make any noise since the baby finally fell asleep for his morning nap, so instead you go whine about it all on your blog…

It’s been that kind of a morning.