sueeeus

I generally don’t understand the whole influenza inoculation buzz that surfaces every fall. I decided to get the shot, one year, several years ago. I then proceeded to get sick. Very sick. Sicker than I’d been in a very, very, very long time. There are many who will say it’s only a coincidence and one can’t get flu from the shot because the virus is dead. However. I was very sick. With flu. The other argument is that the shot can’t address all strains. Well, if there are a bazillion strains, what good is it to guess at which one is or will be prevalent? It seems like a shot in the dark. So I don’t get vaccinated for flu any more.

Being a mother, I now feel a bit guilty about it. As though I have a parental obligation to have my youngster inoculated.

I’m torn.

He has relatively low exposure to the outside world at this point. The daycare kids currently don’t have elder siblings circulating in school, collecting and transmitting all manner of microscopic ickiness. He plays hard and gets lots of fresh air. He eats well (in general). He is robust. I’m not planning to take him in for a shot. But I’m feeling guilty about it.

It feels good to feel good.  But I am discovering that it’s not all smooth sailing, navigating this slippery slope of mood stabilization.  It’s been about 4 weeks now, and I’ve begun noticing tightness in my jaw, as though I’m unconsciously clenching it, all day long.  It’s a bit unnerving.  It’s like a displaced anxiety.  Take it away from one place and it pops out another.  I don’t like it. 

A cursory Google search yields numerous accounts of jaw clenching as a side-effect of SSRIs and SNRIs.  Even more alarming are the scattered accounts of tics and twitches that may in some cases become permanent.  It frightens me.

I was told it takes 4-6 weeks to realize the full benefit of this medication, so I think I will continue with it this month.  If the jaw tightness remains, I think I will refill one more month on the prescription and use it to gradually taper off.  Because I’ve also read that side-effects from discontinuation are unpleasant.

I wonder if having this reminder of what it feels like to feel good will act as a neural reference point, and help me to attain that frame of mind without brain chemical interference.  I hope so.  I’m somewhat torn.  I want to continue feeling bright and good, but this involuntary jaw clenching has got to go.  It’s mere presence causes anxiety, which defeats the purpose of the medication.

It just feels so good to feel good.  I wish it didn’t come at this price.

It’s an excellent day. It all began last night when the satellite couldn’t capture the signal. No point in trying to watch House. So off to bed by 9:30 p.m., and, surprisingly, no struggles from the nearly three year old. Woot! A good night’s sleep. Up at 5:30 a.m. Poor little guy was having a bad dream. A slug on his pillow. Too scary. I let him crawl into bed with me and snuggled him back to sleep. He’s the sweetest little thing. I could have stayed in bed, but decided to seize the day instead. I had a full hour to get ready, so indulged in a cappuccino and went about donning my carefully constructed costume, all the while smiling at how pleased my beautiful boo boy would be when he learned he could be Superman all day long. What a wonderful start. And when we got to daycare, who was there? Peter Pan. And tonight? His cousins will be here, and then we will all go trick-or-treating. I am just bursting with anticipation, once he discovers that he gets to be a superhero and walk the neighborhood with his becostumed cousins, knock on people’s doors, and get candy!! It brings back such sweet memories. The happiest moments I recall as a child were Halloween, opening my Christmas stocking and finding my Easter basket. Now I’m a mother and the idea that my own child will soon experience this wonder and delight has me beside myself.

My costume today? I am a teenager. I think the look is more aptly the skateboarder look. Blue jeans. Long black camisole layered under a short dragon-emblazoned glitter t-shirt, layered under an even shorter crimson hoodie with long cuffs that cover half my hands. Messed up hair (well, that’s my everyday look, but it works). I am so pleased with myself, giggling at my own silly humour. As if anyone is going to get that I’m in costume. But it feels good to feel young. I feel young. I should have started Zoloft years ago.

I’ve had a box of course work that I’ve toted about for the last twenty some years. I don’t remember why I saved it for so long, other than a vague notion that I’d refer to it once in a while and refresh my memory of lessons learned. As if I would need to know how to do a Laplace transform. Or remember Thevenin’s equivalent. Or differential equations. I have used the equations I learned in economics for calculating amortizations and present and future values, before the advent of the www with its plethora of readily available calculators, but now there’s no need to remember how to calculate them by hand. It does astonish me, somewhat, to imagine that those squiggly scratches made some kind of sense at one time. Oh the things we can do when we’re young!

I bought this pencil in 1982 or 1983. I put much consideration into the quest for the perfect pencil, and it was a splurge, at $8, for a student on the brink of poverty. It continues to serve me well, and it reminds me of my youth. In retrospect, money well spent.

College for me was drudgery. I didn’t enjoy engineering school. I wanted a decent paying job at the completion of my degree, so it was merely a means to an end. I couldn’t imagine spending so much time and money on an education that wouldn’t serve me. That was back when I naively thought that the road to financial stability was the road to happiness. How often I’ve looked back and regretted not investing more in my heart. How different my life would be now.

All the same, my path is my path, and here I am. Learning to revere the journey. Learning to revere the day. This day. This moment. Now.

Had I not followed that path, where would I be? I can’t imagine a life without my beloved boy, so all steps that led me here were necessary steps in the journey.

So I wouldn’t change a thing.

And look at me now.  Mother of a superhero.  Can it be any better than that?

It’s been two years.

I heard somebody once say that it takes two years to get back to a sense of normalcy. Grieving is a process. A very long process.

I wish I could understand. I wish I knew what he was going through. I wish I could have intervened. I wish I could have made him better. Or at least helped him.

I will always remember him as my bright eyed boy.

I miss him.

The other day as I was leaving work, about to enter the freeway, I saw a family standing on the corner, hoping for a ride. A very large man holding a large sealed cardboard box. A fairly large woman holding a sleeping child, draped in an afghan. The child looked to be five or six, judging by the length of the body compared to the woman’s stature. It struck me deeply in many ways.

I wanted to stop and give them a ride. But I didn’t.

I see my own sleeping child. In my arms, he is just as big as that other child. I carry him upstairs to put him to bed. How grateful I am that my child is safe and sound in a warm home with plenty to eat and a comfortable and safe place to rest.

How frustrated I am that the possibility that these people weren’t who they represented themselves to be would overrule my natural inclination to help my fellow man.

How I wished my husband had been with me. Then we could have given them a ride.

Were they homeless? Where were they going? Where did they come from? My office is so close to the airport, and there are regularly scheduled buses. Could they not afford bus fare? Was everything they owned sealed carefully in that box?

It’s been one of those days.  Rain. Wind.  Dreary gray sky.  Too much work and not enough time.  A snit with the spouse, in which he hung up the telephone.  I mean, how rude.  RUDE!  I would never do such a thing.  Granted, I made a poor choice of words, but was hung up on in the midst of trying to repair that choice of words.  So.  How immature and annoying.  Sometimes there’s no getting through a snit, other than to wait and let everything settle.  I hate not having resolution though.  Loose ends bug me.  He probably thinks I should apologize, but I’m not planning on it, even though it would be a generous and kind thing for me to do.

Consequently, my will to overcompensate with food has superseded the power of the pill (that mood regulating wonder), and I am quite overly sated now after a breakfast, lunch, and afternoon bowl of bean soup.  There’s just enough left for one more serving this evening, if I so choose.  I don’t even want to think of what my blood sugar might be.  I’m sure it’s skyrocketed up, up and away.

On a positive note, I’ve discovered the wonders of pressure cooking.  I made a fabulous bean soup in an hour.  Not an overnight simmer.  Well, I did presoak the beans, but I’m used to the crock pot or an all day stove top simmer.  But with pressure?  One hour tops!   I made a pot roast in under an hour this week also.  The meat wasn’t as tender as I’d have liked, but it was a low budget cut, previously frozen, and I didn’t allow it to thaw properly on its own.  If I try again, I might use fresh meat of a better grade.  It won’t be for a while though.  I’m all beefed out.

Work has drained me.  Sometimes when there’s a mammoth task that goes on and on and on,  it gets tedious and exhausting.  I would have liked to have had some time for blogging this week, but alas, it wasn’t to be.  In fact, much as I love to visit blogs page by page, I subscribed to bloglines so that I can see everyone’s recent posts at a glance, without visiting each individual blog.  It’s such a time saver, albeit much less personal.

I’m so looking forward to the weekend, in which I plan to visit my sister and see her scrumptious little boy, now 3 months old.  Hopefully the marital strife will have blown over by then.

Don’t answer a fool according to his foolishness, or you’ll be like him yourself.

That would be Proverbs 26:4 — just the sort of thing I have to say when idiots indulge in road rage.

And Mr. Gadget’s rebuttal would be something on the order of Proverbs 26:5…

Answer a fool according to his foolishness, or he’ll become wise in his own eyes.

Is it any coincidence that this morning we awake to find the truck vandalized, with both windows broken and strewn across the driveway in thousands of bits of blue-green glass? Now, he would say no. I, however, am not fully convinced.

Perhaps there is no relationship between the two, but I stand by my conviction that Mr. Gadget should by no means attempt to “teach them a lesson or they’ll never learn.” Not unless he wants to pursue a career in road-patrol in which his capacity is official and warranted. And especially not when his wife and child are in the vehicle. Especially NOT.

Hello? This is not Small Town America, in which people know each other and lessons might actually be effective. No, this is Suburbia, in which nobody knows anybody, and crazies mingle with the masses. People carry guns, drive by and shoot each other. The odds of encountering a crazy are amplified if one chooses to provoke.

If it weren’t for the Zoloft, I think I would have given him the tizzy of tizzy fits over that selfish display of immaturity. As is, I gave him the standard sharp and curt lecture, and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening. However, with the dawning of a new day, and a freshly vandalized vehicle, I find it hard to imagine that these incidents are unrelated.

And it totally sucks that someone would do this to us. At least nothing was stolen. Due to the abundance of gadgetry, it took the entire day for Mr. Gadget to realize that something had, indeed, been stolen. His GPS. And why didn’t the alarm go off? What good is it if it doesn’t detect breaking glass? So now I’m worried that whoever it was will be back. I’m not one bit happy. Mr. Gadget has run off to the car gadget store, to have an updated alarm installed.

Maybe it is unrelated, but it doesn’t matter. There is no call for a stupid display of road rage. None. It serves no good whatsoever. Nope. I’m not one bit happy.

There’s really no significance behind the picture, other than I think it’s pretty. I like the way other bloggers post pictures of pretty or interesting or pretty interesting things on their blogs. I don’t have pretty or interesting or pretty interesting things happening in my life, in general, but why not post a pretty picture to add a little flourish to an otherwise dull post?

I’m analyzing the side effects of this Zoloft journey. Objectively and subjectively. The diarrhea was very short-lived, thankfully. Less than one day, really. Today is Day 4.   I feel a little dizzy or loopy, tired, and scattered.  Less anxious, though.  My neck and back are killing me, but that’s probably from my chiroquackery.  Yesterday I had the mother of all migraines. I don’t know if it was Zoloft related or not, but it’s certainly nothing that I want to repeat any time soon. There was less than no appetite, and nausea for sure, but those accompany migraine, so I can’t determine whether one caused another or whether one exacerbated the other, neither, or both. Migraine does a number on blood sugar, I see. No food and elevated glucose. I’d have liked to have taken ibuprofen to help the headache, but recently read that ibuprofen usage at the time of conception dramatically increases the chance of miscarriage. Not that I’ve conceived again, but if it’s at all in the realm of possibility, another miscarriage is the very last thing that I want to experience any time soon. So I took some acetaminophen. It didn’t help. I waited a few hours, did some frantic Google searching on the safety of Vicodin with Zoloft, found nothing concrete, and decided to just take the plunge and hope for the best. I stockpile my Vicodin, if ever I get a prescription, so that I have something for emergencies as this. It helped, in that it kept the pounding at bay so that I could get through the day. I thought the caffeine from some strong coffee might help, but I simply couldn’t stomach the idea of anything.

Did I mention that I was watching five kids this weekend? 15 yog, 11 yog, 7 yob, 2 yob, and 6 mos girl. Sitting on the floor at 3 a.m. holding a teething infant with diarrhea and a blistery red diaper rash, trying to change her diaper without inflicting too much pain, feeding her, comforting her, and trying to get her to go back to sleep, all the while breathing slowly through the pounding in my head, and repeating over and over again, Oh dear God, Oh dear God, why do I think I want another child, Oh dear God my head hurts, please don’t let me throw up. Granted, it’s a big step to go instantly from one child to five, and the migraine made it nearly unbearable. I love my nieces and nephew desperately, but how relieved I was for that day to be over! It takes a full night’s sleep for me to recover from a migraine, for some reason.

It fills my heart to bursting, though, to watch the joy in my son’s face as he plays with his cousin. Two rugged beautiful boys chasing each other in circles, running non-stop through the house, upstairs, downstairs, round and round and round, inside, outside, and back again.

It fills my heart with wonder to watch these beautiful children, and untold gratitude that they belong to us.

I had my first post-diabetes-diagnosis follow up appointment yesterday. I was doing a great job of glucose control while I was pregnant, and I wasn’t even taking the Metformin. After the miscarriage, I restarted the Metformin, but the numbers have been climbing. Granted, I was depressed for a few weeks and wasn’t so careful with my diet. It’s remarkable, the way stress and anxiety affect blood sugar. I’m on the lowest dose of Metformin, and wondered if I might need a little bit more, but she’s not changing the dose for now. She once again recommended a program like Weight Watchers. The reason being that people with addictive tendencies do well in controlling them by attending meetings, like AA or NA, or, in my case, since alcohol and narcotics aren’t my thing, WW. I’ve done WW in a past life. I am not a meetings kind of a person. I can’t do it. I won’t do it. It doesn’t help me. I can’t really explain it. It’s sort of why I don’t go to church, either. I am a solo person. Groups don’t work for me. Anyhow, better weight control will definitely improve the glucose control, so all these things are related.

Then she recommended therapy. I’m not comfortable with the idea of therapy, and I couldn’t very well explain why. I don’t like groups and I don’t like the idea of saying things to a complete stranger that are basically petty, selfish, or both; things that I should be able to deal with on my own. She noted several reasons. So I could grow as a person and get beyond the discomfort of groups. So I could work through the body image. So I could work through the anxiety and stress and grief from trying to conceive and suffering two miscarriages in one year. Is she in cahoots with my ob-gyn? They do share an office. And my medical records. My file is two inches thick.

My blog is my therapy. That and a good cry once in a while.

Which brought her back to the topic of mood stabilization. I had told her that I was okay now; not depressed. But I’ve been wondering lately if I really have been, in my basic state, depressed all along. I told her that I had decided that after I was done with the baby thing that I might consider trying something like Wellbutrin, but I don’t want to go on anything while I am still trying to conceive. I’ve read about weight gain associated with antidepressants mood stabilizers, so I’m very wary. Wellbutrin is one that actually might have the opposite effect, so I asked about it. Wellbutrin would be very low on the list of potential stabilizers that we would recommend. (It’s Category C.) Note the terminology. Stabilizer, not antidepressant. Prozac? No way. I did try that once, ten years ago or so, and couldn’t make it through the first two weeks. I felt like I had a brain cloud or a delay and that I didn’t have immediate control of my mind. (That’s the point, isn’t it? I suppose…. but I didn’t like it.) She said that I might do well with Zoloft, and it’s something that could be taken while trying to conceive, because reduced anxiety improves one’s chances. If I did conceive, we could discuss tapering it off at some point during the pregnancy.

So. Zoloft it is. I picked up the prescription and read that it is used to treat OCD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and social anxiety. Well. Maybe it is the thing for me. Just what the doctor ordered.

Side Effects: Nausea, dizziness, dry mouth, loss of appetite, increased sweating, drowsiness, diarrhea, trouble sleeping.

The pharmacist recommended taking it at night, due to the somnolence factor. Oh. And that it would take 4-6 weeks before I noticed any benefits. As if I’m going to make it past 2 weeks. Fine. So this is day 1. I didn’t sleep well, and had no appetite this morning. (A good thing!) But along with that, nausea. And, ugh. Diarrhea. At least now I can stop taking the Colace for constipation. Hunger briefly overrode nausea, and with it, dizziness. I assumed my blood sugar had dropped, but no. It’s higher than 3 hours ago, which means my liver probably pumped out some extra sugar to make up for the food that I didn’t eat. And the dizziness is likely the Zoloft, not the glucose. Now, after some toast, the hunger is gone, the nausea is back, and the dizziness persists.

But there is no brain cloud, so I can live with this. For now.