letters to myself
September 20, 2008
How you allow men inside: through breath that parts your lips, is taken up in your lungs. They say your name and it threads through you like a weed vine. Their diamond stylus needles fall into your ruts, take up residence there, scrape gently along your ridges. Men pull from you what is within you and translate it as sound. You keep skipping, like a record. You keep skipping. You hold their names in your mouth, roll them around like rocks. When you speak, you return to them what they have breathed into you. When you speak, there is no sound, only motion.
from the sprigs* archives: boob job
September 19, 2008
* I wrote this piece Nov. 27, 2005. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
I am lying on my stomach, my bare body covered only by a white sheet. The thread count is high, so the sheet feels like silk when it brushes against my back and ass. Music is playing softly in the background, something slow featuring wooden flutes.
I hear the doorknob turn, then Natasha steps into the room. The lights are off, the room lit only by three scented candles. Natasha is young, mid- to late 20s. She is thin with delicate features and long, brown hair that she’s pulled back. She giggles as she carries a bottle of warm oil across the room to where I am lying.
Natasha gently lifts the sheet, uncovering my left leg. She works the oil, which is mixed with sea salt, into my skin. With all the force her small hands and slender arms are capable of, she begins kneading my thigh and calf.
That’s right. I am getting a massage and exfoliation. I’m at a fancy spa in Victoria, British Columbia.
I don’t care that I don’t know Natasha, that we will probably never see one another again. I don’t care that I had to pay her to touch me like this. All I know is, this massage — which I thought would be relaxing — is actually quite hot. I haven’t been naked with a woman in a long time. (Sure, I am the only one who’s naked, but I’ll take what I can get.)
Plus, I know I am going to leave this spa without any trace of dead skin cells on my body. Natasha will see to that.
Just when I think the massage has gotten as good as it’s going to get, Natasha, who has asked me to reposition myself on my back, asks in her soft, high-pitched voice, Would you like me to do your chest?
I play it cool. Um … suuuure. She slowly removes the sheet from my chest. Standing behind my head, she leans over me, arms outstretched, her own chest practically touching my face. I try not to make any strange faces at the feeling of her hands working the oil and salt into my breasts.
When her pinkies sweep my sides, it tickles a little. I start to smile, only partly because she’s tickling me. I say, Sorry, I’m a little ticklish. She responds, Oh, I’m ticklish, too. She giggles. I giggle. Would you like me to stop, she asks. Oh … noooo, I respond.
When it’s all over, I leave her an enormous tip.
That was in August, the last time I visited Victoria. This past weekend, when LoveShack and I were visiting again, I made an appointment for the exact same spa service at the exact same spa. Yet things didn’t go down in exactly the same way.
It started out promising. Different room, different masseuse. But I am naked, and there’s oil and salt involved. All in all, things are looking pretty good. I notice at the outset, however, that there’s no music. And the candles aren’t lit. But I can look past those details. Any moment, the masseuse is going to enter the room. She’ll have an exotic name, and I will be minutes away from being felt up.
The masseuse, whose name I forget, gets things off on the right foot when she says, I’m just going to ask you to part your legs a little for me. Oh yeah, I am thinking, This is going to be good. But it immediately becomes apparent she doesn’t have the same touch as Natasha.
Natasha combined extreme pressure with intense abrasion. With her, I felt like a naughty girl who needed to have my naughtiness scrubbed right off of me. I thought I was going to have to scream STOP before she removed all the skin from my limbs, not just the dead skin.
Not so with this gal. She wasn’t digging into me with everything she had. And there was absolutely no giggling. Then, right before the part where she would reach second base, the worst thing of all happened: She quit.
We’re done now, she announced almost brusquely.
What? But what about the girls, I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate.
How could she be done with the massage without any titty-touchy? She didn’t even do my stomach. What the FUCK just happened here, I asked myself after she left the room.
She told me to take my time before coming out to shower off. So I laid there and did for myself what I’d paid her to do. I rubbed the salt and oil mixture into my own breasts and stomach. But it wasn’t the same. I feel myself up all the time.
As I took matters into my own hands, I wondered if the boob rub was an optional part of this service. Or had Natasha offered me a little something extra, if you know what I mean. Had Natasha given me the female equivalent of a ball rub? Images from that massage flashed before me. The candles, the music, the giggling, her chest in my face.
Had Natasha played me for a bigger tip? Or was this masseuse just shirking her responsibilities?
I would never know, because I couldn’t figure out a way to ask the spa’s managers without seeming like a perv. And I didn’t want to get Natasha in trouble if she was working the system. I might want to go back sometime and ask for her by name, after all.
from the sprigs* archives: the bathroom series (iv)
August 6, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Nov. 25, 2005. It is part four in the bathroom series. Part one can be found here, part two can be found here and part three can be found here.
Self-service
My mother’s funeral was an uncomfortable event for a number of reasons, only one of which was the fact that she’d died. This was the first time in more than 10 years that I’d seen the passel of cousins and first cousins who were either living in the small southern town in Oklahoma where they were born and raised or who were flung as far as northern Texas. These were the country folk on my mom’s side of the family who, for a very long time, had not been exposed to much besides crops, cattle, the locals, a gas station they’d once owned that had burned down and the few rundown bars located in their vicinity, one of which a couple of them bought.
They were good people, solidly built, who smoked and drank with the best of ’em and knew how to whoop it up. Once they got going, their genuine collective laughter easily filled any room, and you couldn’t help but laugh along with them. They could even make you chuckle a little at your own mother’s funeral.
The last time I’d seen them was in 1992 or 1993: The family had four unplanned get-togethers that year over the summer months. Each gathering was for a funeral. I can’t remember who died first, but my maternal grandmother, two uncles and an aunt were all plucked from us well past their prime from various causes and in quick succession. I have since referred to that time as The Summer of Death. But it was good to see the ones who were still living. That is, until first cousin #1 (which is what I’m going to call her to protect her anonymity) alluded to the incident.
The incident: It occurred when I was 15 years old and had gone to stay with first cousin #1’s family in that southern Oklahoma town for a few weeks. First cousin #1 had a younger sister, first cousin #2, who was about my age. Their mom thought it would be fun for me to have the chance to hang out with first cousin #2 for a while. And it was fun. Hell ya. I was still in my drinking phase, and unbeknownst to me, First cousin #2 had also entered her own drinking phase. We spent a couple of dry days together, until we each discovered the other liked to drink.
Our eyes twinkled and we wasted no time before getting into all the booze we could find (an easy task given the fact that her parents had a fairly well-stoked bar in their house). Our crowning moment in drinking came when we stayed over at first cousin #1’s apartment one night. First cousin #1 was a few years older than first cousin #2 and had moved into her own place a couple of years back. She was going out of town, and she gave us the keys, along with permission to drink all her alcohol and do whatever we wanted.
My memory of that night is a little sketchy. We pulled into the parking lot of a crappy apartment complex. There were a bunch of crappy cars in the lot. A shady-looking fellow was leaning on one of the cars, watching us as we pulled in. I felt bad that this was the place first cousin #1 called home. But it would as good a place as any to get shit-faced. Once inside the unit, we drank everything we could find. I even drank a decent quantity of rancid vinegar after mistaking it for a diminutive bottle of wine. We watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (That one scene with Phoebe Cates is totally hot, by the way.) We played a game or two of Life.
Once we’d grown tired of board games and VHS tapes, we looked for something else to occupy us. That’s when we discovered first cousin #1’s drawer of sexy things. It contained a graphic novel, sex toys and smutty magazines like Penthouse and Cheri. You name it, first cousin #1 had it. We weren’t about to touch the sex toys (it’s just wrong to handle something that’s been inside someone else, especially one of your first cousins), but the reading material was fair game. In typical female form, first cousin #2 went for the graphic novel. Since I am more visually oriented, I snatched up the porn. We retreated (that is, stumbled) to separate corners of the apartment where we perused (that is, stared bleary-eyed) at our acquisitions.
First cousin #2 shouted out a couple of snippets of dialogue from the novel that she found especially entertaining. Not long after that, she fell silent. She had passed out on the living room couch, the book splayed on her stomach.
What to do, I asked myself. What … to … do? I was alone and drunk, with nothing but a stack of pornographic magazines to entertain me. Have I mentioned I can get really … um … aroused when I drink? Yup. So in the end, I did what had to be done. It was the only thing that could be done, short of grabbing the shady-looking guy from the parking lot and having my way with him. Um-hum, there was only one conceivable resolution to my predicament. I tried to resist doing it, but the more I thought about resisting, the more compelled I was to give in to temptation.
I took a deep breath, made sure my cousin was still passed out, grabbed a couple issues of Cheri in one hand and slipped silently into the bathroom. I locked the door behind me and had my sloppy-drunk way with myself.
What can I say? It didn’t take long and it wasn’t that satisfying, but it had taken the edge off. The way I remember things, afterward I hid all evidence of what had transpired, carefully placing all the magazines back in the drawer, plucking the graphic novel off my snoring cousin and returning it to its proper place in the drawer as well. I had completely covered my tracks on this one. Nobody would ever be the wiser.
So in ’92 or ’93, when I next saw first cousin #1, I was surprised by her reaction at seeing me. You still drinking, she half-asked, half-laughed. I could tell “drinking” was code for something else. She was eyeing me oddly, her expression betraying knowledge of additional, secret information. Embarrassing information. Remember that night you all stayed at my apartment, she chuckled. I cringed. She added, You’re a pretty wild gal, you know that?
Sure, she never actually used the words “had your sloppy-drunk way with yourself” or “I know you did it in my bathroom using my porn,” but I was certain she did know something, and that what she knew had made a lasting impression. I must not have covered my tracks well after all, I worried. I imagined the porn left strewn on the bathroom countertop or the sex drawer in such a state of disarray that my disruption of it would have been evident. And then there was first cousin #2. Perhaps she wasn’t passed out after all. Or maybe I wasn’t as stealthy about the whole undertaking as I’d thought.
Some drunken oversight gave me away, I thought. First cousin #1 knows.
I’d hoped that whatever I presumed she knew would have long since been forgotten by 2004, when she showed up at my mother’s funeral wearing black jeans and faux fur-rimmed cowboy boots. But I appeared to be shit outta luck. In front of my brother, sister, LoveShack and all those cousins, she brought it up again. I’ve got a real doozie of a story I could tell about Dana, she said, or something along those lines. Fortunately, I distracted her well enough that she didn’t tell that story. (Her short attention span worked to my advantage that day.) I brought up something funny, which got all the cousins laughing uproariously and in unison.
Just keep them laughing, I thought. Just keep ’em laughing.
from the sprigs* archives: the bathroom series (ii)
July 30, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Nov. 23, 2005. It is part two in the bathroom series. Part one can be found here.
Passage
—for Ray
When I open the bathroom door, he is standing there, nearly as large as the door’s framed opening. I’m startled. I had waited until he’d gone to bed before quietly slipping in and carefully sliding the door shut so I could pee and brush my teeth. He’s a large man, tall with a barrel chest. I am 13 years old and still growing; I’ve reached a height of about 5’6”. Still, he dwarfs me.
He and his wife had been friends of the family for years, since well before I was born. They were one of only two couples with whom my parents spent any appreciable amount of time. My father had died in March, and this couple had taken me on vacation with them. His idea. He told my mother the trip would do me some good, take my mind off losing my father.
He was grieving the loss, too. I remember the day he sat at our dining room table, adjacent to my mother, my father’s usual seat at the table conspicuously vacant. They were crying. His head was hung, and he moved it from side to side in small motions, the way we’ve all tried, unsuccessfully, to shake off grief. It should have been me, he told her over and over, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. Then he said it slower, and adamantly, as if putting his fist down, disallowing this death. His words came out in hard, stuttering dactyls, with a single accent at the end followed by a caesura: Mignon. It should … have been … me.
I watched them from the far end of a long hallway that spilled without fanfare into our unattractive dining room. They didn’t know I was witnessing such an intense and private moment meant only for adults. I’d learned after my father’s death that children are not allowed to fully enter the space of grief, the kind that takes your body over whole, like possession or glossolalia. We are told to carry on. To go play. To go to our rooms. That our father is in heaven.
There, there now is the most anyone said to comfort me after my father’s death.
* * *
He was 16 years my father’s senior, which meant he’d been old as long as I could remember. He could have passed for my grandfather. But he still had a solid build, and it was easy to imagine him playing football or building ships in his younger days.
The vacation entailed driving from the middle of Oklahoma to Memphis, where the couple’s eldest son and his wife lived. The two were going on vacation, and we were charged with watching their house while they were away.
It was a long, difficult drive. The couple didn’t want to use the air-conditioner and, to solve his overactive bladder problem, he peed in a tin can every 30 minutes or so. The combination of the heat and urine was almost unbearable.
Still, I couldn’t help but be grateful. The trip was a change from the ordinary. I’d never been so far from home. Memphis had a glittery, twangy sound to it. I had great expectations and high hopes for the couple as well, even looking to him as a potential father figure. Nobody could replace my dad, but this man was the next-best thing. The two had been best friends for 30 years, after all. And sitting in the back seat, looking at the back of his head the entire trip, I began to reason that he and my father were not terribly dissimilar. They both loved fishing, drinking, smoking, football, talking on the CB radio, speeding and flipping through a good dirty magazine now and again.
One of the best stories of the two of them, my father and this man, involved their trespassing on private property in rural Oklahoma. They sneaked into a pumpkin patch they’d seen while driving on a back road and were unable to resist the temptation of not-quite-ripe fruit.
As they made off with pumpkins under their arms, gunshots were fired behind them. The property owner: He had a rifle; he meant to take his pumpkins back. The two spun a tale about heading up a Girl Scout troop and wanting to take a couple of pumpkins to the girls. Hearing that lie, the property owner softened. He wouldn’t be one to disappoint little girls.
How many do you need, he asked, or something to that effect. Then he had my father and his friend back their El Camero up to the patch and helped them fill its bed up with pumpkins. They must have chuckled as they drove off, the burnt orange El Camero struggling under the load’s weight.
* * *
The couple’s son’s home was well-appointed, its bathroom large and as nicely designed as any bathroom I’d ever been in. The door to the bath was hinged on the left. Toilet and sink to the right. Bathtub to the left. I don’t remember the room’s other details, besides a pleasing color scheme and high-end fixtures.
I do remember what happened there July 17, which would have been my father’s 56th birthday. The day had been rough. Images kept coming: me rushing to my father, eager to present the birthday card I’d picked out all by myself; him holding the card in his left hand, slipping his right arm around me; how he always read those cards and then said, That’s great, Danawana with more enthusiasm than was called for, as if I’d handed him my heart instead of a Hallmark card.
But of course, I had handed him my heart, as I did every day of my life up until his death.
The anniversary had affected me all day. I still crumble on anniversaries of difficult events, even though I tell myself dates don’t matter — that they are just an arbitrary way for us to measure time and thus have no inherent significance.
The other night, when my migraine prevented me from sleeping, I read a few blogs I like. I don’t know why, but I had the idea of reading people’s entries from Dec. 20, 2004, and from Aug. 11, 2004. The first is the day my mother died. The second marked my 33rd birthday. I was struck by how differently these days unfolded for other people. Even though it makes no sense, I sometimes feel the whole world must thrum along with me when I am happy, and that everyone must feel a little sadness nipping at their heels when a tragedy has occurred in my life. A ridiculous notion, I know.
* * *
It comes as no surprise that nobody feels a thing when this man asks me to hug him goodnight, then pulls me close and latches onto me. The pressure of his body turns my lungs into bellows that force the air out slowly. Locked together, we become a single, deformed creature that barely fits in the bathroom doorway. I love you so much, he whispers so as not to wake up his wife. I love you so much, he repeats, saying the word love in a low and throaty way as he tightens his grip and slides his right hand down my pants, inside my underwear, all the way down.
* * *
The rest of the world chugged along as usual. His wife in the other room sleeping. My mother at home, her eyes most likely heavy from grief and alcohol. The next day, when I called her, he stood within earshot as she and I shared an intense and private moment. She said I sounded sad. I started crying. What’s the matter, she asked. I didn’t answer. She said she thought she knew what it was. You miss your father, don’t you.
Yes, I said. Yes.
from the sprigs* archives — 24/7
July 11, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. The entry is from Nov. 30, 2005, ages ago in Internet time. Oh, and it’s a true story. Every word.
I was visiting a friend of mine in Washington, D.C. He was a little more than a friend, actually. He was my ex-boyfriend. More than that even, he was the first guy I ever dated. We’d remained close even after breaking up, and I hadn’t been dating LoveShack long enough for him to put up a fuss when I announced I was jetting off to the nation’s capitol to see my first boyfriend turned ex-boyfriend turned best buddy.
The Ex was active in the peace movement. He was living in voluntary poverty at Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House and protesting things and stuff on a regular basis. The trip was kind of boring overall. Conversations in the house always hinged on political themes, and I wasn’t really into it. The people living at Dorothy Day were so good, so selfless, so Catholic. I didn’t have much in common with them.
After a few days, I gave in to the laidback pace of life at Dorothy Day. I slept in late. I ate gobs of donated food. I wrote letters to LoveShack. And I read. Tired of conversations about achieving world peace, I started talking with The Ex about inner peace, meditation and other topics that for me existed only in the theoretical realm.
He gave me the book Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh, which I devoured. I’ve always been an overachiever and, after reading that book, I was overcome by a fierce determination to achieve inner peace as quickly and efficiently as possible. I would use meditation as a mechanism for getting there.
The Ex told me about something that might help with my accelerated enlightenment plan. It was called “poustinia,” which is Russian for “desert.” He explained that this was a practice brought to the United States by a Russian woman named Catherine Doherty. Though it was completely bound up in Catholic traditions, the root of the idea was to have quiet and solitary time (with God). I added the parentheses there because that wasn’t the important part for me. I just saw it as a great time to meditate and in turn speed along on my inner journey toward self-awareness and self-lessness.
So I decided to do it. The Ex called Madonna House and made all the arrangements. I would be off for poustinia the next morning.
Here’s how poustinia works. You are led by a nun into a smallish, sparsely furnished room. The room includes a twin-sized bed, two lamps, a rocking chair with a small table next to it, and a desk with several items laid out on it — a pad of donated stationary, a pen, a copy of the Bible, and a brochure about poustinia and Madonna House.
A ginormous cross hangs on the wall, and there is a little thingy to kneel on in front of the cross, in case you are moved to do so. The room does not have a door, only a curtain drawn across the doorway. The curtain doesn’t reach the floor; it flutters about 9 inches above it. I guess the nuns want to have the option of looking underneath the curtain to ascertain what you are up to during your stay with them.
As one “making a poustinia,” you are to stay in the room for 24 hours (though you can slip out quietly to use the restroom down the hall). During the 24-hour period, you cannot talk, and you cannot eat. (You can actually have tea and a little stale bread, but that’s it.)
That’s poustinia in a nutshell.
I found myself completely and utterly bored within the first 5 minutes, during which time I’d looked over the brochure, walked in circles around the room, sneaked down the hall for a pee, and tried to sit comfortably, first on the inherently uncomfortable rocking chair and then on the ridiculously firm bed.
After the first 5 minutes, I tried to meditate. I got nothing. I tried harder. Still nothing. I tried to do it without trying. I just wasn’t feeling it. I ate some bread. I made a cup of decaf tea. I looked out the window at the world in which people played basketball, talked and ate. I saw a group of folks outside a nearby building having some sort of social gathering. They had a table full of great-looking food, including scrumptious desserts. Aah, how I longed for desserts. I hadn’t eaten anything in about 10 minutes, except that crusty old bread. I landed hard on the rocking chair and gnawed at another slice.
I felt completely unsatisfied. Not at all what I’d anticipated.
I remembered The Ex had told me he’d slept for a long time during his first poustinia. I tried to sleep. That would pass the time, I thought. But I couldn’t sleep on that unyielding mattress. I knelt on the kneely thing and tried to pray. I wrote LoveShack a letter, which I still have. It reads, in part, “I am here reaching out and becoming one with that spirit within me, within everything and everyone in the universe.” Yeah, right. What a bunch of malarkey.
Once I was done with my letter, I read Song of Songs. Why not? The Bible was right there, and it was the only reading material other than the brochure I’d already skimmed. The Ex had told me there was some racy stuff in Song of Songs, so I decided to see what the fuss was all about. I was not disappointed. Your name is an oil poured out. That sentence really got me. Dare I say this was some hot writing. I kept reading. Your lips distill wild honey.
It must have been a couple of hours into my stay, after I’d filled up on bread and read through Song of Songs, when something finally stirred inside me. It was a strong sensation. Palpable.
I was horny.
Horny as hell.
But what could I do about it? There wasn’t even a door on my room, and there were nuns crawling all around the place. To further complicate things, a guy in the room next door was in the middle of making his own poustinia, so I really had no privacy. What was wrong with me that I could come here, to this sacred place, looking for inner peace only to end up all hot under the collar — and with a giant cross lurking over me, to boot? Was this God’s message for me? Part of my path to enlightenment?
I am not going to tell you what I did. But I will tell you I did it seven times. Seven times in 24 hours, all on God’s watch.
The next morning, the nun peeked through the curtain and told me my time was up. I descended two flights of stairs behind her, joined her for a cup of tea at a table on the main floor. She asked me how everything had gone. I grinned and kept my eyes on my teacup. We talked about The Ex, who’d been there several times and had made quite an impression on the nuns. He was such a good person, she said, so in touch with himself. Apparently, I had really managed to get in touch with myself as well, just not the way I’d anticipated.
What the hell? They say God works in mysterious ways.
Addendum: I just reread the letter I wrote LoveShack while in poustinia. Apparently, the bread was made by the nuns. (Shame on me for describing it as stale.) And there was a rosary in the room, along with holy water. I don’t recall those things being there.
(lack of) sleep study
June 5, 2008
I had a sleep study last night, which my sleep doctor/neurologist urged me to get. I had been putting it off because I was having so many other medical issues that I thought it wasn’t the right time to undertake the study. I saw my sleep doc two days ago, and he insisted that I have the study ASAP because he’s pretty much convinced I have restless leg syndrome with periodic limb movement disorder, and he wants to get to the bottom of that and treat me if RLS/PLMD is in fact the cause of my paresthesia and twitching.
Can I just say this — why do they call it a sleep study when they know you don’t have a chance of getting a good night’s sleep? I mean, please. They wired me up with 20 or so leads on my head, back, arms, legs and face. They also strapped two (tight!) belts around my waist and chest to monitor my breathing. What he hell?
Then to top it all off, they stuck this hideous tube device up both nostrils and into my mouth. It was all one apparatus, so when I exhaled through my nose, the air went shooting through the tube into my mouth and gave me a case of dry mouth unlike any I have experienced except on the few occasions that I have (admittedly) experimented with the giggle weed. The only difference is I didn’t get the munchies. Or high. So pretty much it was a bust as far as dry-mouth experiences are concerned.
And don’t even get me started on how the tube prevented me from closing my mouth and led to an inordinate amount of drooling, enough to make me feel like I was lying in a shallow pond or a puddle in the low area of a parking lot. Not a great way to promote sleep. The only other times I’ve laid in a pool of saliva like that I was a drunk-off-my-ass teenager who didn’t notice, or care, that my face was covered in spit. (Or was that vomit? I don’t recall.)
Plus not once but three times I managed to get myself, my pillows and the stuffed doggie I sleep with all tangled up in the jumble of cords attached to me. The technician kept having to come into the room to untangle me.
Also, I was trying to sleep in pajama pants, since the whole study was being videotaped and I didn’t want to give my sleep doc a woody by unnecessarily exposing my fabulous badonkadonk. But the pajama pants were absolutely a no-go. They got all bunched up in the cords leading to my legs, and at one point I woke up with my ass hanging half out. It was all breezy and shit back there. I knew then that it was time to push the call button to once again summon the technician to help me take my pants off.
Yes, that’s right. I am a nearly 37-year-old woman who was forced to enlist help to remove my own pants by someone who was not a sexual partner. It was a new low for me.
So what I am getting at — in a circuitous fashion — is the assertion that they should call it, more appropriately, a lack-of-sleep study. I mean, come on. This was done at a hospital, so there were sirens going off all night as people were being whisked to the emergency room. And I don’t know what the guy in the room next to me was doing, but he banged, hard, into the wall adjoining our rooms in the middle of the night (on his way to the bathroom, I presume), which of course jolted me awake.
Then, when I was (finally, thank God) deeply asleep, there was suddenly light all over and the sound of a woman’s voice. I thought for a moment that I’d died and was going into *the* light. But no. It was just the sleep technician coming in to reconnect a lead that I’d apparently jostled loose while I slept.
(Oh, to be free to jostle in my own bed where there are no leads connected to me and no technicians to startle me awake with the bright light of death!)
Anyway, I was there with three other people who were also being studied, and I was having a grand time trying to diagnose their issues as they arrived. The first guy was overweight and looked all bedraggled. I suspected he had sleep apnea.
The second guy looked like a member of the technorati from Microsoft or some other software company that overworks its employees. You know, the kind of place that gives its workers free dinners and massages and an on-site gym and stuff because they expect them to never — ever — leave the campus. I immediately diagnosed him as having stress issues that were negatively affecting his sleep.
The third person was a woman who kept knocking on the door to the facility when she arrived and pushing the call button over and over, despite the technician saying she’d be up in a minute to let the woman in. This woman even tried entering random codes into the security keypad on the door in hopes of gaining entry. I diagnosed her as having an uber Type A personality that was making it hard for her to relax and fall asleep.
But of course, I am no expert. Who am I to diagnose anyone else when I can’t even figure out my own sleep and health problems? That’s what my sleep guy is for. I am hoping he’ll get to the bottom of things, or at least get me on the path to having some answers. (And if nothing else, he’s seen me in my panties, which means in a sense he’s already gotten to the bottom of things, for whatever it’s worth.)
All I know is this: I hope. To hell. I sleep. Tonight. Because. I fucking. Deserve. A good. Night’s sleep.
The end.
it is *really* hard to get a bra on when you’re wearing a holter monitor
May 21, 2008
monitor me
May 20, 2008
My MRI results came back, and they were normal. My EEG results also came back and show that I have abnormalities in my brain as well as my heart. (My heart function was assessed with a two-lead EKG as part of the EEG.) No verdict on what might be causing either of these problems. I am going for a 24-hour Holter monitoring test tomorrow and will have a 12-lead EKG the day after tomorrow.
I am not very happy about these developments. I am trying to remember my mantra, but doing so is not an easy undertaking.
my mantra for this week
May 17, 2008
Health is not the absence of illness.
— Anne Lucas (my cognitive-behavioral therapist)
yes, i am dysfunctional
May 9, 2008
I saw a neurotologist yesterday and finally have an answer for why my hearing has been so sensitive for the past couple of months: I have Eustachian tube dysfunction. She tested the ability of my ears to respond to changes in pressure, and mine don’t respond. My tubes get locked in either the open or shut positions. When they are shut, sounds are muffled; when they are open, sounds are incredibly shrill and painful.
She loaded me up with medicines, mostly over the counter, that are supposed to help the condition, namely those for allergies and laryngopharyngeal reflux. I didn’t even know I had this form of reflux but once she described it, I realized I have all the symptoms associated with the condition, including hoarseness, difficulty swallowing, a lump in my throat and excess throat drainage. Who knew? I attributed those symptoms to my thyroiditis and allergies. Apparently, between the allergies and the reflux, the part of my Eustachian tubes that opens into my mouth has become inflamed, resulting in the dysfunction.
I am so happy I went to see the neurotologist. I saw an ENT a couple of weeks ago, and he had no idea what was going on. I could have given up at that point, but I decided to see someone who specializes in ear disorders instead. I almost canceled the appointment two days ago because I’d gotten to the point that I felt nobody could help me and I just had to live with the sensitivity. I’m so glad I didn’t give up too soon.
I am sharing this because a number of people have found their way to this blog in the past few days by searching for “hyperacusis” or “sensitive hearing.” I know how frustrating it can be to live with this condition, how quickly it can become debilitating, and I hope my diagnosis might help others who are looking for answers. Of course, not everyone will have Eustachian tube dysfunction, but some people will, so I want to share my experience.
We’ll see how all the medicines help over the next few weeks. The doctor said it will take some time before I notice any improvement. At least I have something to look forward to — and I’ve wrangled one of the seven health issues that is plaguing me. Actually, two of the seven: I’ve also made headway on my temporomandibular disorder, with the help of a TMD specialist. Now I just have to get over the thyroiditis and deal with the paresthesia, insomnia and fatigue, as well as the anxiety, which has not completely subsided.
OK, so I have a long way to go. But I am going, which is the important thing.
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
The poem on the page is only a shadow of the poem in the mind. And the poem in the mind is only a shadow of the poetry and the mystery of the things in this world. — Stanley Kunitz
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beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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flick, flick, flick
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i cannot be bought
