Yesterday, I found myself in the gastro doc's office for two and a half hours. We went through in detail my history of eating disorders, veganism, vegetarianism, surgeries, childhood afflictions and allergies, family history. The nurse practioner who spent so much time with me reviewed the results from my last colonoscopy. She told me all the things that could be causing my distress. She told me that the last gastro doc eyeballed my gut but didn't actually do a biopsy for celiac disease. She told me sometimes part of my stomach gets stuck in my esophogus. (!) She said they needed to start over. I began trying to hide my anxiety attack.

She ordered labs to look at my kidneys, thyroid, liver. She ordered an upper scope and colonoscopy for next week. She asked for all sorts of things too gross to list. She gave me a sheet on colitis. She told me a list of other drugs that might help, one of which was steroids. 

I started to cry.

I told her one of the ways I manage my eating disorder history is to try very hard to stay in a ten-pound window that is healthy and realistic. I told her I knew it's possible my mother is right and my ED contributed to my current suffering, but that talking about it like that makes me feel like I somehow did this to myself on purpose, which brings back memories of people thinking I did anorexia to myself on purpose, that I am to blame for everything bad that happens to my health. I told her I'm scared of steroids.

She dropped her papers and rolled herself over and touched my arm. She told me she understood and that would be a last resort.

I understand how stupid it sounds to be so afraid of weight gain. Welcome to the wonderful world of ED recovery. I write this here not because I want to scare my family into thinking I'll relapse, but because I work so very hard not to relapse, and I'm always actively managing what I put in my body with that in mind. It's important my doctors understand that if they have choices about which medication to give me, they should not give me the one with a side effect of weight gain. I've been shocked at how willy nilly doctors can be about not telling their patients this pill or that pill could make you gain forty pounds, by the way. It's true that everyone's body responds to things differently -- something I am learning more and more as I get older -- but still. If I were a doctor, I would tell people things like that.

And she said since I'm getting a colonoscopy next week, it won't make too much a difference to eat gluten. She suspects it's not gluten because the situation is so severe, but only a biopsy can tell for sure.

I went a week without eating any gluten at all. It was actually not as hard as I thought it would be. Eating at home was a snap. Eating out was a giant pain in the ass, but we only ate out one meal in that week I was off gluten. More and more, that's the case for us, especially in the summer. It's so expensive. I didn't realize how expensive eating out was until my husband lost his job last fall and we drastically cut our food budget. However, sometimes it's really fun and necessary and being gluten-free while eating out sucks eggs. 

She also bumped up my Welchol to three giant horse pills in the morning and evening to see if that would have any effect. She said at this point, it's just a process of elimination until we figure out what is causing my problems. As I stared at the chart listing all the things that can be wrong with my digestive system, I was pretty overwhelmed. And I felt pretty old. 

She asked me, though, to please let her keep trying to find the problem, since I admitted I'd only gone to two gastro docs once each because what they gave me didn't help. I asked her if she thought that was weird because clearly I had a problem, and she said, "You'd be surprised what people will tolerate until it becomes their normal."

Isn't that an interesting sentence? I am so stealing it.

So now that I have absolute, positive verification that no, what's happening with me is clinically significant, otherwise known as ZOMG YOU ARE A FREAK OF NATURE, I'm promising myself I'm going to figure out, at least, what is causing these issues and see what I can do to bring it down to a low roar. Even though the doctor's office called me in a panic this morning because my insurance is changing again and I don't know the new number and won't until July 1. And my colonoscopy is on July 3. 

Last night I ate a huge plate of broccoli and mac & cheese. Hello, gluten, my long-lost love.

Though there are many times since I started working for BlogHer I've wished I could look away from Twitter and the news, paying attention to the world is an occupational hazard for me. And I have anxiety disorder and many times intrusive thoughts, which means I find it difficult to stop thinking about the horrible thing that has happened and worrying it will happen again, and then about the people to whom it happened, worrying, worrying into a spiral that leaves me with racing heart and seizing gut, and in those times I find it difficult to model coping skills for my daughter (although, as with Newtown, we've kept the TV off around her and will only talk to her about it if she brings it up, because we prefer to shield her from unnecessary news of this kind). I know I can't change the world we live in, and awareness of all the horror that goes on in the world only gets higher with each posting online. This won't change, and my girl will probably have ten times as much coming at her from all corners of the world by the time she is my age. I need to get the anxiety under control, and I need to teach her how to filter her world the way my mother taught me how to check a garment for holes before buying it. This is our world now.

So here's how you look at this picture.

Image credit: hahatango on Flickr

The runner in the yellow shoes and other spectators on the ground with someone hurt.

The guy holding the small child, taking him away from the scene.

The spectators in the yellow and black jackets leaning over to help.

The guy in jeans who took off his shirt, probably to make a tourniquet.

The police in yellow vests waching over the scene making sure there was no riot.

We can't shut out the world in the window. We have to be aware of our surroundings. But we can hold the right focus on these events. We can look at the majority of people in the picture who just wanted to help. 

My sister has pulsatile tinnitus. You can read more about it here. She's had it for years and has spent thousands of dollars trying to not hear her heart in her ear every single day of her life. Imagine the Tell-Tale Heart. That's her. And there are other whooshers, but because there's no diagnostic code for it, pulsatile tinnitus gets lumped in with regular tinnitus (ringing in the ears) and thus is harder to get treated.

Sign this petition to get it a new diagnostic code? They need 1,500 signatures and are so close.

Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »

Remember how we put Petunia down in November because she had late-stage diabetes?

SOB!

I took Sir Charles Buttonsworth to the vet yesterday because he peed in the little angel's closet and was acting weird. Turns out he was severely constipated and had to stay overnight getting enema after enema.

Before I left, I told the vet to also run labs on a gut hunch.

The vet called a little bit ago. Buttonsworth has diabetes.

I cried. I asked for another vet to give me her opinion. She said he's an excellent candidate. Nothing wrong but the diabetes, docile personality, not ancient (I'm finding I have no idea how old any cat I ever adopt really is).

When I learned Petunia would need a three-day hospital stay and to be boarded every time we left town and shots twice a day, I knew in my gut she would never put up with it. She needed to be sedated just to get a vaccine.

When I learned Buttonsworth would need to come back in a week to see if the shots were working and he'd need to be boarded every time we left town and shots twice a day, I knew in my heart I was going to fight for him. Not because I loved Petunia any less, but because I knew she would be so miserable with all that medical interference. Buttonsworth has had a Brazilian, six enemas and a blood draw in the past week and purred his way through the whole thing. I think the fat cat might be able to handle insulin shots.

The Manx Gets a Brazilian

I am such a bad chooser of shelter animals.

But not from their perspective, I suppose?

---

Check out my review of awesome, customizable retro dresses from Eshakti (plus a Surrender, Dorothy coupon code good through March 25, 2013) on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

My parents and sister were down last weekend. Right before they left, my mom looked at me and said, "You seem happy." And she's right -- I am happy fairly consistently right now.

I would say I'm in a good place, only I no longer believe in good places and bad places, only places. One might think I'm happy because my novel just came out, but in actuality, I got totally anxious and angsty when I signed my contract, so good things happening for me professionally don't necessarily translate into good things happening to my mental health. I'm sure that seems ridiculous, but it happens all the time. Look at how many people -- particularly creative people -- fall apart a little right after they get a break. I think change is hard no matter what type of change it is, because it's fucking scary. Putting out a novel means I have to up my game next time, and people will read it and maybe hate it and talk about it -- so many things for my anxiety to grab onto.

I'm actually shocked I'm happy right now. Even though that sounds ridiculous.

Last Saturday I woke up snarly and snarled at Beloved and the little angel before I took her to ballet. As I was sitting there waiting for ballet to be done, I realized how familiar that snarl had felt, how I used to an extremely frequent snarler, and how I had committed to myself and my husband a few years ago to really stop snarling and try to look at the world more optimistically. I'm by nature melancholy, and it's a real effort for me to instantly see the good instead of the bad. However, I've noticed the more I work at it, the easier it is. When I snarled, he responded with, "Why are you yelling at me?" and I didn't know the answer to that question. I think I surprised him because I have not snarled quite like that in so long.

I sat there worrying I'd introduced a new tone into our house that was going to creep back into our lives. I texted him, called him, made sure he knew I didn't mean it and wanted to start the day again. And then we did, and my family showed up, and my mother's takeaway is that I seem happy.

I've learned to work toward happy. I still have mood swings, sometimes very bad ones, but I try not to show my irritability or randomly thrash those around me when my heart beats fast and the hair on the back of my neck stands up for absolutely no reason but my body chemistry. I pray with my daughter, and we talk about the best part of the trip instead of what went wrong, and I pet the cats and wish for the thousandth time I could invent a purring, warm neck wrap to wear around when they aren't available. I try to take advantage of sunny corners the minute I see them, even if it's just for a few minutes. I try to do one thing at a time and give that one thing my full attention.

And even then, sometimes it still doesn't work. Sometimes I find myself deep breathing and staring at the wall without knowing why, and in those times I've learned to ask myself what human need could be met right in that moment that would make me feel better. Am I cold? Am I stiff? Am I thirsty? Am I tired? Would I like some music, less music? Are my clothes itchy?

I tell people I spend as much time managing my anxiety as some people do managing diabetes or asthma. I no longer look at these little breaks as wasting time, because that makes me more anxious, and the faster I can get things under control, the more productive the day will actually be, the more creativity I will be able to bring to my work. If I am not anxious, I won't foist that tone on my household.

And so when my mother told me I seemed happy, I actually took it as a compliment more than an observation. I haven't always been a happy person, but I'm working toward that. I want to be a happy old person one of these days.

---

• The Obvious Game review and giveaway on What If No One's Watching?
• The Obvious Game excerpt and giveaway on A Dream Within a Dream
• The Obvious Game excerpt on Book Maven's Picks
• Interview on I Like These Books
• Review on author Kelly Hashway's blog

It's returned, yes it has, the neck and upper back pain. This is slightly different than the constant I-work-a-desk-job-and-always-mouse-with-the-same-hand upper back/pinchy nerve sort of pain that I've had for years. This is the I've-been-cowering-like-a-dog-with-my-shoulders-around-my-ears pain I get when I'm holding my stress in my shoulders. You could bounce a quarter off any part of my upper back right now.

I work at home. I have an actual desk. On the actual desk is my work laptop, and behind that is our home desktop computer, which is one of those crazy-huge Macs that we got refurbished (side note: refurbished is the way to go) about five years ago. Unfortunately for me, I can see my reflection in the Mac. It's unfortunate because since I work from home, I usually don't shower and get ready until after I've worked out over my lunch hour, so I'm looking all nasty most of the time in that reflection. But I can also see where my shoulders are, and it's like I push them down and then five seconds later, they're floating back up to my ears without me even knowing it.

There are things that help, and I know this. One of them is stretching. Once when it got really bad, I ended up in physical therapy, and so I went looking for PT stretches online and I found this list of stretches for the neck and upper back. It takes a ridiculously long amount of time to do these stretches properly, which is why I don't wanna. But they help, they really do; it's totally worth it. So I thought I'd share them here in case you, too, have a major pain in your neck, or will because you have to spend a few days straight with your extended families next week.

You're welcome.

One thing about social media: It teaches you you're not the only person with problems. My connection to hundreds if not thousands of other human beings each day has made me more grateful for the good things in my life and more tolerant for the bad. No, everyone else is not sitting around on unicorn-fur couches sipping ambrosia -- they have cancer and bankruptcy and also new babies and cute puppies and lottery winnings. We are all in it together, for good and for bad.

As Beloved's job situation stretches on, I've found myself in several doctor's offices making sure the thing I have now -- my health -- is intact. Last week I went to a dermatologist to get my first-ever full-body skin cancer check. Basal skin cancer seems to be all the rage in my hometown for the farming crew, and I let my fair-skinned self turn lobster red way more times than I should have in my youth. I also tanned before prom, just sayin'. Luckily this time I came out clean, and I made an appointment to get checked again around my birthday every year.

Today I'm going in for a well-woman appointment. I haven't had one in years. Unfortunately, I was inspired to do so after a dear friend lost her cousin to sudden and unexpected girl cancer. Like two weeks unexpected. Though I don't even know this woman, I'm taken aback by the speed in which she was taken down, and it scared me enough to immediately book a Pap smear. I tell you this so if you are a woman, you will be sure to get one, too. So many girl cancers can be treated if caught early.

I'm not perfect with my health -- none of us are. And I try not to think too hard about my health, because I have anxiety disorder and if I think too hard about all the crazy-ass things that could give me cancer or brain damage or whatever, I'll freak out. It's so much easier to avoid breaking a bone than getting a terminal disease. I have a close relative who is dying of something completely awful right now that scares the shit out of me.

I try not to think about that.

But there are some easy things that I can think about, and one of them is skin cancer checks and another is well woman checks.

And then I'll go back to my job and hope everything else in my life works out just fine.

"Mommy, sometimes I feel like I miss something that isn't even there."

Hormones? Anxiety? 

"Well, you're getting to the age when you will start having these suckers called 'hormones.' They help you grow your boobs, but they can be a real pain when it comes to emotions coming out of nowhere."

"Hormones make you feel bad?"

"Sometimes. When I was your age, I started to have anxiety."

"What's that?"

"When you feel nervous or really excited or scared for no reason out of nowhere. If you feel those things, tell me, and I'll tell you more about it."

Saying these words gave me a huge download of anxiety, of course. Please, God, don't let her have anxiety disorder. Please give her Beloved's even keel.

It passed, and she didn't mention it again. I don't believe in sweeping emotions under the table, as I feel my emotions with the strength of a hurricane, and I know how great or horrible they can make your life if they're kicking on too high a gear.

---

Last night, we went to parent-teacher conferences. Her classroom teacher talked about social skills and reading levels and practice those math facts!

Her gifted teacher invited my daughter to attend the conference with us. Her teacher talked about confidence with math and how my daughter needs to work on her confidence so she can take risks in that area. We talked about how scary it can be when you're gifted and just know the answers to some things through absorption, and then you hit on something that doesn't come naturally. She turned bright red.

Her teacher told my daughter she is intuitive and how important that would be in her life, to be able to walk into a room and understand which people were feeling good today and which people weren't. Her teacher complimented her on her ability to sense who needed a boost and provide that boost.

Then her teacher handed us a few articles on parenting the gifted child. I don't know if this sort of literature was available when I was in school or not. I haven't asked my parents yet. I was in one of those programs, and I don't remember anyone ever talking to me about the flip side of just knowing the answers to some things without having to learn them in any sort of thought-out way. I remember being completely unprepared for my first colossal academic failure and questioning my whole existence as a result when it happened -- the side effect of knowing the answers automatically to some things.

I don't want that to happen to the little angel, but seeing her eyes dart around in a way I've never witnessed before and watching her practically climb the chair with anxiety when we talked about timed math tests reminded me of that feeling of panic when the answers don't just pop like they do with spelling or reading comprehension or wherever your gifted wheelhouse is academically.

Her teacher gave us one article I particularly wanted to share, because if you are a gifted person or are parenting a gifted child, it's important to understand the flip side of a brain that works differently than the "normal" people (a word I use extremely loosely). It's called Gifted As Asynchronous Development, and it's by Stephanie S. Tolan.  Here's a short excerpt that grabbed me:

Often the products of gifted children's special mental capacities are valued while the traits that come with those capacities are not. For example, winning an essay contest on the dangers of global warming may get a student lots of attention and praise while her intense emotional reaction to the threat technology poses to the planet and its life forms may be considered excessive, overly dramatic, even neurotic. If she tries to act on her beliefs by going on strike to force her family or school to renounce what she considers harmful technology, she may be ridiculed, scolded, or even punished. Writing a winning essay is deemed not only okay, but admirable; being the sort of person she had to be to write it may not be considered okay.

When we focus only on what gifted children can do rather than who they are, we ignore vital aspects of their developing selves and risk stunting their growth and muddying or distorting their sense of themselves and their worth.

That is a hard one, when you're parenting a gifted child. I find myself getting very frustrated with her daydreaming, her inability to break focus when she's creating something. Last night I could not get her to stop making two levels of invites to go trick-or-treating with her -- there was the VIP level for her friends, and then a different, generic "guest invite" level for any of their +1s. For trick-or-treating. All I wanted her to do was go take a shower and go to bed.

It's hard not to push with the math facts to the point that it's uncomfortable, because her classroom teacher told her she tested her in reading up to the level she can go -- but she doesn't really know because that was the top end of the bar. The math facts tears flow instantly, at the mere mention of math facts, because the timed tests are the only things she's ever not just been able to do, and she feels a deep sense of shame because they are not easy for her. I see this shame in her eyes.

From Tolan's article:

Many gifted children are able to develop their gifts and use them productively. But some of these achievers, as adults, live their lives with a nagging discomfort with themselves. They focus, as the people in their childhood environment did, only on what they can do because they are ignorant of (or uncomfortable with) who they are.

It's my job as the parent of a gifted child to do the following things:

• Remind her she is enough just for existing and being a kind person. Achievements will come and go. Some days you're the windshield and some days you're the bug, and that has ultimately got to be okay or your life is going to be too exhausting. No one wins every day.

• Teach her coping skills for when the inevitable failure comes. Deep breathing. Reframing. Humor. Talking to a loving friend or partner. Reading great quotes from smart people who bombed it spectacularly. Exercising. Getting enough sleep.

• Help her understand that her intellectual brain is not her. It's not her spirit, it's not her soul. It's a handy thing to have around, but it is not the sum total of who she is. Her intellect's strengths or failures should not be the ruler by which she judges her existence on this earth.

• Encourage her to use her gifts to get what she wants out of life, but to understand the consequences of success -- successful people have constraints on their time, they have a lot of people depending on them, they have a lot of pressure to perform every day. Just because you're good at something doesn't necessarily mean you will be happy doing it.

• Provide her with the endless creative and intellectual challenges she needs via the Internet, books, games and parental focus. She needs to engage with my husband in me in a way that's different than some kids engage with their parents. She needs us to be parents and set limits and boundaries, but she also needs us to be creative partners participating in her elaborate schemes and internal stories. She needs us to let her stage Macy's-level window displays out of the junk in her room and appreciate her use of the color wheel doing it, and she needs us to listen to her while she worries about all the bad things that could happen to her fish if he lived in the ocean, because she is sincerely concerned with these things and needs to be taken seriously.

• Recognize when she needs to disengage because she's getting too worried about something.

• Encourage her to keep writing down her stories, because writing allows a person to get as dramatic as she needs to be while exploring possibilities in a safe and socially acceptable way.

I'm no psychologist or teacher or social worker. The things I wrote above are my instinctive reactions to her as her mother and as a reader of the literature provided to me by her teacher (there was more, but I'm not going to quote it all). And as a gifted person. It's hard to write that, because when I grew up, it was considered bragging to say you were gifted, even if you were. It shouldn't be -- gifted means your brain works differently sometimes in a way the world values and sometimes in a way it doesn't. It's an end of a spectrum. Every characteristic of a person is on a spectrum. We all fall somewhere.

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As an adult, I find this research comforting, because even though my parents never made me feel bad about my extreme emotional reactions to everything from Hurricane Katrina to the death of an author I never met in person to my often-inappropriate desire to fix things for complete strangers, other people did. I've been called too sensitive, dramatic, over-reactive and worse. It alarms people when they see this part of my personality in full force. I know it makes people uncomfortable, and I usually try to hide it in person, the same way I used to sit in class and only allow myself to raise my hand every fifth question so I wouldn't be THAT KID.

I always thought my extreme reactions were wholly attributed to my anxiety disorder, but now I'm wondering if it's just the side effect of my brain grokking some concepts in a different way than the average bear. If that's the case, I can forgive myself the drama and focus on helping my daughter avoid 37 years of wondering why they hell I react to things that most people find puzzling at best and annoying at worst.

My daughter is very smart, that's true, and that's wonderful. But she also tends to walk around with her heart on the outside of her body, and I just want the best of everything for her. Nothing in life is all roses, and neither is being gifted.

My daughter struggled with sleeping until she finally slept through the night for the first time at about four years old, shortly after we moved into Chateau Travolta. That whole period of zero-sleeping through the night is a giant haze and something I like to avoid thinking about, except to note she was cute and sweet even though she never slept.

Then she turned into this awesome sleeper who could sleep through military helicopters flying over the house and fireworks set off next door and kids opening up their muffler-less cars on our little residential street.

And it was good.

Then, this week: eight-year-old insomnia. WHAT?

Last night I went to bed too late, slept from midnight to three and woke to hear her crying. She explained what she was crying about (nothing big), then I crawled in bed with her, but she was Wide.Awake. Then Petunia wandered in and was all meowy-meowy, then the little angel was REALLY REALLY WIDE AWAKE, and then she tossed and turned until I said, "I'm going to check on you and go back to bed," which means, "I've had it, kid."

I went back to my bed and five minutes later, she was there, too. Then she did fall asleep and started shoving me farther and farther toward Beloved, who may have been suffering from allergies (I wear earplugs, and no, they don't work). Finally, my back felt like it was being stabbed from the bizarre position I was in, so I extricated myself vertically and went into HER bed, leaving her to stick her bony little knees into my husband's back instead. It was about six by then. I finally fell asleep in her bed, and she must've slept in my bed, though I doubt Beloved did.

This morning on the way to school (I had to drive her because I couldn't get my EYEBALLS TO OPEN in time to get everything going to catch the bus), I said, "So what was going on this morning?" And she was all "I don't know. I just couldn't sleep."

RECORD SCRATCH

This can't happen again.

So we talked about relaxing all the different muscle groups. And we talked about counting backwards from 100. And we talked about what works for me, focusing on relaxing the muscle between my ears. And we talked about deep breathing.

And she was all PSHAW.

The bad part is that she woke up at three on Saturday night and couldn't go back to sleep, too.

OH MY GOD WHAT DO I DO?

Does anyone know how to cure insomnia in a kid?