Category Archives: doctors suck

Why do doctors suck so much?

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I’m not going to write a lot. Famous first words.

Seeing the med doctor last night was a little creepy. He asked me, repeatedly, when I was talking about anxiety–“Do you feel like a bad girl?” His tone of voice was totally “sexy Daddy is going to give you a spanking” and uhm… whoa. That was pretty weird.

Over all he usually manages to do a good job with “concerned and supportive”. He checks to make sure I’m following up with a “general doctor” for health check ups. He asks enough nosy questions about my PTSD (and makes notes, and has follow up questions years later) that he seems to have some familiarity with my case and with PTSD in particular. He asks specific follow questions about my patterns of self-harming behaviors because he knows what they are.

So overall he is a much better quality of doctor than I normally deal with, in my judgy-ass opinion. He listens to me.

But what the fuck is up with using the sexy Daddy voice? I’ve already stopped seeing one doctor because he wanted to do bdsm with me. (Specifically he wanted to cut me up and cauterize the wounds. He told me so. In detail.)

So yeah. I’m kinda sensitive. But I think I fucking should be.

I think he was trying to tease me. That was the overall tone. He thinks I shouldn’t feel guilty about using medication. He was pretty emphatic. It was a cheerful visit. But I felt pretty fucking squicked for a bit there. It was time to end the appointment.

He never gets to see me nekkid so it’s not an intimidating relationship. He continues to monitor that I have mental health issues. He checks for continuity of care among my other health care providers. He asks after my physical and emotional safety.

He asks questions about my parenting and how things are going with my kids.

What is up with me and the creepy Daddy’s?

I’ve already fucked enough dirty old men. Thanks.

And I’m declaring defeat on the attempted sugar fast. I need too much self control right now. I need the sugar. Yup, I’m an addict.

Dr was…

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Well, I didn’t leave wanting to set his car on fire. I am not as hopeful as I could be. But he did manage to get the radiating fire from my neck to calm down.

We’ll see. I’m suspicious of people who want to spend half an hour telling me how awesome their teacher is and then how they “invented” stretches. Uhhh… whatever.

Dr tomorrow

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So I should figure out what to say. This isn’t a Kaiser appointment so I have more than 15 minutes. Hurrah!

I’m thinking I should start at my head and work my way down. I get severe headaches. Usually I think of them as “eye strain” but I got new glasses last year and it didn’t help the way it did in previous years. These headaches center around my temples and mostly streak back towards my ears. That throbs in the 2-5 pain range pretty much daily. The whole muscle group that supports my skull has been unhappy and fairly crampy since I had kids. My entire skull hurts all the time.

I have vertigo off and on. I used to be prone to blacking out but that hasn’t happened in years. I go through periods of extreme tinnitus.

It is difficult for me to breathe through my nose. If I try I end up gasping for breathe through my mouth.

Before I move down from the head it is important to note that a large part of the reason I am going to the doctor is because I have PTSD and GAD and depression and I am having a hard time controlling my behavior when my body is in this much pain all the time. My PTSD symptoms include hypervigilance, flashbacks, avoidance, heightened startle reflex, extreme anger, repetitive intrusive negative thoughts, nightmares (when I’m sober but pot controls these), suicidal urges, self-harm urges, and early wake up time.

In a few months I will be at the point where I have been in therapy on and off for 30 years. It has been court ordered and paid for by the state for a lot of my life because my traumas were considered extreme. Society has an interest in making sure I don’t climb a bell tower with a loaded gun. I have “tried” every school of therapeutic approach I could as I went through 21 therapists. At this point I do cognitive behavior therapy (cbt), acceptance and commitment therapy (act), eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (emdr), prolonged exposure therapy, and I use cannabis with a medical card. I have tried a wide variety of big-pharma medications including anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and anti-anxiety meds. I had severe side effects from everything that made it impossible for me to actually live while taking the meds. I am more functional without those medications.

As a result of life experiences I have a great deal of difficulty working with doctors. When I was a child my mother spent a great deal of time telling me I was a “hypochondriac” because my body always had problems but a brief 15 minute visit to a doctor always resulted in them saying “nothing was wrong with me”. Which lead to hours or weeks of being screamed at and berated and sometimes I was beaten if my mother was under enough stress in her life. Later I had other negative experiences with doctors. I have extreme difficulty in learning to trust people who might be able to help me with my help. My experience is they really don’t care about me.

Ok, now to continue down the body. That neck is still a nightmare all the time. I do not have full range of motion through my neck.

My shoulders have been in pain since my first pregnancy. Sleeping on my side for years has caused me to develop a lot of pain all the way through my shoulder muscles. I have several specific big knots that are dull notes of pain all the time with occasional spasms. This pain area stays in the 2-6 area. Mostly down at a 2 with spasms that absolutely hit a 6.

My arms are getting worse by the year because I type too much in bad positions. I’m a writer. I will always type too much. I have muscle pain and tingling up and down my arms and into my hands. I can point at a few specific unhappy spots. I have been specifically diagnosed with tennis and golf elbow.

I have experienced back pain from early childhood. The severe back pain started after a specific trauma at around age 9. I have low grade back pain (4ish) all day every day with times that I have spasms in my lower back that spike up to the 8-9 range. When the spasms happen I have to lie on the floor and cry and wait them out. I get the spasms irregularly. I have fewer spasms when I exercise more so I suspect that it is related to weakness in the muscles but I’m not sure. I have seen a chiropractor in the past and it made the pain less intense but did not eradicate it. I get irregular massages to help with my muscle pain and they can generally bring my entire body down at least one or two levels of pain.

In the front of my body I have a lot of digestion issues. I have had chronic diarrhea for all of my life that I remember. I was probably malnourished through my childhood because I had multiple years where I ate nachos for my free lunch at school and ramen for every meal at home. We were poor and I was alone and unable to cook more advanced food for myself. I was alone most of the time from about four years old. I could boil water for ramen. I didn’t have much more talent than that.

I worry that I have food intolerances or allergies but I am not sure. I know that the diarrhea and abdominal cramping is highly related to stress but I have never managed to detect other true signs of allergies. Wheat and dairy combine to make more than half of my diet and sometimes I have symptoms and sometimes I don’t. So… I’m not sure what that means. If I eat too many raw vegetables I will be in extreme pain. Cooked vegetables are better but I still have pain from them sometimes.

I have had periods of extreme stomach pain for my entire life. That’s where I hold my stress.

I had two hard pregnancies and two rough labors but I don’t intend to have children again. Yay!

I have an area on my lower abdomen where I occasionally get a throbbing feeling. A doctor can verifiably feel the throbbing sometimes but the first test looking for a hernia came back negative and I have not been psychologically able to pursue follow up testing as to why I still have that throb in my belly. My husband suggested aneurism. I don’t know.

I figured out a while back that carbonation causes me extreme pain. I no longer ingest it.

My hips are tight despite me doing a lot of stretching (I do yoga at home by myself–I have a book) but they aren’t what I would consider “painful”.

I used to get a lot more pain in my vagina than I do at this point. I had a lot of internal scar tissue but luckily child birth seems to have dealt with breaking up the scar tissue. At this point I have only occasional pain during sex.

My legs go in and out of pain but that has all been since I started running and it feels like good, healthy muscle soreness. It isn’t like my shoulders or back at all. I get occasional escalation of soreness near my knees but if I try to watch my running form more carefully for a bit that goes away. I am happy to report that my feet only hurt after long distances of running.

That’s all I can think of right now. Have I missed anything I bitch about frequently?

Didn’t wake up crying.

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I’m up to 38, 471 words. It is getting harder to think of topics I should cover. Almost through the process. Thank goodness.

Therapy was good yesterday. I got to have some time off afterwards because K told me not to come home until two. Yes, ma’am. I sat and ate and wrote. Good thing because I was falling behind in word count.

I have a blank white wall in my garage. Noah suggests islands. My garage is much warmer now. The wall is tilted because it was built around the garage door in such a way that I could believably tell the city inspector that I can dismantle it myself in an hour so SURELY this isn’t a permanent room and thus breaking city code. But it is much warmer now!

Today I need to put plant bulbs in the ground. Daffodils and tulips of joy oh my. So “need” is probably a strong word. They are in the fridge and according to planting guides they want to go in the ground sometime in the next five days. Today is the best day. The lovely rain softened up the ground for me. How convenient.

My therapist and I talked about the whole unmet needs thing. I told her that I’m struggling with the fact that I have actual needs at this point in my life but they are going unmet and they will continue to go unmet and at some point my kids will grow up and I won’t have these needs anymore and hopefully it will be easier then.

I’m kind of used to having needs that aren’t met.

But sometimes even when you have actual needs they will never be met and it won’t kill you. And you have to just get up and keep moving anyway. Even though your needs aren’t being met.

I keep checking the internet. My mother told me that if I took my children away from her she would kill herself. She isn’t dead yet. I guess the need for my children wasn’t as strong as she thought. I think I’m glad. I’m not sure.

I have a lot of good reasons for being an angry person. That doesn’t make it easier for anyone to put up with. That doesn’t mean that people should put up with me lashing out at them.

I asked Noah if I am still harsh with him. He said not anymore but I used to be. I used to be that harsh when I didn’t believe that he would respond well to boundaries or support me or believe me. But I’m not harsh any more. I stopped a while ago.

I blog the way I do, in this stream of conscious sometimes I regret volunteering all of my inner drama to the world sort of way because people like me usually never find a voice.

Being inside my head is not pretty. I really and truly want to accurately reflect it. Being a real person means that you are not always what other people want you to be. That means the difficulties and the good things too.

When I die it will be possible for people to still know a lot about me. The good, the bad, the ugly. It is really important to me for reasons I couldn’t possibly explain. It just is. I hope I am this obnoxious for the rest of my life. Not because everyone deserves to be trashed–that’s not the point. I’m not trashing people.

When I complain about issues I tend to complain about larger patterns and not particular people. I have had a large number of people over the years tell me that they have thought about helping me and they decided not to. That pretty much exact exchange has happened numerous times. I don’t think I have ever blogged about it before (can’t recall off the top of my head) so it is this invisible pattern in my life. It’s a pattern that is causing me problems.

I haven’t talked about it because I know the people involved “mean well”. I don’t actually want to hurt people. I have way more tact than anyone would believe.

But sometimes I am not able to put my head down and shut my mouth and just smile and say thank you. Sometimes I can’t. I regret my lack of control but I’m not sure mastery of this subject is within my grasp in this decade. Maybe later.

If you need to exist out in public that means you will be judged and that means that sometimes you will fuck up in public. Sometimes people will not like how you are acting. That has to be part of the process.

I don’t promise to talk nice in my blog. I promise I will do my best to always treat you exactly how you deserve in person. I’m very sorry that knowing about the difference between what I think and how I act is hard. I am trying to learn how to not be offensive. I don’t know how to turn my brain off though.

I am looking forward to planting and spreading some mulch today. I’ll move slowly.

I’m not going to paint the garage wall this winter. Can’t do it. That means the garage is put back together for a few months. Today I will attach the bookshelves to the wall. That’s the non-self-hating thing to do. I hear.

I’m very glad I get to pick what I do in a day.

I’m very glad I get to spend today with my girls.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time thinking about the fact that when I was Calli’s age my parents divorced. My mom moved a boyfriend in to support her and I was “mean to him” and he left resulting in my mom and sister hating me. We became homeless. I was sent off to live with the first in a long string of homes. That was when I started rocking and crying myself to sleep.

I’m glad I get to be with my kids all day. I want this life so bad.

The house is clean so the kids can help with cooking stuff. There is room and space and I won’t freak out as I trip over things. I can be patient enough to let them make another mess.

I’m not teaching them to be kids. I’m teaching them how to be an adult. Adults have to go do a lot of different things. You have to have skills. We’ll get to academics. Later.

Today will probably be good. I’m almost done with my reading list. I’m almost done with my gardening projects for the whole year. I’m done with house stuff for the year.

I want to put up the outside Christmas lights. We haven’t gotten a tree yet but we’ve done the rest of the decorating. (I had to move the cabinet the decorations were in–I might as well put them up at the time. Also we will be out of town for 10 days of Christmas. I’d rather not have to do the decorating during the shortened time period. I instead get to come home to Christmas. Yay!)

Noah is making cookies already. I should freeze some. He’s made three kinds so far. Sugar is love. Ha.

My house is already clean enough and set up enough for the party in a month. I will only have to do flight of the bumble bee.

We are in the process of eating all the carbs in the house (almost done with the backlog in the freezer) because come January I will have to do an elimination diet. Yes I will work with medical professionals. I need to need less pot to deal with the pain in my body. I need to stop paying for the ability to eat. This isn’t working. It is too expensive. I need to do something else.

I would like to be fully off of pot before I go on the cross country road trip with the kids in 2015. I don’t think I should be driving during the days and getting stoned every night while I camp alone with my kids. That strikes me as wildly inappropriate and unsafe. So I have to be functional in my body alone before then. I have a year to make it work. Ok. That’s what next year will have to be about. Shit.

Some people need a crutch for their whole life and there is no shame in it. Sometimes you need a crutch for a temporary period. I went about 25 years unmedicated (there were some stupid periods mid-way where I tried meds–I was so sick the whole time) so I will have to get back to that. Stress management has always been how I have done it.

Sex, exercise, better food choices for my body (which I don’t have a fucking clue about right this minute), and I don’t even know what else.

I feel good about the fact that my life is so clearly plugging along. I may be whiny but I get shit done. Things are changing.

I will have tulips in the spring and for every spring afterwards.

I don’t know how much gardening this year will bring. I may be growing very different foods next year if I can’t have nightshades any more. We’ll see.

I am trying to organize some local families into a fruit gleaning group. I have buy-in and initiative. I just need to figure out the details and do the back end work. That will probably be part of next year.

Next year I am going to have to find the courage to go get rejected by a bunch of publishing houses. Woo. bleh.

Good thing next year is next year and this year is this year and I am almost DONE WITH MY CHORE LIST!! Ahem. I uhh probably take too much self-identity from this.

I have completed 50 new-to-me books so far and I am more than halfway through two more.

I really changed the yard this year. Man I’m grateful for the help I got. I sing hallelujahs and praise the names. Paying for help does not invalidate that it is help.

I’m happy with the house progress. I’m overjoyed that my garage will no longer flood. I like the pantry set up a lot more than I did. This is better. Once I have the boxes outside for the tools I think the pantry will be perfect for at least five minutes. Then I’ll find a reason to whine. I’m talented.

No, I’m kidding. I think I may have found a configuration that can just last for years. I feel… way more feelings than I should about this. I’m happy with the idea that my house is settling into a shape where I might stop ripping it apart constantly.

I get to be here. I get to stay here. I’m allowed to make this into what I really want. Nope, it isn’t polished and perfect and an expensive looking house. I’m kind of a cheap date. I’m happy with cotton batting over the pipes as a line of clouds instead of a wooden enclosure. I think it is pretty fun.

I don’t need perfect. I’m not perfect. I’m having fun.

Missing

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I write Noah’s mother long letters about my kids because I wish I could tell my mother these things. It isn’t the same. She doesn’t even like me.

I sent a follow up message about the cat scan that should be ordered. Let’s see what happens. I feel so sad.

This morning during our morning snuggle Calli said, “Everyone needs love!” and hugged me tight. Shanna said, “You weren’t loved when you were a little girl, were you?” I said no. I wasn’t. She said she would love me enough to make up for it.

I hope so. I’m not sure how this works. I try so hard to hide my need. It isn’t anyones problem but mine.

One of the random moms I don’t know well from the home schooling group happened to be in the lobby when I walked out of the surgeons office crying. She wanted to comfort me. I couldn’t even talk to her. I’m not sure I was civil.

I want people to like me and be nice to me and care about me but I don’t seem to be able to behave in a way that will let me deserve it. Noah likes me. Shanna likes me. Calli likes me. That has to be enough.

I hate talking to doctors. I hate them so much for, “Why don’t you go see psychiatry? You don’t have to feel this way.” Fuck you and your fucking magic pills. They don’t work. They won’t make me “feel better”. They never have before. I have fucking tried.

It doesn’t matter. Just shut up and get used to hurting. That’s just life. Sometimes it works that way.

I’m not going to stop feeling disposable until people stop disposing of me. Trying to convince me that I should change this is flat stupid. If I started expecting people to stick around then I would experience much more extreme grief when they leave me. I can’t believe that people will stay. They never do.

It feels very bizarre every day that Noah isn’t gone yet. What is he waiting for?

I lay in bed half the night thinking about cutting. I couldn’t sleep. It was too late for a sleeping pill. I traced with my fingers the lines I wanted to make. I wish this wasn’t the resting place for my brain too. I wish there were more tracks.

This morning I commented to Noah how intense it is that the kids like to cuddle with me for literally hours a day. I wonder how children handle not being able to cuddle as much as they need to? I learned to offer sex or cut myself. Those are the kinds of touch I know how to go get for myself when I feel bad. I couldn’t wake Noah up. I wasn’t interested in sex and he hadn’t slept enough. He can’t be up all night with my stupid hysterics.

I don’t know how to be someone different. Someone better. Someone who isn’t bad.

My therapist keeps telling me that I need to work on letting people touch me. This cuddling with the kids is a good mid-level step but they sit on me. It is kind of different. I don’t seem to be able to let adults touch me in a comforting, non-sexual way. I can’t allow it. If I allow it I might find out I like it and then I may never get it again. I don’t want to find out how good something is that only other people get.

Stop whining Kristine. Go work. The only value any human has is what they do for other people. It really doesn’t matter what happens to you. It isn’t like bad things are happening any more. Other people have genuinely bad experiences happening to them today. Shut the fuck up already you whining, pathetic, stupid loser.

No, I wouldn’t talk to anyone else this way.

I’m scared. My body hurts. I tried to ask for help. That rarely goes well. See, this is why I think I am better off just staying home and hoping it kills me. Then I won’t waste anyones time with them having to tell me that pain just happens when you are crazy. If I weren’t so crazy my problems would go away. See, just stop being crazy and it will all be fine. It is my fault things happen. If I weren’t so damn crazy…

didn’t sleep

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Instead I went to look at Mint. We have a lot of expensive life goals. Are we moving towards them or am I fucking it all up? Noah is more than doing his share.

I spend around $900/month on my mental health. How is that for privilege? My insurance does not pay for any of what I do for my mental health so it is all out of pocket. And none is eligible for reimbursement from an HSA. Ha.

As long as I am suicidal I should be in therapy. It is obviously a band-aid on a severed limb but it is all I have. Is it perfect? Obviously not. But I’m not dead yet.

I feel very ashamed of myself for needing such a large amount of money in order to be relatively cheerful and functional. Without spending that much money I cry and cry and cry and scream. I don’t stay calm very well. I feel very ashamed of myself for being broken in this way. Why can’t I just “fix it”?

Why can’t I just stop caring. Why can’t I stop bringing up old shit?

Because I am still sitting here. And I am still me. And bodies have limits of stress. I’m trying to figure out how to lower my stress levels. I’m trying. I’m trying.

The worse I feel about my lack of progress the slower my progress. Rinse. Repeat.

I’m absolutely terrified that the doctor is going to be dismissive and tell me that my abdominal pain is just stress related. It isn’t. It isn’t all in my head. It is physical. I feel so pathetic. I keep crying. Please. Please believe me.

It is hard feeling out of control of my body. It is a reminder that I am never in control. Not of anything. There is the possibility that my body could be helped by western medicine.

But I’m outside the norm. I have had doctors tell me to my face that they will not treat me until I fall into line and stop being outside the norm. Doctors have told me that it is no big deal when sex is intensely painful for me–I’m just doing it for the man any way. I’ve been told it is my fault that procedures hurt because I am “anticipating the pain” and creating it.

I don’t like doctors very much. They tend to think of themselves as all-knowing. Just because you read something in a fucking book doesn’t make you all-knowing. You fucking asshole.

 

ack kid up

Looking for a therapist (still)

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(First: I didn’t mention getting new shoes and I worried blacksheep. Yes, I got shoes that work  better for my feet. No more ouchie.)

I sent out some emails to local therapists last night. When I do the modern equivalent of throwing a dart at the phone book I find that I am mostly interested in working with black women–apparently. If you search through all the people who are therapists in Fremont (and are listed online in a way I can find) only black women mention the important buzzwords for me: intense early trauma, “all stages of addiction”, incest, complex ptsd, ongoing anger issues, depression. Even when white people (or Asian or Middle Eastern [from what I see here]) try to say they work with trauma they are fussy and particular. They work with “change of life traumas” or “immigrant family issues”. Not really my problems.

“Hi, thank you for calling me back I have a few important buzzwords I have to run past a therapist before I can work with them: incest, bdsm, promiscuity, self-harm, attachment parenting, complex ptsd and queer. Let’s talk about them.

I don’t have a problem with educating an open minded therapist about alternative lifestyle issues. I am looking for a long-term relationship. I have two distinct needs with regards to therapy: first is that I go through periodic intense crisis periods. I have very little prediction of when they will happen outside of obvious anniversaries of trauma. Those are often very intense for me. I strongly prefer someone who has some experience in EMDR and CBT because I need occasional directed work. Mostly I see therapists because I do not have ongoing bonding relationships with very many people and I suffer intensely from this. Lack of attachment is one of the hardest parts of my life for me. I use therapists as surrogate parents and friends.

I need a therapist who will not flinch or overly react when I am all of a sudden telling you intense details about lurid rapes. I need someone who will not get overly indignant all the time–that’s not very useful. I am already angry. If you flinch or react or pull away when I talk about difficult things I will begin to look for patterns of disapproval. I will find them, I will project the fuck all over you and then I will disappear. I need to have a fairly blank mirror to talk to for a long time. That is hard for therapists. I am a fairly weird patient. You have to get to know me slowly.

I have been in therapy more on than off for 27 years. I have a few intense hot buttons due to these experiences: first and foremost is punctuality. If you do not respect my time you do not respect me. I will take note. I won’t be back. No I won’t try to “work it out.” I’m fucking paying for your time. I feel entitled to my 55 minutes. It is one of the few things in this life I feel genuinely entitled to: I pay for 55 minutes and I bloody well need to get them. I need you to be careful what you say to me. If something sounds like a promise to me and you don’t follow through I will disappear.

And seriously dude, all of my symptoms existed in well documented fashion for many years before I tried smoking pot. The fact that 99% of western medicine believes that my first problem is marijuana and I “should be sober before beginning treatment” means that I’m just not in a position to accept a lot of help. I’m not very open to western drugs right now. The side effects are far worse than the benefits of the drugs. They hurt me. Pot isn’t great but it is effective and less damaging to me than most of my other options. I’m not interested in being shamed because I’m trying to deal with a lot of stuff that isn’t my fucking fault.

I don’t take advice well at the beginning. I have to warm up to people. I have to know someone for a while and hear a series of shorter conversations before I begin to respect someones opinion. I do not respect people just because they want me to. I am very anti-authoritarian and I am very resistant to being directed towards giving up aspects of my self-determined identity. I have come a long way. I need to be respected for that. I do not need more people who are just assholes about how I’m not perfectly like a non-traumatized person so obviously I suck.”

And the next asshole who sends me a long letter about how what I really need is to say how helpless I am and turn everything over to “God” and go to AA/NA is going to get punched. Fuck you very much. It’s an approach that helps approximately 10% of the people who try it. I’m very unlikely to be in that small group.

It’s weird to me that I am doing very well and very poorly at the same time. I’m afraid that is going to be permanent. I have a lot of body memories from being raped. Most of my intense suicidal ideation happens around wanting to be away from those sensations. it hurts and I’m really tired of hurting in that way. Flashbacks and corresponding suicidal ideation seems to be a permanent fixture in my life. Managing that takes a lot of energy. It has been really bad since Shanna was about eighteen months.

I really hate my parents. If my father were alive I think I would enjoy killing him slowly by inches. I would take off one finger and toe at a time before I slowly started carving shapes out of other parts of his body.  I don’t actually want to hurt my mom–I suppose that’s good. But I don’t want to know her. I don’t want to act like everything is all hunky dory and fine now. I’m not fine. I’m a fucking wreck. You fucking assholes wrecked thirty years of my life so far. How much longer am I going to have to feel like this? Maybe forever? Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Mostly I feel very lucky that I get to have the life I have. I enjoy my kids far more minutes of the day than they trouble me, even including all the extensive work I do for them. I’m really happy to have them here as companions for my life. I do not begrudge them some work. But it is a lot of work. It’s hard to find enough energy for everything.

It’s not that my relationship with Noah is free from all frustration, but it is very affirming. Noah thinks I’m just a great person. I like being around him. He talks to me like I am smart. My house is a very good and safe place to be.

I loathe Palo Alto Medical Facility

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I need to get a chlamydia test done for reasons I’m not going to explain here. Life is complicated. PAMF is being annoying. I had some kind of visit in the last year so they’ve told me that I will have to pay for 100% of the visit. Why do I have insurance again?

I think I’ll go to Planned Parenthood. Even paying out of pocket there is cheaper.

Busy weekend

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I went up to work at Wicked Grounds this weekend. On Saturday I went up after running thirteen miles. I was tired but ebullient. BART was really full so at one point I gave up my seat so that an elderly person could sit. Even though I just ran thirteen miles, I am clearly in a better position to be standing.

When I stood up two elderly Latina women started making comments–ok, so only one of them was loud. They glared at me. The words are already fuzzy in my memory (ahhh blessed medication) but she called me trash. They expressed shock that I was that gross and a woman. Ew. I was wearing jeans, a t-shirt with the words “Rope Slut”, and a zip up hoodie mostly closed over my chest. And a dog choke collar closed with a padlock. I looked at her quite fiercely and asked, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” She turned bright red and looked down.

By contrast I ran around several blocks in San Francisco yesterday wearing a latex cheerleader outfit. It’s made with maroon and clear panels. One of the clear panels on the skirt is right over my ass crack. There is a deep clear vee in the front of the shirt. Now that I have ginormous mom nipples you can clearly see areola but not quite the nipple. It’s uhh festive. I had quite a few gay men tell me that I looked fabulous and they were proud of me for wearing it. It was… different.

Dore Alley is my anniversary. I got beaten by choice for the first time the night before Dore Alley in 2000. I was eighteen. It was my second weekend at the Power Exchange, a bdsm themed sex club in San Francisco. I had brought my sister the previous weekend and I was too afraid to play. I came back dressed in clothes I bought at Hot Topic and I asked a transwoman to beat me. I was afraid of the men, honestly. She flogged me very well.

I feel like Leather as an identity has changed a lot in the twelve years I have been part of the bdsm community. Even though I’m not active these days it still feels like my community. I have been there my entire adult life. I don’t have another community. There is no other grouping of people who will accept me for absolutely all of my fucked-up-interests.

I got to know a new person yesterday as a result of a massive faux pas. I used the wrong gender pronoun. I felt like a total fucking asshole. The woman-born-woman very bravely stayed near the cash register to tell me that I made a mistake when I said “he”. I felt so bad. (In my defense she is a very butch lesbian. Not that it excuses me in the slightest.) After that I ended up having a very long and protracted conversation with her.

It’s not every day I meet someone who says, “I know I am weird but it is because I was tortured as a child.”

Her androgynous gender appearance is the result of her father performing medical experiments on her from birth and trying to change her gender because she was born an identical twin and they wanted a boy.

We had a lot to talk about. We felt very comfortable together. We both found the bdsm scene at eighteen. She’s two years younger than me. I’m not sure how I have missed her for ten years. I do recognize her handle. I think I just have never been a San Francisco person. And City people don’t come south.

I got to sit down and have a surprise conversation with someone who I pretty much couldn’t shock. Do you know how often that happens to me? I’d put it at twice a decade. Normal people want to talk about their lives. From birth to eighteen I lived a traumatic horror show and when I turned eighteen I ran straight into the Leather community. I was embraced and adored. I still am.

I didn’t spend much time with anyone outside the Leather community for the four years I was with Tom. I was still close with Anna but Jenny and I barely spoke. We had very different lives even though we were both college students. I have rarely been like people my age. It was really amazing yesterday to find this person. I hope I can keep in touch with her. She feels like a gift.

The actual Up Your Alley Fair wasn’t very exciting. I felt pretty sad about how much it has changed. I saw far more latex than leather. Most guys were simply wearing underwear if they weren’t wearing pants. It didn’t look like a leather event. It looked like a bath house but outside with very little sex. I only saw three or four guys getting head. There used to be hundreds. I had the very strong impulse to ask the only really slutty guy I saw there (he had a line of boys) if he was willing to see if a mouth is just a mouth. I didn’t! I don’t do that any more! But I wanted to. I wonder if he would have let me. The fair felt uninspiring and if no one else was going to put on a show I might as well.

I really like this part of me. I want Noah to go to Folsom with me. Exhibitionism is big for me. I probably won’t have actual penetrative sex at Folsom but we will have to drive because I won’t be willing to make it home. The car can be put somewhere private.

I really like getting the shit beaten out of me while people watch and freak out. I like it. I really really like it. I like the energy of the crowd. I freak people out in dungeons too. I am on the far extreme edge of what is currently common. I wasn’t when I came into the community.

I found the leather community at the very beginning of the online era. People were still very paranoid about using the internet. It was harder to find parties because they weren’t advertised online. You had to get to know people still. We hung out in IRC talking all day and night together but we arranged the parties at munches. We had dungeons that were basically our community spaces. People spent a lot of time hanging around.

When I showed up as an eighteen year old it was very rare to see another person under thirty. The community was full of people who had already had full lives and then discovered something about themselves. They were people who made very conscious life choices to become the people they were.

Where I was there were a lot of older women who were very heavy masochists. Life has already made their ass hard. They have been getting hit for a very long time and they have leather  butt. They can barely bruise any more. Sadists like bruises. If it gets harder and harder to bruise you… well… I guess I’ll just have to hit you with something bigger.

I got to meet someone this weekend who grew up like me. She was intensely abused and ostracized as a child and then found the same Leather community. I know all of the people she was mentored by. I don’t know how in the hell I have missed her.

I really want to write more about sex but I should go in.

What I just sent off to my GP

1 Reply

Dear Dr. S,
            I apologize for the length of this message, I am not good at being brief and your office visits aren’t really long enough for me to come in and talk to you in person. 
            I went in to see Dr. Sastry as you recommended.  I will not be working with her.  I can explain that by telling you her parting line to me: “You have two major ways you deviate from the norm, breastfeeding and smoking pot.  I won’t be working with you until you stop them.”  She expected me to wean my daughter and quit smoking in a week.  Or she wouldn’t work with me.  Well, that week is over.  At no point in that week did I feel like a relationship with Dr. Sastry would improve my life so I cheerfully ignored her recommendations.
            She wanted me on an anti-psychotic, and she encouraged me towards upping the dose quickly.  She told me she was putting that I was bipolar on my medical record.  Even though I very firmly believe I am not bipoloar.  I have GAD and complex PTSD.  They are treated differently.  I don’t believe it is appropriate to medicate me as if I am bipolar.
            Instead I am paying a ridiculous amount of money to a Harm Reduction specialist.  I went in and talked to her for an hour and a half.  At the end I left with a prescription for Ativan.  Six pills for a month.  To be split in half.  I’ve had them almost two weeks and I’ve taken a pill and a half.  I have cut my smoking to almost nothing.
            Dr. Sastry had no interest in finding out what I have legitimately done to deal with my issues.  She wanted to medicate me into a coma to stop my sexual acting out.  I don’t appreciate her agenda.  When I talked about the recent periods of going without sleep for days she refused to believe me that I wasn’t also sexually acting out.  She wanted them to be manic cycles.  She would not accept that I wasn’t manic.  I wasn’t manic.  I was hyper-vigilant and experiencing flashbacks of being raped.  I wouldn’t let my children touch me let alone anyone else.  Yes, I am ethically non monogamous with my husband.  I don’t harm my life.
            I would encourage you to not sent patients to that woman if in any way they “deviate from the norm”.  No one needs to be shamed while they are in the process of receiving medical care.
Secondly, I am worried that some aspects of my health have been badly managed and it’s complicated to explain.  I saw a homebirth midwife through both pregnancies.  My first labor I did 40 hours at home before transferring and I delivered at Valley Med because they are the most friendly to transferring homebirths.  I actually think they did a fabulous job of dealing with me as a person who “deviated from the norm.”  The vast majority of the staff was really kind and effective and I appreciated that.  The delivering doctor asked me out of the blue if I wanted my placenta since I was a transferred homebirth.  When the delivering nurse said I couldn’t have it the doctor said, “We don’t know where it went.”  I will be grateful forever.
Neither of my pregnancies went well.  I was horribly sick.  I lost 18 lbs by the end of the second trimester with Shanna.  I had a lot of really intense long-lasting early labor scares.  I lost two babies in between Shanna and Calli.  I lost the first the day before Shanna turned one.  That pregnancy was about 9 weeks along.  I guesstimate that because I went up to Portland right after that and they have an exhibition showing the size and development of a fetus every 2-3 days through the pregnancy.  I found out I miscarried because I found the baby.  I thought I was just having my first postpartum period.  This was rather traumatizing.
We used condoms for two months and tried again.  We got pregnant immediately.  I lost that baby  at seven weeks.  The reason I knew I was pregnant again is because I have instant full body horror symptoms.  Pregnancy is awful.  My whole body treats it like a toxic experience.  I became pregnant again without a period.  That’s Calli.
I was in labor with her for nine days.  At about day four I started feeling like I was leaking fluid.  I called my midwife to talk to her about it.  She told me I was on a 48 hour clock.  I had to deliver the baby by then or I had to go to the hospital because I risked infection.  Technically she knew she was only supposed to give me 24 hours.  But she knows that I really didn’t want to go to the hospital.  Every home get-it-going-thing we did.  I had contractions every 3-10 minutes for so many days.  I couldn’t get them to stop. 
I ended up at Washington Hospital.  I had a rude on-call doctor and a sanctimonious on-call nurse.  They lectured me horribly and treated my like a recalcitrant child.  At the very end of the visit he swabbed me and said, “It’s not amniotic fluid, go home.”  When my midwife filed out he gave me this long nasty lecture about how I was going to kill myself and my baby if I stayed home.  He was almost right.  I still wasn’t going to go back to him.
I hemorrhaged really badly.  I couldn’t stand at all for days because I lost so much blood.  I had to crawl to the bathroom for weeks.  My midwife told me point blank about 20 minutes after my daughter was born, “If you close your eyes you won’t open them again.”  My midwife didn’t really do much about the hemorrhage.  I was told to eat blood thickening food.  I didn’t move from bed for two weeks because I couldn’t stand.
I have lost 1-2 lbs a week since then.  I often have trouble eating.  My stomach hurts all the time.  A lot of it is my mental health stuff, I’m aware.  But I was on a medication years ago through a different PAMF doctor, Dr. -.  It was for stomach acid.  I don’t remember what it was.  I am curious about pursuing something for my stomach acid again.  I get up in the morning and I smoke pot so that I can settle my stomach enough to handle eating.  If I don’t smoke I can’t eat more than about half a piece of toast before I’m in violent stomach pain.
I wake up every morning to an hour or more of painful burning diarrhea.  I can’t believe this is normal.  This hasn’t happened my whole life but it has been happening for months.  I’m not sure how many months.  I’m working on getting my mental health stuff in order.  I truly am.  I can’t keep waiting forever on dealing with these other aspects of my health.  My thyroid appears to be no longer functioning normally.
I feel like this all should have a lot more attention paid to it, but I don’t know what that will mean.  I’m tired of my body acting like I am in full crisis all the time.  I need to find a way to make the stomach acid stop destroying me from the inside.  I think that will help.  It might actually help me to sleep as well.  I wake up at 4 because I have to go to the bathroom.  Then I spend an hour having burning diarrhea.  Then I can’t sleep again.  Maybe this isn’t just about my mental health, you know?

This is why I don’t work with psychiatrists.

3 Replies

Well, my local medical office now has me diagnosed as bipolar.  I feel that is the wrong diagnosis.  I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.  I’m not saying I’m not crazy.  I’m saying I don’t think I am depressed and no I don’t want you to put me on an anti-depressant.  After 26 years of therapy and many long-term therapists agreeing with me.  I was told that I have an omnisciency problem when I said that I don’t appreciate her putting an inaccurate diagnosis in my medical record.  She told me loftily that here at (medical office name deleted) they only use things that are evidence based medicine.  I asked her, “Like transfusions?”  She said they only work from studies.  I asked her if she was aware of the massive problem of study bias and how it is well documented.  I don’t think she is right just because she has decided she is.

And I have to wean and stop smoking marijuana this week or she won’t work with me.  Those things are “outside the norm” and she won’t deal with them.  She lectured me extensively on the marijuana and expressed shock and disgust that the pediatrician didn’t turn me in.  I asked her if *she* has read marijuana studies and she went back to that… she is only interested in evidence based medicine.  Because obviously there is no merit to marijuana in any way.

All of my problems are because of my parents.  Nothing else that has ever happened to me matters.  I am *only* acting out those relationships at all times.  I said, “Really?  The fact that I was repeatedly raped and attacked by animals and not allowed to bond with people in normal ways and… everything is just my parents.  Sure, why not?  It’s easiest to blame them.

She told me that the fact that I went to college proves that I have an omnisciency problem, because I think I can control everything and make anything happen.  That kind of bothered me.  No, scratch that, I’m really upset.

Thank you western medicine for reminding me of how very broken I am.  I think I was coping better before I saw her.  I have an appointment next week with a psychiatrist who works with my therapist at the Harm Reduction Therapy Center.  I’m pretty terrified at this point but it really has no way to *not* go better than today.

I just had a really funny thought about this exchange.  She left off the meeting saying, “You have to do x and y in a week or else.”  At first that terrified me.  It really did.  My first instinct was full fledged fear.  I am going to get in trouble if I fail.  And what she asked me to do is a big fucking deal.  I don’t think it was a reasonable thing to say to me.  But at the end–when I’m really scared–I get angry.  I get so fucking angry that I want to hurt someone.  I can feel my eyebrow go up.  “Or else, what?”

No, I can’t work with this woman.  We do not have compatible approaches to care.  But there are other people in the world who are not raging assholes.  I’ve heard.  I’m not sure if I believe it.