The Goddess Writes

Live Nude Woman

2010-11-30T11:13:00.002-05:00

Today, November 29, 2010, roughly fourteen years after I first conceived of the idea, I did it! I took my clothes off in front of a room full of mostly svelte college students and contorted my body in various poses for nearly three hours. My mom would be so proud that I’m putting my Master’s degree to good use (ha ha!).

Now, for those of you who might think I’m out of my freaking mind, in some ways you would be right. Maybe you do have to be a little bit, of a different mindset to do what I did.

I could tell you “desperate times call for desperate measures” and my unemployment is about to run out and all that jazz, but the truth is, as long as there isn’t a mirror in front of me, I’d much rather be naked than clothed almost any day of the week, in almost any situation. I loathe, loathe, loathe clothing and I dream of a world that is warm enough for all of us, yes, ALL OF US, to run around NAKED, without a stitch of clothing on, ever-unless we get cold or are getting sunburned or maybe just feel like covering up. But the point is, in my ideal world, clothes would be like scarves and mittens and costume jewelry-frivolous but permissible to wear if one wanted to, yet certainly not required.

This view is by no means endorsed by anyone else in my family, so please don’t think that they are a bunch of self lovin’ nudists like I am-that couldn’t be further from the truth!

In addition to loving being naked (except for when I’m cold), as an artist, I am completely enamored with the naked human form. Probably always have been. Although as a kid I do recall being horribly torn-both aroused and embarrassed at my Aunt’s nude female art work she so brazenly had displayed around her house. I mean she was single and all, so did that make her a…lesbian…? And the art work aroused me…so did that make me…a lesbian too? And with the exception of “The David” I never saw any nude male artwork and really, his bits are covered up by a damn fig leaf or something, so that was hardly a turn on! Such confusing thoughts for a young kid, and of course we never talked about these things in my “very open household”!

I distinctly remember the first time I saw my first naked person, that I was supposed to draw I mean. It was actually a rather traumatic experience for me. It was autumn of 1996 during my college Life Drawing class, which, after this experience I took to calling my “Naked People Drawing Class.” Our first model was a man.

Now, I’d seen a few naked men before, even one or two with my consent, but even I was so stunned at the depth of my ignorance and denial as “Mr. Incredibly Tanned Ass” took off his rob and mounted the modeling platform in the middle of the room, I didn’t even recognize myself. I’m nearly certain I turned a billion shades of red and prayed for anything in the world…a tsunami, an earthquake, a sudden death in my family, my immediate and untimely death right there on the spot, a giant black hole to swallow me up…anything to happen to me so that I did not a) have to be in that room and b)that whatever he did, however he positioned himself, that I didn’t have to see that god-awful thing between his legs!

I sorta got one wish granted and I think you can figure out which one that was. I was so appalled at my reaction to his nudity and so angry at my Professor for not warning us that the model was going to be male that I spent most of the class shaking with rage and seriously considering that I should either drop the class or get some psychological help. That night, my drawings were for shit.

There was something in the realness of it all, in my first experience seeing a naked man who didn’t want something sexual from me, which completely unnerved me. I had no idea what to do with a nude man standing before me whose sole purpose was to teach me how the human body worked, how it looked in various poses. On some level, after the initial class, I realized this was a huge part of what made me tremble with rage and with time I was able to relax and even enjoy drawing other models, even male models and their penis’s. Sometimes, though, all these years later, I can still recall how I felt when I saw my first nude male model…his great tanned ass… and the occasional glimpses of his little penis hanging limply between his balls and I feel a mixture of sadness at my initial reaction and an intense desire not to illicit the same responses in students when I pose.

Live Nude Woman Part 2

2010-11-30T11:05:00.004-05:00

As traumatic as that first experience was for me, and as grateful as I was that I did not have to draw a penis in my very first nude model experience, my Life Drawing class was one of my most favorite classes in college and certainly one of the few classes which fundamentally shaped who I am as a person today. To be able, as an artist, and even more importantly, as a human being, to witness other human beings bearing, not just their naked bodies, but in some ways, parts of their souls, to a room full of strangers, and strangers who are, generally speaking, physically in the prime of their life, is a profound gift that I doubt very much I even had the capacity to fully appreciate at 19 years old.

To be a model, to be a good model, you have to do so much more than be willing to get naked for money in front of people. You have to be willing to share part of yourself, parts of your passion, parts of your story, parts of the twists and turns and flexions and posses that only you can bring to a session. You have to be willing to let people look closely, possibly closer than you would ever allow a lover to look at you, under glaring hot lights, for 30 seconds to an hour or more. You have to allow strangers to critique your cellulite, your scars, your uneven breasts, your sagging ass, pierced nipples, fading tattoos, spider veins, crow’s feet, pubic hair, dimples, missing testicle, uncircumcised penis and everything else you might cringe from in a dressing room mirror, but which ultimately makes you a beautiful model to teach students how the human body works and how your body moves and behaves differently from everyone else’s body on the planet.

I think ever since my Life Drawing class, even while in the class, I thought about how I would do things differently if I were the model, but for some reason, it never occurred to me to ask my Professor how to get into this line of work, even though I had a great relationship with her. At that point in my life I was still battling my anorexia and child abuse and had never been to a clothing optional resort, nor was I comfortable identifying as a nudist. I still had a very long way to go in my own journey before I was ready to take the steps that lead to me taking my clothes off today.

Nevertheless, the idea of being a model never left my head and it wasn’t until this summer, when finally visiting a clothing optional resort very close to where we currently live, I met a guy (I shudder to think of him as a man) who claimed he was a model in the area, and while blatantly staring at my bare breasts, he told me that I should “get into the business.” He offered to show me all his moves, and give me his contacts, if I took him back to my room, (most nudists I’ve encountered are not this smarmy be the way!!) at which point I repeatedly declined and wondered what the hell was taking my lover so long in the bathroom. The conversation, as disturbing as it was, ignited a fire in my brain though and almost immediately when we returned, I started researching modeling in “the Valley”.

Who knew it would be so freaking frustrating! Maybe I should have brought that guy back to my room after all-with my lover as the body guard to make sure things stayed legit! I had no idea you needed experience to take your freaking clothes off! I thought you just took the damn things off, strutted a few poses, held them for awhile, stayed as still as possible and viola, everyone is happy! Yeah, not so much. Not only is it not that easy, not only do you need experience, you need references! Well, how the hell do you get references if you don’t have experience?

I called one school, and in sheer desperation, and asked if taking a Life Drawing class and being a nudist counted as experience. The Administrative Assistant didn’t sound terribly impressed with my credentials, but told me to write a cover letter and e-mail it to her and she’d see what she could do. Ok great. What the hell was I supposed to put in a cover letter? “Hi so and so, I’d really like to get naked for your young art students. I have a pretty good body, although I’ve put on some weight in my middle. My breasts are a 38D and they are pierced, as is my nose. I’m a nudist and an artist so I’m comfortable being naked in front of people and coming up with unusual poses….” I felt like I was trying to be a porn star. In the end, I said more than I needed to (go figure) and didn’t hear anything for months. Oh, and I only sent my cover letter thingy to one school because I was so discouraged by how the phone call went (so much for following through on your dreams baby!).

And then, lo, one day, towards the end of October, when I was feeling all sorts of fat and down on myself, a guy named Jason e-mailed me about my availability and I said yes to every date he had (doctor’s appointments be damned!) and the day after that THE WOMAN I was supposed to train with in the Valley contacted me about a workshop she was running in few weekends (for only $30) for wanna-be models! It was all starting to fall into place and I couldn’t believe it!

I scheduled my debut with Jason for today and my workshop with Pat for a few weeks ago. Pat and I really hit it off and since then I’ve observed her at another school where she introduced me to the person I need to know to get scheduled for next semester and I will be posing with Pat on Thursday near where I used to live and will hopefully get hired there as well. I’m trying to keep my enthusiasm in check, but I had a great time today and the feedback from the Professor, who knew it was my debut, was that “It was like (I) had been doing this my whole life” and it pays a whole lot better than most jobs I’m likely to find in Public Health…except for the fact that there aren’t any benefits and the work is very sporadic.

No matter how long the “gig” lasts though, someday I’ll either write a book about it or tell great stories about how I was a live nude model. Hell, maybe I’ll do both! After all, how many people get to say that at a cocktail party and mean it?

A Finger In My Arsehole

2010-10-20T14:19:00.006-04:00

Yesterday was the dreaded day. The day when I, well, my insurance company really, payed someone to put their finger in my arsehole…all in the name of healing. Now, I realize that I haven’t written in awhile about what I’ve been doing to manage my chronic pain issues, which in many ways, became the focus of this blog last October when my life was torn asunder by a multitude of unexpected diagnoses. And I realize I probably could have found someone on Craigslist or some other internet site who was more than willing to stick their horny little finger in my rectum for free-hell, maybe they’d even pay me for the pleasure of doing so (but that gets into all sorts of murky waters and possibly illegal issues and who can afford to lose the job they don’t have?). But now dear reader, I’m back at it-giving you a glimpse into a world hopefully you’re grateful that you aren’t living in.

Seriously though (I have a really bad habit of joking about the things that scare me the most) I had to undergo a humiliating and excruciatingly painful rectal exam by a Colon Surgeon before I could even be cleared to have someone paid to put their finger in my bum! Perhaps I’ll write about that procedure some other day, when I’ve recovered a bit from the shame of it. Oh, and speaking, err, writing about shame, my early childhood abuse experiences left my anything but ready for yesterday’s procedure!

However, I feel I am at my wits end. Sitting, hell, sleeping on my back has become such a source of pain that I can no longer do many of the things I formerly enjoyed in life like riding a horse or a bike (for fuck’s sake riding my partner is even a rarity!). Long, rambling car rides, writing for hours on end…anything that requires me to sit on my beautiful ass for more than 45 minutes to 2 hours (on the best of days and a heavy dose of pain killers) is just about out of the questions. Fuck, I’ve even been woken up from the little sleep I manage to get because the pressure on my rectal region is too intense…from a friggin” mattress!

I haven’t written about this yet either (although I swore I did…that’s the problem when you are always writing in your head…you tend to forget what you actually put down on paper, or cyber paper), but over the summer I was diagnosed with Pudendal Neuralgia by a specialist in New Hampshire who was fairly adamant that the only way to relieve my pain, if there was even a way to relieve it, was to have MAJOR surgery, which would involve two cuts deep inside my each side of my vagina to, “vaporize the ligaments which (are thought to) entrap my Pudendal Nerves”. This too, is a blog for another time, but in a nutshell, the doctor hardly evoked confidence from me, as he could not, or would not, answer most of the questions we had for him and he repeatedly stated that this procedure worked best, when it worked at all, on people who had this problem with a short on set; in other words, not so much with people like me who can easily remember being 5 years old and unable to sit without severe pain!

In the months that have followed the bittersweet and very uncomfortable 8ish hour drive to New Hampshire, I have received an intense amount of pressure to have the surgery and to not have the surgery. I left the doctor’s office in tears, all but refusing to have it done, unless it became all but impossible for me to sit, at all. I figured I’ve managed to cope with it, on so many levels, for the better part of my life, why the fuck would I want to undergo an incredibly invasive procedure, having yet another man I don’t trust violate my body once again, to have my vagina sliced open, to be on bed rest for roughly two months? And if all goes well after that, have to wean myself back into sitting at 5-10 minute increments and wait possibly 2 years for results which might never happen??? The whole concept seemed ludicrous to me!

The research I did, which in and of itself, was a difficult process (try Googling Pudendal Neuralgia and see what you come up with!) also helped confirm my belief that surgery, at least at this point in my life, even if, as my mom likes to declare, my insurance should pay for all or most of it, is not the right choice for me. So, that is what led me here…to having a finger in my rectum.

Here I was, again with Karen, my Pelvic Floor Physical Therapist. She’s the blessing from the universe who helped stretch out my vagina (although I may have used a pseudonym for her in earlier blogs, Karen is her bona fide first name) when I was suffering the worst of the Vulvadynia and Pelvic Floor Dysfunction (see earlier blogs). Now, after being cleared by the butt doctor, Karen was going to stick one of her slender, gloved fingers into my rectum in the hopes that doing this-for who knows, maybe a few sessions, maybe several months, would be enough to release the tension on my Pudendal Nerves and thereby avoid any need at all for surgery.

Although I was scared out of my mind, wanting desperately to clench my ass so tight that she couldn’t do anything at all, and spent the week leading up to my visit with her dreading THE DAY, even going so far as to make “jokes” on Sunday about how I was going to have a finger in my ass on Monday, there is no one in the world I would let do this, other than Karen. The amount of trust it takes, probably for anyone, to be curled up in a fetal position while someone lubes you up with Slippery Stuff and as gently as possible inserts a gloved digit into your poop shoot, at least in a medical setting, is tremendous. Now, this doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed some forms of consensual anal play in my day, but the very nature of it being done in an attempt to correct a medical problem, well, for me, that changes everything! That and the fact that the Ass Surgeon who had me bend over a rectal table for her exam, about broke my tailbone in THE MOST PAINFUL RECTAL EXAM EVER!!! I was none too keen on having anyone back there in say the next three millennia or so. Then again, my little air cushion that I bring with me everywhere I might want to sit, isn’t helping much and I’m not too keen on surgery either. Pasta fungul!

And so, after a plethora of questions…yes she knows what Pudendal Neuralgia is, yes she’s treated lots of women with it, no she doesn’t think I should have surgery if it isn’t what I want, and so on, we finally got down to the butt business. And as long as I kept reminding myself why I was there, why this was happening and that I needed to breathe (and of course, resorted to my defense mechanism of continuous questioning) it wasn’t that bad. That is, as long as she stayed away from my tailbone. If Karen’s finger was anywhere near my tailbone I wanted to projectile (vomit?) heave her out of my areshole it hurt so much! And as with my vaginal stretching, I was inexplicably tighter on one side (this time my left) than the other.

The entire procedure lasted maybe five minutes and that was that. She removed her finger as she promised she would and left the room so I could wipe the remainder of the lube of my rump and get dressed in privacy, although after that ordeal does privacy really matter? What I would latter find out was really the worst part of the whole finger in ass process was the most horrific smelling fart I’ve ever released in my life about a half hour after I left Karen’s office, enroot to my therapist’s office; and believe me, I’ve impressed some guys with what I can unleash! That and an almost uncontrollable need to shit every two hours or so. And I’m not talking about a little bowel movement here and there. I mean, the hardcore, been out drinkin’ all night, or Thanksgiving shits-the kind you worry could break the damn toilet and certainly leave a trail of evidence behind when you flush! All friggin’ day and most of the night long I crapped into the porcelain god. My bum began to bleed from wiping so much and even though we’ve stocked up on what I thought was enough toilet paper to last into 2011, I’m afraid if I keep seeing Karen (and it is supposed to me twice a week starting next week) and my bowels keep moving like this, we’ll need to buy a storage unit just to hold toilet paper! She has such tiny fingers too and she only used the very tip, I don’t get it. I will definitely have to ask her about this before she does any butt work next week.

Criminy I hope this is a better idea than slicing open my vagina! Ugh! Just re-reading that last sentence makes me want to vomit all over my keyboard…yes, yes a finger in my ass sounds much better than cutting open my vagina any day! I saw the movie Seven, and while not quite the same thing, it still conjures up images of the razor embedded leather cock harness. I’m fairly certain that’s a sign I’m not ready for surgery even if I have to shit for hours after seeing Karen!

My Bathroom, My Space Station

2010-10-09T01:40:00.000-04:00

When I was I kid, around the age of eight or ten-old enough to know it was never going to work, I would sometimes hideout in our downstairs bathroom. Always the downstairs one, never the upstairs one. Bad things happened in the upstairs bathroom, or at least they did when my dad lived there. And when he finally left, the memories of what he did left an indelible stain on all the bathroom surfaces, especially the shower, so I never sought refuge there.

The ugly blue, beige, brown down stairs bathroom, as I remember it, was a different story. Long before it became a place to surreptitiously pop my zits, I would sometimes delude myself into believing it was my secret, savior space station. When life was at its lowest of lows, or I couldn’t starve myself anymore, or I wasn’t in the mood to entertain suicidal thoughts, or maybe I just wanted to get away but it was too (cold, rainy, dark, scarry, whatever) to run away, I would lock myself in the bathroom.

Then I would begin my secret rescue ritual. I’d sit on the toilet, with the lid closed, put my youngish left hand on the yellow handle of the plunger, which always sat faithfully next to the toilet, close my eyes, maneuver the magical handle forward in an intricate pattern, and begin my commands to the space station as we prepared for lift-off. Depending upon whether or not I thought I would be heard by anyone else in the house, I would either speak my commands aloud or murmur them under my breath; but I had this fervently held belief that if I wanted to be rescued, I must say the words out loud. I have no idea where I got that notion from, but I believed it, heart and soul, despite the fact that my bathroom space station rescue missions never worked. And believe me, I tried these rescue missions for far longer than I am willing to admit here!

I am reminded of my bathroom space station tonight because one of my deepest fears seems to be coming true-that once I no longer am able to maintain control over the ironclad, zillion-times sealed walls aptly confining my tears, my anguish, I will never be able to do anything else but drown in the mire.

I started crying uncontrollably on Monday, when Thomas, my most favorite of our now four cats, escaped from the deck. I hadn’t noticed he was missing and hence had no idea how long he was gone. Stupid me! I thought for sure THIS TIME I had managed to cat proof the fucking deck! I was beside myself with fear and panic that he might get hit by a car or kidnapped and cooked by our motherfucking neighbor (yes, I hate him and he rents a restaurant next to us and hates us as well, so it is possible that he would do such a thing for revenge!).

I spent what seemed like forever looking for him, hell, I even prayed to God to bring him back and offered up all the other cats in exchange, before I apologized for praying to a God I don’t believe in and offered up my prayers to the universe instead (yeah, I was a wee bit of a basket case)! When the fat fuck of a cat finally tried sneaking up behind me, my eyes did not believe my face and it wasn’t until I tried hoisting all 25 pounds of him into my arms that I realized he was truly alive and safe and home. And I lost it. I was sobbing and shaking. I mean snot pouring out of my nose, gulping sobs that caused the people going to the restaurant to gawk at me. I was clutching Thomas so hard the poor cat was gasping for air and I didn’t even notice, my crying was that uncontrollable.

When I finally got us both inside, I collapsed on the stairs, still hysterically crying while my seemingly bewildered cat, who was probably expecting to be locked in the bathroom for escaping, tried to console my by rubbing up against me, purring his head off…until he got bored with me and I finally got a grip on myself.

Except that I never really did.

What felt like the fatal loss of my most favorite animal companion ever, appears to be the final push that catapulted me into a chasm of pain I have been doing lifelong, mind boggling acrobatics to avoid peering into, never mind confronting head on. And now I feel as if I am spiraling, otherworldly, out-of-control, guts heaving, can’t focus on anything else, where the fuck did this come from, into something I intuitively feel is only going to get uglier the farther I fall in to it.

Even though I finally stopped crying external tears when Thomas became bored with consoling me, I haven’t stopped the deluge of internal tears that began falling that Monday. Now it is Friday and the taunt gossamer threads of denial which previously held my lonely life precariously together are obliterated by bitterness and acrid tears. I feel little but resentment towards my partner (?) who is rarely here and even when he is, does little more than offer physical proximity to me. I feel trapped and isolated living here in “the Valley” and enraged at my dumbass self for ever suggesting that we move here. I feel friendless in an area where I once had several friends. I feel in constant pain that few take seriously and no one (that I don’t pay) wants to hear about. I feel sleep deprived from the constant nightmares that keep me up, tossing and turning all night, while my partner slumbers on, oblivious to my nocturnal thrashings.

I feel my teeth ache from the spontaneous outburst of tears right before he came home from work today. From the crying almost all the way to couples therapy-our big Friday night date, and the crying on the way home, and when we got home. And on the bathroom floor, after he fell asleep. Which is what reminded me, as I sat sobbing and rocking myself on the chintzy bathmat, of my useless bathroom space station, and the fact that as an adult, if that is indeed what I am, no matter where I live, I still try to keep the plunger on the left hand side of the toilet-something I never thought about until tonight.

I guess my hope that I can rescue myself dies harder than I thought it would. And the pathway out of hell, or healing as my therapist likes to call it, looks like it’s gonna take a whole lot more out of me than I ever bargained for, if it doesn’t wreck me first.

The Bi Phase

2010-09-20T22:59:00.003-04:00

This weekend, while humoring my partner and seeing, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” I was reminded of a “trend (?)” which incenses me. And that is, “The Bi-Phase”. For those of you who haven’t seen (or suffered) through the movie, the main female character tries to escape her past “ex’s”, which her none too bright, sorta boyfriend keeps referring to as her ex-boyfriends. Although she constantly corrects him by calling them her seven evil ex’s (we never learn why they are evil, despite how long the movie drags on, but that is besides the point), he never notices the corrections she makes. Nor does he make any connection to the female who accosts him, ninja style, in an alleyway.

Now, before you go all nerdy video-gangbusters on me here, I understand Scott Pilgrim was hardly a glowing example of anything other than “the nerdy guy beats every guy who ever beat up on him and still gets two hot chicks in the end” kind of movie, and that isn’t where my beef is (well, not in this blog anyway). What’s got ants in my pants, bees in my bonnet and whatever other trite expressions you can think of for being pissed off, is the whole concept of a “Bi-Phase.”
In this particular movie, you would have to be beyond a nerd or live in a darker cave than I do, to not realize that Ramona (female character with 7 evil ex’s) has had a relationship with a woman. That’s certainly cool with me and I speculate that it is probably cool with the nerdy 95% male dominate population in the movie theatre. What’s not cool with me; you know, me who identifies as bisexual, is that when it comes time for Ramona to ‘fess up about her relationship with her evil fem ex, she merely shrugs it off as, “I thought I was Bi. It was just a phase.” And, to kill the ending of the movie, much like “Chasing Amy,” Ramona decides that she’d rather be with a man. How convenient.

How sad.

How fucking much it pisses me off that in the few movies I’ve seen, bisexuality is still being presented as a phase, a joke, a temporary, desperate period of exploration until a man is found.
How oddly, eerily biblical-as if finding a man is the true answer to what every woman is really looking for, and yet, if she can’t find one, she might be able to get away with being edgy enough to be “bi,” but only if it is a passing phase. And of course, that discounts all the bisexual men in the world!

Clearly for me, this is a deeply personal issue. For most of my life I was torn, often to the brink of suicidal ideation, over my sexuality. My very first crush, as I’ve already blogged about, was on a boy my age that lived across the street. However, in hindsight as an adult, I often wonder if he would have been my first crush if I hadn’t had heterosexuality rammed down my throat and bashed into my head at least since the time my first, and only, male cousin was born- a mere six months after I was. We were constantly referred to as “kissing cousins” (whatever that means…By the way, it turns out he’s gay and I’m bi, so that whole forcing heterosexuality thing upon us didn’t turn out so well!) And ever since I can remember I was asked if I had a boyfriend-I mean from the time I was THREE or so on!

Come ON! Talk about inappropriate questions for kids! We don’t even give children a chance to develop their own sexuality in our American society. We form their sexuality for them: based on religion, based on fear, based on tradition and our own expectations of weddings and what have-you and we start bombarding them, at the earliest ages possible, that they are to be heterosexual and that is that. It is almost a carefully re-written version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, except here children aren’t being taught to hate, they are being taught whom it is permissible to love and when and how.

Once my first crush moved away, my attention turned to a girl who lived on the next block from me. I was smitten with her in a way I’d never felt before, in a way part of me already knew I shouldn’t be, thanks to my Catholic upbringing. Yet on the rare times when we would walk to Sunday School together, the longing inside me to reach out and hold her hand was so intense I was certain it was worth any price that awaited me in hell. In our younger years I could get away with doing so under the guise of skipping to school to make it there faster, but all I really cared about was being closer to her. My crush on her lasted ages, or at least from second or third grade through fifth or sixth grade, when she turned to the ‘80’s Brat Pack and whatever boys Teen magazine told her where hot and I lost her forever. Two decades later though, I can still squirm in my seat as I think about my early childhood orgasms I’d have with her as we became too old for holding hands and skipping to school but not to self-conscious to avoid wrestling each other alone in my basement; our legs brushing, crushing each other’s clitoris’s, our barely developed breasts rubbing against each other’s breasts, hot, sweaty faces gasping for air, lips poised inches apart from lips, in a kiss we never dared.

The Bi Phase Part 2

2010-09-20T22:53:00.002-04:00

Unlike Amy and Ramona and whatever her name(s) were in all those other movies that depict bisexuality as a phase, I believe it is something just as real as heterosexuality and homosexuality and probably about as understood as bestiality, although maybe slightly more accepted. Perhaps it is a phase that some people go through and that is ok, I’m just sick and fucking tired of it being marginalized, shoved off to the side, dismissed, laughed at, denied, denigrated and in some ways, treated as the new homosexuality-the new thing you can’t talk about.

In my life, I am only aware of three other bisexual people. One person is openly bi. One person’s sexuality was revealed to me under penalty of losing my friendship if I revealed that information to anyone else and the last person (who was also the first person I ever knew) was a co-worker at the time and I discovered her bisexuality when she began hitting on me after her relationship with her ex-boyfriend ended. At the time, I was not out to anyone, including myself, about being bisexual. At that particular period of time I probably thought I was a lesbian. I have no idea what kind of relationship my former co-worker is in, but the other two bisexual individuals are in passably heterosexual relationships, as am I, which tends to make people assume that we are straight (a term I loath-I’ll save it for another blog!). Perhaps this is part of what helps to weaken the view of bisexuality as it’s own, verifiable place within the realm of human sexuality.

Other reasons I think people label bisexuality as a “phase” are a) because we are conditioned to think (generally) in terms of two categories (on/off, right/wrong, black/white, gay/straight, female/male etc.) and b) because it is (or appears to be) so much easier just to chose one category to belong to. There were times when I thought I was going to go friggin’ nuts over trying to decide if I was heterosexual or a lesbian. So many times I just want a clear cut answer that neatly fit into one fucking category goddamn it and quite frankly, I didn’t care which one! But when I decided I was hetero, it negated the feelings I’ve always had for women and when I decided I was a lesbian it was always from a place of intense anger or hatred towards men and negated the few positive experiences I had with men. I’ve come out as gay. I’ve come out as not gay. I’ve tried being asexual. I’ve tried just being loyal to my sex toys. None of it worked because none of it acknowledged the core of who I was.

Once I grappled with that beast-that all along I had been denying the core of who I was, and who I am is a sexual person who is attracted to sexual people-I don’t care if they are gay, or bi, or hetero, or intersexed or gender-curious, things began to make more sense to me and I began to be more at peace with myself. Still, it was a long time before I told anyone that I was “bi” for lack of a better word that seemed to fit how I identify.

Still, talking about being bisexual, at least for me, and I am someone who is incredibly vocal about what I believe in, has not been easy. My honesty on this issue has played a role in ending relationships, as at least one boyfriend all the sudden felt the need to worry about every friend I went out with, in case they became competition. My current partner spent years grappling with my jokes, for example, when it was pointed out that something in our house wasn’t straight (to which I’d quip, “Neither am I!”) as well as the more difficult issue of how could I be “bi” and still be with him. My family doesn’t understand how I can claim to be “bi” if I haven’t ever had sex or made out with a woman (past child abuse doesn’t count). Even thought I’d explain, “Gee, maybe she wasn’t interested in me, or I wasn’t interested in her, or the timing was wrong, or she had a boyfriend, or someone walked in on us….” None of it seems to matter. Until I’ve had sex with a woman, my family appears steadfastly unwilling to see me as anything other than heterosexual, and I’m pretty sure even if I did have sex with a woman, they’d ask me how I “knew” it was sex. And when I explain, again and again, why I fight for the right of all Americans to get married, it doesn’t sink in that I am also fighting for my right to marry a woman, if that is what I chose to do some day.

Perhaps the ultimate reason bisexuality is dismissed as a phase, as opposed to part of the continuum of sexuality, is because it is too much for many people to deal with. Instead of see-sawing through attractions for women some of the time and men at other times or possibly both all of the time, it is just easier to grab a box, preferably the one labeled “heterosexual” and shove yourself inside it. After all, it’s only life, love, sexuality, emotional fulfillment, orgasms, closeness, ones’ self, one’s partner, society’s edicts, pleasure, pain and reality you have to deal with or avoid, and aren’t those pesky tasks anyway?

How To Make Your Partner Feel Loved

2010-07-16T01:18:00.003-04:00

Tell her how beautiful she is when she gets diagnosed with a whole bunch of health problems and promise her that her beauty will never fade in your eyes.

Tell her that there are endless ways to be intimate without having sex and promise her that you'll have fun finding those ways together.

Promise her that you won't leave her even if she can never have sex again and even if she will never blow you again (that blow job thingy was part of the original dating agreement).

Promise her that you'll do whatever you can to support her.

Then, as time goes by tell her how beautiful she is but do it from further and further away from her, until it is impossible to touch one another.

As time goes by, keep your physical body in the same room, but "check your mind out." Forget about her doctors' appointments. Let her continue to try and manage life the same as she used to-you know, manage the housework and all that other "womanly stuff". Fail to see that she doesn't meet your eyes (because they are full of tears) when you ask if it's ok to do whatever it is that takes you completely away from her when she needs you most

Then, as more time goes by, and she is having "yet another flare-up" and "can't have sex again" tell her how every night you think about rubbing one out. And do so, as she, half-heartedly encourages you to because she no longer has the courage to ask you to hold her through her pain instead.

And when you fight about it, as you surely will, remind her how beautiful you think she is, even if you can't remember the last time you touched her shoulder or her fucking toes. Remind her of how hard you try to be there for her, even if you can't remember when you did more than drive her to the occasional doctor's appointment and make so many squeamish faces as the needles were about to be inserted deep into her, that you were more of a hindrance than a help. Promise her you'll call the counselors and repeatedly forget. Say "I'm sorry" more often than you say "I love you".

But most of all, if you really want to make your partner feel loved, especially when she feels like a loathsome, diseased piece of pond scum, tell her that she is beautiful from the other side of the house, while you're washing dishes and remind her that you'll do anything you can to help her as you race off to the burdens of your world, leaving her ugly and untouched to handle everything you promised her, all alone.

My Gigantic Diseased Organism

2010-07-16T00:21:00.025-04:00

Lately, say for the past 10 months or so, I've been feeling that old familiar feeling that I'm not living in my body anymore. I thought that those feelings had more or less ended when my dad went to prison and the abuse stopped and I could pretend that I slept soundly at night.

But now, with my diagnoses, that one friend (?) put it, my doctor, "fucked me with!", I feel less and less like I live in my body or any body for that matter, unless I am standing naked in front of a mirror. Then I suddenly tend to feel like I am transformed into a walrus with blond hair, glasses and an eyebrow piercing, but a fat, tusk-less walrus nevertheless.

The more things hurt and the more intimate areas where things hurt, the more detached I feel from myself. It's kinda funny in a way. In a humbling, humiliating sorta way. I used to fancy myself a sex educator before all of this. I was open minded and outspoken and I firmly believed that there were endless ways to have sex and intimacy, which are NOT the same thing, without, in my case, ramming something into my vagina.

However, once Dr. E told me I had Vulvadynia and Lichen Sclerosis and all other pleasant sorts of vaginal diseases, I began again to view my vagina (and I'm using the term incorrectly- I really mean the vulva-the outside part and the vagina-the inside part) as one more thing that was wrong with me, albeit one more thing not too many people would see. Ha! That was before I realized how many doctors and specialists I would see and how much poking and prodding I would get by a nearly endless stream of people. Now I could probably have an entire gyn exam done in the middle of Times Square and be nonplussed!

The more that old familiar feeling (I hate that I vaguely feel like I'm quoting Frank Sinatra here, even if he was from New Jersey!) of loathing my genitals (a word I despise) crept over me, and eventually overtook me, becoming part of my identity again, the more worthless I felt. The more hopeless I became about my prognosis, although I generally pretended to be just fine to most people since I didn't trust them to care any way.

With sex becoming a cruel and distant memory, and spontaneous "flare-ups" between my legs occurring more often, I retreated further into denial. I went from someone who used to get dressed up in lingerie when I had the house to myself, and masturbate in front of a mirror for the sole purpose of turning myself on, to someone who wouldn't even ask their partner to look at my vulva, perineum, rectum, whatever, unless it was so fucking painful and it had literally been plaguing me for days!

As the pain and denial continue to intensify and I continue to feel less and less like I live in a body and more like I inhabit a flow-blown diseased organism, I have flat out refused to look at my "private parts" at all. That is, until today; when the excruciating pain of the worst sunburn ever, combined with an endless onslaught of paper cuts, mixed with lemon juice and saltwater, in my labia and perineum, ceased to get better, and in fact, got worse over the past two-ish weeks. Nothing. Absolutely nothing was bringing relief for more than an hour or two at best and I'm using up my Lidocaine so fast that my insurance company is gonna refuse a refill!

Only this morning did I haul out the super magnifying mirror and flexible reading lamp and arrange it all between the blob that used to be my vulva.

Perhaps I should have done this sooner, because I noticed the reddest inflammation I've ever seen along the inside of my outer labia (the lips the pubic hairs grow on) and bumps I can't explain along my labia and perineum.

I about flipped out before I remembered that I was no longer living in a body and therefore not subject to things like STDs (of which I've always tested negative for, so has my monogamous partner of 6 years). And then I got super pissed off for not looking at myself sooner and insisting that the doctor see me sooner than today's scheduled appointment so I could be healed. After that, I got super pissed off at myself for breaking my denial and looking at my "down there" in the first fucking place-like I was gonna know what to do with whatever the fuck I saw?

Turns out Dr. E doesn't know what the bumps on my blob are either, but he isn't concerned about an STD. I guess that's good. It would be hard to explain an STD when you aren't even fucking yourself!! He just proscribed two courses of Diflucan and thought it might be a latent "flare-up" to last month's antibiotics and told me to avoid sex, swimming and everything else that might bring me pleasure. And we're going away for the weekend for our anniversary.

I barely avoided a nervous breakdown in his office as I thought about how little my partner touches me now anyway and I left feeling like an even more loathsome and diseased organism than I did when I first arrived.

F'ing February

2010-06-28T02:08:00.016-04:00

February has been the darkest, most loathsome month of my life, ever since I can remember. It's an era in which the tentacles of hatred, frigidity, sheer indifference to the world, to myself and to life in general, have always threatened to obliterate whatever narrow shards of my heart I was foolish enough to leave vulnerable from the previous months' holiday revelry. February contains my least favorite holiday on earth. The wretched month takes on a power, a possession so intense that I fail miserably to explain the effect it has on my to anyone, especially myself.

Even in the best of times, in the rare, "less than dastardly" days of February, it is difficult for me to exist, never mind to try and thrive.

This past February, 2010, I gave up all pretenses of trying to exist. I stayed in bed until just before my lover would come home. I wouldn't shower for days. I ignored everything that existed outside of my bellybutton. I pulled so tightly into myself that my old bindings which had cloistered me together for so long began to wither and crumble under the additional burden. I was light years beyond the usual Seasonal Affective Disorder that usually impales me at this time of year.

I pulled away from all that I used to enjoy, which really wasn't that difficult since sex was already taken away from me and chocolate was becoming less appealing since one of my meds had caused me to gain nearly 40 pounds in TWO FUCKING MONTHS!!!!!

About the only things I continued to do regularly were feed the cats, attend my doctors' appointments (so no one would suspect there was anything wrong with me)-I showered on these days and berate myself for being such a sexless, jobless, useless, unattractive, worthless, taking up too much space on the planet, good for nothing loser.

I was falling apart all over the place-inside myself, outside of myself, in my spiritual self, in my quasi-relationships with the few people I even bothered to make a pathetic attempt at maintaining a relationship with; and yet no one seemed to notice. Not my family-most of whom don't seem to believe there is anything wrong with me in the first place. Not my friends who are consumed with babies, careers and planning a wedding and most of all, not my lover who sometimes goes with me to my appointments and sees me fall to the floor in random spasms of uncontrolled pain.

All of the pretending, all of the trying and the lying to myself came to a crashing halt at the very end of February. My lover had just bought a "new" used car and we were at the dealership getting ready to sign the paperwork, of which I had made it perfectly clear, in advance, that I wanted no part of, because I had already applied for some government programs to help me get health care and food assistance and I was afraid that this car purchase would jeopardize all the work I had done, and besides, like me buying my car, it was supposed to be something he was doing all on his own. He assured me he took care of everything ahead of time, which should have been an enormous red flag that he took care of everything but the obvious stuff, and what ensued was a disaster!

When it came time to sign the papers, it very quickly became clear that my beloved had not taken care of much of anything and I, already a mess from whatever new concoction of meds I was on, was very quickly becoming livid. The dealer was probably never so uncomfortable in his life as I started first just yelling at Luke (we were the only customers in the dealership on a Saturday afternoon-weird right?).

Then, as I began to realize the depth of what he did not take care of, I started yelling a stream of expletives I will not repeat here. When I do that (which isn't terribly often) Luke grows calmer and calmer, which turns me into Mount St. Helen and I erupt, red face, spit and curse words flying, until I collapse from exhaustion.

It was fucking wonderful! If anyone had recorded it and put it on YouTube, we'd probably be mini-stars.

When I finally stopped screaming at him and he had a chance to speak, he said, with tears in his eyes, that the car wasn't worth all this and we could just wait until....but I stopped listening. I knew by the look in his eyes and the wounded way he was holding himself that I had hurt him very badly-never mind the fact that I had humiliated him in the dealership, I had done something much deeper than that, something that in my own hurt and rage I couldn't comprehend yet.

I knew I was wrong to have done what I did and I knew that he was wrong to say that he took care of everything when he didn't. I also knew that there were so many other options for how to handle this situation, but something inside me literally snapped.

That's the only way I can describe it. There was a complete break-down inside of me and I didn't care about a goddamn fucking thing anymore except lashing out. I wanted to hurt everything in my path-probably even my nephews too if they were there. I didn't care about hurting myself-I wanted to hurt myself! For a fucking change I wanted to know where the pain was coming from and why. I wanted to hurt my lover because I was tired of him living a presumably pain free life. I wanted to hurt the bloated car sales person who kept staring at my tits. I wanted to hurt the whole world. I wanted the whole world to feel February.

In the end I gave in, as I so often do, and screamed something at Luke along the lines of "Well FUCK YOU! You pay for all the groceries now any way! If you can't try and respect all the goddamn fucking work I've put into helping us try and save some money, what the fuck do I care if you fall farther into debt by buying this car and paying for all the groceries? It's not like we're fucking married or anything!"

I ended up scribbling something that could never pass for my signature on an endless ream of papers I never read and finally the Ford Focus was all his. Or was it our? I'm still unclear about that one.

I stormed out of the dealership after helping myself to one or two of their pens and Luke and I left in separate cars-no congratulations on your first financed car or anything and headed to a mutual friends house where we did out best to ignore each other all night. It was grand!

I bet the car dealer couldn't wait to see us go!

Where Oh, Where Has Elizabeth Been?

2010-06-28T00:48:00.006-04:00

If anyone out there has been paying attention (and I know at least one dear soul who suffered a similar catheter fate read my blog recently! And Nurse Ratchet sister of mine, neither of us enjoyed the experience as much as you seem to enjoy inserting them. There's something wrong with you girl!) it has been almost 5 months since I last posted anything on my blog. I hope that some people have missed me...I know at least Nurse Ratchet's husband would read it during his down time at work (oh the luck of having a job) but I don't know if I've missed me these past five months.

See, when I was first diagnosed with everything, I made a vow to write it all down, even the painful details-ha!, as if there would be much else to write about! But before too long, I was back into my old ways.

Even though I am no longer physically capable of running, I have been running, terror stricken, from the realities of my life for at least these past five months (and much, much longer...it's just that here, with this blog, I was trying to address some of them for a change).

I don't even know how far back I can go and accurately recount what has gone on in the months since I've failed to write. I only know that part of the reason I am here now, writing once again, is because my lover is away on a too short business trip.

As usual, I spent the entire day struggling to figure out what I wanted to do with the day, with MY DAY. And, as usual, the day was over before I came up with an answer and fell gratefully into a long, uninterrupted nap. It wasn't until I was brave enough to lay naked outside on our deck (don't worry prudes, it was well past 10 pm and not a soul could see me-how sad actually), on the uncomfortable wicker love seat, watching the fireflies sparkle through the sultry night air, that I realized what I needed to do was to clean my mind out and not the living room like I had planned on doing.

So now I sit, still sans clothing, on my trusty seat cushion and try and recount how it all went awry and why I haven't written in so long. And I try to keep my thoughts on this serious business of writing and purging my feelings while trying to ignore the sweat coagulating between my breasts because it is too fucking hot out, even at nearly 2 am and the air conditioner is too loud and makes me need my inhaler, which I am completely inept at using, having just recently been diagnosed with asthma.

I'm also simultaneously trying to ignore my stomach's craving for Vienna Fingers and milk because we ran out of milk before I dropped Luke off and I didn't feel like fighting the righteous Sunday shoppers for a quart of organic milk. And hell, I've already gained a bunch of medication related weight and had vanilla ice cream (with a fresh peach) for dinner, so why have a healthy dessert? And I'm somewhat happily alone, so who the hell will know what I eat anyway?

Mostly though, I'm procrastinating. Like all good writers, I'm procrastinating telling you how it all went wrong. How I really feel. How angry I am. How doubtful of everything and scared of nearly everything, I am. I am trying to avoid the ugly and draw upon the pretty, which is something that would probably surprise most people who know me, but then again, most people who know me only know a me they want to see. I am trying to avoid reliving the pain because no matter how many years of therapy I've had, and continue to have, I never quite believe them when they tell me it never hurts as much the second time around.... Is that because you can't re-amputate a lost arm or because you can't re-shatter an obliterated heart? I've yet to figure that one out.

At any rate, February was when the worst of it all happened.

That's So Gay

2010-02-08T15:42:00.006-05:00

Recently my youngest sister has adopted a habit I find both annoying and offensive. I don’t know where she got it from, or why she thinks it’s ok to say this, but she’s started saying, “That’s so gay” whenever she thinks something is dumb or annoys her. Not only does this bother me on a personal level, I wonder how it will affect her as a manager at her job if she is heard saying this. Even though she is my sister, I think language like this should be seen as potential harassment and at the very, very least, certainly inappropriate at any level in the workplace!

Now, I’ll be honest, this wasn’t always a saying that bothered me. In (a deeply embarrassing) fact, there was a time, before I learned to think for myself, that I was very vocally homophobic. (For those of you who know the area, picture me saying repeatedly and loudly, while at a public parade in New Hope, Pa, “There’s no hope for New Hope” and other obnoxious slurs.) However, somewhere around high school, perhaps when I began to admit, at least to myself, that I was either confused or ambiguous about my sexuality, I began to question and challenge homophobic statements.

Now, also in all fairness, I have not always stood up to people who arrogantly, ignorantly or hurtfully hurl anti-gay statements, but with my sisters, I feel I must establish a firm line here. I feel this way for three primary reasons, 1) They know, although don’t really accept, that I am equally attracted to men and women and therefore feel these kinds of statements are a direct insult to me as well as to humanity; because it is never ok to put down one group of people in order to feel better about one’s self, or for any other reason. 2) My entire family knows I made a vow, many years ago, in my single days, to not get married until all people could get married. (I confess, I have amended that statement to currently mean all American citizens and I have inserted a medical clause in there in case either myself or my partner should need medical treatment which we are only able to afford by getting married and being added onto the other person’s health insurance policy). I didn’t make this vow to be cool or start a trend or emblazon my views upon my chest. Instead, I made this vow because once I decided I could spend my life with a man, a woman, both, either, neither or someone who claims to be gender neutral, I couldn’t stop myself from seeing marriage as an federally regulated institution which alienated me. And 3) Because once my sisters started having children, it became an imperative for me to be at least one voice (and hopefully not the only voice) to tell my nephews that it is perfectly acceptable to love and date and marry or not marry whomever they choose.

Before anyone freaks out, if you haven’t already, I made sure to check with both of my sisters when their kids were still infants and get their permission to talk to their kids about how we feel it is ok to be gay or to love anyone you want. My little sister’s recent inappropriate comment aside, both of my sisters said it was fine with them if I had these conversations with their kids, but they wanted to be the ones to have “the sex talks”.

When, in a recent phone call with my youngest sister, I heard her say, “That’s so gay.” I cleared my throat and replied, “Excuse me, what did you say?” At the same time her eldest son overheard her expression and loudly enough that I could also hear him, objected to what she just said. In my opinion, my sister proceeded to cover her ass by exclaiming, “What? It could also mean happy!”

I didn’t buy it and neither did her son (who had probably never heard the word used that way before). My sister, in an almost combative manner, challenged her son to get a dictionary and see who was right about the meaning of the word “gay”. According to the CHILDREN”S dictionary she used, she was right. The book said it meant “happy”.

Lest she get too triumphant about her “victory”, I told her that while the CHILDREN’S dictionary she used might say that the word means happy, I still sided with her son that she used the word inappropriately. I also told her I was offended that she used that term the way she did. In fairness to my sister, she told her son what I said, word for word and he even more vocally voiced his gratitude to me, as well as to himself for also being right.

Later that same day, my partner and I were headed to my youngest sister’s house to pick up her four kids (ranging in age from just over 1 year to 8 years old) for a mini-family reunion at one of my aunt’s homes. My sister was unable to attend because she had to work and my partner and I were going anyway so we figured it was no big deal to bring along a baby and three slightly older kids…good thing my little sister let us use her minivan or we never would have all fit in my little Scion xD!

Before we left to pick up the kids, I replayed the conversation my sister, myself and her eldest son had on the phone, to my partner. I told him that it was very important to me that we make sure to discuss the many different meanings of the word “gay” with the kids and to reiterate how we feel about the rights of all people to love whomever they please. I asked my partner if he was comfortable having this conversation with the kids during the hour or so car ride to my aunt’s, and to my surprise, he was very willing to talk this over with the kids.

Naturally, since we don’t have kids, it took longer than I thought it would to corral all of them into the minivan and be on our merry way (already late for the reunion!). One of the first things I said to the oldest boy, who was seated next to the baby, as well as to the other two kids in the way back of the van, was that while their mommy was right that the word “gay” can, and probably was originally used to mean happy, that isn’t how it is usually used today. I asked my eight year old nephew what he thought the word gay means now. He fumbled his way through an explanation about a boy loving a boy or a girl loving a girl. I told him that he was right and I asked him if he thought people usually said the word “gay” as a positive or negative word. He told us that in school people seemed to use it as a negative word. He went on to say, with an upset look on his face, that one of the kids on his bus calls him gay. This surprised me as he had never told me this before and I made a mental note to tell this to my sister.

Both my partner and I told him, and all of the kids, that it is perfectly fine for them, or anyone, to love boys or girls or both at any time in their lives. Both the oldest and second youngest immediately chimed in that they had girlfriends (at 5 and 8 years old!) and I said that was fine but if they ever changed their minds and liked boys or girls or both or no one, that was fine too.

Since the two kids in the far back of the van seemed more interested in their handheld videogames than this conversation, I asked the eldest how it made him feel when someone called him gay. He said he didn’t like it, that it hurt his feelings. I said I could understand why it would hurt his feelings and that when people use the term gay in a negative way, it hurt my feelings and his uncle’s feelings too. He was completely confused at this point and wanted to know why, if we were a girl and a boy that loved each other, would we be hurt if people used the word gay as an insult. I tried to explain to him, as I have tried to explain to him since he was 3 or 4, that it is ok to love whomever you love, be it a boy or a girl and that his uncle and I don’t think it is ever ok to put someone down or hurt someone’s feelings. I tried to explain that this issue is so important to us that we are refusing to get married until all people in this country can do so, in the hopes that he and the rest of our nephews will have a much easier time having their choice of partners be accepted than we did when we were growing up. I tried my best to reassure my nephew that what the kid on the bus was saying was wrong and that he was welcome to talk to us or his parents about how it made him feel.

Finally, he asked me how the word gay could be used in a positive way. I gave him the two best examples I could think of at the time. I said, “Well, if you are talking about your male cousin, in a positive way, you could say that he is gay because he loves boys.” Even though this is at least the second time I’ve told the kids this, the eldest still expressed surprise, perhaps because since they have been old enough to pay any attention to their family member’s partners, my cousin has been single. My second example was, “If you are having a really good time, then you could say that you are having a gay time.”

Not missing a beat, he quipped back, “Well, can I say that I’m having a gay time now and it would be positive?” To that I responded, “Are you having a good time now?” When he said, “No. Not really.” I laughed a little and said that if he wasn’t having a good time right now than it probably wasn’t the most positive use of the word; however we wanted him and his brothers, whom I assumed were ignoring me, to know, that while some people don’t think it is ok to be gay think, it is perfectly fine in our eyes for them to love whomever they want, whenever they want.

I’m not sure how much of this conversation the kids understood.

Shortly after making that point, the car ride was interrupted with the unexpected surprise that we probably didn’t have enough gas to get to our destination as well as my need to give pesky directions since we dared to travel without a GPS. The gay conversation seemed to be over, for now and as far as I know, did not come up again during the reunion.

The car ride home was full of such deep philosophical questions as, “If you could be any superhero in the world, who would it be?” and “If you could be any animal in the world, what would you be?” Although three of the four kids fiercely protested that they weren’t tired at all when we got in the car, all of them were sound asleep before answering both of the questions. One of our nephews even fell asleep in the middle of telling us why he would be either a land turtle or a sea turtle.

My god I love our nephews!

I Just Skinned My First Chicken!

2010-01-28T13:22:00.013-05:00

Hey Everybody,

I thought I'd take a break from writing about all my pain and health problems to tell you about something I've never done before.

In an effort to save money, I got this brilliant idea to buy a whole chicken because it was $.78 a pound. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to cook the damn thing but a bargain is a bargain and it is harder for me to pass up then sex (well, when I was having sex anyway!).

I didn't know what to do with the whole chicken, so I tossed it in the freezer and forgot about it. However, we have a very small freezer thanks to the old school ice cube and cold water dispenser feature that takes up a huge amount of space. The refrigerator/freezer was a bargain I found on Craigslist...Do you see a theme here?

Since I've discovered Amelia's Grocery Outlet a few miles from our house (and also located near a Goodwill...oh the bargains...oh the fun!), I have spent a lot of time and little money buying lots of frozen and non-perishable food. Eventually (like in the first shopping trip) I bought too much frozen food to fit in the freezer and it became obvious that I could no longer avoid cooking the chicken.

I must admit, I was deeply intimidated by cooking this thing. I used to be a vegetarian and I really prefer that my meat look as little like the animal it came from as possible. Also, I could still hear the humiliating laughter of my friend Sara as she showed me in a hostel in Ireland, in front of a guy I had a huge crush on, how easy it was to cook a whole chicken and how silly I was because I didn't have a clue how to do it. Clearly there is trauma everywhere associated with turning this bird into our future dinner!

After I let the frozen block defrost for two or three days in the refrigerator (I know, I know, that is too long but I got busy, I got distracted, I got intimidated....) I knew it was now or never. Fear or not, I didn't want to waste the bird who, without any choice, gave it's life to us. So I googled, "how to cook a whole chicken in a crock pot" and found this amazing blog: http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/ and I confronted my fears head on!

Like the author of "A Year of Slow Cooking", I am thoroughly grossed out by skin on my chicken and any visible fat. Non-visible fat in my ice cream, chocolates and other "less than great for me foods" are ok, but the nasty yellow, blobbish fat on meat is horrifying, so it had to go! Again, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing but I figured, "What the heck, people have been skinning chickens for generations, so how bad could it be?"

I began the denuding with inadequate tools and I struggled with my non-kitchen, barely sharp regular scissors, to open the chicken's package. This resulted in a lot of blood running all over the cutting board and the counter, but fortunately not on my favorite white tee shirt I was foolish enough to be wearing while mutilating my chicken. With my cheapo knives and scissors, I began to recklessly attack the skin before I remembered that I had to remove the innards. That part really was more fascinating for me than I thought it would be, as I briefly tried to identify pieces before dumping them into a bowl next to me. when I was finished stripping my chicken, I dumped all the innards and scraps in the backyard so whatever carnivorous animals that live near us will benefit from my experimentation. I saw this as a sort of giving back to the earth for the once living chicken I plan on eating. I hope that wasn't a bad idea!

The entire process of removing the skin and all visible fat took me about 45 minutes and was a far more effective anatomy lesson than dissecting a frog in high school ever was! It was also cold, slimmy and sometimes gross. However, it did give me a greater appreciation for the food I am hoping to eat tonight (especially when I removed what I think are the kidneys...they are so tiny!). At some point in time my hands began to burn and itch like crazy (is that a normal reaction?) so I decided it was time to stop, even though there is still some skin on the ends of the drum sticks and some persnickety fat which refused to be removed.

If you are curious what I ended up doing with my new, naked chicken, I took pictures of it with my partner's new digital camera, in case I can convince him to post them here. I then put about 1 cup of water in my crock pot before going crazy with the seasonings.

In generally, I rarely follow a recipe all the way, preferring my "Goddess Method of Cooking by Intuition". I gathered up the rest of our rather old garlic, and a few clementines we weren't eating and shoved those inside the chicken...hopefully as a flavorful replacement for what used to be it's vital organs. Then I created a mixture of white pepper, oregano, rosemary, thyme, double ground mustard and a dash of cumin. I stirred it all up in a bowl and rubbed it all over the chicken and tossed the rest inside the cavity with the garlic and clementines. I also added some clementines to the top of the chicken because I thought it looked pretty.

Why this combination? Well, because it seemed right to me. I have no idea how my naked chicken dinner will turn out, but it smells pretty good cooking right now. I'll have to follow-up and let y'all know how it turned out!

What Hurts The Most

2010-01-08T13:29:00.006-05:00

For quite some time now, I’ve been uselessly debating what I would tell people if anyone other than someone I pay, asks me “What hurts the most?” Would I say that it hurts the most in my right side, an area which no one can figure out why it hurts? Would I try and describe how it feels like there is a large, ever growing lamprey living there, with teeth so sharp it feels like razors eating into my flesh…and that is on a good day? Would I tell someone, as I try to nonchalantly limp away from the table to pee that the inexplicable pain in my side currently feels like minions of fireballs searing, tearing, paralyzing me with pain, and that when I finally reach the bathroom stall I cry silently to myself unable to endure what is happening, scared to death about what might be wrong and desperate, so desperate for an answer…any answer…as long as it is the correct answer to what is causing this pain? Would I confess, when I rejoin them at the table that I was away for so long because I couldn’t stop myself from crying, that I couldn’t wipe the tears away fast enough or pull myself together quickly enough to devote my energy to the conversation?

No. I’d probably lie and say I was fine…fine...always fine. Because no matter what I say, it isn’t all of the truth anyway. Whether I am writing about my ripped rectum or my constant need to pee, even when I can’t, I’m never really telling the full truth about what hurts the most.

Well, I once told my Physical Therapist that what hurts the most is my ego and self-esteem; both so wounded and in pain that the mere act of getting out of bed is pointless. She did the best she could to console me but that isn’t her area of expertise. And I’ve tried to talk to my partner about what hurts the most, as the tears pouring down my face blur the distance between us…blur the space where all I want is a strong hug and a shoulder to absorb the snot gushing out of my nose and instead becomes the space where somehow it is about him and how he needs to fix things he can’t even understand. I guess those experiences, as well as a lifelong bludgeoning into my brain that pure truth is rarely what people are looking for, are a large part of what keeps me lying, to everyone but myself, about what hurts the most.

If I were to be truly honest, (will I ever learn my lesson?) as I prepare for one more whack in the face, I would say that what hurts the most is the indifference, the denial, the complete and utter forgetability of what I am going through. What hurts the most isn’t the physical pain…I’ve got pills for that as well as well honed childhood skills of separating my mind from my body when things hurt too much. No, it is what lies deeper and far more invisible than physical pain that hurts the most.

It is the lack of visible proof that something is wrong with me. It is lack of phone calls or e-mails or text messages with the sole purpose of seeing how I’m doing. Sure, people still call me, for whatever it is they need and want me to fulfill for them and sometimes, as a sort of cursory “pleasantry” they will ask how I’m doing and inevitably become too busy, too sidetracked, to one-sidedly selfish to really listen to my answer, if I bother to give one at all. Sometimes it is just so much easier to lie and say, “I’m fine.” in a false staccato voice which does not belong to me but isn’t heard anyway.

What hurts the most is that I envy people who are on crutches or temporarily in a wheelchair or have a cast or sling or brace on their arm, even people who are in the hospital, because “those are the ones who truly have something wrong with them.” Those are the people whose pain is easy to acknowledge…it is easy to do things for them..say, hold open a door or autograph their cast or give them special parking places until they get better. The people who are in the hospital get ‘round the clock questions about how they are doing. They get cards and flowers and visitors. They get obvious acknowledgement of what they are going through, even if it is only temporary (the acknowledgement and the suffering).

Believe me, I am not wallowing so deep in my depressed navel gazing that I truly believe this is the case for all people who are suffering this way. I know that I am romanticizing and glossing over and being selective or downright creating my own reality about what I want to see, but right now…today…last night…this week…for god only knows how long, that is of little consolation to me.

Because that is what I so desperately want. I want the money “wasted” on cards and the fucking flowers that are just going to die and make me sneeze anyway. I want a cast on my arm that people can write encouraging things on it like we used to do in school. I want the “I’m only calling to see how you are doing” phone calls. I want the visits where people are stopping by with homemade chicken noodle soup, or chocolates or hasty get-well drawings from their kids. I want visits and phone calls where people, for once in my goddamn fucking life, are asking no more of me than how I am doing and for once in my fucking life, are actually listening to the answers…the ones I give out loud and the ones I give with my body language. I want people to see through my false self-deprecating jokes that they can help me by “just cutting out whatever is wrong with me.” I want acknowledgement of the hurt and fear and pain and foreboding sense of hopelessness inside me. I want to know that there are people that I can lean on, that will put aside their own super busy lives, if only for a ten minute phone call or a quick visit that’s all about me…that is not a ruse for their own needs or desires for me to be a living “sounding board” for their problems, hopes, failures and despairs.

I want to be seen as someone who is sick, if even temporarily, and needs other people to lean on.
What hurts the most is this ridiculous game we keep playing that I am strong enough to get through anything AND that I can handle everyone else’s problems too. What hurts the most are the people…friends, family and professionals, who outright tell me, or subtly and cowardly, imply that if I just got over my anger, my problems would go away…I’d be able to shit without medicine, walk without pain, fuck without guilt, stand tall and proud without stabbing pains in my lower back. If I just changed me, without medicine, without anger and without help, I’d be fine.

That’s what hurts the most…that my problems are either my fault or that I am strong enough to handle them alone, and that I should fix them by myself while simultaneously being there gleefully supporting the rest of the world and the very same people who don’t call or send cards or stop by to visit but still want me to help them heal their wounds, their pain, their problems.

My Shit Stool

2010-01-05T22:31:00.003-05:00

In our bathroom we now have a shit stool. It’s a lovely golden thing with fringes around the middle that the cats like to tear off. It’s cushiony and has a neat pattern on it for me to stare at in flights of fantasy if I need to.

It used to reside in our living room, in front of the wooden rocking chair with the woefully thin blue cushion. It never matched the rocking chair but it sorta matches our ugly gold sofa and it theoretically served as a great place to rest your feet if one was ever to lounge in the rocking chair with a good book and a stiff drink. I rarely ever did anything more than rock myself back and forth when I would cry in our last apartment, so I could sort comfort myself and not wake my partner up by crying in the same room. The foot rest seemed superfluous when I was crying as well as when we were moving for the second time in a year last year, but for some reason, we never got rid of it.

Now that golden stool resides in our bathroom. I bought the wrong color “oops” paint at Home Depot and we didn’t prime the walls before we painted them, so the bathroom has a rather morgue green hue to it. However, that is only relevant to this story to highlight the fact that this stool does not match the bathroom anymore than it matched its old mate, my rocking chair.

Whether or not it matches anything is irrelevant overall though, because the sole purpose of the stool in the bathroom is to help me move my own stool better, more efficiently, and with as few anal fissures as possible.

I learned about the shit stool when I was discussing my current pain problems with my physical therapist. At the time, it felt as though my bowels drove a Mac truck through my anus and left shred marks to prove it. Shitting was just as painful as sitting and it was a fascinating topic of discussion for that day’s therapy session. Turns out, my beloved physical therapist has a) heard of this problem before and therefore wasn’t openly repulsed by what I was describing and b) had some possible solutions in mind. Hell, she even had a diagram to send home with me that shows the proper 90 degree angle at which one should sit in order to most productively shit!

She also discussed the possibility of trying pelvic floor stretches via my anus (that reminds me, I probably should write about what happens in PT!) and getting a stool for the bathroom to help me achieve that perfect angle. For the meantime, I opted out of the rectal stretches in favor of the shit stool (my words, not hers).

Being either frugal or cheap, I did not want to rush out and buy anything as unglamorous as shit stool (I’d much rather spend the money I saved on one of my post-BI shopping trips.) so I went home and thought deep thoughts on the crapper as nothing came out of my bowels. Finally it occurred to me to use the plush, padded, mismatched stool we already had in our living room and see how that worked out.

For awhile, all I could do was shoo our white cat, Jezzabella of the stool, since she now thought it belonged to her, and maneuver it in front of me before I sat down on my throne. I would place my feet upon it as I sat there trying to expel a trickle or two of urine, since nothing was coming out of my little Wal-Mart.

My partner and I have taken to calling my anus my little Wal-Mart when the stores around here got the less than brilliant idea to change their symbol to what my beloved claims, looks like an anus. Initially I did not agree that’s what the symbol looked like, but that was before I spent so much time contorting myself to look at my own anus for cracks, tears and fissures and to apply the once or twice daily ointments to that area. Then I began to agree with my lover that Wal-Mart’s new symbol and my anus do bear a striking resemblance! Although I swear Wal-Mart has an easier time moving shit out of its orifice, err, store than I do.

It never ceases to amaze me what you can learn to talk about and become comfortable with in a relationship, since I’ve never discussed this part of my body with anyone so openly and frequently as I do now!

Even though I couldn’t shit for a while, I rather liked the feeling of having my feet propped up when I peed. It gave me a more comfortable chance to impersonate Rodin’s "The Thinker", as I tried to expel something, anything, from some lower hole in my body.

Eventually the Miralax and the three stool softeners I take each day kicked in and something festering inside me for entirely too long serrated it’s way out of my colon and my anus. And I was somewhat more comfortable as it tore slightly less of my ass part now that my perch perfected that sought after angle of release.

The shit stool doesn’t stop the anal tearing and it certainly isn’t something I’m going to take with me everywhere I ago, but now that I am used to it, I find it much easier to crap with it’s help. Plus, since many of my medications make me constipated, and I know it takes a day or two for the Miralax to work, I am rarely caught off guard with the need to shit. When I am, I now try to replicate the 90 degree angle by sitting on the throne and pushing my knees up as high as they will go while simultaneously trying to balance most of my lower weight on my tippy toes. This usually results in very sore toes, wobbly legs and an occasional cramp in my arches…a small price to pay for an easier crap I’d say!

Pee Envy

2010-01-05T21:22:00.004-05:00

I am starting to suffer from pee envy. It’s a condition I either developed or became fully aware of yesterday.

See, I was in the bathroom stall at the hospital, needing desperately to pee for the second time in less than five minutes, when, presumably, a woman entered the stall next to me. In the time it was taking me to line the seat (again) with toilet paper and sit down, the woman next to me was already getting down to business.

As I paused to consider whether or not she had taken the time to line the seat before plopping her ass down on a much used seat, my urgent need to pee was, for a millisecond, outwitted by my deep pondering. My deep pondering was interrupted by the noises that issued forth in the stall next to me.

As I sat, impatiently trying to wait patiently for my urine to spew forth, there was an active geyser jettisoning its way into the toilet next to me. I was aghast. I was stunned. I wondered what the hell was going on over there! The woman seemed to be peeing as if her very life-force depended upon it…as if she drank an entire pot of coffee mere moments ago…as if she was trying to disgorge something in time for a drug test…as if she weren’t human.

I was still sitting there, waiting, waiting, waiting for my “urgent pee” to come out and this woman must have pumped a gallon or more of liquid into her throne. I say liquid because the sound lasted for so long that I began to doubt it was really a human being urinating next door. Perhaps it was just someone pouring out all the leftover stale beverages from the holidays…into the toilet…when it would have been so much easier to empty it all out in the sink. I thought about looking under the wall, you know, quickly and inquisitively like you did when you were a kid, but at 32 I felt too old to risk the reaction I might get.

Then I considered that maybe there was a horse in the stall next to me, which would obviously explain the ferocity with which urine was pummeling the toilet. Again, I resisted the urge to stick my head under the partition and instead, I surreptitiously surveyed the floor next to me, in case it was a horse, not a woman, making all that ruckus. To my dismay, I only saw two feet when I was hoping to see four hooves.

I know that this might sound utterly ridiculous, looking for horses in a hospital bathroom, but hey, it may have happened somewhere! Yet what it really came down to was a realization that smacked me between the eyes as my own urine trickle, trickle, drop, dropped out. I was jealous! I was insanely jealous of the ability of the person next to me to urinate freely and with such force she could probably propel herself into another universe if she tried not to pee at all during an 8 hour work day. I was jealous of the fact that she was out of the stall and washing her hands as I, who got there before her, was still trying to coax more urine from my bladder. I was jealous that she doesn’t pee like someone who has IC, and truth be told, her ability to do so, made me want to cry about my own inadequate urinating abilities.

I know I wrote recently about the things I was grateful for, but right now, I’m having a relapse. Mentally I am forgetting the brief feeling of relief I had when my pains had names and treatment options. And physically, for reasons I cannot figure out, I seem to be “flaring up” as bad, or worse than I was before I started all my treatments.

Now, having the powerful, “I will stomp on small children and elderly ladies in the way of my getting to the bathroom” need to pee after physical therapy doesn’t surprise me too much, I just didn’t think it would last ALL DAY! And even that doesn’t explain why, seemingly within the last week or so, I feel the need to pee far more often and produce far less urine. I’ve been, with the exception of chocolate, ridiculously good about trying to stay away from any “problem foods”, even over the holidays. And even if I did have three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc on New Year’s Eve (and I took my Prelief!) it shouldn’t be causing a “flare-up” so many days later!

I’m getting sick of writing down everything I eat and drink (which is only water and milk and I think milk is gross!) and when I pee and when I shit and how I feel when I feel it. I’m getting sick of watching what I eat and still seeing my weight go up. I’m getting sick of feeling ridiculously strong urges to pee and not being able to fill a thimble, or even better yet, feeling like my clitoral hood and/or urethra is being sliced apart with razor blades when I finally dribble something out. I am no longer amused by the AZO Standard (over-the-counter pyridium) I take before my bladder instillations which turn my urine Easter egg shades of yellow and orange…as well as my underwear if I forget to wear dark colored ones and our white sheets too!

I don’t mind the oral medicine so much, even when the Elmiron lodges in the back of my throat like stifling cum, but that is probably because I haven’t noticed any hair loss, or other unpleasant side effects which may occur. Nor have I noticed any marked improvement, but I was warned that could take 3 to 6 months and I have only been popping those babies for a month or so.

I am beginning to loath the bladder instillations. Even as much as I like the nurse who does them, there is NOTHING FUN about having a catheter shoved in your urethra and to do that for 9 weeks in a row is beyond madness, it might even qualify as a form of torture! Another nifty thing about BIs is that when the catheter is removed, and I am finally allowed to pee, I almost always produce a profusion of air bubbles which make me feel like I am farting from the wrong place. Sometimes those air bubbles hang around for many feeble urinations afterwards.

During my last BI, as they are called in the office, the nurse suggested that it was possible that the IC spread into my urethra and the treatments that were supposed to make me better (the BIs) might be causing me more pain. So, I stopped going for several weeks over the holidays because my urethra hurt and burned and felt fingered by Freddy Kruger so much that air, never mind underwear, was causing me intense pain. Everything hurt that area…sitting down, laying down, standing up, walking with my feet as far apart as possible, being naked. Everything.

I am often frustrated and disgusted. I feel like one treatment option exacerbates something else. Sure, I could stop the BIs and continue with the Elmiron, but realistically I couldn’t stop urinating, no matter how painful it may be. And as much as I love to be naked, it is too fucking cold to be tottering, legs wide apart, throughout our house and I am too damn cheap to pump the heat into the 80’s so I would be more comfortable naked. And it never occurred to me how much I envy some people’s ability to urinate until yesterday, until the full reality that I really do have a problem, finally sunk in.

Today alone, I have peed 16 times. Sixteen times and it is only 8:30 at night! If I were able to collect all the urine I produced in one day, I sincerely doubt it would fill a pint glass (which is what the woman next to me yesterday was able to produce each millisecond!!). I used to think my urge and frequency was normal, but now that I know it is not, it is really fucking with my life. A few weeks ago I thought I was getting better. Now I feel like I am just getting better at peeing through the pain.

The Christmas Coercion Song

2009-12-31T04:00:00.008-05:00

Taking a brief break from my pelvic pain writing, I’d like to rant for a while about a Christmas song I loath and I must do it now because the friggin’ song kept playing ad nauseum in my head two days ago and I promised myself that I would write about my thoughts on this song if only it would stop it’s endless loop through my brain. So here I am, trying to maintain that promise, even if it is a day later than I said I would write this.

In case you are curious, the song I absolutely loath is called, “Baby Its Cold Outside”. Apparently this song was written as a duet between Frank Loesser (is that pronounced Loser?) and his wife in 1944 and played at a housewarming party (Source: http://www.christmas-lyrics.org/baby-its-cold-outside-lyrics-song.html). I don’t understand the appeal of the song then and I certainly don’t understand it now!

Last year I used to refer to this song, in as loud a voice as possible whenever I heard it played in a public lace, as “The Christmas Rape Song.” But this year, after closer examination of the lyrics, I have come to the conclusion that there is no evidence of rape or any other form of sexual assault taking place within the song.

Therefore, this year I had to change the title to “The Christmas Coercion Song” because every friggin’ version of this song I’ve ever heard is all about a “man” trying to convince a woman to stay at his place when she repeatedly tells him that she must leave. I do not see any other way of viewing this song as anything other than coercion and as an absolutely terrible message to be putting out there…that it is ok for a “man” (or anyone for that matter) to hound, pressure, coerce, manipulate or in any other way try to force someone to comply with your desires when she or he has made it clear that they are uncomfortable with the situation.

Depending upon which version of the song you listen to, the woman says at least once to repeatedly that she needs to leave and her answer to the guy’s request for her to stay is NO. My least favorite version of this song features Rod Stewart (as if that weren't bad enough!) and Dolly Parton where she concludes the song by saying "You sure know how to wear a girl down, don't you? Okay Okay..." (http://www.metrolyrics.com/baby-its-cold-outside-duet-with-dolly-parton-lyrics-rod-stewart.html).

Why the hell, in the 21st century, when we try to teach our kids that “no means no” and rape is an unacceptable crime, is this song still being played? Even if the guy never rapes or assaults her, he is still using his powers of persuasion, as well as alcohol, compliments, flat out refusals to help her get home and guilt trips (“How can you do this thing to me?” “…my lifelong sorrow if you caught pneumonia and died…”), in order to have his way, regardless of how she feels.
Throughout the song the woman talks about how her family would react to her staying so long, possibly overnight, at this “man’s” place and all he can do is think about his dick, her looks and his pride. He, apparently, has nothing to worry about except for whether or not she complies with his demands for her to stay.

Wow! That really puts me in the Christmas spirit like nothing else does!

Every year I become enraged when this song is on and I let everyone in earshot know how I feel about it, but until now, I’ve never done more than loudly complain about the mixed messages in the song and how I don’t understand how people can listen to this.

My lover, who has heard my rant for years, tells me people don’t listen to the lyrics and analyze them like I do, that is why they aren’t pissed off about it. According to his view, at best people tend to hear the chorus, “Baby it’s cold outside” and some crap about drinks and a fire and how beautiful she looks and that is about all the thought they give the song...if it even gets that much attention from harried shoppers, pissed off drivers stuck in holiday traffic and all the other holiday situations and mayhem which might cause someone not to pay attention to the music being played.

And yet I can’t help but find it interesting that in “the Valley” where I live, the local news paper ran an editorial debate over the lyrics of the Insane Clown Posse. Now, I haven’t heard their songs in years and I never liked what I heard and I’m certainly not a fan of “Imma Kill U” (the lyrics of which I just read a moment ago). (http://www.metrolyrics.com/imma-kill-u-lyrics-insane-clown-posse.html).

Even I recognize that there is a huge difference between talking about killing someone (even if that someone is a child molester as in the Insane Clown Posse song) and trying to coerce someone into doing what you want, but both songs send strong (and in my opinion) terrible messages to people and the song, “Baby Its Cold Outside” is heard by far more people, even if only at Christmas time, than any song by the Clown people, especially since the Clowns aren't played in most public places.

I also think that it is crap that, at least in “the Valley”, some people are trying to link a horrific murder to the “Imma Kill U” song and yet I’ve never heard one person, ever, link ruining a woman’s reputation (“My sister will be suspicious”…”My brother will be there at the door…”) if she stays to long at a guys house, or worse yet, is sexually assaulted, to this “cheerful” Christmas song.

Can anyone explain to me why that is? Why is it ok to gloss over the coercion simply because one hears, and maybe even agrees with the fact that it is cold outside? Can anyone offer me a plausible alternative on how to interpret this song? Because I can’t think of any other way to view it or excuse it and I can’t seem to not be pissed off each year when I hear this song.

The older my five nephews get, the more I wonder about the impact of songs like this, especially songs that are presented as cheerful, holiday tradition songs, versus songs that are clearly ok to vilify, even if we are condemning them without fully listening to the lyrics. And I wonder what kind of impact, if even a subtle one, it will have on them as they begin to explore sexual relationships and form opinions of their own.

My Angry Bladder, Part One

2009-12-17T22:28:00.005-05:00

Well, I’ve procrastinated writing anything else after my last posting, because what do you follow up your blessings with? I couldn’t think of anything that sounded as great as what I am thankful for, but today by bladder is in spasm and it really hurts, so I’m going to write about that (lucky you, my dear reader!).

Interstitial Cystitis, which is one of my many diagnoses, means that I have one very angry bladder. While no one knows exactly what causes this problem, or the best way to treat it (I’m sooo comforted my these realities!), the current theory is that IC is a wearing down, or eroding of the bladder’s protective lining over time. This possibly allows the very acidic urine to come in contact with or aggravate surrounding nerves which are used to being shielded from this abuse by the bladder’s protective liner. The nerve aggravation is believed to cause incredible irritation to the bladder and possibly surrounding areas, leaving the IC patient in sometimes excruciating pain, with frequent and incredibly strong urges to urinate. Some IC patients urinate over 50 times a day!! Prior to treatment, I was probably averaging 20 times a day, which really interferes with one’s life since I am peeing almost once an hour every day! Right now, I average 13-15 times a day, which is still far higher than the normal bladder’s voiding 5-7 times a day.

While Dr. E doesn’t know how this problem began for me, I strongly suspect that it has roots in my childhood. When I was a kid, we had two bathrooms, one in my parent’s room and one downstairs. I learned very quickly that it was a horrible idea to wake my dad up and it was a long, scary walk downstairs at night. This meant I often held my need to pee all night, or all night until I wet the bed (which I did until an age far older than I care to admit). This stress on my bladder, along with other traumas and life events, as well as the endless mantras to “hold it just a little bit longer” and road trips where I forced myself to hold my urine for hours longer than I should have, are probably strong contenders in the reasons why I now have IC, and may possibly have it for the rest of my life.

In Dr. E.’s opinion, it was most important and most practical to start treating my Interstitial Cystitis right away since he could treat me in his office at a reduced rate while we waited to see if I would be able to afford any other forms of medicine and physical therapy. He also thought this was the most important issue to address because I have likely had untreated bladder problems since I was at least 5 years young and 27 years of an untreated problem is a tremendously long time to be ignored!

I chose today to write about this because apparently my bladder is in currently in spasm, the nurse may have used another word for what is happening, but that is what my bladder feels like to me! The current cause of the bladder spasms, which started three days ago, are probably the weekly bladder instillations I’ve been getting since November 4th.

If you’ve never had a bladder instillation, or treatment as they call them at my mom’s place, you are really missing out in life! In addition to all the medication I take, once a week, for at least nine weeks, I get my bladder pumped full of medicine too. Now, there are only a few ways to get medicine into one’s bladder, and I do two of those ways, one of which is by orally taking medication. The other way of getting medicine into my bladder is far less pleasant!

A bladder instillation, in Dr. E’s office consists of meeting with a nurse once a week. At the beginning of my appointment she asks me how I am doing, triages any problems that I am having and adjusts, changes or adds any medications as needed and tries to answer my plethora of questions. Either before or after this discussion, I go to the bathroom in an attempt to empty my bladder, even though I’ve already peed less than 40 minutes ago before I left my house. At some point the nurse leaves the room and I get half naked from the waist down. As I await her return, I try to make myself comfortable as I sit cold and cross-legged on the examining table with the giant scratchy tissue looking thing covering my nude bits.

When the nurse comes back, I maneuver my body down the table and put my feet in the stirrups as she sits on a low stool with her face between my very unshaven legs. I don’t really think this is a comfortable thing for either one of us, no matter how many times she’s done this. It certainly isn’t comfortable for me, no matter how many times I do this! Then, while talking about something or other, she will either use a giant Q-tip to lightly examine my latest problem (the Lichen Schlerosis , the tear in my anus, the Vestibulitis…whatever) or she will gently apply Lidocaine to my urethra (can you figure out where this is going?). The Lidocaine stings and burns in an attempt to numb my urethra for the child size catheter she is about to insert.

Ever have anything inserted into your urethra? I firmly consider that orifice to be an “exit only” hole, and this procedure sure as hell violates that rule!

When “Susan” is my nurse, she is very gentle as she guides the catheter through the bumps and ridges and whatever else is inside my urethra. When Dr. E. does it (which thank god was only once!) he was not nearly as patient or gentle! Once the catheter is in place, my bladder spews forth more urine, even though I swear I just emptied it, and it is caught in a pink plastic something or other. I never actually see this part since I am covered with a giant tissue, but the first time it happened I was mortified! I thought, not very rationally, that I was peeing in my nurse’s face! When she didn’t say anything about her golden shower, I was left trying to figure out why the hell I still was peeing when I literally went to the bathroom 5 minutes ago! When I finally got up the courage to ask, Susan told me I, A) am not peeing on her face or any other body part and B) it is because my bladder and the pelvic floor muscles supporting my bladder are, and have been, in spasm for so long it is just about impossible for me to truly empty my bladder right now. Evidently the catheter which is scorching holes in my urethra is going to help me fully empty my bladder once a week.

After my bladder is drained, it is filled with a mixture of Elmiron pre-dissolved in (I believe) bi sodium carbonate, water and something else I always forget. Several treatments later, I no longer feel the medicine being pushed through a big needle looking thing into the catheter and finally deep into my bladder, but the catheter still burns and its insertion always makes me feel a terrible urge to urinate (despite the fact that I just did before I got half naked and that my bladder was drained even further when the catheter was initially inserted! How much pee can one person have?) When I’m good and full, of what, realistically is probably two or three inches of liquid, even if it sometimes feels like 40 gallons, the catheter is withdrawn. The procedure is over, and unless I’ve asked a few questions or we have a good conversation going, the entire process takes fewer than five minutes. Sometimes we talk while Susan’s face is still between my hairy legs. Sometimes I scoot back on the table and have the conversation in a more “normal” position. Eventually Susan leaves the room, I get dressed and she generally comes back with whatever new ‘scrips I need or to follow-up with any other questions I might have. She is a brave woman to come back into the room, as I always have more questions to ask!

Finally, I am given instructions to try my best not to urinate for an hour and a half and I am free to go (after I pay, of course!). An hour and a friggin’ half??!! To someone with IC, that is almost akin to asking me to never pee again! The only times I ever go that long without peeing are if I’m asleep (and up until recently I was lucky to sleep more than two hours without needing to get up and pee) or if I deliberately dehydrate myself because I know I am going out and I don’t know where the bathrooms are, if there are any or, if I try mightily to ignore the increasing pressure and painful need to pee, like on long road trips to Massachusetts. Telling me not to pee for an hour and a half is torture sometimes. I might ordinarily be able to hold it that long if no one told me not to pee, but once that edict is given, my bladder pounds at the door of mercy, begging for a bathroom, threatening to saturate my clothes and publicly embarrass me if I don’t release my urine right this very minute!

My Angry Bladder, Part Two

2009-12-17T22:21:00.005-05:00

The feelings of a burning urethra and an angry, recently penetrated bladder are generally too uncomfortable for me to drive the half hour or so home. So after I pay “Missy” my $30 for this incredibly fun procedure, and schedule a time to do it again the following week, I usually end up driving 5 minutes to the new shopping center near Dr. E’s office (where I now know exactly where all the bathrooms are in ever store I go in and how clean they usually are!)

There I try to distract myself from my burning urethra and overwhelming need to pee by furtively browsing racks of things I can’t afford or by buying trinkets and baubles and sometimes Christmas gifts. I know I will return many of the things I bought the following week after my next bladder instillation, when the guilt of how much I spent overwhelms me, or I find something even better to purchase. It’s becoming a vicious cycle!

When my hour and a half is finally over, or when I can’t stand the suspense any longer (usually around an hour and fifteen minutes later), I wield my shopping cart like a deadly weapon in an ungraceful shuffle-sprint to the nearest bathroom. After carefully lining the seat with toilet paper or the tissue paper seat protectors (the fear of bathroom diseases my grandmother instilled in me as a kid still lives on, and quite possibly lead to my MPH…but who knows about that last one?), I carefully plop myself on the seat and blessedly, gratefully, sometimes almost orgasmically, release my pent up, medicated urine.

Often I want to moan with pleasure as I profusely thank my bladder for holding on this long instead of seeking revenge by saturating my sweatpants with pee in the middle of the shoe aisle. I am always grateful when I am the only one in the bathroom, in case a moan or two really does slip out. As I sit there, I try to ignore the rageful indignation of my urethra, which is either on fire or bubbling out excess air from the injection, or both. The first time I felt this bubbling sensation, I thought I was farting from my urethra and I debated calling the doctor’s office while still sitting on the throne. I had no idea what to do and no one told me to expect this! Maybe something else was wrong with me and I should get it looked at right away, when I was only five minutes away!

Somehow, I gathered my wits about me, I think it was shortly after I finally stopped peeing, and realized it was probably just air bellowing its way out of my urethra, and while it wasn’t a sensation I was used to, not much of my new life felt normal to me anymore! Finally, after every fantastic post-bladder-instillation-release, I dry myself off, pull my sweat pants back up, wash my hands and leave the bathroom, knowing full well I’ll need another one (or the same one) within the next 30-45 minutes!

Since I am constantly learning about my issues, this week I learned that one of the side effects of bladder instillations are bladder spasms. I learned this three days ago when an invisible stabbing knife slashed its way through my bladder while I was at home urinating. The pain was crazy intense and out of nowhere. It also stopped as soon as I was finished peeing and didn’t return until after my bladder treatment yesterday. I asked Susan about this and she said that it was “normal” and that they probably should have started me on Pyridium prior to any bladder work.

Apparently this is a medication to numb the bladder and the urethra from the trauma of having things shoved inside them. Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

Susan was willing to write me a scipt for either 100 mg or 200mg, because one of the things I’ve learned very quickly through all of this is the massive price variations in medications. She also told me there was non-prescription stuff I could buy that would work just as well. And the perk of this medicine, in addition to numbing areas that shouldn’t need to be numbed, depending on what I take, my urine will turn either bright orange, red or blue (how psychedelic!) and it absolutely cannot be taken for more than two days. She advised me to see which option was best for me and to make sure that I took a dose before next week’s assault, err, treatment.

I admit, I left the office skeptical about taking one more friggin’ med to fix a medication I am already taking and that damn stabbing pain only happened once. Nevertheless, I drove over to the Target (the one in my weekly shopping center, because I wanted to buy Chutes and Ladders, for myself, thank-you very much! And make some returns..again). The incredibly helpful pharmacist looked up how much it would cost for 12 pills in each strength and also showed me where the non-prescription stuff was. I thanked her for her time and still did not see my problem as worthy of $4 for a prescription or $6 something for 30ish Azo pills.

Nevertheless, I had some time to kill before I could pee and I wandered the store until I got tired of listening to all the people complaining about putting off their holiday shopping. As I was headed to the check out, the pharmacist actually met me in the aisle and handed me a bag with her card in it, a coupon for a $10 gift card if I chose to get that, or any other prescription filled there, a list of their generic drugs and the cost of each and two Hershey’s chocolates. I was so surprised by her generosity; I think I got misty eyed. I doubt I will forget that act of kindness!

Still, I did some more browsing, shopping, returning until it was finally time to pee in the usually clean Christmas Tree Shop bathrooms and I left for therapy unconvinced that I needed the medication. I remained unconvinced until after my partner and I finished dinner. I was standing up near the table when that damn knife of pain struck again, momentarily blacking out my vision and causing me to fumble for the table, the chair, a unicorn to support me. With tremendous concern, my partner asked me what just happened. I told him I wasn’t quite sure but I think it was a bladder cramp (that was the word the nurse used) and it really fucking hurt!

The pain spread and intensified and I decided it was time for a trip either to the Walmart or Rite Aid pharmacy, after I peed (which, this time did not really lessen the pain) and before they closed. It was too late at 8:30 pm to get a prescription, since my nurse wrote down what I needed and told me to shop around, so we decided to go to Rite Aid and beg the pharmacist for help right before they closed.

The kindly gentleman who was working there listened to me prattle about pain in my urethra and IC and a catheter and burning and I knew I wasn’t making sense to myself, but he was able to show me my two options and he assured me that it would turn my urine orange and it would numb the pain. I grabbed the store brand, exclaimed, “God Bless you! Merry Christmas!” and hobbled to the cashier as quickly as a wounded turtle.

I wanted to pop the pills right there but they need to be taken with food (Damn it! And I’m not supposed to be throwing chocolate candy bars down my throat for nourishment!!). I waited until I got home (and peed again-even though it hadn’t been more than 20 minutes since the last time I peed) before scarfing something, I don’t even remember what it was, and tossing too oddly colored red pills down my throat.

My partner encouraged me to lay down on the sofa with my heating pad and Thomas, my cat who will rarely leave me alone when I am on the sofa. We had planned to do the vaginal stretches that evening and after a while, I groggily and with increasing nausea, got up, took the rest of my night time meds and went to bed where we could begin the stretching.

The candles were lit, the mood was soothing, my partner was so gentle and I felt so sick I needed him to stop after a mere few minutes. I was sound asleep by 10:30 pm with a heating pad on my bladder to help quell the pain!

When I woke up around 2:30 am I forgot all about the pills I took and couldn’t figure out why the hell the toilet paper was sunshine yellow and the toilet water was Easter egg orange. I thought it was a dream and I went back to bed. When it happened again, a few hours later, I had to show my partner because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing (yes, we’ve reached that stage in our relationship, for many reasons, most of which began two months ago!). He was just as stunned as I was! I went back to bed, grateful yet again that I didn’t have to call out of work as the pain in my bladder twisted its wrath, bubbled its pain and serrated its frustration on my already battered body.

When I awoke for good, and all day, my angry bladder has been dying the inside of our toilet bowl varying shades of orange and yellow, the color, I guess, depends upon the strength of the medicine still inside me. And I’m supposed to do this again tomorrow and for the remaining two bladder instillations?

Wow, I used to think my life was so dull…now it’s almost Technicolor!

I’m Grateful for This Much…

2009-12-09T22:17:00.004-05:00

I meant to have this posted by Thanksgiving but somehow something absconded with the time I planned to write this…the little thief! But I am slowly learning that every day is a good day to give thanks for something, so maybe it’s ok that this wasn’t posted sooner.

Anyway, to borrow a phrase from a very dear friend, I would like to take some time out of my shock and anger about my diagnoses, and sometimes my life in general to remind myself that, “I am grateful for this much”:

For each day, no matter how much of a struggle it is for me, that I have another chance to be alive, to see the beauty in this world and to be given the chance to grow stronger as I grapple with that which is painful, or difficult or even ugly in this world.

For my partner who supports me, both emotionally and in many ways, financially, and has no resentment about bearing the largest brunt of our financial burdens as I focus on healing instead of finding a job…who stands by my side and tries to understand my pain as if it were his own…who accompanies me to doctor’s appointments and reassures me that this is not all in my head, not something I did wrong.

I am grateful for my partner who, too many times, stands in my shadow, as I focus so much on what is wrong with me, on my problems and my issues. And I forget, sometimes momentarily, sometimes for weeks, that we are in this together and that I am worthy of his love.

For my five nephews, who forget, each time that I see them, that I am in chronic pain. While their head-butts in my back, fierce hugs around my waist or their desires to bounce up and down on my lap (and press against my bladder) are painful, it also reminds me that they see me as their Aunt Elizabeth Goddess, whom they love with all their pure hearts, not as someone who is riddled with problems and somehow untouchable.

I am grateful for two incredible friends who meet me for dinner and listened with their hearts as I told them little bits of how I, how my partner and I, are struggling through this. And I am grateful that they shared with me what is going on in their lives, their struggles and their joys instead of focusing solely on what is wrong with me and how it fix it. Their trust and their sharing helped me feel human and loved, not diseased and shunned.

For my dear friend who shares deeply of her struggles to be where my partner is now…the one who is not diagnosed with a medical problem but still bears the undiagnosed and all too often overlooked burden of inner pain…of bearing the brunt of a partner’s pain and rage…of our distancing and diminishing intimacy…our withdrawal and blame and our sometimes selfish refusal to hear about anyone else’s day…or sometimes even our refusal to listen to our partner’s dreams and fears because we hurt too damn much to care about anything else. I am grateful that she has helped me to see what my partner struggles with and has helped me find my courage to ask him when I don’t know what is going on inside his heart and head.

I am grateful for the silent prayers to a god I don’t know that I believe in but are absolutely a reflection of my friends’ faith and their deep love for me. And hey, prayers and blessings on my behalf sent out to the universe aren’t going to make me any worse!

For my family, who struggle, each in their own way, to understand what I am dealing with…who try to understand “the sudden onset” or why I kept all of these problems to myself for so long…who struggle with whatever my problems stir up for them…who struggle with the right thing to say or do…who have to learn how to live with a whole lot more, “No I can’t do that” instead of the familiar, “Yes, I can help you out with that.”

For my dear friend in Chicago whom I didn’t know was reading my blog and called me, when I was at one of my lowest of low points, to see how I was doing…as he has called me at many other low points, without even knowing it, to see how I am and to let me know that he cares about me and our friendship.

I am grateful for friends who set aside time in their busy lives to call me, text me, e-mail me to “check-in” and see how I’m doing…for friends who take a day off of work so we can get together and talk and cry and remember why we are dear friends in the first place.

For my dear friend and the blessing of her financial generosity…for showing me how to humbly “not block a blessing.”

For the compassion of a friend, whose partner also reached out with love and wisdom, to teach me another set of skills in taking care of my little girl…the one who is so loved and so perfect and is waiting for me to bring her into my heart and love her as every child deserves to be loved.

I am grateful for the waitress who repeatedly asks the chef what is in every entrée I think of ordering and then, with the cook, manages to find a way to prepare Shrimp Scampi in a way that I can eat it and is delicious…and for the waitress after her who was just as patient and understanding of my dietary constraints, despite the number of tables she had to wait on.

For my gynecologist who set all of this in motion, by believing me and referring me to others when she did not have the answers that I needed.

For my therapist who sees me for less money an hour than people who work at McDonalds make…for her strength and her belief in me and for all the deep personal work she did to even be able to get to a place where she could help me and guide me into the gentle, yet long neglected art of caring for myself.

I am grateful for my Pelvic Pain Doctor (who really does look like Santa) and his staff who are overwhelmed with work and responsibilities and the pain and fear of many patients, but still do their best to give me the time I need to answer my questions, to quell my fears and address my concerns each week…and most of all, for believing me in the first place!

For my Physical Therapist, who, after listening to my history, thanked me for trusting her enough to share so much of my life story with her. I am grateful for every visit with her because she takes the time to make her room a healing room…a safe place…for encouraging me to be gentle with myself and my lover. She encourages me to find my own voice and assert my rights to everyone, including her, as well as reminding me, several times in each visit, that I am the one in charge here and we will do what I want when I want it and nothing more. I also appreciate her efforts to discuss how all of this impacts our relationship (between myself and her, between myself and my partner and between the three of us and the rest of my treatment team) as well as what my lover and I can do to deepen our intimacy and connection without having intercourse.

For being able to get “charity care coverage” through my local hospital, which covers my physical therapy and for the woman in charge of the program, who always treats me with respect, not like a poor person who is unworthy of her time.

I am grateful for the endless pharmacists and techs I talked to in search of the cheapest med prices, many of whom gave me priceless tips and saved me so much time and money, in addition to treating me like a human being.

For the pharmacists at Kmart who are the kindest, most compassionate pharmacists I’ve ever had the honor of meeting.

I never in my life thought I would say this, but I am grateful to the big pharmaceutical companies, Johnson and Johnson and Lilly for recognizing that I am too broke to afford the medications I need and are covering three of them 100%.

I am grateful for Snowball, who is destined to become the next Velveteen Rabbit, because over the 20 plus years she’s been by my side, I’ve managed to pick out most of her fur, smother her in snot and tears, throw her carelessly on the floor in the midst of a bad dream or a hopefully good lay and she never complains about being naked or cold or used as a panacea.

For those who read my blog and offer me feedback and let me know that one of my remaining sources of comfort makes a difference in your life too.

Finally, some days, I am grateful for these struggles…for the ways in which they have broken me down, made me re-assess what I believed to be true about this world, about love and friendship and about my own self worth. And I am grateful for the light of hope, even when it is as dim as a dying firefly, that I will emerge a stronger, more compassionate and gentler person who is even more in love with her partner, her friends and family and the world she too often bitterly shuns.

When The Sexpert Can’t Have Sex

2009-11-30T18:30:00.003-05:00

Of all the devastating news Dr. E. gave me, by far the most difficult for me to handle is the fact that I can’t have sex…for an indefinite period of time. Until I get better. If I get better.
For anyone who knows me well, sex is something that has defined my life. It is a huge part of who I am, how I see and relate to the world. It is what I breathe, what I study, what I advocate for.

I used to believe that sex was best had at least twice a day; an easy thing to do in the beginning of my relationship with my partner when we only saw each other once every six months or so, for a week to ten days at a time. During that time, everything in our lives, outside of the bubble of each other, stopped. Once our clothes came off, they were rarely and very reluctantly put back on. Since we lived a time zone apart and saw each other so infrequently, we had little opportunity to transition from friends to lovers and dating each other was not something we really did.

Although I know we have an enduring friendship and a sturdy relationship, in addition to all of my “new” medical problems, I worry the most about how not being able to have sex will impact our relationship and, most of all, my self-esteem.

I’ve had pain for so long I really don’t remember not having it, but not having had sex as frequently with anyone other than my current lover, the pain occurred much less often. And when it did occur, I generally chalked it up to being my fault…to not being wet enough, or wanting it too many times in one day/night, or not being able to focus my mind on what was going on. I rarely blamed my inept (or sometimes very capable) partners and I only sometimes blamed the endometriosis. Perhaps once every millennium or two I might get an inkling that maybe I wasn’t enjoying this because of past abuse experiences, but generally I tried to shove those thoughts out of my mind.

All too often I kept pushing on despite the pain. Sometimes I pushed through it because it reminded me that I was alive, that I could feel something on the days that were so dark and endless. Other times I kept going because it was my body goddamn it and it was going to respond the way I tell it to…which is with pleasure and not pain. That approach rarely worked.

When I told my partner about my multitude of diagnoses and treatment options, I saved, what for me, was the most humiliating part, for last. I told him that we wouldn’t be able to have sex, or any kind of penetration for me, until I get better. If I get better.

I waited for him to process what I said. I waited for him to blow up. I waited for him to get angry. I waited for him to protest, to cry, to pressure me like so many of my other lovers. Most of all, I waited for him to leave.

Instead, he just sat on the sofa, took a few agonizingly long moments, which felt like an eternity, to think about what I just said. Finally he proclaimed, “Ok. We’ll wait as long as it takes then.” I sputtered and protested. I tried to spar with him about how he would eventually get fed up and leave or pressure me to give in “just this once.” He reminded me that it was far more important to him that we are able to have sex without me being in pain and he was willing to wait as long as it took for that to happen.

I should have been happy. I should have been relieved and grateful, maybe even crying on his shoulder in gratitude, but instead I was bitter. Bitter and disbelieving.

Always the optimist, he assured me I would get better (as if he has any authority or credibility to be assuring shit like that!). I didn’t feel his enthusiasm or optimism. He told me that our relationship is about so much more than sex-that we started out as friends for 7 years before we ever had sex-that we could get through this together. But I remained doubtful. I started to believe what a dear friend once told us-that two people who love each other but don’t have sex are friends, not lovers. At the time I thought it was a ludicrous thing to say, but now I was beginning to fear the weight of its truth and I wanted a goddamn lover not a fuckless friend!

My partner had to remind me, the sexpert, the one with the insatiable sex drive, the one who studies sex, talks about sex, advocates for healthy sex for all people, that there were more ways to be sexual and intimate than just sticking a penis in a vagina. He had to remind me of what I had been preaching for so long…preaching from the comfortable, arrogant distance of one who isn’t directly impacted by what they are talking about, to people who weren’t listening anyway (or so I thought)! He had to remind me of what I swore was true, that is, until it affected me directly, until it affected us and our relationship. Somehow, the strength of my previous convictions wobbled away with this new news.

Although once upon a time sex was a multi-times a day event, we, like so many other couples, eventually fell into a routine where sex was once or twice, three times at most, a week. It was often late at night between two people who generally would rather go to sleep, with too little foreplay, too many muttered words about how “next time will be different” and definitely, too much pain. As I tried to process my new doctor’s orders to abstain from sex for an indefinite period of time and this was already what our sex life looked like, how the fuck was abstinence going to make it any better?

My partner may have gone through a five year period where he didn’t have sex because the situation wasn’t right or he knew she wanted more than just sex or he was too tired or drunk or whatever his noble reasons were, but that sure as hell wasn’t me! As he pointed out somewhere in our conversation, I use sex to dominate my body, to have it as often as possible, when I want it and how I want, in whatever way I want it-on my terms! Rarely did I choose to abstain from sex, even if I knew the other person wanted more from the experience then I did.

Maybe he could go years without having sex and satisfy most of his needs with masturbation, but I am a recovering Catholic and as open as I am about sex and masturbation, I’m still only sometimes ok with touching myself at all…and besides…that wasn’t much of an option for me now except to apply greasy medical ointments in a most non-sexual manner!

Despite the fact that sex, in some positions, an increasing number of times, was painful for me…sometimes curl up in a ball in agony afterwards…sometimes only hurting for a brief moment or two, it was still away to be close to my partner and to be closer to myself. And I never knew if there was going to be pain or what kind of pain I might be in until we got to that point, if we got to the point.

The times when there was no pain, when I was on top or he was going down on me and orgasm after orgasm flowed through my body, I was enlivened. I was beautiful. I was two steps further away from every negative, violating and painful sexual experience that had previously consumed so much of my life. There was no way in hell I wanted to give that up now!

I never considered the toll that having painful sex was taking on my body-the body imprints (as Dr. E. would say) that it was leaving behind. I also rarely told my partner exactly how much it hurt, which, as I look back on it now, was an amazingly hypocritical thing for someone who values honesty so much, to do.

Eventually the pain of intercourse, the burning irritation of merely having his penis near my vagina or the all over my body feeling of acidic hives I would often get the rare times we didn’t use a condom, left me less and less likely to want to have sex. I grew increasingly more likely to start a fight or read a book or stay up until well after he went to bed so that sex became less of an issue, almost a non-option. And then I got pissed off about the fact that we weren’t having sex and I often took it out on him; though no one ever saw the ways in which I internally took my frustrations with sex and pain out on myself.

By taking sex and any form of vaginal penetration out of the relationship, for an indefinite period of time, what was that going to do to us? To our relationship?

Oh, I failed to mention another layer of complication. Due to the pain I feel, which also sometimes occurs when I orgasm, I am supposed to avoid anything that makes me cum. The problem that avoiding orgasms causes for me, and I know I won’t get much sympathy here, is that if I am aroused enough, I can cum without any genital stimulation at all. So, does that mean that my partner should stop stroking my hair and nibbling on my ear to the point where I cum because it makes my lower back spasm in pain?

If all of this is the case…if we are supposed to avoid sex, avoid any penetration for me and any orgasms for me, how the fuck are we going to survive this? Sure, I can get him off, but what about my needs? They didn’t dry up just because it hurts! How am I going to survive this? He can at least jerk off! What the hell will I do for a release? I become a lunatic when we go three days without sex! What the fuck are my options now?

It’s my body that’s in pain, that’s causing all these problems and one of my biggest and most comforting sources of release and relief has just been yanked away from me. What the fuck do I do now?

Wedding Day Blues

2009-11-20T14:41:00.008-05:00

This post has been mulling in my brain for quite some time now and it had a very different slant to it before I went to the doctors…as I am finding so much of my life was different before that day!

A week prior to seeing Dr. E., my partner and I had spent considerable time discussing weddings and marriage since we were going to attend the wedding of two of his co-workers, both of whom I’ve met several times before. Truth be told, I was not looking forward to the wedding, even though I like both of the people getting married. I wasn’t looking forward to it because I did not want to face what, for me, have become the inevitable wedding questions…”Why aren’t you married?” “When are you getting married?” “Is there something wrong with you?” “Are you a lesbian?” “When are you going to grow-up?” and so on and so forth.

I hadn’t always been against marriage, in fact, in one of my earlier posts, I wrote about wanting to marry my first childhood love. In college I had a thankfully fleeting feeling that I wanted to marry the guy I was sorta dating, because, as I told my mom, “he is just as miserable as I am”. I’ve even batted the idea around with a few other people I’ve dated since Mr. Misery. The closest I’ve come to following through getting married was with someone I met while living in Ireland, someone I thought was the love of my life. For a long time I fantasized about how getting married would curb his desire to whore, er, travel his way around the world. Fortunately I gave up on that idea!

During my single years since him, I spent a great deal of time thinking about weddings and marriage and what that institution means to me. I attended a lot of weddings as the single woman. I heard the reasons the people around me were getting married and I saw lots of miserable relationships and divorces. I also thought about how I love and what I want from a relationship and from life. And I realized that marriage, as it currently exists in the United States, does not fit my needs or beliefs. I recognized the legalized discrimination inherent in marriage in this country and decided that I was not going to get married until it was something that every adult in this country could do. Naturally when I began to talk about my reasons for not getting married, people assumed I am a lesbian. I let them assume whatever they want.

The truth, in case you care, is that I don’t care one way or the other about the gender of the person I am with, I love or have a crush on. My feelings have been just as strong for men as they have been for women as they have been for people whose gender is not immediately obvious. Trying to discuss this with people in my life all too often has caused even more problems since I can’t easily be labeled.

Once I came to these realizations about myself and decided that I would wait to get married, I made it a point to tell any prospective partner about my views within the first few dates. I also made sure to tell them that I was never going to have children either. This led to a drastic reduction in my dating life!

After my nephews started coming into this world, my views about marriage discrimination only solidified. I wanted them to grow up in a world where they could love and marry, or love and not marry, whomever the hell they pleased. I wanted to show my five nephews that it is important to stand up for what you believe in, even when it isn’t an easy or popular thing to do. And as they grew older and began to ask us if my partner and I were married, I, with both of my sister’s permission, told them that we were waiting until boys could marry boys and girls could marry girls. While at the ripe ages of 7 and 8 I don’t think that they fully comprehend this, I hope it has a positive lifelong impact for them.

My current partner of four years (a new record for me!), happens to be a man…which to me is as insignificant as his eye color. We had zillions of conversations about my views on marriage and kids over endless phone calls, since he lived in Chicago and I lived in Pennsylvania at the time. He was stunned and confused and often disagreed with my viewpoints. While I tried to respect what he was saying, in order to be true to myself, I kept reminding him (and keep on reminding him) that this isn’t about my feelings towards him. This is about my unwillingness to participate in legalized discrimination, a form of discrimination which would directly impact me if he happened to be a woman and not a man.

My partner grew up assuming he would get married and have kids and I did too, until I took boatloads of time to think about these choices for myself. Despite our disagreement on these issues, we began to date and over time, I hope without pressure from me, my partner began to see that he too did not want children and was willing to wait to get married until everyone in this country can.

These decisions did not cause much of a change in his life initially. His friends thought we were weird but it would pass. His family didn’t pry any further when we, separately, told them of our choices. It wasn’t until he was employed at the hospital where he currently works that he began to get a lot of shit and a lot of “You’ll change your mind someday” or “Someday you’ll make an honest woman out of her” crap.

And on some level I was happy that he was finally hearing some of what I have been hearing for so long…that our relationship didn’t matter, wasn’t as important or as meaningful as a marriage. Despite the fact that we are committed to each other in every way, that we have told each other time and again that we want to grow old together through the good times and the bad, that we have joint checking and savings accounts (unlike many married people I know) and that we, at least monthly check in with each other to make sure our relationship is working, moving in a direction we both want it to and that we both want to be here, together; all of this is somehow less meaningful because we choose not to get married! People tend to see our choice based as bizarre or martyr-ish since they assume we are both heterosexual.

Going to weddings always stirs up these issues for me, even though this is the first wedding we will have attended together since we “officially started dating” whatever the hell that means. I also know that we have at least two weddings to attend next year and so I was frequently bringing up all sorts of marriage and wedding related questions for discussion. Almost every chance I had I asked him if he was ok with our decision, how he thought it impacted us, our friends, our family, even his employment. Very little went unanalyzed…it was even getting a little out of control.

Two days before his co-worker's wedding, I did some research on people who were boycotting marriage until it was legal for everyone and I found the National Marriage Boycott which sells equality rings meant to draw attention to the discrimination of marriage (http://marriageboycott.ning.com/). I suggested that we think about signing the pledge and wearing the rings to do even more to call attention to our viewpoints. We decided to think about it for awhile and discuss it again at later point in time (even though the in-your-face part of me wanted to wear those rings to the wedding and have all sorts of controversial conversations, I promised my partner I wouldn’t do that and it turns out no one asked us about getting married any way.).

Less than a week after the wedding and our continual re-evaluation that we are making the right choice for our relationship, our convictions were put to the test. Dr. E. made it explicitly clear that while he was willing to see me for $150 instead what he charges people with insurance, and while he could put some of my treatments on a sliding scale, I was going to need a lot of meds, a lot of physical therapy and possibly other medical interventions which would be beyond my means to pay for, even if I had a job without insurance. Twice during my visit he suggested that if it was ever going to happen, perhaps my partner and I should consider getting married sooner rather than later. I wanted to be appalled at what he was suggesting, but part of me understood where he was coming from and I always had a medical exemption clause in my refusal to get married, I just assumed that this injustice would be corrected before I was 90 and started having health problems.

As I discussed my problems with my partner, I became increasingly scared that marriage was our best option, even though I felt like I would be using him for his benefits. We discussed how our families would react if we went to city hall the following day. We discussed how we both felt about the looming prospect of getting married and he stammered out that if it weren’t for knowing my viewpoints about marriage, he would have proposed a long time ago. I was flattered and I was stunned. Since we never seriously discussed the prospect of marriage I never knew he felt that way.

The conversation was agonizing and raw because we both felt we needed to do the best we could in this situation, even if it meant that I might feel like a hypocrite for caving on my principles just so my medical needs could be met. We discussed the obvious reality that if I were a man or he were a woman, I would be covered under his hospital’s benefits, but no amount of my partner’s letter writing or talking to HR was going to change the hospital’s rules. They claim it’s Pennsylvania state law.

In the days that followed, we agreed not to make a rash decision and get married right away, but instead to explore all our options. I spent hours looking into charity care options. I called every pharmacy in the area to see how much my meds will cost (you’d be amazed at the differences) and compared those costs to what it would be if I had his insurance. I was trying to approach the marriage issue as some sort of cost-benefit analysis and I’ve never had a business class in my life!

I went to the library to find books on my conditions. There are none. I inadvertently passed by the wedding section and with the kind of car crash on the highway mentality, I looked through some of them. I wanted to vomit my brains out as I fled the library. I had nightmares about becoming a bride…about how I am standing in front of endless rows of white, puffy, stupid dresses and I am sobbing my eyes out in a panic because I don’t want any of them. I don’t want this.

Most of all though, I grappled with the strength of my conviction versus feeling like a hypocrite. And I repeatedly thought back to when my partner told me that he would go to city hall and marry me this weekend. My response was to sob in his arms because the doctor told me we can’t have sex until I’m better.

What the hell kind of honeymoon would it be if we couldn’t have sex?

The Long Drive Home, or, What to Tell My Partner

2009-11-20T14:36:00.006-05:00

After my part with Dr. E. was over, and he handed me a packet full of information and several prescriptions, I went with Kris to another room where she went over everything in the packet one piece of paper at a time in an attempt to make sure I understood everything. While I appreciated their efforts, most of this time was lost on me because I was well beyond overload and drowning in a sea of shock. I know I asked her some questions but I can’t recall what I asked or what she said and so much of the day’s events flew out of my head the moment I walked out the door.

I left the office with the bittersweet thought that maybe, this time, someone believed me and was going to help me treat these problems. However, now that a medical expert appears to believe me, and be willing to treat me, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t prepared to be believed, as I haven’t been believed so freaking many times before. I was prepared to argue with him and guilt him, if necessary, into removing my ovary by reminding him that he took a Hippocratic oath to do no harm and by leaving my ovary in place, he was, in fact, guilty of doing great and irreparable harm. I never got the chance to deliver that impressive speech though, because he claims to believe me.

I’m still doubtful though. Maybe he will give up on me once he realizes I am too poor to pay for his expertise. Maybe he will say adios when I can’t afford the treatments.

Maybe it really is all in my head. Maybe I gave the wrong answers to his questions, to his probing, to the exams. Maybe I failed the exam. Maybe we could do it over again and I would get the answers right this time and I would be cured. Maybe we could just go back to when it was all in my head.

Somehow even I doubted those delusions of grandeur.

The drive home was in a dangerous haze. All along Route 22 people kept cutting me off, and for one of the first times in my driving life, I didn’t care. I didn’t flip a single person off. That’s a surefire sign something is wrong with me!

I kept replaying bits of the conversations in my head, this diagnosis and that diagnosis but when that made the tears singe my eyes and obscured my vision, I switched my thoughts to marriage and what I would tell my partner. I fantasized about going to city hall sometime that week and never telling anyone that we got married, although I couldn’t figure out how to explain how all my medical costs were suddenly being covered. I tried to imagine my family’s reaction when we announced, before Thanksgiving dinner, that we were in fact going to get married. That we were doing this because I needed to use my partner to get health care coverage and all of you people who don’t support health care reform in this country can kiss my ass and aren’t invited to the wedding! I didn’t think that approach would have good results either. I imagined the nightmare of planning my family’s last wedding and his family’s first wedding and my head throbbed with a new pain.

As I drove past my partner’s office, I fought the urge to text him from the parking lot that he needed to leave work immediately and take me the remaining 4.5 miles home. Instead I kept driving. Kept trying to keep the tears at bay. This was definitely going to violate my strong policy of only crying once or twice a year goddamn it!

Somehow I managed to get myself home, take care of the cat’s needs, pee yet again and get myself situated on our back deck, thinking that the view of the river might soothe me. I managed to bring out a blanket, my new packet of medical information, a glass of water, box of tissues and a box of chocolates (screw the fact that they are on the new banned foods list!) before bursting into tears.

My body shook and shivered. My tears fell and my sobs caused the fisherman, whom I was clearly bothering, to move further downstream so I didn’t scare his fish away. To me it felt like an eternity that I wailed and shook, cried and felt sorry for myself. In reality, it probably only lasted less than a half hour. I’ve never been much on crying, probably because when I was a kid and I cried after a punishment, I was told that if I was going to cry, I’d be given a reason to cry, which of course meant that something much worse was in store for me if I kept it up.

I tried to process all that was said, all that had happened. I tried to figure out what to do, how to go back in time and tell the doctor I made it all up. And then the pain in my side flared up again and sent me doubled over in agony, even as I tried to deny its existence.

I tried to decide what to tell my partner. I imagined him coming home and my saying, “Hey honey, do you want to marry me?” before bursting into a fresh set of tears at how romantic that sounded. I tried to figure out how I was going to pay for all of this and if it was better to mooch off the system or my partner.

A few months ago I qualified for charity care through the hospital where my partner works, thanks to the suggestion of my gynecologist. This benefit covers “medically necessary costs”, for those doctors and services who participate in the system. I later learned that my physical therapy would be covered 100% but my medications, any necessary medical equipment and my visits to Dr. E. would not be covered. If we got married, maybe more of my expenses would be covered. Maybe not, I didn’t know much about his policy.

I thought about getting a job…as if it were that easy right now…and I wondered if I even got a job, if this would be covered or if it would be denied as a pre-existing condition. If I got a job, I would make too much money to qualify for charity care and then I would be stuck either with more bills I couldn’t afford to pay or I would have to forgo care that I needed but couldn’t afford. And, if I got a job it would have to be one where I didn’t have to sit for more than 15 minutes at a time, where I could pee at least once every hour and where I didn’t have to stand for more than, say a half hour at a time in the same place or my pain would be unbearable most days. Exactly what the hell did the qualify me to do in an economy where at least thousands of people, healthier people, could vie for the same job?

Somehow I ran out of tears and managed to text my partner, who happened to be on call all that week, to see if he could get someone to cover his shift for a few hours. He got back to me immediately, saying that his boss would do it and she was fine with him leaving right away.

When he got home I had managed to wipe as much of the snot off my face as I could but it was still obvious to a blind person that I had been crying. He asked me what was wrong and gave me a big hug which only caused me to cry more…something he’s rarely seen me do. I tried to tell him what was wrong, but I couldn’t remember most of it so instead I tried to assure him that although I had a lot of problems, none of them were life threatening, merely quality of life threatening. He was visibly relieved since on the frantic drive home he thought I might have cancer (even if I did, I doubt I would know that after a 3 hour initial office visit.).

I tried, through tears and frustration, snot and stumbled sentences, to relay what had happened. In the end, I thrusted the packet of information into his hands and then got annoyed when he tried reading it instead of comforting me! I didn’t know what to do and he didn’t know what to do and I sure as shit didn’t know what I wanted him to do, so slowly, painfully, we began to discuss our options.

We began to discuss the “m” word.

And the Doctor Says…(Part 2)

2009-11-19T21:53:00.006-05:00

Lichen Sclerosis- Dr. E. tells me about this one while my bare thighs are raging in spasm on either side of his face. He even shows me with a mirror where the inflamed and damaged areas are. However, it isn’t until I put my clothes back on and see a picture of another woman’s vulvar region, that I can think of anything other than, “Why the hell do I have moss growing between my thighs? I seem to recall, in high school biology, that lichen are moss, how the hell did they get there?” The term, which I later learn, gets its name from how the abnormal cells look under a microscope. The Lichen Sclerosis is causing inflammation and tissue damage along the inside of my labia majora; those are the fleshy parts between your thighs…like drapes…part of what the pubic hair grows on…they are what you have to move aside to ever get into the vagina. It is also causing inflammation along my perineum and rectum. While holding the mirror, he shows me the bright red streaks all along the inside of my labia, which become an even angrier red as he gently passes a Q-tip over their surface.

I had been idly wondering about those red marks for at least a few years but I assumed it must be due to the natural color variations in women’s vulvas and I never connected it to the god-forsakenly-awful itching sensation I would sometimes (at least monthly) get from my vulva to my anus. I just assumed that was either “in my head”, another yeast infection, from being in a wet bathing suit for too long or from sitting too long, or too much lube or not enough lube, or luck of the draw, or… Turns out it is a treatable, yet incurable disease which is thought to be an autoimmune problem. For some reason, my body is attacking itself and it burns like hell when it flares up.

I am one of the lucky ones though. Even though this disease has been ragging for years (Dr. E. can tell by the scarring), I have lost very little elasticity in my vulva. My skin has not become so taunt that my clitoris is permanently concealed. Very little of my labia majora have disintegrated and the entrance to my vagina is not fused shut. Furthermore, we can begin immediate treatment with a generic ointment, called Clobetasol, one of the first of many prescriptions he hands me.

I should be elated that this will make the itching go away. Instead, I feel like moss grew fat on an erogenous zone and I begin to feel disgusted, yet again, by my own body.

Interstitial Cystitis- This, in addition to the pain in my right ovary otherwise now know as my Ilioinguial muscle, should have been what sent me to the doctor a long, long time ago. Interstitial Cystitis is another treatable, yet incurable disease and since it primarily affects woman, little is known about this disease, even though some people think its first recorded diagnosis was in the late 1800’s! It is currently believed that something causes the bladder lining to thin or wear out which leads to frequent urination, bladder pressure, nerve pain and often, pain upon penetration of the vagina.

Perhaps that is why I all too often feel the fireworks in my brain pain with penetrative sex, as well as a painful, intense pressure, as if something is trying to ram its way through me with a lance. These sensations are often exquisitely painful if my bladder has any urine in it during penetration. Since I can never fully empty my bladder due, in part to the pelvic floor dysfunction, the feeling of being impaled happens entirely too often. And is something I’ve always kept hidden from my partner when we have sex.

The interstitial cystitis diagnosis is where we begin to run into problems. If I had insurance, Dr. E. would immediately start me on Elmiron, the only FDA approved drug thought to help repair the bladder lining by acting as a buffer between the urine and the lining while the bladder heals itself. Even as, or maybe as a result of being, a public health educator, I have little faith in this organization, but I know enough to that any medicine of which there is only one kind, means it is too damn expensive for me! I also have problems taking regular old Benadryl. It either knocks me on my ass in a blissful sleep or does absolutely nothing for me and we need to get my histamine levels down so that my nerves aren’t so inflamed and so I will hopefully be in slightly less pain until we figure out what to do about the prohibitively expensive Elmiron.

Dr. E. thinks Benadryl a) isn’t strong enough for me and all my nasty histamines and b) won’t work until we calm my anxiety down. Fortunately there is a generic anxiety medicine, called Clonezapam, which is affordable without insurance, which should reduce my anxiety. Affordable is a relative term, by the way, especially to someone whose unemployment nets them $900 a month!

I agree that I have anxiety issues, even if I no longer jump up and down on Christmas trees, and do not argue with the medication. By the way, it cost me $16.62 for a month supply.

Vulvadynia- This diagnosis brings me to tears for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it highlights the depths of my denial about my symptoms. For years I have volunteer at a program called Sex Week which teaches future doctors how to talk to their patients about sex. For two of those years a woman gave a presentation about Vulvadynia.

I distinctly remember watching her come into the room and set a cushion down on her already padded seat before she slowly sat down. I remember watching her gingerly, painstakingly get out of her seat and shuffle, in her shapeless dress, towards the microphone. I remember listening to her divulge intimate details of her life as many med students snored around me. She shared how suddenly intercourse had become painful for her, leaving her with stabbing, shooting pains in her vagina. This eventually turned into a feeling of swelling in her perineum, of razor blades in her vulva when she sat or wiped herself after urinating. On and on she went detailing her symptoms, her life and her endless crass shuffling off of one doctor to the next as no one believed her symptoms.

Her talks seamed to last FOREVER to me as I sat throbbing in my pants, shifting this way and that to take the pressure off my vulva. I desperately tried to keep my underwear from brushing up against anything and, though I would never admit it, I was grateful for a week without sex since I was in New Jersey for this event and my partner was still in Chicago. And yet, with all my shifting and chafing, burning and discomfort, I never, ever heard her symptoms as my very own symptoms. I didn’t need to bring no stinking pillow with me everywhere I went and I could still wear sexy dresses, even if I didn’t, thank you very much! So arrogantly convinced was I that at least I didn’t have vulvadynia, I even scoffed a bit at the women on Dr. E.’s website whose stories I perused the night before my visit.

See what scoffing at people will get you?

It will get you a vulva that becomes so inflamed and enraged that it can be anywhere from mildly irritating to excruciating to have anything rub up against it, including super soft toilet paper. I have had a terrible time buying pants before I ever thought to cut the ridiculously thick crotch seems down and lately underwear, even all soft and innocent looking, non-sexual cotton ones, are becoming my enemy!

Not only do I have vulvadynia, which refers to pain along the lips, both the labia majora and minor (what some people tend to, wrongly, think of as the vagina) I also have the subtype Vulvar Vestibulitis Syndrome. This means that when the nice doctor tried to gently swab the vestibule, or entrance to my vagina (The vagina is inside the body…it’s what gets penetrated sometimes…what a baby’s head rages its way through…its not what is immediately visible between a woman’s legs. What is immediately visible is called the vulva.) I wanted to jump off the table and rip his nuts off because it hurt so fucking much. Guess that’s not normal either! Guess that’s why penetration, before anything even plows into my bladder pressing on my vagina, hurts so fucking much. Guess that is what is so ragefully raw when I sit for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time.

There are generic ointments for my Vulvadyina and Vulvar Vestibulitis. Although the next day when I go to pick up the Topicort and learn it is $43.68 for a tube about the size of my thumb and the generic Desoximetasone is $30.39 for a tube about twice the size of the Topicort. I want to give up all over again. I will use both medicines three times a day for maybe a month before being switched to something else.

And (I forgot this one until I saw my official report a few days ago)I have Mild to Moderate Irritable Bowel Syndrome- that means I have trouble shitting. This one didn’t make me want to cry since by this point I was feeling like a giant, diseased former woman, I didn’t care how well I could or could not take a crap!

In a huge nutshell, I’m a mess! And I was convinced it was just my lousy ovary!

The one thing I appear to already be doing right, which if I weren’t, Dr. E. would put on my treatment plan, is seeing a counselor. Over the summer I had decided that since I lost my job and, like millions of other people, was having an impossible time finding another one, I would spend this time working on healing from past issues. My gynecologist referred me to a woman who agreed to see me for $20 a week for a two hour session, which is a steal since she usually charges about five times that an hour (I didn’t know this when I called her or I never would have!). So, in theory, my continuing to see my counselor should help alleviate some of my problems.

The other problems we run into since I don’t have health insurance, is the ongoing cost of medicines, which will change often and need to be adjusted regularly according to how I am tolerating, or not tolerating them. The need to use only generic medications which are generally cheaper, even if a non-generic option might work better or result in my having to take fewer medication and the need for physical therapy for both my lower back pain and my pelvic floor dysfunction. There is no way on god’s green earth I can afford to pay for those visits out-of-pocket right now. I tried that approach after I lost my insurance in Chicago. That’s why I stopped going to physical therapy. Dr. E. seems very vexed by this and unconvinced that the Physical Therapists on his team will see me for a reduced fee. He suggests, yet again, that my partner and I get married so that I can be covered by his health insurance.

And The Doctor Says…(Part 1)

2009-11-19T20:09:00.010-05:00

However, as the visit progressed beyond the internal exam, I struggled to understand what the doctor was telling me, what the problems are and what the treatment options are. It became increasingly difficult not to break down in heart wrenching sobs of relief and additional pain. On the one hand, I wanted to be believed. I wanted to know that I hadn’t been making all this stuff up for so long. I wanted to know that there are medical and scientific reasons for what is happening to me. Hell, part of me even wanted really fancy names to banter about the next time the pain in my side causes me to double over unexpectedly at the dinner table, just inches away from my food. I wanted to be able to wave banners in the wind proclaiming for all the world to see that I really am in pain, the doctor said so (as if that many people in the world would ever read my banner or care about my pain anyway!).

Yet, most of all, I did not want to feel the way I felt, the ways I still feel, once I got the diagnoses. I wasn’t prepared to feel so vulnerable, so raw and defenseless. I wasn’t prepared to be believed and so I went to my appointment alone. And as soon as the doctor walked in the room and told me I have a lot of issues going on, I wanted to hide in the corner, curled up in a ball, sucking my thumb with my back to the world. I wanted to give up. I wanted my partner to be there with me.

I wanted this to all go away. To go back “in my head” where it really belonged.

When the doctor told me he believed me before he even asked me what was wrong, I wanted to collapse into his arms and heave out the rancid tears of years of being disbelieved. I wanted the snot and the hurt and the relief and concern to flow from me on to him until I was cured. I also wanted to run in the other direction, screaming like a lunatic in denial.

I didn’t know what to do if I was believed, if the pain truly wasn’t all in my head. I wanted my partner to be there, to hold my hand, to make it all better, to take it all away. I wanted it to be a bad dream. I wanted it to be yesterday, when I was only afraid I wouldn’t be believed. I desperately didn’t want it to be today when I was believed.

All those emotions were before the exams and the conversations, before he told me what he thought was wrong. Before he told me how he thought we could fix it and it was most certainly before we discussed the harsh reality that I don’t have health insurance.

When I was finally able to extract my convulsing thighs from the stirrups, get dressed and pee for the third time since I got to the doctor’s office, the evaluation continued in Dr. E.’s office.

This is where he reviewed the bombshells he dropped when I was half naked (a state I prefer to be in when some stranger isn’t peering and poking his way between my thighs!).

While Kris appeared to be taking notes on diagnoses she must have heard dozens of times before, Dr. E. explained each of the following diagnoses (again) to me and three-ish weeks later, I remember about as much as I did when I sat, dumbfounded, in his office.

Apparently I have (which I’ll try to sum up as best I can):

Anxiety- Which while I won’t usually admit it upon pain of death, is true. It isn’t normal to be in such a constant, world hating state of tension and fear.

Chronic Pelvic Pain- The definition of this includes pain anywhere from around the belly button to the middle of the thighs and everything in between that region. Obviously this applies to me. It is also a condition which, due to its broad region, is different for everyone who has it. I have pain from just above my belly button, all throughout my uteral region (I think I just made that term up), my vulvar region, sometimes at the top of my left thigh, in my hamstrings and always in my lower back. Some of it comes and goes. Some of it persists, day after painful day, like a nagging sin I can’t do enough penitence for.

Lower Back Pain- Yup. My lower back as never been the same since I fell down a flight of stairs. But again, I was here about that damn ovary. I’d long ago accepted that my lower back pain was here to stay, at least until I got a job with insurance and could afford some more physical therapy.

Pelvic Floor Muscle Dysfunction- Apparently the muscles in my pelvis are (I think he described it this way) in constant “fight mode” from a whole slew of events and traumatic experiences throughout my life. According to Dr. E., these events are stored as “body memories” and are imprinted in various ways throughout one’s body. Sometimes you can live unaware of these imprints, but as they accumulate and the pain builds, eventually your body reaches a point where it can’t take it (or deny the pain) any more. Apparently I am at that point in my life. This explanation was also applied to my Chronic Pelvic Pain. So, since the muscles in my pelvic floor are in such a state of hyper stress and pain, they are contracted or in spasm, maybe constantly, and that is part of what makes it so fucking difficult to shit or piss or even have sex. Really super tight muscles don’t like to have things pass through them, no matter how vital it is that it happens!

Myofascial Pain- I think that this refers to the specific points on my body which cause various areas, such as my lower back, to go into spasms, but I’m not quite sure yet. I remember nodding my head along to Dr. E’s explanation, but my memory system was on overload a long time ago!

Iliopso and Psoas Spasms- This refers to specific groups of muscles which are in pain. And since the doctor’s office was thoughtful enough to send me home with a bulging packet of information, I can look back and see that these muscles run up and down my lower back (the Psoas muscles)…definitely pain there! And the Ilioinguial muscles run through your lower back, around your stomach (in fact, that is the source of the pain that I thought was my fucking right ovary), into the front of, and down part of each thigh. This would also explain why sometimes, out of nowhere, little demons on plows would tear their way through a small section of my upper left thigh, leaving behind an inexplicable row of centralized pain.

Sexual Pain- Here I’m not sure if Dr. E. is referring to my past horrible sexual experiences or to the pain I sometimes have during masturbation or penetrative sex, or to all of the above. While they ask about sexual abuse and rape on the intake form, he is clearly uncomfortable talking about these issues. In fact, he told me several times that while he needs to know if it happened (these experiences are part of the “body memory imprints”) he doesn’t need to know the details, nor does Kris, who asked me the same questions two hours ago. Both of their reactions to my revelations enrage me and in my head I shout at them, “It’s fucking child abuse! It’s not like asking about it is con-fucking-tagious! So don’t worry, I won’t hurt you with my memories!” But of course, after decades of training, I keep those thoughts inward and smile or something as he prattles on, and I try to give them some credit for at least asking the questions no one else wants to ask.

Eventually I am pretty sure he is talking about the pain I feel when being penetrated by whatever. He tells me that there are many layers to this pain, which, by this point in time, I can figure out for myself. These layers include all that I’ve mentioned above, plus whatever is going on in my head (which he tells me to discuss with my counselor, not with him) and the symptoms below.

I imagine I am nodding along like a puppet by this point. Sure, I understand. It all makes sense. I agree. I comply. I…I...I don’t hear most of what he is saying because I am so nauseous and so freaking overwhelmed, but please, I think to myself, do go on. I know you have other patients to see and I have overstayed my time.

The following additional diagnoses make me want to cry or bury my head in shame.

Finally Seeing the Pelvic Pain Specialist

2009-11-16T14:54:00.003-05:00

As trite as it may sound, Wednesday, October 21st 2009 will remain a day that changed my life and I’m still not sure how I feel about that. I was pretty good and pissed off before I ever even saw the doctor. I mean, having to wait almost an hour on uncomfortable chairs when you are already in pain with not much else to distract you but articles about pelvic pain and a giant bloody picture of some gross baby being delivered is not my idea of fun even if I was feeling well! When Kris, the Medical Technician finally came to get me, I did not conceal my annoyance at having to wait so long (something I later regretted doing). She told me, as I was sitting on the equally uncomfortable gyno exam table, that Dr. E. tries to take as much time as each patient needs and sometimes that causes him to run late. Since I was still bitterly convinced he wasn’t going to believe me, this reasoning offered me little consolation.

I was still fuming as Kris and I went over the huge packet of information I filled out prior to my visit. This packet was at least 15 pages long and asked questions about damn near everything in my life, from how often I pee to what I eat, to how satisfied I am with my life, to what kind of pain I was feeling and where and what kinds of recreational drugs I’ve used. It was the most extensive pre-exam paper work I have ever filled out and still I was certain that I was not going to be believed in this place. For Christ’s sake, they deliver babies, what the hell do they know about the pain my childfree body is experiencing? Turns out they know a lot. Too much even.
After Kris finished asking me tons of follow-up questions, she went to get the doctor as I sat, in growing agony, on my horrendously sore bum. As I l waited for the doctor, it occurred to me, in a sad sort of way, how I was determined to see the doctor for the pain in my right ovary and nothing else…not the fierce pain between my legs or my constantly aching lower back or my overactive bladder, and I had no idea why the ridiculously long intake forms even asked about those things.

When the doctor walked in the room, he shook my hand, introduced himself and asked if I preferred to be called Elizabeth or Liz. So far things were going ok. Then, without taking his eyes off my face, he told me that I was safe here and that I was believed, that these things were not in my head. I was stunned. I was relieved. I was terrified and I wanted to get the hell out of the room as fast as I could, because even when a man who looks a hell-of-a lot like Santa Claus tells you that your medical problems are real, it can be a very jarring experience. And, as if being believed before he asked me any questions wasn’t jarring enough, he, with very sad looking eyes, apologized for all the other doctors I saw over the endless years before him and their inability or unwillingness to correctly diagnose me.

I was now more confused than ever! I mean, I guess I was being believed but he hadn’t even examined me yet, and why was he so sad that no one else believed me? I wouldn’t be here if they had!

For the next two and a half hours (yes, you read that correctly, my appointment with him lasted two and a half hours…and that was just the part with HIM!) Doctor E. asked me even more questions about my life and my pain and gave me so much information my head is still reeling, three weeks later. He started with a lengthy differentiation between acute pain (which is immediate and short term) and chronic pain (which is long-term, 3 months or more and generally your body’s way of trying to protect itself from injuries that have ended. In other words, chronic pain shouldn’t be happening but, for a myriad of reasons, it does.). He took pains to make sure I understood what he was saying, which I did until all the other information started flowing, and then began the internal exam.

The internal exam was like nothing I have ever experienced. While there was the uncomfortable gyno table, the crappy paper “blanket” and yourself spread eagle in the ridiculous stirrups, there was no speculum, no “hurry up and get through this” attitude from the doctor and Kris was in the room with me the entire time, taking more notes than I ever took in grad school!

Dr. E. told me he would be talking to me every step of the way and explaining what he would be doing before he did anything. He began the exam with what looked like a toothpick and told me it was a sensitivity test. He touched a variety of places on the inside of my thighs and buttocks, some of which I could feel in ways that made my skin crawl with an itchy, electrical sensation and other places I didn’t feel at all. He then used a Q-tip to examine the inner and outer labia and check my vulva for sensitivity. Again, there were places where he touched me that I could feel and places I could not. What I could feel was a horrendous itching, burning sensation when he touched the Q-tip near the vaginal opening. The entire time he was talking to me, asking me questions about how things felt and almost nothing felt anything less than uncomfortable. Most things felt somewhere between painful and excruciating.

Dr. E. did an abbreviated internal exam which revealed all sorts of pain I thought was normal. Although he was so gentle and slow moving during the entire exam, I couldn’t understand why barely inserting a finger into my vagina made my vulva burn and itch with rage, my vagina recoil and that odd spot he touched inside my vagina throb with pain and a terrific need to urinate. Everything he was doing was a whole lot more gentle than sex or masturbation, so why the fuck did it hurt so much? Why couldn’t I stop my inner thighs from uncontrollably convulsing?

I mean, when I wasn’t deeply entrenched in denial, I could sorta allow myself to think about why these areas would hurt during sex or masturbation but I couldn’t figure out why everything bothered me so much now; especially when he showed me by touching my hand, how gently he was performing my internal exam. I was definitely not having a good time!

Throughout the exam, he tried his best to convince me that all the things I had been feeling, or in some cases, not feeling, were not normal, were causing me harm and are very much worthy of medical attention. While I wanted to believe him, I also really just wanted him to cut out the offending ovary so I could get on with my life. He refused to do that because, despite what other doctors have told me, the pain I came in for was not in my ovary. Hell, your ovaries aren’t even located where I feel the stabbing pain! Who knew? I sure didn’t!

He did agree, based upon what I was telling him, that I probably have endometriosis (which is invisible without surgery) and that was causing some of my pain, but not most of it. At this point I became baffled and angry. I was diagnosed with endometriosis in 2001 and in a peculiar way, this diagnosis had become something to cling to as a source of my pain and problems, even if it never got better with various “treatments.” Now, with Dr. E. telling me that the endometriosis was only a small part, at best, in what was going on, I didn’t know what the hell to do or believe.

After delivering that stunning bit of news, he then proceeded to tell me all sorts of things which challenged my long held beliefs and all-too-often ignored pain. He told me: it isn’t normal to feel as though your rectum is being ripped to shreds when you have a bowel movement. I protested that I only felt that way sometimes…like once or twice a month…but he still said that wasn’t normal and any amount of blood in or near the rectum is BAD. It isn’t normal to be able to feel stabbing, twisting, fireworks in my brain, pain when my vagina is penetrated. Again, I protested that I only felt that way sometimes and in some sexual positions. He still insisted feeling that way sometimes was too often. Apparently it is not normal to have a perineum that is chronically so inflamed and painful that it hurts to sit, wear pants or even some days, underwear, because of the constant feeling of extra coarse sandpaper lacerating its way between my thighs. Nor is it normal to feel as though your perineum is so engorged that you have to heave it off the ground before you can even put your underwear on. I’m being metaphorical here. My perineum never actually dragged on the ground but inexplicably, for days at a time and without obvious warning, it would get so swollen that it felt as it was an extra, protruding appendage. And finally, it is not normal to have to pee an average of 20 times a day, or to have trouble starting your urine flow, or to produce anywhere from a trickle to 3 or 4 ounces of urine each time you pee!

Who knew these things were not normal? I thought most of them were. For even as open-minded as I think I am, I’ve never discussed bowel movements or the swelling of my perineum or my painful bladder with my friends. And after not being believed for so long about the chronic stabbing pain in my right side, I stopped talking about most pain with my family members and any medical personal. Besides, I wasn’t there to discuss those things. I was there to have my ovary removed, even if it wasn’t the cause of all my suffering.

When Dr. E. began pointing out or poking at problems and other sources of pain that had been my companions for so long, I didn’t know what to do. Fortunately shock set in and kept me from sobbing my formerly not believed mind out.

Inexplicable Pain, Part 2

2009-11-13T21:17:00.007-05:00

At one point, I was prescribed Lupron which literally made me homicidally crazy. My first indication that something was wrong with me on this medicine should have come about two months after my first shot. It was early December and I was sound asleep, until my Christmas tree in the adjoining room fell over. Instead of reacting like a sane person and either going back to sleep or picking the tree up, I (and I am still embarrassed to admit this) began swearing at the tree, kicking at it with my bare feet, even jumping up and down on the tree!

I swear on my life this is true! At one point I paused for a moment and realized what I was doing hurt my feet, so I stopped just long enough to go back into my bedroom, put on shoes and commence jumping up and down on the tree again. Seriously, this might sound side-splittingly funny, but it is true. My sense of judgment while on Lupron was so skewed that I thought my reaction was perfectly normal and whats more, I couldn’t, I mean, could not stop myself despite the throbbing in my feet and the shards of broken ornaments everywhere. I couldn’t stop myself until I was so exhausted that I simply went back to bed, leaving the shattered tree on the floor until the following day.

Two weeks later, while stuck in traffic on Christmas Day, I literally pounded my head over and over on the steering wheel because I felt so hopeless and out of control, both because of being stuck in traffic and because I couldn’t control my body, my thoughts or my emotions any more. I don’t know if my sister, the only passenger in the car, was more scared for her life or mine.

The final straw for Lupron came about a month later, when, again stuck in traffic, I literally imagined what it would be like to kill the person in front of me. I mean I imagined getting out of my car, getting in to their car, putting my hands around their throat and squeezing the life-force out of them without any remorse…I could even feel in my hands what that would be like! It was one of the most horrible wake-up calls of my life and I had to stop taking the medicine because of the terror of my thoughts and what might happen if I stayed on it.

You may wonder why the hell I kept allowing myself to be a guinea pig to all these medical “treatments” and I often wonder that myself. But the heart of the truth is that even after my surgery and each new medical treatment, I kept feeling worse and worse each month and I just wanted the pain to go away. I just wanted to feel human. Instead I often felt like some grotesque blob that was being controlled by inexplicable bodily pains. I wanted so badly to believe that the next medical thing would cure me, and if it wouldn’t cure me, that at least it would give me some reprieve from the pain and the reassurance that this was not “all in my head."

A few years after the Lupron disaster, (as well as brief attempts to use the Nuva ring, which also didn’t work for me) I moved to Chicago. One of the few blessings to come out of living in Chicago was health insurance and a co-worker who referred me to a primary care doctor who had no idea what the hell was wrong with me. Instead of dismissing my pain, she was compassionate and humane enough to refer me to a new male gynecologist who did take me seriously.

St. Marc (as I will call him for this story) believed in me and in my pain. He also believed in my ability in my late 20’s to know for certain that I never wanted to have children. While he, like every doctor before him, refused to remove my ovaries or uterus, he did prescribe the Mirena IUD. He did this after carefully discussing with me what it was I wanted from my treatment and informing me that while I might like to have my ovaries and/or uterus removed, that likely wasn’t going to solve the problem. The IUD, however, should cause me to no longer have my period, which should quell the pain we believed was caused by the endometriosis (which flared up very month with my periods). Additionally, the Mirena doesn’t contain estrogen, which I cannot tolerate and should last for five years. I wanted that damn IUD more than a child wants to see Santa and a sack load of gifts on Christmas Eve!

In order to get the IUD, St. Marc had to battle his colleagues (I could hear them arguing outside the exam room door) who were adamant that I was too young for this procedure and too young to decide for myself if I did not want to have children. Since the IUD is rarely (at least in that office) given to women who have not had children (in the rare even that it could rupture my uterus and leave me unable to have the kids I don’t want), I had to sign a wavier that I knew what I was doing, knew what the risks were and wanted the IUD anyway.

Finally, on May 17, 2006, at the ripe old age of 29, I had the IUD inserted. That procedure and the following two weeks were far more painful than most of my periods, in part because I was never pregnant so my uterus was rebelling against being stretched out to have this thing inserted into it. There were even times of such agonizing pain that I rolled on the floor in the fetal position waiting for the massive doses of Tylenol to kick in while my partner looked on in helplessness (St. Marc did not prescribe any pain meds since he was falsely convinced that I would not be in that much pain).

However, despite the few weeks of intense pain, that Christmas I received the best gift I’ve had in decades…my last period. This December will mark three years without a period and the longest period of time I have ever been able to use any form of birth control without horrendous side effects. While the IUD and my former gynecologist have been blessings in my life, they were no cure. For a while though, I thought that the worst was behind me.

Then, five months after getting the IUD, (which, in all fairness, sometimes made my lower back feel achy) I fell down a flight of stairs outside our apartment while trying to take the laundry down the rain slicked stairs to the laundry room. I must have blacked out during the fall because when I “came to” I had no idea why I was lying on the cement ground in the rain. And yet, despite my aching everything, I forced myself to get up and start the laundry. Once that was going, I hauled myself up the three flights of stairs and called my mom for advice. Since nothing was broken she told me to ice what hurt and take some pain medicine. I didn’t go to the emergency room until two days later when I got a doctor’s appointment for the persistent pain. My doctor was the one who insisted that I go, despite the fact that the x-rays they took showed nothing abnormal was wrong. From that fall to this day, my lower back has never felt the same, despite plenty of pain killers and a few months of physical therapy.

Sometimes, over the past seemingly endless years, there were periods of respite from the pain, be it my lower back pain, the pain in my right ovary or the pain in my uterus, but always it came back. I don’t really know when the pain returned. In many ways it has always been there in one form or another and eventually the pain spread to other places in my body. However, once I left Chicago, I did not have health insurance, even when I was employed, so again I tried to force myself back into thinking the pain was all in my head.

Within the past year, the pain, in various forms, seems to have returned, usually out of know where…and generally when I am doing nothing more strenuous than standing still. And I cannot recall a time when it seemed to have such sudden onset and intensity. It was really starting to scare the hell out of me.

Even though I am currently unemployed and still do not have health insurance, the pain I am experiencing became so intense and so freaking scary, I finally sought medical help which I would have to pay for out of pocket. My gynecologist, a woman this time, was unable to figure out what was causing me such agony after all my routine medical tests came back “normal”. To her credit, she did not write me off or tell me, yet again, that it was in my head. Instead, she referred me to a Pelvic Pain Specialist, (one of the few in the country) who agreed to see me for hundreds of dollars less than he would normally charge. I took the first available slot and spent the next two months trying to convince myself to cancel this still very expensive appointment, because, you know, it was “all in my head.” But the pain throughout my body was telling that idea to fuck off.

Inexplicable Pain, Part 1

2009-11-13T21:09:00.006-05:00

It has been almost a month since I’ve written and it hasn’t been because I don’t have anything to say, but because I am afraid to write what I have to say. Writing things makes things real. At least for me it does, and I have spent the better part of my life trying to believe that the now daily pain I feel is all in my head. And since it was all in my head, I saw no need to blog about it or even get help for it. That is, until the pain got so bad I just needed someone to cut something out of me. I needed someone to permanently remove whatever hideous and hellaciously angry part of me was causing so much pain that merely breathing sometimes exacerbated the problem.

Unfortunately, the doctor I finally went to see will not remove any of my angry organs. That bastard!

Over the course of the past fifteen years I have seen more doctors than I care count, to try and get answers about the stabbing pain on my right side. I remember exactly the day I first felt this pain. The summer before my junior year in high school I was 17 at cross country camp in New York with two of my friends. We were stretching before our run when out of nowhere came this searing pain in my right side. I doubled over in agony and was sent to the nurse who told me that I may have pulled something or maybe it was my appendix, we’d wait and see. While I was at camp the pain eventually subsided and was more or less forgotten about until the next month and the next month and the many, many months after that when it kept returning, always on my right side.

When the pain would return and when it would intensify, so too would the pain of my periods. Now, I don’t ever recall having “easy” periods since I started menstruating at 13, but they certainly became more painful with age, especially in college. It got to the point where I had such intense cramps I would curl up in a ball in bed all day, my tears as useless as the over-the-counter pain meds I tried furtively to numb myself with. Sometimes even without a period, I would get debilitating pain, again, always on my right side, which would come out of nowhere. I remember running through the woods one day in my early 20’s when a pain on my right side so fierce knocked me to the ground without any warning. All I could go was double over on the ground and wait for it to pass.

For over a decade since then, I’ve seen doctor after doctor, most of whom told me it was “in my head” or “the burden of being a woman” or “that’s just what happens when we menstruate” (which ALWAYS was said by a male doctor and left me wondering when the hell the last time he menstruated was!!). The few family members and friends I told about the pain over the years didn’t know what to do or they too told me it was all in my head, part of being a woman, nothing to worry my pretty little head about. Sometimes I believed them. Most times I didn’t but what the hell was I going to do? No one seemed to take me very seriously, especially since the pain would come and go, lessen and worsen, sometimes seem to disappear altogether for months or two at a time, only to return with a vengeance later on.

The doctor I was seeing at the time believed that my periods were the source of my “frustration” and prescribed birth control pills to get everything under control. My first negative experience with birth control pills occurred within the first few months of taking them. I was a freshman in college at the time and I was irregularly sexually active. A mere few months on the pill led to a weird tingling sensation on the left side of my face which appeared out of nowhere during a math exam. The tingling sensation spread down the left side of my face to my upper left arm until that went numb. From there the sensation slowly traveled down my lower left arm and eventually throughout the entire left side of my body to the point where I had trouble using my left hand, speaking, feeling my left foot or even thinking clearly. Finally, scared out of my mind, I had my sorta boyfriend take me to the emergency room. The ancient male doctor who finally saw me, without doing any medical exams, lectured me about how I was having symptoms of a stroke and how stupid could I be to keep taking these pills when they could, literally, kill me. I was too stunned and afraid to tell him why I was really taking these pills, although I did immediately stop taking them.

After that incident, other “more knowledgable” doctors and gynecologists prescribed different types of the pill which weren’t supposed to have the same side effects, and while it is true that I didn’t stay on them long enough to experience stroke-like side effects, I had a variety of other problems which caused me to go off them.

For awhile I relied on condoms, but I had problems with them too. It seemed like most (but not all) of the time when my partner used a condom I would get anything from a mild irritation in my vulva to a full out burning, acidic forest fire inside my vagina, the pain of which could last for a day or two. I discussed this once with my mom (yes, with my mom) and she suggested waiting until I was more aroused to have penetration and if that didn’t work, switching brands of condoms (I’d already tried quite a few and generally they all caused some negative reaction) and if that didn’t work, she suggested trying lube. No one ever suggested that I see a doctor about this (although given my past experiences, I doubt that it would have helped much anyway!). And anyway, condoms didn’t always cause such burning irritation, so when things were fine for awhile, I’d go back to telling myself what I was feeling was all in my head.

Once, while on charity care in New Jersey, (because even though I was working two jobs I didn’t make enough money to afford my own health care and neither job provided part time people with insurance) I sort of got a smattering of answers about my pain which refused to go away. The charity care doctor I saw initially told me that my pain “was part of being a woman” and saw no reason to pursue medical treatment. However when the nursing assistant tried to perform a routine gyn exam, I almost jumped off the table from the pain of her trying to insert the just the tip of her finger into my vagina. I fought back tears as she left the room, presumably to let the doctor know that something had to be done.

Reluctantly the doctor ordered an ultrasound to see what the hell might be wrong with me. He told me it might be an ovarian cyst or endometriosis, though he still seemed to think the tests were a waste of time and taxpayers’ money. Despite feeling that way, he did strongly suggest that if I have endometriosis, I really should consider getting pregnant because that would stop my periods (and presumably my problems) for at least 9 months…longer if I breast feed or had more kids. My highest paying job at the time was $6.50 an hour, never mind the fact that I never, ever want to have kids, and this was what the doctor thought was the best course of action for me?

The ultrasound revealed that I had a cyst on my right ovary (at least that wasn’t in my head!) and Doctor Charity Care begrudgingly consented to giving me a laparoscopy to remove the cyst.

Finally, on September 12, 2001, I had the first surgery of my life. The procedure revealed that the cyst on my right ovary had ruptured prior to surgery so that should not have been the cause of my current pain. It was also discovered that I had endometriosis; which I had suspected and attempted to discuss with the doctor when I first met him and he immediately dismissed. He told me they removed all the endometriosis they could see but since they weren’t expecting to find any in the first place, there was no way to tell, without further surgeries, if anything remained. At any rate, he “assured” me it would likely come back in a few years anyway, as long as I kept getting a period. Again he recommended the “cure” of pregnancy (which I later learned can often make endometriosis even worse!) as a means of “keeping the endometriosis at bay” since there is no cure for it.

Since I refused to get pregnant, this began years of failed treatments, increased pain, several new doctors and an increasing sense on my part that maybe this was really all in my head.

Over the years, when I was somewhat believed, doctors prescribed a plethora of birth control methods aimed at controlling my periods. I was on several types of birth control pills (both regular and progesterone only), even after the disaster I experienced in college because each new gyn “assured” me that this pill would not cause the same, or even similar side-effects. None of the pills worked for me since I appear to be unable to tolerate extra doses of estrogen.

From there I was prescribed “the patch”, which I thought was a miracle, since I had been able to use it longer than any form of birth control pills. That is, until the day I leaned over to pick something up off the floor of the nursing home where I was working and I felt an intense tightness in my chest followed by sharp shooting pains in my chest and down my left arm. Although I had tried to ignore the tightness in my chest that I was increasingly feeling on my drive into work that morning, even I wasn’t foolish enough to ignore these symptoms. My doctor diagnosed these symptoms as warning signs of a heart attack and ordered me to stop using the patch. I was twenty five at the time.

I Loathe Christopher Columbus (And Some Other Random People I've Never Met)

2009-10-16T12:54:00.006-04:00

This past Monday apparently was Columbus Day. Who knew? My mom did but that is only because she has a government job and is one of the few people who had this day off. Every year she looks forward to this holiday and every year I give her a lecture about how dumb it is and why we shouldn’t celebrate it. She stopped listening to me a long time ago.

When I was a kid I used to get sort of excited about Columbus Day, if it meant we didn’t have school. When I became an adult who had to start buying her own stuff, I liked the day a little bit because it meant sales, sales, sales at many of my favorite stores. The thing is, ever since I can remember learning about Columbus, I’ve hated, I mean HATED, even loathed the man and I have no idea why. I can’t tell you any sort of rationale reason why I would despise someone I’ve never met, but if I tried to have a conversation about this person, the hatred in my voice would probably cause you to wonder what the hell was wrong with me.

Even though I can’t explain why I loathe this man, I can tell you that I was thrilled, when, as a kid my mom told me a story about Colombus’s death. Even though I was no older than 10, I distinctly remember her telling me that Columbus was likely buried alive (although I can’t find anything to prove this statement). I think he was in a coma and the people who thought he was dead were merely unable to detect a very weak heartbeat, so the bastard got tossed in a tomb. My mom told me that when they (whoever they are) exhumed his body (I don’t know why this was done) there were claw marks inside the coffin. I guess he woke up and realized he was in a very bad place and tried desperately to get out.

I remember being filled with horror at the thought of being buried alive and also being filled with a sense of glee, yes, I mean joy, happiness, even elation, that Columbus was supposedly buried alive. Now, I am a relatively stable minded person who can be malicious but isn’t usually sadistic and I cannot rationally explain why the thought of some ancient moron who got credit for “discovering America” when he really thought he found India (and we celebrate this because why, exactly?) thrills me.

The compassionate side of me imagines that it must have sucked to wake up from a coma or whatever he was in, and realize that it was very dark and cold where he was. I imagine what it must have been like to try to figure out where he was and why couldn’t he move and then trying desperately to claw his way out of whatever he was in. It’s sick. I know. I really shouldn’t find satisfaction in this, even if I do despise the man.

My Aunt, who believes very deeply in past lives told me that if I feel this strongly about Christopher Columbus maybe it is because we had some sort of connection in a past life. I don’t really like to think about that sort of stuff, but if it is true, then I imagine whatever connection we had, it wasn’t a very good one!

I also have great disdain for other people I’ve never met and likely never will meet, despite the fact that they have done nothing to me. Among these people are Bill Clinton and Rachael Ray.

I know it is almost sacrilegious to say you hate Bill Clinton, but I haven’t really toned down my feelings towards the man over the years. I still loathe the no-good, lying, sleepy-eyed-basset hound and I never understood why anyone would find him attractive, never mind want to suck his dick! As far as that goes, I’d almost rather never have sex again than even think about fellating that pompous windbag! Having said that, I don’t really get my intense disdain for him either. I mean, I did vote for him at least once (I’ve chosen to “forget” if I voted for him the second time or not) and he hasn’t done much worse than so many arrogant little pricks in positions of power have, but still, when I passed by his book, “My Pathetic Life” or whatever it is called, at the library today, I wanted to heave my guts out all over his lecherous face. I have that reaction whenever I see his face, which fortunately isn’t very often!

My loathing of Rachel Ray is about the only one I can somewhat rationally explain. It began when I learned that my lover thought she was hot. For me, it was immediate. She was competition. She was a threat to our sanctuary, our relationship. Until I managed to shame my lover into no longer openly admitted that Rachael Ray is hot and has great tits, I was tormented with nightmares of her. Of course it didn’t help that my lover once admitted that she was on the” Celebrity Top Five People To Fuck If The Opportunity Ever Presented Itself” list.

“Ah ha!” You say, “So there’s the problem. You feel threatened.” Well, yes, in a way I do but it is not because my beloved wants to bang someone else, but because that someone else is Rachael-Fucking-I-Can-Make-Dog-Shit-Taste-Good- And-Smile-While-Children-Die-Of-Malnutrition-Ray! I don’t feel intimidated by Kathy Ireland, who has held the number one “Celebrity Fuck” spot since my lover was in high school. At least Kathy is hot, hot, hot, has red hair and is, or at least portrays herself as a highly intelligent, business savvy, I-Can-Conquer-The-World-In-My-Sleep kind of woman.

I feel threatened by Rachel-fucking-Ray because she is so much that I am not and never freaking will be! She is petite and perky, rich and friendly, can out cook me any day and is so goddamn optimistic I just want to grate her expensive plastic surgery smile off her face while simultaneously deep frying her airhead laugh and roasting her eye balls over an open fire (which was created with all of Bill Clinton’s books!). Besides, what the hell does Rachael Ray offer the world besides stupidly named dog food, more useless cookbooks and monthly magazine covers where her tits are the main feature?

My loathing of her is perfectly rational and it makes far more sense than my visceral loathing of Columbus. In my defense, at least I don’t want to bury her alive or vomit on the cover of her books!

Really, there might be something wrong with me for how strongly impassioned I can become about these people I will never meet, but before you write me off as a callous, threatened lover, a snarky bitch (well, I might like that one) or just plain insane, maybe you could take an afternoon or two to think of people you loath that you’ve never met. Brittney Spears…Paris Hilton…George Bush…Dick Cheney…Mother Theresa…? I’ll bet you have at least one or two people you loath that you’ve never met…so come on...‘fess up!

Mr. Can't Get It Up, Part One

2009-10-05T22:34:00.004-04:00

(The following is another excerpt from a book I am working on, currently entitled, "Dabbling with Dating Disasters" which I might some day get up the courage to submit for publication. The first excerpt, if you haven't been reading along, is entitled, My First Childhood Love.)

Mr. Can’t Get It Up remains one of my biggest regrets, and not, by the way, because of his unfortunate nickname.

I met Mr. Up when I was working at Kohl’s Department store in a town not too far from where I grew up. I had just moved back, temporarily, into my mom’s house and I was trying to get a job, a real job, doing something using my degree that I spend so much money for, as my mom liked to frequently remind me.

Since I wanted to use my degree and I was tired of waitressing, I naturally decided I would apply for a job at Kohl’s (or just about anywhere that would allow me to keep my clothes on and not have to serve food to people). Although I really couldn’t justify how a job there was using my degree, it was a paycheck while I was waiting to land the job of my dreams helping those less fortunate than me. (Really, I’m not that altruistic, but I really did want to find a job where I needed to have a bachelor’s degree, since it was long past time to start paying the loans back!) I was hired to convince people to sign up for credit cards and to run credit application checks on those people who were silly enough to actually sign up for them. It wasn’t a bad job. Interminably boring towards the end but I worked with some cool people and our supervisor was laid back.

I don’t recall meeting Mr. Can’t Get it Up at the new employee orientation meeting, where we were herded like sheep into a tiny room to learn about the benefits we would never be getting and watching movies about the proper way to lift boxes we would never move. If I had seen him there, that probably would have made the event far more memorable.

Mr. Up was unlike any guy I had ever been attracted to in so many ways. First of all, he was much shorter than me and while I’ve never been a stickler for a guy’s height, I still cringe when I think about my sisters dancing around with the family dog on it's hind legs, mocking the fact that my prom date was almost a foot shorter than me…before I put on shoes! In addition to being shorter than me, Mr. Up had (probably still has) the brightest red hair I’ve ever seen on someone and an explosion of freckles everywhere, or at least everywhere that I could see, and believe me, I wanted to see much, much more! In short, he looked like a little leprechaun and reminded me, with great longing, of the time I spent living in Ireland, and by default I guess, of a man I loved very deeply when I lived on the Emerald Isle and hadn’t heard from in ages. He (Mr. Up) even had an authentic Irish name to boot! I was smitten. Not instantly, of course, because I had been working really hard to ensure that kind of crap never happened again, but I was smitten nevertheless.

Mr. Up and I did not spend a lot of time working together at first. It was the store’s policy (or someone’s policy) that there had to be two greeters at each entrance trying to get people to apply for a credit card while the rest of the group stayed in the back and processed the applications. In the beginning, we were too busy smiling, pivoting, soliciting and processing credit card offers to have much of a chance to talk to one another. Sometimes though, especially as the weeks wore on and it became obvious who was better at what job, Mr. Up and I would get to sit next to each other and flirt shamelessly as we worked diligently to approve all the credit applications. It was somewhere amidst the piles of paperwork that I became aware of my attraction to him.

I don’t know what the clues were, maybe it was my embarrassing inability to put together coherent sentences when talking to him. Maybe it was my aching clitoris or the panties which constantly felt like they needed to be changed when he was around. Maybe it was the fantasies I had about being back in Ireland that made me attracted to him. I don’t know and I don’t really care. I just knew that I wanted to fuck him.

That was it really.

In the time we spent getting to know each other, both at work and hanging out with co-workers outside of work, I had gleaned enough information about him to know that dating him was a terrible idea. It would have been catapulting myself down the same dangerous road of all those other disastrous relationships…the ones that I tried to heal, to patch back up, to love ‘em ‘til they’re perfect, all the while forgetting about my own needs. Although I was lusting heartily for him (a lust which was made far stronger by the knowledge that I should not, could not, date him) I was also terrified that I would not be able to simply fuck him and walk away, even though I had more or less done this routine before. Mr. Up, I still believe, has a really big heart and he seemed like he was looking for more of a relationship than I was.

Nevertheless, the day came when I finally told him how I felt about him and it went something like this:

Me: “I think you’re kinda hot.”

Him: “Uh, thanks.”

Me: “I’d like to have sex with you.”

Him: “Uh, what?”

Me: “I would like to have sex with you and that’s it. I like you but I don’t want a relationship. I just want to fuck you and see what it is like.”

Him: (Long, very long period of silence. I begin to regret what I have just said) “Uh, isn’t that what the guy is supposed to say?”

Me: (Very long period of silence. Wondering why I thought I should share this with him.) “Well, that’s how I feel.”

Him: “Huh.”

End of conversation.

That may or may not be verbatim, but it sure is how the conversation felt! I was sitting there, all lusty in my loins and telling him that I wanted to have sex with him, which, by this point, I thought was obvious. No matter what I did though, I was feeling like I was about to get shot down. It was humiliating!

Turns out it really bothered him that all I wanted was sex, not a meaningful relationship.

Christ!

I thought I was supposed to be the one who, stereotypically, gets upset that someone just wants to fuck me. And here he is all questioning himself and me and my motives! It would have been a better idea to go home and masturbate for all the work this was becoming!

Mr. Can't Get It Up, Part Two

2009-10-05T22:26:00.005-04:00

Sometime after I stopped working at Kohl’s and landed the job of my dreams (wow, did I ever actually feel that way about that hellacious place?) Mr. Up called and asked me if I wanted to go out for some drinks or something. I, sensing this was my chance to get some, or at least get the hell out of my mom’s house, said, “Hell yes!”…maybe a little too enthusiastically. After meeting up in the local Wendy’s parking lot, we ended up going to a country-western bar where I once worked for two and a half days (that is a story for another time).

That night was one of the most painfully awkward dates of my life.

Somehow, even though we had tons to talk about before my “I want to fuck you” disclosure, and even though we still managed to have a few good phone calls since I left Kohl’s, on this occasion, we had nothing to talk about. Nothing. Silence was the theme of the evening. It even overtook the awful, blaring country music and the piercing shattering of beer bottles as the surly waitresses prepared to serve another drunken customer.

We barely even touched each other as we sat side by side, nursing our respective beers and looking as pathetic as the rest of the hopeless crowd there. I think every time my bare leg brushed against his, he about jumped off the bar stool. At first I thought it was funny, that maybe he was nervous or something, but it quickly got on my nerves. I mean, I’m an attractive person, do you have to jump like I have leprosy every time I touch you? Jesus! I’ll find someone else in this dump to fuck!

After a lifetime, or several agonizing hours, or at least two beers and painfully limited conversation, we left the bar. As he drove me back to Wendy’s where I left my car, I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness that I had ever bothered to tell him how I felt in the first place. It felt like rejection and looked like rejection and I just couldn’t figure out what I did wrong. I mean, I was taught at a very early age that all guys wanted was sex, so why the fuck wasn’t this guy interested in me? Was he really serious about wanting a freaking relationship?

Ok. If it had to be that way, it had been such a long time since I got laid, at this point I would have gone back in time and undone my honest conversation and pretend I wanted to date him, if, and only if, after a short period of time it meant I could finally get to see the rest of those freckles and satisfy my curiosity about the real color of his pubic hair! Christ! Why did I have to fuck things up so badly by being honest?

He said nary a word to me in the short drive back, or none that I recall anyway. However, it turned out that the ambiance of an empty Wendy’s parking lot, or the effects of a few beers, finally managed to loosen his lips. I believe he finally made the first move and leaned in and kissed me around the same time that I finally figured out that he was probably waiting for me to make the first move all night; after all, I was the one looking to jump his bones whereas he apparently didn’t know what he wanted to do with me!

The kiss was pretty good. A little slobbery, tasting like beer and nervous saliva and very awkward, but still, a good kiss. It really had been a very, very long time for me! He pulled away almost as quickly as a race car driver and again we sat there in awkward silence. I guess this was the part where I was supposed to invite myself back to his place, but I didn’t. I was a lot more talk than action at this point. In my fantasies, everything went so much more smoothly than this and I had no idea what to do with this reality!

Finally, in a small, but trying to sound gruff and non-committal, voice, he asked me if I wanted to go back to his place and make good on my offer to, you know, um, have sex. I, trying to sound suave, said sure.

Perhaps it was a delayed response to the alcohol, or endorphins surging through my body, or the sight of a cowboy hat on his wall, whatever it was, once we finally got to his place, I was just about ready to go. I found a reduced inhibition and began making out with him furiously. Or trying to anyway. He still seemed to have reservations or concerns or something other than a raging desire to throw me on the bed and fuck like crazy. I, in my clear head, thought it would be a good idea to push him up against the wall, press my eager breasts upon him and make out even more passionately while simultaneously trying to untuck his shirt. That didn’t work so well either.

So, since he wasn’t being very co-operative, I thought I’d try and live out a fantasy of mine. I pried myself off him, took his cowboy hat off the wall, placed it upon his head and told him how hot I thought he looked. Certainly this would help things move along…right?

Um, not so much.

He just stood there looking a little confused. However, my sluttish eyes did notice a bulge, a small bulge, but a bulge nevertheless, in his pants. So again I took matters into my own hands and tried to guide him to the bed while unbuckling his pants. Perhaps somewhere along the way I should have stopped to ask him what he wanted, but I thought I already knew. I mean, we were here, weren’t we? For the purpose of having sex, right?

I flung myself on his bed and tried to pull him on top of me as he wrangled his jeans off. It was all very hot in my eyes (except for the part where he was not as enthusiastic as I was and the part where he certainly was not riding me like the hot cowboy I was pretending he was!). I closed my eyes and waited for things to move along, to get better. They never did. Turns out my little leprechaun (who really was rather endowed) couldn’t get an erection.

Now, this was the first time this had ever happened and I sure as shit didn’t know what to do. I thought that they were always supposed to rise in my presence! And while this one was making an attempt, it wasn’t getting very far, or very hard.

I did what seemed reasonable in the moment. I pulled him down next to me and held him in my arms and said it was cool, we could take our time, maybe even have some foreplay. I thought maybe that would help things. I tried to be understanding. I tried to be supportive. I tried not to be disappointed and I tried to figure out what the hell was going on. That is when he decided to enlighten me a little bit.

Mr. Up got really upset about not getting an erection, which I have since learned is a normal reaction, and told me that he was on some medicines, some anti-depressants and that must be the problem. It wasn’t me. It was the pills and the beer. The drinking and the expectation that he just had to perform for me. That and the fact that this was all moving so quickly, there was no time to get used to things, to get used to screwing around without the expectation of having sex. I think he almost started crying.

I was stunned.

It never occurred to me that he might have wanted to take things slower or that he would feel like he had to perform for me since all I wanted was is cock, not him as a person. I tried to console him, to tell him that I knew what it was like to be on anti-depressants and how that affected your sex life. I tried to tell him that we could take a break, or try again later or get together some other time, or do it his way and try messing around slowly, over many dates. In the end though, he was inconsolable and gave me the boot.

Since we took separate cars to his place, it was a short awkward walk to my car and a disappointing good-bye.

I never heard from him again despite my sincere voicemail message that I’d really like to see him again and we could even keep our clothes on this time. I only saw him once more and that was just outside the new Kohl’s he presumably worked at which was much closer to where I was currently living. The last time I last saw him I had just finished telling my agonizing story to my friend, who tried to help me figure out how to undo what I had done. We decided shopping would be a great distraction, and it was, until I saw him ambling through mall with his friend. He walked right by me like I never had my hand on his junk a few nights ago. Like I never existed. I knew I would never get a chance to see if my little leprechaun could get it up.

I wanted to melt into the floor and cry.

2009-10-04T23:28:00.001-04:00

My Nephew's Visit

2009-09-28T16:12:00.002-04:00

This weekend my second youngest nephew and his parents came for a visit. Although I knew we would be watching him in while his parents went to a Yankees game, having already baby-proofed my uterus, I never thought about the need to baby-proof our house.

For nap time, we, the trusting, childfree couple that we are, thought, in our infinite wisdom, it would be just fine to put the little one down, alone, in our room while we took a nap in the adjacent office. Now, in all honesty, my motives for putting my nephew to sleep in one room while we took a nap in another room had less to do with him and more to do with my fleeting desire to “get some” while the kid was asleep and his parents were away. However, as soon as my weary beloved and I sank onto the futon, we may as well have had kids of our own for how quickly the thoughts of sex fled our minds as the glory of sleep took over…in the middle of a conversation nonetheless! While we napped we were blissfully oblivious to the quite curiosities of a “sleeping” three-year-old.

Unbeknownst to me, as we slumbered peacefully, my perfect little nephew was surreptitiously teaching one of our cats what we keep in each of our dresser drawers; this despite both himself and the cat knowing that only people are allowed in this room. He was working his way through the bottom drawer, my lingerie drawer, when I stumbled into the room, foolishly thinking he was still asleep. As my befuddled brain tried to process the scene in front of me, my first, sleepy thought was, “How did the cat get in the bedroom and what is my nephew holding in his hand?” This was immediately followed by, “Oh crap, how do I explain to him what is in his hands? Do I lie? Do I tell him it is just lotion? What will my sister do when she finds out? Do I even need to tell her?”

With his wide blue eyes he turned to me and said, “Aunt Elizabeth, what’s this? Can I put it on?” Instantly grateful that he wasn’t talking about my lingerie, I quickly decided to tell him a version of the truth and explained that he was holding a bottle of lotion in his hands and that he doesn’t need that at his age. After all, what three-year-old needs arousal gel anyway? Somewhat satisfied with that answer, he went back to rummaging through the bag of assorted lubes we keep on hand and again asked if he can put some of this mysterious stuff on. I tried to shake the sleep out of my brain and diverted his attention to the bottle of hand lotion on my nightstand. “Here.” I said, “Put this lotion on. It smells really good and it is good for your hands.” Somehow I failed to notice he had already used that bottle. “I know.” He said. “I already tried it.” That was when the last vestiges of sleepiness left my brain and I thought, “Oh, shit, what else did he find in this room?”

I started to open my nightstand drawer, when, without a moment’s hesitation, he told me that he already looked in that drawer and, oh, by the way, “There’s a really big mess on the other side of the room.” I closed the drawer, looked at him, look at the cat, look at the lube that was still in his hand and mentally assessed what is on the other side of the room before slowly asking him what he meant and how the mess got there.

With all the innocence in the world he turned his face to me. “I don’t know.” He said again. “But there is a big mess.” As I got up and walked with him to the other side of the bed, I saw that my darling nephew had gutted my partner’s nightstand and dumped the contents on the floor. In doing so, he discovered our stash of condoms, my beloved’s journal, a Warren Buffet book and the rest of our adult toys. As if that weren’t enough, everything was lying in a heap with some sort of beige colored thing shrouding the pile. It took me a moment to realize not only had he discovered things he was too young to play with, but that he had also unleashed the fury of the Dark Chocolate Raspberry Body Powder. This would explain the sickly sweet scent of fake chocolate permeating the room.

I told myself that I should be angry about this, but truth be told, I never liked the taste of the body powder anyway, and shaking the nearly empty bottle, I realized we would not be using this stuff again. I was also beginning to realize how foolish we were to leave him alone in a room without any kid toys, telling ourselves that he would be just fine. I now understood that the subtle noises I heard in my sleep were not the other cats trying to get out of the bathroom where we had thought to confine them before our naps. No, likely those noises which I instantly dismissed, were the sounds of my nephew’s eager explorations and his inability to get out of the bedroom since I forgot to leave the door ajar and he couldn’t manage the doorknob by himself.

As I sat on the bed and contemplated how to address the situation at hand, I noticed my nephew was preoccupied with something else he discovered and that the cat was about to meander through the chocolate covered pile. I shooed the cat out of the room and asked my nephew if there was anything else he played with in the bedroom. Distractedly he told me no. But when I notice the top of my perfume bottle lying on the floor, I asked him again. Without looking up, he told me that he sprayed that in his eyes and unfazed, went back to playing with whatever was in his hands. Hoping I heard him wrong, since his sense of vision seemed to be fine, I asked him to repeat what he just said. When he did he also offered up that he put on my lipstick (which fortunately was just chapstick) and that it didn’t feel too good to put the perfume in his eyes.

Eventually I gathered my wits about me and remembered that childfree or not, I was supposed to be the adult here. I decided I wasn’t angry at him and instead I felt far more annoyed with myself, but that he needed to take some level of responsibility here. So I told him that he needed to stop playing with whatever is in his hand and clean up the mess he made.

That was when I learned that a child will make a far bigger mess when trying to clean up a pile of powder than if I had just cleaned it myself. In frustration I told him that he had to vacuum the mess up. No problem and no punishment. The kid loves to vacuum! Who knew? He acted like this was his reward for redecorating our room!

When everything was cleaned up and the room smelled a little less like a NutraSweet candy shop, I realized something else was amiss. Not only did my nephew smell like chocolate, chapstick and my perfume, but apparently I forgot to ask him if he needed to go to the bathroom before he took a nap and since I had inadvertently trapped him in our bedroom, he relieved himself in his pants. As we trudged off to the bathroom I reminded myself for the zillionth time all the ways in which I am not equipped to handle this parenting stuff and I began counting down the hours until I could hand Curious George over to his more qualified handlers, I mean, parents.

Traveler's Guilt

2009-09-25T01:45:00.002-04:00

I’ve just returned from a week in Jamaica and I am trying to keep my sense of guilt from ruining otherwise fond memories of this trip. I’d like to say my guilt started when I arrived in Jamaica, but that would be a lie. My guilt probably started as a young Catholic child and was exacerbated by being an unemployed adult who was preparing to take a vacation during a global recession. The vacation was a graduation present, so I tried to use that to alleviate some of what I was feeling, but it didn’t work very well. Months before the trip I was able to beat myself up with all the ways it was foolish to take this trip, spend this money, take this time off from looking for a job…you name it, I berated myself for it.

When we arrived in Jamaica, there were no shortage of opportunities for me to feel guilty…from listening to the travel advice and haughtily ignoring the people seeking to take us to our resort, to feeling cranky over three hours of sleep and just wanting to go to bed, to seeing firsthand the living conditions of so many people. All along the coast, from Montego Bay where we arrived, to the entrance of our resort, we were pummeled with the reality that people are living in dilapidated “homes” made of metal sheeting, roofless cement walls, even old ocean freight shipping containers while I was en route to my posh, all-inclusive resort, the likes of which I could never have afforded in the United States. The travel agent and almost everything I read beforehand told me that there is great poverty in Jamaica, but it also attempted to reassure me that the people there are “happy for what they have.” I had and still have a difficult time comprehending how people would be happy to live in glorified tin cans while their views of the pristine turquoise ocean are obliterated by endless acres of hundreds-of-dollar- a-night mega resorts.

During our first few days at our resort, I was nearly consumed with guilt over how much we spent on this trip, over how much food and alcohol we were readily able to consume and over how little the people who work here must make so that we were able to afford this vacation. I marveled at the few obnoxious travelers around me…the ones who are complaining that the bar was out of their top shelf liquor (even though they’ve been drinking since dawn and wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between top shelf and donkey piss. I stared disbelievingly at the people who ranted and raved about the lack of hot water when they chose to shower at the same time everyone else in the resort showered. These people appeared to me to be worse than oblivious to the poverty that surrounds them. They appeared to me to feel a sense of entitlement to the good life…a sense that I am almost certain they ridicule in the richer people back home.

One otherwise romantic starry, gorgeous night while lounging, fully satiated with food and drink, I decided to mention my guilt and concerns to my lover. I mean, why whisper sweet nothings in such an amorous setting when you can divulge all your feelings of inadequacy instead? I moaned and moped and mumbled on about my feelings of guilt and frustration and tried to wax philosophical about why I don’t often feel this way back at home. My lover, ever sensitive to my needs, gently reminded me that back at home we are almost always able to insulate ourselves from many of these realities by avoiding certain parts of certain cities, or by filling our lives with people who make so much more money than we do that we are the ones who look poor by comparison. Instead of making me feel better about my tumbling emotions, I felt so much worse, both for feeling the way I did and for ruining what could have otherwise been a passionate evening.

The following day, I saw a side of me that I try so hard to pretend isn’t there. My racist side. This awful side of me revealed itself when we went shopping in Ocho Rios and I was at first surprised, then frustrated and finally angry to see that all the shops we went in were apparently run by Indian men. I never knew that I had such a strong bias against Indian men, after all, the very few I have interacted with in my life have been at least cordial, even very friendly with me. However, on this particular trip, I wanted to give my money to a Jamaican store owner, which if I were being completely honest, I assumed would be someone who was black. I never considered the fact that Jamaica was once colonized by the English, as was India, and regardless, it was still possible that the men I assumed were Indian were just as much a Jamaican citizen as the stereotypical images I had of a “true” Jamaican.

The more determined I became to “give my money to a Jamaican” the more I realized how ridiculous I sounded, how racist I was being, and the more uncomfortable I became with my thoughts and the entire experience. Even now, back at home, I remain troubled by how much more “at ease” I felt when dealing with a “Jamaican” person versus an “Indian” person and I am ashamed and embarrassed to admit I had these reactions. Even in the straw markets when the “Jamaican” men kept trying to reassure me that no one was going to kidnap us here, I still felt, slightly, more at ease than I did when trying to barter with an “Indian” man…even though I was bartering with both people. I don’t know if I can’t or won’t fully explain to myself why I had these reactions and I would be mortified if my former classmate, an Indian man I have great respect for, found out I felt this way. I suppose it doesn’t do much good to lie and pretend I didn’t feel this way though. Even if other people never found out, I would still know how I felt, how I reacted. What I don’t know now is how to deal with all these emotions.

One of my final moments of guilt assailed me when we were passing time in the duty-free shops while waiting for our plane to arrive. I was looking at a huge wall of rubber flip-flops when a very young looking and very pregnant “Jamaican” woman approached me and told me that the entire wall of flip flops was on sale for $10. She just murmured one of my most favorite words and I stood entranced by a wall of colorful objects I did not need and rarely find comfortable. As I stood in silence, she told me that although the price is “a little dear”, they are the world’s most comfortable flip flops and the patterns on them will not fade. I was embarrassed by the fact that I was just thinking about how cheap they were, especially when the same brand was $30 at our resort. At $20 savings, I was contemplating if I should buy a pair even though I knew I didn’t need them and would just pack them away with the summer clothes once I returned.
As I continued to stand there in silence, I think it was embarrassment at thinking these shoes were so cheap and my feeling helpless to do anything…for the young woman next to me…for the poverty around me…for my sense of relief to be shopping in an airport instead of the chaotic straw markets…for my guilt at being able to have so many pairs of shoes…whatever it was, I picked out a pair of flip flops and convinced my beloved to buy a pair as well. When we left the store, I felt no less guilty for giving our money to a “Jamaican” and no great reward in my purchase.

I tried on my new flip flops as we continued to wait for our plane and they were so uncomfortable I regretted my impulsive purchase and I took them off as soon as we were seated. I haven’t worn them since. I also haven’t done a damn thing to alleviate my guilt, to reduce anyone’s poverty or eradicate my racist thoughts.

Other than all that, I had a fabulous time in Jamaica.

My First Childhood Love

2009-08-14T17:44:00.005-04:00

(The following excerpt is from a book I am working on, currently entitled, "Dabbling with Dating Disasters" which I might some day get up the courage to submit for publication. Right now, this is the only non-snarky story I've written for that book.)

One of my earliest romantic memories is of my next-door neighbor, Jimmy. I was madly in love with him at the ripe old age of 5 or 6. I knew as certainly as I loved Smurfette, that I was going to marry Jimmy someday. I mean, I was five. I already had a lifetime of being asked if I had a boyfriend and who I was going to marry when I got older. All the adults in my world were married at one point, (my parents, regretfully, still were at the time, as, equally regretfully, were Jimmy’s) and naturally, I was going to follow the same miserable path everyone around me did. How dare I want more from life than that?

With all the innocence of my young heart, I loved Jimmy. I’m sure if you talked to my mom about him and me, her stories would vary wildly from mine, but that’s the thing about a memoir, I’m the only one whose story you get to hear. And my mom? She doesn’t get a chance to speak!

Anyways, I was wildly in love with Jimmy in a childish, but no less sincere way that only kids and truly genuine people seem capable of. I knew I was happy with him and happy being at his house where his parents didn’t fight in the same way mine did. I knew that I loved being able to play with his G.I. Joes and not being constantly told that I was a girl and should have girl toys to play with. I think he was even radical enough to play with my Barbies occasionally (although what is more likely is that he wasn’t radical at all but he was away from the scrutinizing eyes of his dad and was able to see for himself what all the fuss over Barbie was about).

We rode our Big Wheels together. We sat on the porch and held hands, caught fireflys, swapped secrets and knew, just knew, that we would always be together like this. He even told his dad he was going to marry me one day and gave me a red lifesaver to prove it. That was the happiest day of my little life.

Ah, childhood.

Naturally, nothing that pure lasts for long. His parents finally got a divorce, as they should have, and snatched Jimmy out of my life, as they should not have, for nearly ever. He moved with his mom to some miserable southern state. I think it was Georgia. Sure, he came back to visit his dad in the summers and his dad brought him to see his grandparents who still lived across the street from us, but it was never the same for me.

By then, my parents were getting a much needed divorce which wrecked havoc on all aspects of my life, even if it was for the best. I thought my parent’s divorce, even though I secretly prayed for it every night, was my fault. I spent those years in some of the lowest points in my life and I could never bring myself to see Jimmy without being forced to do so.

As a kid, even a kid of 8 or 10 or 12, I still believed, on some level, that the world revolved around me. So naturally the news of my parent’s scandalous divorce must have reached all the way down to Georgia and to Jimmy’s perfect ears. I convinced myself he would think less of me for what I had done, what my family had become.

That was the end for Jimmy and me.

Sure, I made a point to peek out the windows, between the slats of otherwise tightly guarded blinds to see what he was up to, what he looked like when he came to visit. I still swooned over his wavy blond hair and perfect blue eyes. In moments of weakness I even allowed myself to wonder if he still intended to marry me. I was still Catholic then and I prayed fervently that he would notice me, sitting there, locked up like Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty, even if it was my own exile, and come rescue me.

It never happened.

And slowly most of the parts of him faded out of my life, almost forever.

Penguin Poop

2009-08-12T01:33:00.001-04:00

Cleaning penguin poop is not an easy job. For starters, the poop isn’t solid like normal animals' poop is. In fact, it is often a foul, liquidy mess in varying shades of white, grey, black and green, depending, I suppose, on what the penguin ate in the past few days. Since the poop tends to be liquidy, it can’t be scooped up with a modified pooper scooper, nor can it be shoveled, swept, vacuumed, or ignored.

At the aquarium where I used to work, penguin poop had to be removed from the exhibit, DAILY. Completing this delightful task required the skill and expertise of two highly underpaid college graduates (unless it was the summer time, and then the especially talented high school kids were also given this honor) to scrap, scrub, and scour the exhibit clean.

Of all the crappy jobs at the aquarium (and believe me, there were dozens of them) cleaning the penguin exhibit was the worst, or one of the worst punishments, depending upon what day you asked me. There would be days on my drive to work when I would think back over the tasks I had done that week and I would become increasingly frantic as I realized I had not had to clean the penguin exhibit in, oh god, a day or two…so… it must…it must be my turn soon! Waves of dread would wash over me. My stomach would clench, already knowing what was coming next and I would wonder, again, if I could pay this month’s rent if I called out sick.

Generally there were two of us unfortunate souls sent to clean the penguin exhibit each day. Sometimes, on really special days, you would be scheduled to clean the exhibit twice! Those were my most favorite days of all, the days you knew everyone had in fact, abandoned you and your boss did indeed hate you.

On a typical crappy, penguin cleaning day, you and your partner in misery would enter the exhibit through the secret side door and immediately be pummeled in the face by the moist, oppressive sponge-like air and the stomach lurching scent of shit. This was a gentle reminder of all the fun that awaited you.

If you and your partner liked each other, you might not argue over who got to wear the full-length waders and who got to wear just the rubber boots. Not that it really mattered who wore what. The waist high waders never dried from the person who wore them before you and the boots were always filled with the residual skanky water and lingering shit from the last unfortunate soul who sloshed around in them. No matter what you wore to clean the exhibit, on a good day, you were going to reek of stagnant water and disinfectant. On a really bad day, a whole world of filth, decay and fermenting feces eagerly plotted how best to land on your clothes, your skin, your hair.

Also, if you and your cleaning partner liked each other, you might not argue over who got to get down on all fours and scrub, scrub, scrub while the other person wielded the hose and hopefully avoided soaking you in the process. Neither job was necessarily better than the other. The only real advantage to being the one wielding the hose was that you were further removed from flying excrement.

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but runny, nearly liquid penguin poop is going to spray EVERYWHERE when you try to clean it up and I mean EVERYWHERE! Your hair, your eyes, your face, your arms and legs, nothing is safe from this foul smelling beast. Sometimes you would get really luck and spray the slime of decaying fish and squid guts all over you, which always added to the overall charm of your new perfume.

The unfortunate soul who agreed to or was bullied into scrubbing the exhibit had a different sort of fun experience. Generally this loathsome task was done while on your hands and knees with a crappy Dollar Store scrub brush as your only defense mechanism. Naturally, in this vulnerable position, the penguins tended to gang up on the person with their ass in the air and avoid the person who could pressure wash them into oblivion. As you were bending over the exhibit’s fake rocks trying to clean up crap, the penguins, which look cute and fluffy to the visitors on the other side of the looking glass, would peck at your arms, your legs, your hair, your anything they could reach. While it is true that penguins do not have teeth, they have the bite of Satan in them and it hurt like hell and bruised for weeks!

The absolute worst time EVER to clean the penguin exhibit was when the little fuckers were molting. Molting is nature’s way of punishing stupid humans who think it is a good idea to force creatures into captivity for the sole purpose of making money off of them. There are no other possible explanations for molting in captivity. None. The penguins did not need to get new feathers every season, it’s not like they had other penguins to impress and it’s not like the visitors cared how old the damn feathers were. Most people would have thought those evil demons were cute even if their heads caught on fire!

When the penguins were molting, not only did their feathers fall off all over the place, but they adhered to everything within the exhibit. Now, not only were the penguin cleaners going to be covered in shit, they were also going to be covered in old feathers, old shit covered feathers, and decaying fish guts and squid body parts which were also covered in old feathers and shit.

Imagine a pillow fight, with six to a dozen pillows all simultaneously belching their feathers out and landing in piles of shit. Add to that image a cold swimming pool or ocean or whatever the hell that nasty water thing was supposed to be, full of feces and feathers, which also needed to be cleaned out. Stir in the occasional remains of fish guts and a bunch of pissed off and obnoxiously curious penguins as well as a co-worker wielding a glorified pressure washer and you have a recipe for disaster.

There were times, oh how there were times, when it was all I could do not to plant my soggy, foul smelling boot up the nearest penguin’s ass and hopefully send it sailing clear across the exhibit. I imagine it landing with its beak embedded in the side of the fake rocks and I would laugh uproariously. Most days this image was the only thing that kept me sane.

Seriously, it got to the point where I would dream about, even fantasize about kicking, hurting, torturing penguins. In my most vivid and exciting dreams, I would kick a penguin or two or three clear across the friggin’ exhibit, one right after the other, as a crowd of horrified children and their teachers or parents looked on. In these dreams, there was nothing anyone could do to stop me. I was a penguin kicking bad-ass.

I wish I could say those dreams brought me relief, brought a smile to my face, or at the very least, caused me to look for another job, but alas, none of it was so. For far too long and with and increasing bitterness towards all penguins everywhere, I continued to clean their crap, nurse my bruises and plot my revenge.