Reunity

My 20th high school reunion is this spring.  I haven't been to any previous ones, and since I went to a prep school (I was a day student at a boarding school), that makes nineteen events I've blown off so far. 

At first it was the angry resentfulness of a self-perceived outsider at the warm heart of adolescent belonging: why would I want to go back there and feel ostracized some more?  Of course, I wasn't really an outsider, and a little perspective and the wisdom and confidence of years revealed not only how lucky I had been to have had the wide circle of friends I did and the embrace of a few thriving school subcultures, but how hard life must have been for some of the people whose existences I thought charmed because I only saw them from a distance.  Blonde and pretty and even rich aren't much protection against most of life's cruelties (one of the enduring lessons of early exposure to wealth), but a safe and solid home life is, and I had that in spades. 

Then it was pure lack of interest.  I wasn't intimidated by the people who showed up for Alumni Days and reported their milestones in the alumni magazine.  But I wasn't especially interested in them, either.  The people I wondered about, the ones I'd been friendly with and the ones I hadn't but wished I had and the ones I hardly noticed but in retrospect should have: these people didn't show up for events.  But of course, neither did I. 

It's funny, the psychological space high school takes up for many of us.  There's something about that time in adolescence that imprints itself and sticks, even though it's just four years, even though it ceases quickly to matter in any real way.  I still have dreams -- lots of them -- that take place in high school, peopled by people I haven't set eyes on in 20 years.  It's like my brain got colonized by these archetypes based on an essentially random sampling of humans I happened to share an institution with between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.  People I knew later who made a much deeper and more profound impact on me don't show up in my dreams.

At the same time, I look back on those years and I feel like I'm seeing everything through a veil of self-involvement and crappy perception.  I remember confiding in my friends and being confided in, and it felt at the time like we were sharing something real, but now it seems like those things, our big secrets and dramas, were facsimiles of emotional content, things we created to take the place of the real dramas we may have been experiencing but couldn't handle or couldn't articulate.  For instance, I knew who all my friends had crushes on at any given moment, but I had no idea about their home lives, even the ones whose homes I occasionally spent the night at.  Or maybe those teen love dramas were more real than I give them credit for, and it's only now that I'm a parent that I think the real emotional content was happening at home.

Whenever my mother is in a reminiscing mood, she'll talk about how time telescopes in memories, how forty years ago can seem closer than last week, more vivid, more important.  I'm old enough now to feel that, and also to feel the kind of fondness for youth that obscures both the pain and the vacuity, so that not only do I feel close to my high school years, I feel an affection for them that extends to those random characters in my dreams.  I don't care whether I like them or not, whether they're interesting or not.  They share this funny, vivid, profound-and-yet-not-at-all-profound period of my life, and so I want very much to make some kind of connection with them, even if -- maybe especially if -- it's fleeting.  Our 20th reunion seems like an ideal time, and maybe even the last best chance to do that.

So come on, Class of '91.  Show up.

Seven Books We Like a Lot

I admit it: I don't like Dr. Seuss.  Partly it's a matter of unsuitability to Ben's age: the books are really aimed at children just learning to read, and the repetitiveness that makes them accessible to beginning readers makes them extremely tedious to me.  And they're way too long.  I could take 20 or even 30 pages of in a box or with a fox, but 62 pages?  No way, man.  It's torture.  And the illustrations are hideous!  Sadly, many adults who haven't read aloud to children for thirty or forty years (mis-?)remember Dr. Seuss with fanatical fondness, so Ben gets a lot of his books as gifts.  I keep meaning to put them into storage until the kid is ready to sound them out on his own -- I can quite imagine considerable cuteness issuing therefrom, but until that time, I'd really rather not see them again.  But Ben does like them, and he likes sitting by himself and paging through them without involving me, and I'm not a total jerk, so I won't take them away.  I won't read them at bedtime, though.

Andy and I each read the kid a book before bedtime.  Ben gets to pick, but we exercise the veto: that one's too long, Dad doesn't like this one, Mom read that one five times already this week, etc.  He's generally very accepting of our prejudices, and we are generally amenable to reading books we dislike when he loves them.  He goes through phases of devotion and antipathy with various titles, but the following are long-standing favorites of his and ours, which means they have whatever mysterious qualities make them attractive to this particular two-and-a-half-year-old, plus they are attractively illustrated, quirky or funny or presenting of some unusual perspective, not patronizing or twee or saccharine, and mercifully brief.

Instructions by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Charles Vess

Typical Gaiman, mining myth and fairy tale and stringing together references in that slightly breathless voice that fools you into thinking he's deeper than he is.  I have a lot of affection for the man, but I also find him infuriating.  Anyway, his schtick works extremely well here, except for a few places where he gets tripped up in language that doesn't quite work, and the illustrations are marvelous.  Part of the fun is picking out all the characters and creatures in the backgrounds.  Ben, for instance, sees Tomtens everywhere.

The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren, illustrated by Harald Wiberg

My first notion of this book came from knitting: iconic knitting designer Elizabeth Zimmerman named one of her more famous children's sweaters after the gnomic protagonist.  I knit the sweater before I read the book.  Then friends gave us a copy, and it became a favorite.  It's a strange combination of unnerving and warm -- the benevolent little Tomten pads around the farm at night talking to and doing favors for the animals, and it's all very sweet, but he's also a little non-human creature creeping about at night, which can't help being a bit creepy.  It definitely has that timeless, northern European thing going for it: it could take place in pretty much any century including our own, and that seems to be an appealing element in children's books -- to me, at least.  As is, come to think of it, that combination of creepy and comforting.

Arrow to the Sun: A Pueblo Indian Tale adapted and illustrated by Gerald McDermott

On the whole, I like Anansi the Spider better, but I've already blogged about it.  And Arrow to the Sun is good, too.  Especially the Kiva of bees, which is Ben's favorite part.  It's not too often you see accusations of bastardy in children's books, and it's refreshing!  Not at all inappropriate!  Seriously, though, the way McDermott handles the strangeness of the cultures he presents (as if there's nothing strange about them, matter-of-factly, without oohing or pointing or -- worst of all -- explaining) and the sophistication of some of the concepts is masterful and positively awe-inspiring when you compare his work to the kind of multi-culti, Here Comes Hanukkah! drivel you generally see.


My Little Round House, illustrated by Bolormaa Baasansuren, adapted by Helen Mixter

Speaking of multi-culti.  Mongolia isn't exactly a popular getting-to-know-you culture for toddlers, but this book is just terrific.  I can't express how gorgeous the illustrations are.  I know jack about Mongolian art, but the drawings manage to seem both entirely of their culture and yet thoroughly accessible to little kids, full of detail and yet not too literal.  The story is a bit shoehorned: the protagonist, born in spring, is crawling by summer and running at one year so that the tale fits into the one-year seasonal cycle, but I can suspend my disbelief on that one because the book is otherwise so charming.  ("Ger" rhymes with "bear," by the way.  Which I know because Andy corrected me.  He's been to Mongolia.  Show off.)

Angus and the Ducks, Angus and the Cat, and Angus Lost, written and illustrated by Marjorie Flack

No dog person could doubt for a moment that Angus was Marjorie Flack's actual dog.  He's as real a dog as I have ever seen presented in literature.  Possibly people who are not dog people will therefore find the appeal of these books limited, but I am bowled over again and again by their charm.  Part of the magic, too, is nostalgia for the kind of genteel, early twentieth century country life sketched in the margins: the milkman's horse, the chintz chairs, the tea service.  But it's mostly happy, dopey, having-of-dog-logic Angus and the scrapes he gets into and out of that make me smile whenever Ben pulls one of these books off the shelf.

[If] Mommy Says No Santa [Says Yes]

I wrote about Santa two years ago.

I guess I don't really have anything to add to that, except that it continues to surprise me how many parents I know embrace the Santa thing.  In part I think it has to do with happy childhood memories; if you believed in Santa and didn't feel traumatized by the disillusionment, you're more likely to want your kids to have the same experience -- or to want to revisit the belief yourself. 

There are lots of good reasons not to lie to your kids, especially about something so trivial.  I mean, really, the default should always be honesty unless there's a particularly good reason to lie.  And this is what gets me about the Santa thing: no one ever gives a good reason for doing it.  "Magic," they say, as if the very absurdity of the story justifies it.  The thing is, it's only magical to grown-ups, because we're the ones who live in a world where Santa cannot exist.  It's not particularly magical to children, because so many explanations are beyond their comprehension, and so much of their understanding is about taking our word for stuff.  Is it so much more magical to think that a fat dude in a red suit delivers presents down the chimney than that a burly dude in a brown uniform brings them from grandparents in Wisconsin to your front door in Schenectady?  To us, sure, but to a little kid? So is it really about making more magic in their lives, or is it about reliving the magic of our own childhoods?

As a kid who grew up knowing presents came from mom and dad, I can assure you that there's no lack of magic on Christmas morning for kids like me.  You can even indulge in some of the Santa stuff -- I certainly got presents "from Santa" and left out cookies, knowing full well that Mom and I were playing pretend (Dad not so much a participant in the Santa thing), and enjoying it no less, and maybe more, for the knowledge.  At the age when most kids are learning The Truth about Santa, I could throw myself wholeheartedly into the fantasy because it was never a matter of True or Not True; it had always been a myth.

I Don't Like Children, Either.

(Good grief!  I announce my return and then proceed to blow off the blog for two months.  Sorry!  The longer I go, the more pressure I feel to make a truly spectacular blog entry, and it's kind of making me crazy, so I'm just dashing this off to get the ball rolling.)

The other day, we were listening to the weather report on the radio, and the weather guy was talking about storms in the midwest, and Andy asked Ben what the dude on the radio was talking about, and Ben said, "Vat dude talk 'bout soda."  Yep -- Minnesota.

It's pretty fascinating, seeing through the eyes of a two-and-half-year-old.  Also infuriating.  It truly boggles the mind how many times one person can be told NOT TO GRAB THE DOG'S EARS and yet still, about once an hour if not more, grab the god-damned dog's ears.  How is that so tough to grasp when other things are absorbed and incorporated into his worldview so fast I can't even work backwards to figure out where he learned them?  He started praising dinner recently by calling it a "(s)pecial meal."  This is not something Andy or I say, or have ever said probably, and so it took us some time to figure out where it came from.  A book about Thanksgiving, we finally figured out, which talks about people traveling to each other's homes for a special meal.

One of the things that continues to fascinate me is how fascinating Ben is compared to other children, who are all -- apologies to their parents, some of whom are my dear friends -- awfully dull.  This is part of why I haven't written lately: all the things it occurs to me to write about ("Vat dude talk 'bout soda") fall so distinctly into the category of It's Interesting When It's My Kid; I Don't Care When It's Yours.  It makes me think about a good friend of mine who explained his lack of desire for his own children by pointing out that he didn't particularly like children.  Even before I had a kid, I had a pretty good idea that that was some bogus reasoning.  I don't like children, either, as a rule.  They're ignorant and selfish and dishonest and rude and make extremely tedious conversation.

My own kid, though?  Total gem.

Knock Wood

I've been superstitiously avoiding my blog, but it's time to get a grip.  The last few times I posted about feeling better, I immediately felt worse, and while that might happen again, I miss writing it, and several readers have been so kind as to say they miss reading it, so there it is.

What's happened since I last posted is a lot of ups and downs in terms of how I've been feeling.  Finally in September I had a full-blown panic attack over absolutely nothing, and that sent me back to my doctors willing to try the SSRI I'd pooh-poohed earlier in the summer.  And wow, let me just say again how very glad I am to be living now rather than, say, in the mid-nineteenth century.  Zoloft is much, much better than a few weeks in the country for an attack of the nerves.  So I was on it for a couple of months, and now I'm weaning off it (with doctor's supervision) because I want to get pregnant and my GP and I agree that there was something of a perfect storm this summer that created this anxiety, and I'm unlikely to need medication forever -- so this seems a good time to try getting off it.  And just the notion that I can go back to it later if I want to is a great comfort.

It's still shocking to me how many purely physical symptoms could be chalked up to the anxiety.  When I went on the Zoloft, I was experiencing spikes of anxiety (often unrelated to any events or trains of thought -- just out of the blue), but also periods of extreme nausea and dizziness.  I expected the Zoloft to take care of the anxiety and allow me to analyse the other symptoms without freaking out over them.  Instead, they all went away.  Though, to be fair, my GP discovered I had a B-12 deficiency and I started taking B-12 at the same time, so it's not altogether clear which issues were solved by the SSRI and which by the vitamin.

Anyway, even on the Zoloft -- and I was on what could be considered a half dose, just 25 mg -- I still had occasional spikes of anxiety, which I was able to treat effectively with Valium.  And as time went on, I was able to wait longer and longer before taking the Valium to see if the anxiety went away, since I knew from experience that I'd be able to zap it if I needed to.  And what I found was that mostly I could breathe through it, do a few yoga poses, or distract myself, and it would go away rather than building.  Which makes me feel more confident about coming off the Zoloft and getting pregnant, when I won't have the safety net of the Valium.  And can I just say how cruel and awful it is that there's nothing perfectly safe to take for anxiety during pregnancy?  What kind of nasty trick is that? 

So.  Back to parenting, I hope, and not so much about my health in this here blog.  And thanks again to all of you who reached out while I was feeling wretched or told me that you missed the blog -- you're peaches, every one of you.

Update

The short version: I had some further medical drama, but I'm feeling much better now, and apart from the cyst thing, I think I'm past it.

The long version:

I was feeling better after that week or so of drama, and then a few weeks later, I went to the OB for a follow-up, expecting to talk about whether or not it was wise to start trying to conceive again, given this weird possibly-migrainey stuff that was going on.  Instead I found out that the ovarian cyst I wasn't worried about hadn't gone away on its own as was hoped, and might in fact need surgery.  If I didn't want to get pregnant, said the OB, he'd want to leave it alone and keep an eye on it, but he didn't want me getting pregnant and then having the cyst do something wacky and need removing while I was pregnant, making the surgery risky to the fetus.  Here's the fun part: if I have the surgery, it's likely I'll lose the ovary, reducing my fertility by about a third.  Great.  We agreed to give it eight weeks to resolve on its own, still a distinct possibility, and re-assess after another ultrasound. 

I found this extremely dispiriting. 

Then I had another week of weirdness, this time bouts of extreme nausea with anxiety and what I would call general low mood.  In retrospect, I'm pretty sure this was a dire case of PMS, but at the time, it felt like more strange and very unpleasant symptoms of something that none of my doctors could identify let alone fix. 

I canceled a road trip I was supposed to take with Ben because I was afraid of getting dizzy or heaven-knows-what-else while on the road a hundred miles from home, alone in the car with my toddler.  As it turned out, I felt fine that week, but I was happy with my decision: much better, I thought, to be thwarted by feeling fine at home than by feeling like hell far away from home.

I saw my GP again, and she thought the whole thing at this point might just be anxiety born of so much medical drama.  She told me to stop taking notes on all my symptoms, and advised I start an SSRI.  I didn't like the SSRI plan, so we met in the middle with a low dose of Valium.  I also thought the anxiety diagnosis was wrong and more than a tidge dismissive, but at that point I was open to trying almost anything, so I took the Valium and put away my notes and hoped for the best.

I felt better once my period started.  Which supported my growing notion that everything had to do with hormones.  I took C.'s advice and went to an acupuncturist.  I took my own advice and started yoga, thinking that every step I could take to make myself all-around more healthy would help whatever this nonsense was, too.  I stopped taking the Valium after a day or two: I wasn't feeling so anxious, and the Valium just made me tired and depressed.

I went to another OB for a second opinion.  He agreed with me that apart from the crazy brain stuff at first, the second round of weirdness sounded very much like extreme PMS, and that that was not abnormal for the few cycles after a pregnancy, even a short-term one.  He was also much more optimistic about keeping my ovary if we had to operate on the cyst, and more optimistic about the cyst generally.  (I liked him a lot, and his practice is also about twenty-five minutes nearer to me than my current OB's -- and he shares his practice with three midwives, which I like, too.  So I'm thinking I'm going to change practices.)

So here I am.  I've had a few sessions of acupuncture and have been taking Chinese herbs as prescribed.  I've been getting out and walking as well as doing yoga once a week.  Who knows whether any of that made a difference, or whether time was the thing, but I just sailed through PMS last week with nothing worse than some lower back pain.  Pain -- so uncomplicated! so easy to treat!  And now that my period has started and the pain has let up considerably, I'm not even afraid that the pain is a symptom of some other dire whatnot.

The cyst is still there, of course.  (Unless it's not -- I won't know until the ultrasound at the end of this month.)  But now that the mystery symptoms seem to have tapered off and been proven out to my satisfaction anyway as hormonal aberrations of post-pregnancy, I feel equipped to handle the cyst, even if it means surgery.  My native unflappability has returned, for the most part.

There's still the "slightly abnormal" EEG, too.  I saw my GP again last week, and she and I agreed that it made sense to wait a while, until I'm more sure of feeling normal otherwise, before going back to the neuro for the follow-up he wanted, which is another EEG, only with my brain stressed by a night of not sleeping.  I'm choosing not to worry about it.  For one thing, he said they treat symptoms, not tests, so as long as I continue to feel fine, they consider me fine.  I feel fine.  But I'm not eager to learn anything more about how not-fine I might be under the surface.  So I'm happy to put that testing off until after the cyst thing is resolved.  One category of bad news at a time, please.

I downloaded a bunch of video from a tape onto my computer this weekend, and a couple minutes were from February.  The video is of Ben, of course, but I'm in the background, wearing woolly slippers and a sweater.  Just turned 37.  Pregnant.  Blissfully unaware of all the crazy to come.

More Medical Drama

It's been a while since I posted.  Here's why.

The Very Short Version

I had some mysterious medical issues, at first very scary, now largely resolved, which for several weeks meant that if I looked at my computer, I felt sick.  After extensive medical testing, everyone's best guess seems to be atypical migraines brought on by anemia.

The Long Version

On Thursday, April 29th, just before bedtime, after I'd been at my computer for several hours straight, I started experiencing a visual anomaly: basically, I had a big splotch in my field of vision that looked like the kind of bright semi-blindness you get after a camera flash.  I had it in both eyes.  It freaked me out, but it went away after five or ten minutes.  When I got in bed and tried to read a book, I couldn't.  I could read each individual word, but when I tried to string them together to make some kind of sense, I couldn't.  Which really freaked me out.  I felt perfectly fine otherwise, and I thought maybe I'd just given myself such a scare with the vision thing that I had, I don't know, made myself temporarily unable to concentrate.  Or something.  I put the book aside and went to sleep, figuring I'd deal with it in the morning if whatever it was was still happening.  And it wasn't: in the morning, I was fine, and I chalked it up to eye strain and freaking myself out, and went about my business.

Nine days later, Saturday, May 8th, it happened again.  This time it was around 9:00 PM, and I'd been playing a computer game for about an hour, and I got another camera-flash blob.  I left the computer and went into the living room and turned on the TV.  Again, the blob went away within five or ten minutes, and what followed was some kind of disorientation.  I was watching Lost (on the TiVo), and though I could understand everything that happened, I couldn't follow the thread of the plot from scene to scene, and nothing seemed to have context.

I thought I was having a stroke.

We hauled the kid out of bed and went to the ER, for the second time in a month.  They took my blood and pronounced me extremely anemic (from the blood loss from the miscarriage) as well as dehydrated.  They did a CT Scan which showed nothing.  They said it was probably atypical migraine or atypical seizure, and I should see my doctor as soon as possible.

The next few days are kind of a blur.  I felt like hell, in retrospect partly because I kept looking at my computer, which it took me some time to realize was provoking a lot of the rotten feeling, but also because I was terrified.  My doctor wanted me to get an MRI to rule out some very scary shit including brain cancer, and it was a couple of days before those results came back totally clear.  I didn't have any more visual anomalies or periods of disorientation.  What I had was a lot of nausea, dizziness, and general feeling like hammered crap.  I also had a full work-up by a neurologist, including an EEG to rule out seizures, the results of which I'm still waiting for: I have the follow-up appointment this week.

Once I figured out that the computer, particularly reading anything on the computer, made me feel terrible, I turned it off and stopped looking at it entirely.  Books and magazines were the same, but less intense: I could read non-electronic text for a a few minutes before it started making me feel weird, and my ability to read non-e text without adverse effect returned within a week or so.  Oddly, I could read my iPhone comfortably.

By Friday, six days after the episode that sent me to the ER, I was feeling considerably more like myself.  Feeling normal again made me realize just how wrong I'd been feeling all along.  That wasn't the end of the episodes, but it was the end of feeling shitty all the time.  From that point on, I felt mostly normal and fine, with isolated incidents of not-OK.

I went back to my GP, and she said that based on all the data she had by that point, her best guess was that I was having clusters of migraines, the first few "with aura" (that's what the camera-flash blob was), and that it probably had everything to do with my extreme anemia (which I have been beating back with massive doses of iron since my first GP visit after the ER) and the stresses on my body caused by the miscarriage and hemorrhage, and that she doubted it meant I'd become a migraineur.  The neuro said basically the same thing, but wanted to rule out seizures, which I'll find out about later this week.

It's common, apparently, for women (most migraineurs are women) to begin getting migraines during some big hormonal change: pregnancy, menarche, menopause, etc.  And the migraines often stop at some other hormonal event.  Some women have them during pregnancy and never have them again.  Many female migraineurs tend to have them at particular points in their menstrual cycle.  Anyway, it makes some kind of sense that the the anemia along with the hormonal upheaval of my system resetting after the miscarriage would have provoked either a one-time cluster of migraines or the beginning of some migraine phase of my life.  Of course, I'm very much hoping it's the former, but I can live with the latter.  Better nauseous and disorienting migraines than the kind with blinding pain, after all (presuming, if I continue to get them, they will be like the ones I've already had) or any of the far-more-terrifying possibilities ruled out by the MRI.

Did you know they have TV in MRIs now?  I couldn't actually see the Today Show because I had to take my glasses off, but the sound was pleasantly distracting.  So was the Valium.  The neurological evaluation was nifty, too.  It was all a bunch of follow-my-finger, walk-in-a-line-heel-to-toe, tell-me-where-I'm-sticking-you-(gently)-with-this-pin type stuff, all of which made me want to grill the dude about neurology.  I'd have even warmer and fuzzier feelings about all of it if all the tests and hospital visits and the fact that Andy's employer hosed us this year on medical insurance didn't mean that we had to cancel our modest September beach vacation.

Anyway.  I had my last arguably migrainey spell on the 23rd after having a short night's sleep and being a bit hungover.  And really, for the past few weeks, it's been tough to tell what's migrainey from what's just a bit queasy and wifty.  I started back at the computer five or ten minutes at a time last week with no adverse effects, and now I'm spending upwards of an hour here (hello!) without even having little panic attacks about it.  My guess about why the computer and to a lesser extent other reading provoked the spells is something to do with eye strain and maybe needing bifocals (I've been myopic since I was 8).  So I'm hitting the opthalmalogist this week, too.

I talked to my pal the midwife at my OB's office a couple of weeks ago, and she said she didn't think it was a good idea to start trying to conceive until the anemia was gone.  She said "a couple of months," but I can't see it taking that long.  My hemoglobin had gone from around 8 to over 10 the first week after the ER visit, when I was taking three iron pills a day.  That's already nearly normal, and I've been taking two a day since, so I'll be very surprised if my blood test next week doesn't show perfectly respectable levels.  I've already had a normal (I suppose) period, which means I'm (probably) ovulating again, so now that I feel normal and am no longer freaked out about this whole thing, I'd just as soon get back on the horse ASAP.  Especially since this entirely-without-fun roller coaster ride started when I got pregnant in February and it is now June, and I am in no way getting younger.

I'm off to the OB for a follow-up ultrasound and sit-down with one of the full-metal OBs this afternoon, so I'm going to talk to him about it.  And I'll see my GP next week after getting the EEG results and also the results of a blood draw, so I'll be talking to her about it, too.  And then I'd really like not to see the inside of another medical establishment until I'm safely and successfully and without incident knocked up.  Cross your fingers!