The Pelvic Pain Support Group

Oh, forget it. The whole thing was just really discouraging. Everybody feels like crap, they've been struggling toward The Solution for many years, they're overmedicated and out of options, and there's nothing left to do but commiserate.

I'm not so sure that misery loves quite that much company.

Understanding swine flu

The news is full of chatter about swine flu. It could become a pandemic. It's in Mexico. It's traveling. It's awful, awful, they tell us.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, persons contracting this strain of flu can expect to be sick for five-to-seven days with upper respiratory symptoms, fever, body aches, coughing, cold symptoms, and fatigue. If a patient rests and drinks plenty of fluids, maybe works through some Sudoku, a full recovery should be expected.

More than 1,000 people in Mexico have come down with swine flu, and a few cases have been reported in the U.S. So far, no one in the U.S. has died from swine flu; in fact, most were not hospitalized. To put this into perspective, the CDC says that every year an more than six million people in the U.S. get the flu, more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from complications, and about 36,000 people die from the disease each year.

So, what makes swine flu different and what are the chances it will become a pandemic? Swine flu is a strain of influenza type A H1N1 virus. In other words, it's a Type-A flu, which is what most flu strains are. This new strain has a molecular twist: It is composed of avian and swine influenza genes, as reported by the CDC and WHO. The virus travels effectively across porous borders, which raises concerns that a true pandemic pandemonium will erupt soon. The same warning was issued across the U.S. for SARS and bird flu. Given that this strain is a hybrid of avian and swine flu, the chances of a pandemic spreading throughout the U.S., meaning far more cases than the usual 6+million cases of Type A flu seen annually can best be explained with the following graphic:

Facebook and me

It has been just over a week since I joined Facebook. After searching for everyone I know or ever knew, I concluded the following:

• I'm not really friends with most of the people on my friends list
• The best way to find the Facebook help information you need is to Google it.
• Groups suit me better than friends. I joined something like 15-20 groups and pages.
• There is a Facebook page for Adam's Peanut Butter and that is fabulous.
• People seem to believe they are so original, they should start a group for whatever occurs to them. The overwhelming majority of these people start groups before checking to see that there are already 35 other groups with the same name about the same thing started by other original thinkers.
• Actually finding someone from my past usually leaves me with a very melancholy feeling.
• Social networking makes me feel anxious, not happily connected.

I'm going to start my own new groups:

• "Stop talking about the goddamn NFL day in and day out, as if it's the only sport on the planet, especially when it isn't even football season."
• "The NFL draft is not worthy of being the lead story on the evening news."
• "Professional sports are entertainment and therefore should merit no more than three minutes out of an entire newscast, and should only show up in the final five minutes."

May is cranky and sad and should go to bed. As she heads down the creaky hallway, she ponders the questions: How can people claim to love you if they let months or years lapse between calling or taking your calls plus they never even acknowledge your email? Can you love someone about whom you have no interest? Can you miss someone when they're gone if it never occured to you to check if they were still around?

Because it's more fun than wearing the drapes

No, not Scarlett O'Hara's drapes; the Von Trapp family's drapes.

I'm not sure if I should admit this, but Frank and I can recite most of The Sound of Music. We also do this thing where if someone mentions The Sound of Music, we make eye contact, put our arms out and twirl as we sing these words: "The hills are aliiiiive..." And then we go back to doing whatever it was we were doing.

Give it time to load and then enjoy.

There doesn't have to be a reason

I woke up exhausted and cranky.
I felt lonely and isolated.
The sadness and pain all came back with the revitalized memory of they see this as something I'm doing to them instead of as something that's happening to me.
I am reminded that my brain doesn't work as it was designed to, but I'm supposed to keep up regardless.
I can't think, I can't focus, I can't remember, I can't get any work done.
How can I be this tired?

I wept from the time I poured my coffee, then all the way to work, until I stood in front of the parking garage elevator.

I can't really say why.

I said it first

My husband is a devout fan of the Fox show, Fringe.I enjoy the show tremendously, although the portrayal of the main character, Walter Bishop, can border on mockery. Walter is a brilliant but extremely quirky researcher whose work is a mix of medical research, science, chemistry, and a touch of the paranormal.

Walter spent years in a mental hospital, a fact that is often treated with tongue-in-cheek irreverence. Not just often, but a bit too much.

Walter's son works with him as more of a handler than anything. He occasionally shows flashes of irritation toward his father, and in the first episodes was estranged from his father and still bitter. He had a lot of resentment about Walter succumbing to eccentricity and then being institutionalized.

As the show has progressed, Peter Bishop has started to see his father from a more compassionate angle. He's beginning to understand that Walter's mental meanderings are not malicious in any way, and that his institutionalization took a profound toll on his wellbeing.

At the end of the last episode, Peter was talking to one of the other characters about Walter. He was somber and he said, "I didn't really understand what was going on. Life was so hard for my mother and me when he was gone, that I could only concentrate on how angry I was at him for getting into that situation. The whole time, I only thought about it as what he was doing to us and not as something that was happening to him.

Somewhere in the early days of this blog or perhaps in my pre-online journal, I said the same thing, pretty much verbatim. I remember sobbing in Lisa's office and saying, "Everybody acts like this is something I'm doing to them but they just can't see that really it's something that's happening to me."

When I heard this on Fringe, I sat up straight and whispered, "That's what I said. That's exactly what I said to Lisa."

Frank had forgotten about it, but once I pointed it out, he remembered, and he remembered the pain and frustration that I was re-experiencing in that moment.

No, I didn't do anything to anyone--something horrible was happening to me. To me.

Self-knowledge via Facebook

I needed to join Facebook. The why of that is irrelevant, but if there hadn't been a specific reason, I wouldn't have done it.

I'm still avoiding the creepy follower, so I'm not on Facebook under my real name. I'm not even using my own life. Of course, two people have already called me by my real name, but I don't think anything has been revealed to Those Who Should Not Know.

Facebook is a scary place for me. My relationships exist on the surface, but only one or two people who know me have actually caught on. I struggle with wanting deeper connections but not being willing to reveal myself to that degree.

Facebook has more than 200 million active users. Once I figured out some of the functionality of Facebook--and it wasn't easy--I went on that search of looking for everyone I know or had ever known. Making Facebook friends while using an assumed identity is tricky, at best, especially if you're trying to keep your identity a secret. Sort of. I immediately became annoyed by the people who have an account but no profile picture or location. Don't they know how irritating that is if someone is trying to learn of their whereabouts?

Users over 35 years old are the fastest growing demographic on Facebook. Given the searching I did for fmiliar faces, it was surprising to see how many people are not on Facebook. Maybe they have much more of a life than I do.

The average Facebook user has 120 friends on the site. I have nine "friends" on Facebook. That's about seven more than I actually wanted. There are many people I know on Facebook, but I feel no compulsion to contact them or bring them into my group. I became a fan or member of ten groups (I think), but the only one I felt strongly about adding to my profile was Blogger. Seriously. I spend more time reading and writing content on Blogger than with any living, breathing, entity.

Social networking may not be for the socially suspicious.

Befuddled not bedazzled

I used to have a brain and it worked pretty well. Of course, throughout my entire life, I experienced moments or even longer periods of fuzzy thinking. I had trouble paying attention, so I would miss out on things, or else I was so busy doing and thinking that I would space out on things insignificant or of major importance. I am that person most likely to leave the stove on or to forget to lock the front door (actually, I did that a year ago--in fact, I left the door unlocked and wide open).

It keeps Frank on his toes and gives his OCD something to latch onto.

Every once in awhile, my brain gets full and needs to be decluttered (hence, Brainucopia). I usually know it's time when I start to have amnesia-like symptoms. I have a low frustration tolerance in certain situations, but nothing, nothing makes me lose my mind and patience quite like not being able to find something I have misplaced. If someone ever wanted to really play with my head, all he or she would need to do would be to hide something I would be likely to go looking for.

It's about the damn sterling round and crystal faceted beads I bought for a project. In order to get the best price, I went in with others so we could buy in bulk. The order came, I had it with me at an event we attended, and then...amnesia. I didn't need the beads that night, and we were busy, and I remember having the packet in my hand thinking, "We don't need these right now. I'll put them away and we can deal with them later."

And from that point, I have absolutely no memory of what I did next. Nothing. Zero. Gone.

Someone said I articulated that thought and I put the packet into a bag--one of six we had with us. Sure, if you say so.

It has been a couple of weeks and I cannot find this stuff. The packet of beads wasn't so small that it would have slipped between the sofa cushions or gone unnoticed had it fallen out of the bag somewhere on the sidewalk. It was about the size of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich but dense for its size.

Is there anywhere I haven't looked? In every bag, under the bed, between the sofa cushions, in the basement, everywhere in my car, in my laptop tote, in my office, in the basement again, in the closets, in my coat pockets, amidst the countertop clutter, dining room table clutter, craft room clutter, existing bead population, and then all of those places again a couple more times.

I think about it repeatedly throughout the day. It has become a mental obsession. But here's the thing.

I already bought replacement beads--I had to since I was the one who lost everyone's beads. I am being driven to distraction and depression not by the loss but by the forgetting. Where did that 20 seconds of time go? It remained intact for everyone else who was there, but my part got stuck to the bottom of someone's shoe and walked out of the room to places undetermined.

My brain is not that full right now, so why can't I remember? And why can't I forget about it?

The fragrance never left my memory

Hyacinth. Hyacinths have been popping up in my garden for a couple of weeks now. It’s been disconcerting, to say the least.

I love hyacinths. The fragrance they bring is intoxicating, and the colors are the first to appear in the drab winter garden.

Disconcerting. Troubling. Not the flowers so much as the name. Hyacinths were one of the first things I planted in the garden as a child. They are a favorite, yet I couldn’t come up with the name. I waited three weeks to try to remember, but finally I gave up and did a Google search this morning: early spring bulbs fragrant.

This is not an isolated incident. It started when I began taking lithium, and it never improved. No, the word-finding problem is worse than ever. The short-term memory gaps are increasing and that’s frightening.

I’m going to end up like Guy Pearce in Memento. "Hyacinth" will be the first word tattooed onto my body. With a picture. Maybe scratch-n-sniff.

Slushy--it's not just at the convenience store

In the past month, I've seen fire and I've seen rain. I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end. I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend, but I never thought I'd see winter again.

Fire and rain. A couple of weeks ago on a snowy day, we also had thunder and lightning. Go figure. In the midst of today's white-out snow, a plane got hit by lightning on landing approach.

The weather has been mostly mild and lovely and spring-like. At the moment, it's snowing slush. It's snowing globs of snow, jumbo-cotton-ball wads of snow. If you walk on it, it makes a splork! noise. A walk across the yard to the driveway leaves you cold and sniffly and dripping wet. The roads are covered in snow with slick, frozen slush underneath so it's slippery in the most surprising places.

The view out the living room window sucks. Being on the outside of that window really, really sucks.

Enough already. Bring on spring and warm days and light breezes and sunny skies and bright green grass and the first flowers popping through the garden soil. Ahhhh!

I blog the path alone

I'm not egotistical. I don't really need to know whether or not people think I'm interesting. Still, it's feeling a bit unsettling that I appear to have lost my readers. It validates my belief that I'm dull, although I cracked myself the hell up with the serotonin graphic. Ha!

While I was busy feeling like a boring reject, a sparkly thought came to me. It was a thought about why I started this blog. It wasn't so others could read it--that's just an additional point of interest. The purpose of this blog is to serve as my journal, but in a format that allows for other people to help me think through my life process.

Geez May. Don't lose your perspective. The words are for you.