A wicked wind will blow

There are spiders everywhere, and its cold and gloomy. I hate the weather in this state.

I wish it was the sixties

Its one of those days where everything seems wrong, and since I can't do a thing about the real problems I have, I try to concentrate on the small, ordinary tasks in front of me. I find that the best therapy for helplessness is to reach out and touch something real: plants in the garden or dirty dishes or yarn on a needle. Physical objects are both more solid and more malleable than fears about the future, more solid than pain or fatigue or worries about money.

Whenever a doctor reads my medical records and sees that I've been diagnosed with depression, they try to refer me to counseling, and I have a hard time explaining why I have no desire to go. Talking about things does make you feel better, but it can only help so much when your problems are genuinely unchangeable. No one can take away the pain I feel, and no one can make the VA give me the benefits to which I'm entitled; talking about things won't change that a bit, but talking is all the help that doctors ever offer.

Completing tasks that decrease the amount of entropy in my immediate environment is my primary method of coping. What I mean is, I plant seeds and knit sweaters because changing some small thing so that its different than it was before is a way of affirming my connection to the world, to life, to happiness. I put my world in order to prove that some things are improvable. I hate to assume that anyone is reading this, but if you see this and have a particular coping mechanism that you've more or less invented on your own, it would be neat to hear about it.

I completed the finishing on two sweaters in the past couple of days, and filled the tires of my bicycle this morning. I'm going to teach myself a new knitting pattern here in a bit, and things are growing in my garden. For now, the sun is shining, and I took some pictures.

you can't see the thin air

I had a medical appointment today. I was under the impression that it was supposed to be a referral for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, so I went in all ready to explain that techniques for correcting irrational beliefs in order to improve one's outlook on life are all well and good, but if my beliefs are rational CBT isn't going to be helpful. I firmly believe that my expectation that my health is not going to significantly improve in the future is realistic, and furthermore, that accepting this hard truth is more helpful and healthy than continuing to deny it in the hope that positive thinking will magically cure me.

Turns out this referral wasn't actually for CBT, it was for drugs. The doctor I saw wasn't at all interested in hearing about my memory, concentration, or comprehension problems, and she wasn't at all interested in my history of extremely bad reactions to ridiculously low doses of various medications. What she was interested in was writing me a prescription for Prozac.

I'm not excited about the prospect of taking Prozac, although I agreed to it, of course; I don't ever feel comfortable not agreeing to a suggested course of treatment, because I'm very afraid that if I am ever the least bit non-compliant, for ever after every doctor will point to it and say "Well, it's too bad you didn't agree to this treatment, or you'd be well now. It's your fault you're ill." I'm not sure how rational this fear is, although it has some basis in how I was treated in the Army. Anyway, taking Prozac isn't that big a deal. I am fairly certain it will make me ill just like Effexor did, and I will vomit for a few days, lay about in bed feeling like I'm dying and then I'll recover and not take it anymore. I just wish that I could hurry up and get past the phase of treatment where doctors insist that making me more ill is the best way to treat me.

When going through my medical history with this most recent doctor, we discussed previous medications' lack of benefit on the pain relieving front. She was concerned that I may not be taking medication with the right attitude; her worry is that my cynicism is actually preventing the medication from working like it's supposed to, causing medications that would otherwise relieve my pain to do nothing.

This philosophy that attributes supernatural powers to my emotions is, I think, the worst thing about going to the doctor. I'm not a religious person, nor am I superstitious. I let go of my childhood faith when I could no longer convince myself to pretend to believe in a gigantic Santa in the sky causing good things to happen to good people and bad things to happen to the bad; I couldn't even believe in fate. Things happen because they are caused to happen by real things that exist in the real world, not because you wish they would happen, or pray for them to happen, or believe that they will happen, or deserve for them to happen. This is true of disasters and good fortune alike, and it's true whether I like it or not. It's also true whether you like it or not, which is why mostly I don't give a crap what other people believe about the world. I recognize that there is a human inclination to assign causation to things, and as this seems to be a fairly universal trait (that even I haven't missed out on) I might as well accept it.

It does get to be a problem, though, when it interferes with my health care. I wish I knew how to change things.

Illness as Metaphor

I read Illness as Metaphor yesterday and today, and I would like to write about it. The most appropriate way of writing what I'm thinking may be a contrast study with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but I don't know if I'll have the mental energy to do that. I have other things I need to write in the next week or so. However, for a start, here are some quotes from the book that I thought to be rather edifying.

"According to the mythology of cancer, it is generally a steady repression of feeling that causes the disease... the passion that people think will give them cancer if they don't discharge it is rage. There are... cancerphobes like Norman Mailer, who recently explained that had he not stabbed his wife (and acted out "a murderous nest of feeling") he would have gotten cancer and "been dead in a few years himself.""

"So well established was the cliche which connected TB and creativity that at the end of the century one critic suggested that it was the progressive disappearance of TB which accounted for the current decline of literature and the arts."

"Doctors and laity believed in a TB character type- as now the belief in a cancer-prone character type, far from being confined to the back yard of folk superstition, passes for the most advanced medical thinking."

She quotes Katherine Mansfield, who died of tuberculosis: "A bad day... horrible pains and so on, and weakness. I could do nothing. The weakness was not only physical. I must heal my Self before I will be well... This must be done alone and at once. It is at the root of my not getting better. My mind is not controlled."

"In his Morbidus Anglicus (1672), Gideon Harvey declared "melancholy" and "choler" to be "the sole cause" of TB... In 1881, a year before Robert Koch published his paper announcing the discovery of the tubercle bacillus and demonstrating that it was the primary cause of the disease, a standard medical textbook gave as the causes of tuberculosis: hereditary disposition, unfavorable climate, sedentary indoor life, defective ventilation, deficiency of light, and "depressing emotions.""

"The second [hypothesis] is that every illness can be considered psychologically. Illness is interpreted as, basically, a psychological event, and people are encouraged to believe that they get sick because they (unconsciously) want to, and that they can cure themselves by the mobilization of will; that they can choose not to die of the disease. ... Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it."

"The notion that a disease can be explained only by a variety of causes is precisely characteristic of thinking about diseases whose causation is not understood. And it is diseases thought to be multi-determined (that is, mysterious) that have the widest possibilities as metaphors for what is felt to be socially or morally wrong."

For all that Sontag's writing style is atrocious- she makes me want to tie her to a desk and force her to write outlines until she can complete an argument in a linear fashion- she does have some things to say in this piece that are very apt. I am tempted to write up a little bit about the psychological model of illness to take with me to my next appointment with the Psychologist From Hell.

Because not everything is dark.

It's a Traffa cat!

There's a shadow just behind me

I used to be the kind of person who was sure that I was right. Always, no matter what, I knew that I had thought things through and seen all the complications and formed the right opinions based on The Way Things Really Were. I was able to get away with this because I was young, and because I was intelligent and eloquent enough that people listened to me with respect even when they thought I was wrong, which only proved to me that I was right. Like many young women, I was not confident about myself in many ways: I thought I was overweight and ugly, and I thought that I was obnoxious and no one would want to be friends with me if they knew who I really was. I still don't know how much of this is true or not; these are things that are hard to determine from the inside, sometimes. But I was always sure that when it came to ideas, I was competent and capable and I knew that people should listen to me.

And then I went and made a series of the worst decisions I could possibly have made in the circumstances; I joined the Army, which was not only a totally stupid thing to do as someone who had ideals about how power should be used, considering the timing of it all, but was also a bad idea on many other, more personal, levels. Then I got hurt, and the whole medical farce played out, and as much as I hate to blame myself, I didn't insist on the kind of treatment I needed, because I didn't know that I was allowed to insist, and here I am today.

Even if I didn't have the fibro fog to deal with, I think I would no longer trust my own judgment. The irritability, inability to concentrate or make small decisions, and poor short term memory are difficult, of course. The impression that my memories are being erased, leaving me without a past longer than a few months, the feeling that nothing that happens is permanent because I know I won't be able to remember it in just a few weeks, is worse. But even if all I had to deal with was the pain, without the doubts about my mind, I would not trust myself. I got myself into this mess all while thinking it was a grand idea; I can no longer be sure about my ability to determine the wisdom of any course of action.

This state of mind has hindered me from accepting that I am disabled, or rather from getting used to the idea. Disability, and the circumstances around it, have destroyed the basis for all the confidence that I had in myself. It seems as though now I'm going about without any skin on, so that everything that happens causes me pain. My body and my mind mirror each other; it is a feedback that can lead very quickly to despair, and I do not know the way out.