Health and Illness
February 28, 2008
Even If Prozac Doesn't Work for Everyone, I Still Think It Helped Us All
Continued from my post yesterday.
With the clarity of educated hindsight, I can look back at my life and see that I suffered my first serious bout of depression as a young teenager--serious enough that I ended up in the hospital, though not for depression. No, I was hospitalized because of the effects depression and sadness had on my body: I lost six pints of blood--half the blood in my body--through intestinal hemorrhaging, which the doctors, after conducting a slew of tests and subjecting me to unnecessary exploratory surgery, attributed to "stress."
This being 1978, I was told I had made myself ill, and that I better make myself well, or else next time, I'd probably die. No one offered me any counseling or therapy; and so I dealt with the whole thing the only way I could, which was to become anorexic and even more obsessive and weird about religion than I'd previously been.
Somehow or another, I did get better, mostly because the hospital scared the shit out of me: I didn't want to go back there, EVER, if I could help it. If staying out of the hospital required arriving at a sounder state of mind, well, then I damn well was going to do it.
Flash-forward to my mission, where I developed what a doctor would call a case of severe depression but which I prefer to call "religious despair" or plain old heartbreak, and which, when I came home and tried to discuss, pretty much everyone dismissed.
I got my first prescription for anti-depressants on my mission, and I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to get it. (Metaphorically speaking, that is. No one dragged me to the hospital; I took the train, quite decorously. I just was coerced and cajoled into doing it even though I really didn't want to.) I didn't want medication for SO MANY REASONS, one being that I really didn't trust doctors. Another was that I felt very strongly the spiritual aspect of my despair and heartbreak; I didn't see how medication could treat the pain in my soul--and truth be told, it never did; the one drug that worked only made it able for me to sleep and stop crying long enough that *I* could do something about the pain in my soul. But at least as important as all that was that in 1986, when I got that prescription, the Prozac revolution had not occurred and depression was seen not as an illness but as a sign of moral weakness.
So there's a way in which, even if Prozac doesn't work, I feel it has been a beneficial medication for the entire planet, in that the stigma of depression and of seeking help for depression has been so profoundly lessened.
Speaking personally, and in language I know is religiously loaded, for me Prozac was a godsend and I think it may have very well saved my life. By the time I finally went on it in 1990, I'd tried about half a dozen anti-depressants, not because I wanted them but because my therapist kept insisting I needed them. They were, invariably, AWFUL--most of them exacerbated rather than mitigated the effects of depression. Good lord.... I remember one made me feel all giddy and drunk during the day but gave me the most garish, horrible nightmares.... Another gave me cotton-mouth so terrible I could scarcely teach a 50-minute class unless I drank so much liquid during it I nearly wet my pants before it ended. And the ones that helped me sleep--because insomnia is a life-long affliction of mine that is always worse when I'm depressed--made me not only drowsy, but almost unable to get out of bed, which really upset me, because one of the ways I kept even a shred of self-esteem during the whole business was to make sure I got up every morning and did what I needed to do, every single day, no matter how miserable I was.
So anyway, I'd try these anti-depressants for six weeks or so, realize I'd rather be plain old miserable than miserable AND suffering the side effects of these medications, and quit them. Until one day, my therapist told me that if I didn't go on Prozac, she'd have me hospitalized whether I liked it or not. I couldn't afford to spend a week doing nothing in the hospital, either in terms of my schedule or my wallet--I was a grad student, for christsake--so I went on Prozac.
And my god, did it help me. I can't believe there was a placebo effect, because if there were, I would have seen it with the other drugs. But it restored my sleep, almost by magic.... and it just gave me this small island of physical calm barely big enough that I could feel ever so slightly protected from some of the turmoil of my life, but oh, that was enough.
But the thing was, I didn't want to be on it. First of all, it was FREAKIN' EXPENSIVE: in 1990, it cost $2 a pill, and it WAS NOT COVERED BY MY LOUSY GRAD STUDENT INSURANCE. Sixty bucks a month or $720 a year is a hell of a lot to spend on medication when you earn only $9,000 a year. Secondly, I knew the drug was new enough that no one knew its long-term side effects, and I didn't want to find out the hard way that they blew. And finally, I didn't want a crutch. The point of all my searching and work, including all the therapy I had, all the painful decisions I arrived at and the drastic changes I made in my life (like leaving the church), was never merely to stop being depressed; it was to get as close as I could to enlightenment, to seeing the world and myself as cleared-eyed and accurately as possible, and to make my way through the world as effectively as I could.
Throughout the 1990s I'd go on it when I got desperate (for whatever reason: grad school, love gone awry, brain chemical whatever), then go off it when things got better. But I got tired of the cycle and decided I'd pursue any alternative treatment I could, including things like yoga and acupuncture and massage, all of which worked wonders for me, and seeing psychics and astrologers, which didn't always produce such great results. I was also lucky enough to find a terrific therapist who worked every bit as hard with me as I wanted to work, who supported my agenda for self exploration--she was great. I also read every last self-help book I thought would help me; some really did. After about five years of all that, I really did feel better.
So long about 1998 I swore anti-depressants off for good. And one thing that surprised me after that was how readily a doctor--a general practitioner, not even a psychiatrist, who specializes in mental health--would throw a prescription for Prozac at me anyway when I went to be treated for something other than depression. In 2000 I started having all these weird food sensitivities and allergies; one particularly bumbling fellow suggested I go back on Prozac, just in case it might help, but I said, "I'm not depressed; I'm allergic to something. Do you really think ingesting something else is going to help that?" Long about 2001 I saw a doctor who didn't want to give me a prescription for sleeping pills; he said he'd rather give me Prozac. I protested that I wasn't depressed; I was just having trouble sleeping. Finally he convinced me; I took the prescription and filled it--but it had lost its efficacy. It not only didn't work; it made me anxious and weird. At that point, I knew I'd never take it again.
So I feel simultaneously that Prozac is seriously over-prescribed, that it shouldn't be dispensed like aspirin, that it can only do so much, but that one of the things it can do is save lives--as I said, I think it saved mine. These studies I mentioned yesterday all stress that anti-depressants often work quite well for people who are profoundly depressed, and I don't want to forget that, or deprive those people (having been one myself) of what is potentially a very real source of very real relief. And I really do think the world is a better place since the invention of Prozac--as I say, it has revolutionized the way we see depression. But I think like anything it can be abused. And if studies like these are correctives to that abuse, well, it's a good thing they're being conducted.
Posted by Holly at 9:03 AM | Comments (6)
February 27, 2008
Apparently Fake Drugs Work Just As Well, Unless You're REALLY Depressed
Here's a story that was all over British press yesterday but has yet to appear, so far as I can, in the American Press: According to a story from the Guardian, another from the Independent, and still another from the BBC, researchers at the University of Hull have concluded that anti-depressants are no more effective than placebos in treating all but the most severely depressed individuals.
There are several things about this that I think are important. One is that this story is not being reported by the US press. I read the stories in the British Press yesterday but didn't write about it until today because I wanted to give the US Press time to get around to noticing it. This morning I checked the NY Times, the LA Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today, and couldn't find a mention of this story in any of them. OK, it's a study by a British university, but they're American drugs, taken by a hell of a lot of Americans. This story was important enough in the British press that it was the lead story for the Independent and the Guardian. I think it merits attention in the US Press.
Another is that the researchers didn't conduct new studies; as the Independent put it, they simply "conducted a meta-analysis of all 47 clinical trials, published and unpublished, submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the US, made in support of licensing applications for six of the best known antidepressant drugs, including Prozac, Seroxat – which is made by GlaxoSmithKline – and Efexor made by Wyeth." Still, according to the Guardian,
The review breaks new ground because [study author] Kirsch and his colleagues have obtained for the first time what they believe is a full set of trial data for four antidepressants.They requested the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.
The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.
So, by the findings in all studies submitted to the FDA, the drugs were effective enough for some people, and their side effects not unpleasant or dangerous enough, that the FDA approved the drugs.
But in subsequent matters, such as reviews to determine whether or not Britain's National Health Service would cover the cost of prescribing the drug, not all the relevant data were released, because the drugs did not meet the standards required by the NHS. And only more favorable studies have been published.
This is deceit. Which is why the Independent has a story today announcing Drug giants warned: tell the truth on medicines and another discussing The drug industry's long and ignoble history of secrecy. Of course, the drug industry is denying pretty much everything, and dismissing the study from Hull "'just one study' which should not be allowed to undermine the wealth of research showing that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are effective."
And still another important thing in all this is my own history with anti-depressants, but I think I'll wait to discuss that tomorrow.
Posted by Holly at 10:31 AM | Comments (3)
January 16, 2008
A Really Good Reason to Take a Bath
In my last entry, I talked about the history of bathing, having just read a book on the topic. I mentioned that in various times and places, people managed to live six or seven decades without ever washing their hair or taking a bath or brushing their teeth. Admittedly, living this way meant that they were far more prone than we are to things like carbuncles (something Ashenburg doesn't mention but which I briefly found fascinating ten years ago or so in that "Oooh, how disgusting!" way) and being toothless by age 40, but it didn't necessarily kill them, or cause their flesh to fall off.
(That is, not washing one's hands or body didn't necessarily kill the unwashed one. It did sometimes kill the people that one touched--for example, the many women who died of pueperal or childbirth fever, contracted when they were attended by doctors with unwashed, germy hands. Ignaz Semmelweiz, the doctor who suggested that his esteemed colleagues should wash their hands before touching a woman's filthy nether regions, was ridiculed out of the medical profession by men who greatly resented his outright assertion that they were somehow unclean; he died in an institution, a broken man.)
But here's that something can make the flesh fall from your bones, and might potentially kill you: flesh-eating bacteria, transmitted by skin contact and resistant to antibiotics.
ICK!
You can contract it from sex with an infected person, but you can also get it from contact sports. It's common in kids.
The article doesn't say how it is eventually cured for the people who contract it, only that "One in five infected patients in the US required hospital treatment."
But it also mentions the best way to avoid infection. That's right: "probably [probably! They don't know for sure] to wash thoroughly with soap and water, especially after sex."
I have a pretty good immune system and the ailments that tend to impair my health aren't usually infectious, aside from a mild cold from time to time, or the occasional bout of food poisoning, but I tend to recover very quickly. Normally I'm not the least bit hesitant to shake someone's hand but this is REALLY gross. Then there's the full-body massage I get every three or four weeks: I don't suppose I'll stop, but I might have to talk to my massage therapist about this. But how do you say, "I'm mildly concerned about contracting a gross infection that causes my skin to rot from the outside and my lungs to rot from the inside?" It's not a conversation I'm used to having.
Posted by Holly at 9:53 AM | Comments (2)
December 5, 2006
Stonehenge as Hospital
I own a book called Love Is in the Earth. It's an encyclopedia of various gems and stones, both precious and semi-precious, but it won't tell you how to judge their monetary or aesthetic value, how to cut or set them. Instead, it explains the mystical healing properties of the stones listed in it.
Now, that sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo to plenty of people, but I was profoundly and profusely ill at more than one point in my life, and collecting pretty stones and hoping their vibrations would do me some good seemed as sensible as visiting a man in a white coat, who would bombard parts of my body with invisible "rays" (as in X-) or "waves" (as in sonar) as some sort of diagnostic procedure, and then tell me stuff I already knew, such as "You're ill," before adding, "but I don't know how you got that way and I don't know how to make you better, so go home and hope it clears up and if anything changes, come back."
Understand: I still visited the guy in the white coat, but I figured I should cover all my bases. So I also bought pretty stones. I would hang them in front of my window, or put them under my pillow, or tote them in my pocket, though I was also fond of carrying them about my person in the form of earrings, pendants, rings and bracelets. People have asked me, when I've mentioned buying the stones, "Didn't that get kind of expensive?" I suppose it has, if you count the really fancy stones in really fancy settings that I wear as jewelry.... But the cost of all the loose stones I've ever bought in my entire life hasn't come close costing what I paid for prescription drugs during a single year of grad school. (This was back before we managed to get a grad student union at the University of Iowa.) Not only were the stones cheaper; they were also more psychologically empowering, and still look pretty in the container where I keep them.
Now, this idea that stones have mystical healing powers is not new; instead, it's extremely old. In fact, the giant dolerite and rhyolite stones used in the construction of Stonehenge were believed to have healing properties. Understand: these were special stones weighing several tons, dragged all the way from Wales, while other parts of Stonehenge were locally quarried sandstone. Why go to the trouble of getting great big stones from someplace so far away when there are nice big chunks of rocks to be had nearby, unless it's because there's something special about the foreign stones?
Which is why someone has argued that Stonehenge was a hospital--that, and the fact that surrounding Stonehenge are burial mounds, containing a remarkably high percentage of bodies with strange deformities. Yes, the stones of the site were aligned to astrologically significant points, but that was not the whole point. It wasn't an observatory. The point of matching things up with pivotal days of the calendar was that such matchings would augment the inherent healing power in the stones. The people who hung out at Stonehenge were either sick people hoping to be cured, or shamans hoping to cure them, not religious pilgrims or esoteric priests presiding over arcane rituals.
I admit this argument, advanced by Professors Geoff Wainwright and Timothy Darvill and summarized by Steven Jenkins in a commentary for the Guardian UK, makes sense to me. And had I been some prehistoric chronically ill person, I probably would have attempted a pilgrimage to Stonehenge the hospital. For that matter, I'd probably make a pilgrimage there if it were still a hospital. Or maybe I wouldn't--I believe that Sedona, Arizona, is an intensely powerful place, but it's so overrun with rich people that I prefer to stay away, and find my healing in the desert's solitary places.
Posted by Holly at 9:16 AM | Comments (3)
October 26, 2006
Gallons and Gallons of Bacon Fat Haven't Hurt Me
So, the bad news was, I was really busy.
The good news was, I have a constitution that can handle it.
A few weeks ago at work they had this program called "Know Your Numbers," where you could have these tests done, evaluating certain basic indicators of overall health.
And despite the fact that I eat basically whatever I want whenever I want, despite my refusal to even set foot in a gym, and despite growing up in a home where the primary cooking fat was rendered bacon grease, I'm really healthy.
My blood pressure is 110 over 78 (though it shoots right up when I'm upset); my resting pulse is 80; my random blood sugar is 89; my percentage of body fat is 19.5; all that is ideal for my age and so forth. My high density lipoproteins rating is only 51, which wouldn't be good except for the fact that my total cholesterol is 149, which is almost ridiculously low.
Oh--and I have lots and lots of water in my system--I'm very well irrigated.
Regarding the eating what I want when I want--well, it probably helps that sometimes I want to eat a big bowl of steamed zucchini or an entire plate of lightly sauted organic baby spinach (and god, how I wish I could right now--I miss spinach!). I eat chocolate virtually every single day of my life, but I try to balance it out with other things, like cheese or avocado milkshakes.
Regarding the refusal to set foot in a gym--it's true; I vowed that I would never go to a gym again as long as I live: I hate sweating in public and I find exercising on machines unendurably monotonous. But I try to walk briskly for an hour or so three or four times a week, and I also do yoga from time to time.... And apparently my basic metabolism, the number of calories I would burn if I didn't even get out of bed, is on the high side at 1655 calories a day, so that when I do things like run up stairs and dance around my house to some great song, I stay slimmer.
Regarding bacon: I don't eat much of it these days, mostly for ethical reasons, but very occasionally I indulge. There for a decade or so I didn't eat it at all, but until I left home it was a staple in my diet. My mom, born at the height of the Depression and frugal as all hell, kept a jar into which she poured the grease left over every time she cooked bacon. She used that rendered fat for everything from frying onions to greasing cake pans, so that even a chocolate cake with caramel frosting still had a faint bacon flavor. That's how I learned to cook, and it wasn't until I started reading cook books as an anorexic high school student (if you read about and prepare food, you derive pleasure from it that doesn't require you to eat it) that it occurred to me that butter might work better than bacon grease for greasing cake pans. In any event, I probably ate more bacon fat in the first fifteen years of my life than most people in America consume in a lifetime.
After the medical tests I took a survey evaluating certain aspects of my lifestyle, which are generally good as well: I don't smoke; I don't take a lot of prescription drugs; I don't have dangerous hobbies, like deep sea diving or rock climbing; I've learned to take care of my lower back. According to the survey results, the biggest threats to my health come from driving and drinking, not because I do them together, but because I don't do either as cautiously as I should. I tend to drive over the speed limit, especially on highways, and for some reason I don't buckle my seat belt until I've driven a block or two. And I don't tend to drink much when I'm sleeping on my own, but when my insomnia gets bad, vodka is one of my primary sleep aids.
I also have an increased risk of breast cancer, because I haven't given birth, but I can live with that. It doesn't seem worth it at this point to try to have a baby just so I can decrease my chances of dealing with lumps of nastiness in my boobs.
Although I try to weigh consequences, risks and rewards in deciding how to take care of my body and my health while still enjoying my life, I can't help thinking that a lot of this is just luck, especially since I can look at my four siblings and see how some of this boils down to a matter of which side of the family gave us certain genes. Two of my siblings have high blood pressure and problems with cholesterol, like my mom's family; one's hard to categorize since she has her own unique health problems resulting from being anorexic for 15 years; and the other one has a remarkably strong constitution, like me, which we inherited from our dad's side.
However, also like me, that sister has had inexplicable, life-threatening illnesses that mysteriously resolve themselves. And my poor mother seems to have really gotten a raw deal compared to the rest of the family: not only does she have high blood pressure and crohn's disease, but she has somehow developed cirrhosis of the liver--despite never having taken a drink of alcohol in her life. The only thing besides alcoholism that causes it is gall bladder problems, and she's had those forever.
So we'll see if I end up living into my 90s, like so many people on my dad's side seem to do. I have a feeling I might not do quite so well, mostly because of the alcohol thing, whereas most of my relatives totally abstain. But at least I've got some help in terms of how my body manages to regulate itself.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (4)
June 15, 2006
What I Ate Then, What I Can Eat Now
I'm sure everyone wants an update on the state of my stomach as well as a report of the gustatory pleasures I enjoyed on the cruise. So here they both are.
Probably the only good thing about forcibly ejecting the entire contents of your digestive tract from any available orifice over an eight-hour period is that afterwards, your stomach is as shriveled and sour as an unripened kumquat, which means you can't put a whole lot in it, which means you lose weight.
There are a limited number of activities you can pursue on a boat, but eating and drinking head the list. Cruise lines make it a point of pride to feed guests often and well. On this cruise, room service was available 24-hours a day, free of charge. The ninth floor of the boat featured a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet that didn't exactly stink, though it wasn't up to the quality of the formal dining room, which offered meals like roast pheasant, filet mignon, lobster or lamb chops. I ate more meat in that one week than I'll probably consume for the rest of the summer. I also ate more soup: I'm not usually a soup person, but when it's chilled blueberry soup with champagne, or chilled peach soup with a dollop of creme fraise, or chilled pear soup with ginger, well, then you're just eating a smoothie out of a bowl with a spoon, and who wouldn't go for that?
Supposedly the average weight gain for a cruise is a pound a day. I didn't gain that much, but I didn't diet, either, and I sure as hell always ordered dessert. One of the main reasons I didn't get spectacularly and instantly too big for my britches is the fact that I didn't drink much. I had an occasional fancy cocktail in some lounge while we watched the sun set, but that was it. No one else in my family drinks, and it's just no fun to be the only one at the table ordering wine. Plus it's expensive: you pay extra for fancy coffee (there was an espresso bar in the place), soda (no kidding: a Coke cost $2.89), and booze. The fact that no one drank at dinner quite flummoxed the various wine stewards, who would show up at the table to explain what wines we should be drinking with what course. They'd deliver a spiel and try to hand out a wine list, at which point everyone would turn to me, and I would say to the wine steward, "We don't drink." He would then say, "No one wants to risk drinking and driving tonight, aye?" and again try to give someone a wine list. "We don't drink," I'd say a second time, and he'd realize he wouldn't be earning any tips at our table (a 15% gratuity was added to all beverage orders) and begin dejectedly gathering up our wine glasses. But it was clear that for plenty of people, what really made the cruise a vacation was the fact that they could have not only meat but alcohol at every single meal: I can't stomach a nice plate of bacon and eggs and a bloody mary first thing each morning, but for those who can, well, a cruise is ideal.
It's nice to be able to think about food again without feeling instantly and thoroughly queasy, though I wouldn't say my appetite has completely returned. I went to see one of my local friends this evening, and we discussed the fact that as you age, it just takes longer to recover from any illness. It has been over 100 hours since I last vomited but my gut is still feeling a tad delicate and tender, and it's funny what seems appetizing and what doesn't.... I went grocery shopping yesterday, and I could think of exactly five things that appealed to me, the primary one being toast. I also had a hankering for two desserts I make a lot, the first being blueberry crumble and the second being fudge upside down cake with strawberries and yogurt. The only vegetables I could bear the thought of eating were boiled peas and palak paneer. I don't know why those things seemed palatable, but given the revulsion I felt at the idea of zucchini, or string beans, or hummus, or a cup of coffee, or just about anything else I could think of, I wasn't going to gainsay the fact that there were at least five solid foods I wanted to eat.
My friends H & K were so solicitous of my stomach that Monday night K made chicken soup and focaccia for dinner because she figured it would be easy for me to digest. It tasted good and stayed down, so she was right. Then we watched television for a while, and the show we settled on was Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. The particular episode involved him going to Canada and hunting seal with a bunch of Eskimos, then eating the entire animal--including the eyeballs--raw. I think if I'd had anything more ambitious for dinner it would have come back up at that point. I was also glad that my own arctic adventures involved foods like salmon and crab cakes rather than seal brains. Fish tacos are daring enough.
Anyway, I should be done writing about gut trouble for a while, in case you haven't enjoyed this topic. And I guess I was wrong when I said the only good thing about puking is that it shrinks your stomach: another benefit is that when you're done being sick, you remember that it's really quite lovely and wonderful to feel healthy. I feel pretty healthy--I think I could even enjoy popcorn right now, so I'm going to go do it.
Posted by Holly at 10:12 PM | Comments (5)
June 11, 2006
Post-Sea Sickness
About half a dozen people, when I mentioned that I was going on a cruise, asked me if I had ever read "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" by David Foster Wallace (who, like me, is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Arizona but who, unlike me, is fabulously wealthy and famous), an essay talking about how cruises aren't really that great after all. I have not read that essay, though I'll track it down now, but I have to say that I had a FABULOUS time on my cruise to Alaska and would do it again in a heartbeat.
This is not to say that every aspect of the trip was ideal: for one thing, I got tired of being expected to pose for photographs, with guys in polar bear or eagle suits, and to then pay $7.95 for said photos. The coffee was generally lousy. The DJ in the nightclub was annoying and played crappy music. (More on that later.) The hot tubs were closed for cleaning half the trip, because a case of stomach flu was going around and the staff was anxious to contain it (more on that later too)--this is also why they wouldn't leave salt and pepper shakers on the table. But those are small things, and I had to sit here and think for a moment in order to come up with that list of disappointments.
I could list a lot of great things about the trip, and I will, eventually. But right now I'm kind of focused on the fact that while I was lucky enough not to get sick on the boat, I started puking my toe nails up around 10 p.m. last night. As I couldn't even keep water down, I had a crappy night. However, several hours have passed since I last vomited my guts out and I just moved up to Gatorade, which I fear may have been a mistake....
I really did have a great trip, and I really would like to do it again, gastro-intestinal distress notwithstanding. But this stomach thing is a bummer, you know, because I was planning to hang out with Jim today, but for obvious reasons we would all prefer that I not pass this bug on to his toddler. That means I'm stuck imposing on my friends H&K some more. They are very gracious and accommodating hosts, but who wants a sick person running from the bathroom to the guest room?
Anyway. I'm going to lie down again.... But expect more about the trip soon.
Posted by Holly at 8:57 AM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2006
I Am Suddenly So Freakin' Productive
As I've mentioned, the semester ended Friday, May 5. To celebrate I wore a really great outfit (maybe some of my lurking colleagues will attest to the fact that my shirt, which I bought a few days prior, was indeed very cool, and my skirt, which I made last fall, was indeed very pretty) and went out for margaritas (it being Cinco de Mayo and all) with friends/colleagues. I even got a ride so I could get rip-roaring drunk, but I was stymied in that endeavor by A) the lack of tequila in the margaritas and B) the surplus of icky green margarita mix in said beverage (just makes ‘em harder to suck down) and C) a pissy attitude that kept me from ever really having fun.
The next day I felt like crap though I wasn't even hungover. And I'd gone out with such good intentions! It really added insult to a lack of injury. I was...depleted, mostly. Exhausted by some teaching-related ickiness I might blog about if I work up the nerve.... Anyway, the weather was lovely but I was having none of it. I wore ugly old sweats and sat on my couch and watched television I didn't enjoy: four hours of Grey's Anatomy, one of those shows about doctors* that can't be bothered to include genuinely sick people. The show has people who are dying of cancer in some part of their digestive system and still weigh close to 200 pounds, despite the fact that when your digestive system stops working, you tend to lose both your appetite and weight, because even the few things you manage to put in your stomach don't get broken down properly. Or people who, only hours after having their chests sawed open, are sitting up, talking coherently, groggy from neither pain nor general anesthesia.
Sunday I at least left my house, though I didn't leave my yard: I managed to go out in the evening and do a little gardening. But I was still sulky and pissy.
But last week I somehow managed to become oh so productive! Before the semester ended but when the end was in sight, I had a moment of clarity during which I Planned Ahead: I made a bunch of appointments, so that last week I was plugged into a schedule. I took my windshield to the chip repair place. I took my cat to the vet. I took my teeth to the dentist. I took my hair to the salon. (This week I'm taking my body to the doctor--annual check-up and all that, but as I mentioned, I really distrust doctors.*) I went to graduation. (God, that was boring.) I had coffee with a friend I haven't talked to in months. I finished up some school-related business. I did some research for the Buffy paper I've got to write and ordered books for another project. I made a skirt. (It's adorable--believe me.) I took some pictures with the digital camera I got for Christmas and haven't really mastered using. (One of these days, when I'm not quite so overwhelmed, I'm actually going to plug the camera into my computer and download pictures of my cat Dinah, who is very, very cute.) When I wanted a break from all that structured productiveness, I put in a movie and watched it while I ironed all my recently washed laundry, or I worked in my garden.
I like being this productive, but I seriously dislike that I HAVE to be this productive. I have all this shit I MUST do before May 25. Didn't I just get done with some big lousy deadline? Oh yeah, I did: and dealing with it made me catatonic for 48 hours and pissy for a lot more.
Oh well. This too shall pass.
*Doctors are one of the few groups of people I've dealt with in my life that I trust less than Republican politicians and Mormon priesthood holders. They can hurt and screw you over in ways few other people can. Dishonest mechanic? Well, being stuck with a huge bill for unnecessary services does indeed suck, but it sucks even more when any unnecessary procedure is done to you. "Do no harm," the Hippocratic oath** enjoins, but I've never met a doctor who truly upheld it.
**I just discovered, when I looked up the Hippocratic oath, that the old one, which begins with an appeal to Apollo, prohibits abortion and assisted suicide. The modern one states, "I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick."
Posted by Holly at 10:07 AM | Comments (6)
March 15, 2006
The Ides of March
Monday afternoon a student stopped by my office and after he'd asked and I'd answered the question he had for me, he stayed for a few minutes to chat. Quite suddenly he surprised me by saying, "Wow, you're really happy today! You're, like, glowing or something. Did you get a new boyfriend last week?"
"I most certainly did not get a new boyfriend last week," I said. "And if I did, I wouldn't discuss it with you. But I'm not really that happy. You're just noticing it more because I'm easier to chat up in my office than in class."
"Nah," he said. "You're definitely happier. You must have had a really good spring break."
"Well, as a matter of fact, I did," I said. "I was, let's say, 70% as productive as I should have been, which pretty much counts as very productive, considering all I had to do. I'm caught up with most things. That makes me happy. The idea of having an easy week makes me happy."
After the student left, I analyzed my mood and realized I was indeed extra happy. For reasons I could not and cannot explain, I felt like a beloved child of the universe, blessed with abundant good fortune I was eager to share. I fully expected to come home and find some notice of success or largess mixed in with the pleas for money my mail usually consists of, but when there was no such notice, it didn't hurt my mood a bit. I was merely happy, uncomplicatedly and profoundly happy, which was great until it came time to go to bed. I was in such a fantastic mood, so full of good spirits and the delightful conviction that some entity was busy devising ways to bestow great bounty on me, that I couldn't fall asleep.
So, as I occasionally do when I can't sleep, I popped a prescription sleeping pill.
Insomnia has been one of the great trials of my life. Sometimes I simply cannot sleep to save my life, and there's no obvious answer as to what causes my insomnia, aside from clinical depression and/or severe anxiety. I have lots of experience in trying to overcome it. I've tried all kinds of prescription meds and I scoff at wimpy pills like Ambien, which is supposed to help make you drowsy (like I need something to make me drowsy when I've been sleep-deprived for well over two weeks!) and which also has a half-life of only three or four hours so that you don't wake up feeling hungover. There's also been this stuff in the news recently about how Ambien can cause memory blackouts: supposedly you can take it and be awake enough to have conversations and make really bad decisions--like going outside, taking off all your clothes, and picking a fight with a policeman--but not remember it the next day. That's not what I personally look for in a sleeping pill. No, if I'm going to take a prescription sleeping pill, I want it to be something that will render me unconscious as quickly as possible and keep me that way a good seven or eight hours. It's true that if I do wake up in the middle of the night after taking such a pill I feel all drugged and out of it, but I rather like the feeling because it means I'll almost certainly go back to sleep.
After years of trying different prescriptions, I found something a few years ago that worked for me: brand-name Restoril, generic Temazepam. Sometimes I'll go weeks or even months without needing to resort to it, but sometimes I rely on it quite a bit. It has been a godsend, but I have very strict rules about how often I can take it. I never take it more than two nights in a row or more than four nights in a given week unless I'm traveling (in which case I give myself permission to take it every night because there's something deeply awful about lying awake in someone else's guestroom and being really exhausted and irritable when you're on vacation). As for any remaining nights when I can't sleep, I employ various other remedies, including a Benadryl and a shot of vodka (which is what I used last night), chamomile tea, lots of yoga, visualizations, and when those fail, I'm not above sitting at my computer at 3 a.m. in the foulest of moods, sulking and bitching and sending email to everyone I know about how much I wished I were asleep.
Anyway the point of all this is that taking that pill is perhaps one reason why my extreme good mood was less extreme by Tuesday morning. That, and the fact that several of those minor tasks I didn't quite finish over spring break had to be dealt with on Tuesday, and I woke up knowing it. There was also a problem with the weather: Monday was rainy and warm; Tuesday was mightily windy and there was a decent amount of snow blowing around. It didn't accumulate--the wind wouldn't let it settle--but it was nasty and I had to run errands in it.
This morning the weather's lousy and I'm OK--not all that happy, but not exactly cranky, either, which I guess is good enough for a day that's supposed to be inherently inauspicious. For most of 2006 I've slept pretty well, but the last few days my sleep has been disrupted by something--I'm not sure what, since nothing has been all that different except for being really relaxed and happy, and if being relaxed and happy gives me insomnia, something's wrong. Restoring my preferred sleep pattern is going to become my primary project starting Friday--I've got social obligations both tonight and tomorrow night--and who knows? I might end up in a really good mood again soon after that.
Posted by Holly at 9:18 AM | Comments (6)
December 4, 2005
Neti: Gross, But Effective; or,Try This at Home
As I mentioned, I caught a cold during my travels, a fairly comment event when you're stuck in cramped quarters for eight hours with hundreds of strangers breathing their own personal bacteria colonies into air that gets recycled over and over throughout the plane.
It hasn't been a good time to be sick. I canceled classes Thursday, not something I like to do in the penultimate week of classes. I suppose I could have showed up for classes anyway, but what I would have done in the classroom wouldn't have been teaching, because I WAS sick, I felt like crap, and I had trouble forming a coherent thought.
So I stayed home and poured water into my sinuses.
No one likes a cold, but I sometimes think I have an especially hard time with them, because I can't take most cold medicines. Most decongestants are also stimulants, and for me they exacerbate rather than mitigate the suffering a cold causes. One of the things you need to recover from a cold is sleep, and if I take a decongestant, sleep is something I don't get.
Several years ago in Iowa City, my beloved yoga teacher explained a technique for a particular kriya (cleansing exercise) she thought I should try. Called neti, it involves irrigating the sinuses with water. Done regularly, it's supposed to prevent colds, but I have found it hard to incorporate the practice into my daily life. Instead, I use it as needed to relieve the discomfort of congestion and to shorten the duration of any cold I do catch.
Here's what you do:
1. Get a small glass--a juice glass, say, with a fairly small mouth, to reduce spills--and fill it with room-temperature water (filtered, if the water in your area is tainted with things like chlorine). Add a little salt--not too much, or it will be unpleasant.
2. Have a sheet or two of paper toweling handy. Stand in front of your sink. Close one nostril by pressing it shut with your forefinger, then raise the glass to your nose.
3. Tip the GLASS toward your face precisely the way you would if you were drinking from the glass, so that the water flows easily and gently into the open nostril. DO NOT tilt your head way back and pour the water forcefully into your head, and DO NOT inhale or snort the water up into your sinus. That will result in that horrible stinging sensation we refer to as "getting water up your nose."
4. Continue to allow the water to flow into your nostril and through your sinuses until you feel water run down the back of your throat and into your mouth. There might not be much--most of the water will still be in your sinus. Nonetheless, feeling the water in your mouth is how you know the sinus is full.
5. Open your mouth and allow any extra water to run out of it into the sink. If you accidently swallow some, don't worry--it's just salt water, so it won't hurt you.
6. Repeat with other nostril.
7. Leave both nostrils open and repeat the process, allowing the water to flow into both sinuses.
8. Pick up paper towel and blow your nose until there's nothing left in your sinuses.
9. Repeat entire process again once or twice as needed.
This kriya is, admittedly, gross, but not nearly as gross as having a head so full of snot that your teeth hurt. It is also as effective as it is gross. IT WORKS. It will clean your sinuses out better than any decongestant. You may have to repeat the process once or twice, and you will have to blow your nose copiously and assiduously, but you will be amazed (and grossed out) by the amount of phlegm you will remove from your sinuses--you'll clear them out, in fact. You'll be able to breathe freely, if only for a half an hour or so, until your head fills back up with phlegm. Still, that half hour will be a very welcome relief.
Neti is perfectly safe and involves no chemicals except the salt you add and those already found in your drinking water, so you can do it as many times you as you feel up to. I find it very helpful to do this right before going to bed, so that I fall asleep more easily. I also do it not long after getting up, to clear out all the phlegm that accumulated during the night. The biggest drawback to doing it often is that the salt water can irritate the skin around your nose.
You can buy something called a neti pot, which looks about like a teapot with a long spout, so you can pour the water neatly into your nostril, but that means you have to spend the money on the pot and have this extra object in your home. A glass works just as well.
Posted by Holly at 8:15 AM | Comments (1)
August 20, 2005
I Love Needles
This is kind of maudlin and strange, but what the hell.
Every couple of weeks I drive 20 miles for a block of alternative health therapies: a chiropractic adjustment, a massage, an acupuncture treatment.
I start off with an adjustment from Jack, the chiropractor, whom I really like. He's young, 6'5", well muscled, blond, and affable. If you're going to let some guy you hardly know cradle you in his arms and squeeze until all your joints crack, it might as well be some hot guy with a slow, sly grin. Yesterday I told Jack I was just a mess, and he agreed–said my adrenals were shot and marveled at how toxic my system was, until I told him I've been treating my insomnia with booze, benadryl and prescription sleeping pills.
Bonnie, my masseuse, was astonished at how knotted and tight my neck and shoulders were, until I told her I've begun standing on my head for a few minutes every day as part of my yoga practice. She refuses to believe this is a good idea, even when I explained how it's supposed to massage your internal organs and give you a new perspective on your problems and flood your brain with oxygen etc etc. She had no sympathy when I cried out in pain as she dug her thumbs into these kinked lumps along my trapezius muscles, but at least I felt better when I got up off the table.
I save the best for last: I LOVE acupuncture. Maki, my acupuncturist these days, is a very cool Japanese woman who trained at the New England School of Acupuncture, the oldest school of acupuncture and Oriental medicine in the United States, also the alma mater of my other favorite acupuncturist, who lives in Iowa. I told Maki what I told Bonnie and Jack: that I was a mess, and she agreed. She started some process of assessment, then told me, "Your mind is so busy, isn't it. You think too much."
"Everyone tells me that," I said. "But it's hard to stop."
She paused, then said, "But it's your heart that's most disorderly. It's going crazy. What happened to you?"
So I told her some of what I've been dealing with lately. And then she started inserting needles.
One of the things I love about acupuncture is that it works: it has healed and improved so many of my ailments. Another is that it sometimes causes these funky altered states. It doesn't happen every treatment, but when I feel it coming, I get really happy because I know it'll be good. One part of my brain turns off and another part takes over and I go on this cool ride to someplace I don't get to visit often enough. When I felt the transition starting last Friday, I told Maki, "I need to tell you while I still can that I'm OK, but I'm going away now. And I won't be able to talk to you for a while."
Instead, I talked to my heart. I could feel myself having this conversation with it, I could hear it and I could feel it, could feel it as if it were a separate entity, this presence living inside me with an identity of its own, talking to me, telling me how I'd neglected it. It seemed terribly brave and strong to me, in ways that astonished and humbled me. I kept offering to protect it, and it kept telling me it didn't need protecting; it just needed attention from me, and nurturing after it got hurt.
So now, however cliched and silly it sounds, I'm trying to listen to my heart. I guess as I consider the matter it seems that phrase might have become a cliche because it can mean something real. And I'm trying to trust this bravery I somehow carry inside me, this refusal to accept protection and safety as a substitute for experience, discovery and growth.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)