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The Alternate Lexicon
autism, atheism, feminism, linguistics
but girl, you’ve really gone and turned it into an art
An update on the glasses situation:
I have exchanged convivial emails with Scott Urban, of the awesomesauce Urban Spectacles. His prices start at $650, lenses are included at cost, and all the fiddly stuff like inlays are (reasonably) more. Who has some money to give me? No?
I’ve also emailed with the Herrlich people, but no word yet on the pricing.
I’ve found a more different pair of faux-wood, though, that I sort of crave. They can be viewed here. Can I wear this shape?
wrap me up against the cold
Alright, first of all, I would like to whine because it is COLD DEATH HORRIBLE COLD and has been for weeks.
Look, I know that by choosing to live in the mountains of Virginia, I run the risk of both boiling in summers and getting at least one good snow a year in the winters. But it is cold and terrible and death and I think there’s a definite risk of frostbite at this point. I never lived anywhere colder, so having temperatures in the teens and twenties–that’d be in the -12 to -5ish range for you celcius lovers–for more than a day or two at a time brings out unprecedented levels of whining. Also, the radiator? Not so hot. Space heater ftw.
This wasn’t actually intended to be a long whinge about how cold it is, except that that lyric got into my head, so here we are.
What I intended to write about is how much I want some wooden glasses. See, my job does not yet know I am leaving–something I plan to leave to the last minute–but I do. I know that it took me 8 months of varying degrees of intensity of searching to get a job back in 2008. I know that I am pretty much disqualified from buying private insurance because of the migraine issue, not to mention this pesky autism stuff, and I’m too old to get back on my mom’s insurance (also, not a student right this second). Between trying to remember to make a dental appointment and worrying about how the gabapentin, rather than making me drowsy, is making me an insomniac, I got it into my head that I need to drop a couple hundred and buy some glasses.
My insurance is good, as far as insurance goes. The copays are not horrible, the premiums are not horrible. I have vision and dental, which is more than most people (should have taken advantage of this earlier, but I only remember going to 2 dentists–I’m sure I went to one as a small child in Atlanta, but I have no memory of this–and seeing anyone else scares me). I bought glasses pretty much as soon as my insurance kicked in when I started this job, but since my ’scrip is stable, I’d like to get another pair before I quit. Insurance pays for 40% of my total, flat. My lenses are cheap, because I am largely not blind, and the only special stuff I like is anti-glare.
After trying on a bunch of glasses and coming across a pair I quite liked, I started to really think about wooden glasses and how badass that would be. My first stop was Urban Spectacles, which involves hand-carved custom awesomeness (my favourite pair are ‘gold star’–love the asymmetrical bridge!). However, apparently prices start at $500, and I’m not even sure if he’s making them any more–even if he is, I doubt he takes my insurance. So. Second stop was Herrlicht, a German site with very little by way of information (linked directly to my pair of choice, in the reddish wood plzthx?); I’ve no idea what they cost or if they’re still operational. Third stop, however, may have been a victory. On page 6 or 7 or 8 of my google search (“wooden glasses”) results there came this website, an online glasses retailer with a pretty good-sounding return policy and super cheap. Yeah, they’re not wood (I’d want them in brown, as it’s most wood-like), but they’re probably the closest I can afford for now. I see no mention of taking insurance, but since they’re about $60 all up I guess I can’t whine.
Is getting two pairs of glasses exhorbitant? I’m thinking yes.
my favourite place is me and you
Today we mourn the passing of Edward Cullenmouse the First (he sparkles in the sunlight!). Last night he appeared to be in poor but stable health:
But sometime during the night, he moved on (warning, these pictures not suitable for children or kittens):
Edward Cullenmouse the First appears to have died of a stuffing aneurysm. He will be deeply missed by his owner, Prosper.
Tags: prosper
gave me a lake
I’m fairly certain that what I am drinking right now is the very definition of woo, some unholy combination of homeopathy and HBOT (hyperbaric oxygen therapy). And it is cracking me up.
(No, it isn’t giving me any more ‘Energy’, no matter what the label says. Yes, I bought it for 70 cents because the bottle made me laugh.)
and I notice these things
I really like the Aspie Teacher, and need to add her to my blogroll. I usually re-discover her blog when I’m playing on the autism hub and a new post comes up, and it’s always insightful and very helpful.
I’ve been thinking about perseveration since New Year’s Eve, when I read this post by her on the subject.
The idea that perseveration happens with emotions is one I had never considered, but is so true that I read it and immediately sent it to Kitty (“Yes. This!”). I tend to think about perseveration in the way I think most people do: obsessing about a special interest and having a hard time changing topics, fixed patterns of doing things that sometimes look a bit odd (like lining up toys rather than playing with them ‘correctly’ or having to eat one’s food in a certain order), echolalia. This post has really shattered those thoughts for me, made me acknowledge the depth of my tendencies towards perseveration–even when I seem completely normal, at ease.
There isn’t a time or age in my memory which I can point to and say I didn’t have perseverative behaviour and thoughts; some level of this is probably normal, because like with all things on the autism spectrum, it’s not the case that the behaviour itself is abnormal, just the severity. I have always tended to pick up a special interest, fixate havily upon it for a varying length of time, and then let it go. I think that the way that I played with my toys was probably a little odd–I remember that I enjoyed greatly dressing my dolls, but they didn’t tend to do much on the whole. I enjoyed setting up a scene, but not creating a story and then playing them through it. I read and reread the same books (and lots of new ones, too, but there are a handful of books I still reread when I feel stressed), many well below my age and reading level (the Baby Blue Cat is always soothing). I can’t remember a time when I did not repeat conversations (or rehearse conversations to come) in my head and sometimes outloud. But much more strongly than any physical types of perseveration, I emotionally perseverate.
What this means is that when I experience a strong emotion–the type most likely for me to notice I’m feeling (1)–I tend to get stuck in a pattern. I know my friends and family must be rolling their eyes, because it’s obvious, but I’d never thought of it in these terms and it’s actually really helpful and enlightening to me. Aspie Teacher describes it as a loop, like a broken record. I think it’s sort of like those toy trains with tracks in a circle. Once things reach a certain, unspecified level of feeling–once I’m on that track–I can’t stop going around it again and again without help. That help may be time, or the right input from someone else, or a distracting thing (though distracting isn’t a good long-term fix).
Perseverating makes you feel you’re trapped in your emotions, and they go on and on because no one else understands you enough to resolve the situation. Or you’ll think the situation is sort of resolved and then a few minutes later everything comes rushing back and you’re saying the same things all over again.
I fought with Stina and Dylan, about a week before Christmas. We’re okay now, as far as I know, but thinking about perseveration in this way has helped me work out why it happened in the first place. I have an unfortunate tendency to hold a grudge (which is really just long-term perseveration and an inability to forget?) and can’t always predict the small things that will suddenly become BIG THINGS and lead to this. The trigger was pretty stupid, and definitely not worth fighting over, but I got stuck in a thought pattern of being upset and every time I thought I was done, it all rushed back to me. Trying to explain to my mom and Kitty just felt like reliving it. I could not stop thinking about what was happening and my anxieties about the situation.
Venting online is kind of like winning a battle but losing the war – you may feel a temporary boost from the sympathy you get, but it won’t help you stop perseverating.
This is so true. But I would add that venting, really at all, is not very good for me. Explaining once is enough, because after that it just becomes part of the cycle of upset.
Knowing this now, I have some hope that I’ll be better able to catch this and stop it in the future. I also will be able to explain it to my therapist and hopefully make some sense so we can work on appropriate strategies.
Tags: ali, asperger's, autism, friends, frustrations, kit, therapy
noticing me noticing
This is how my year went:
January: Kitty arrived and we met up in NYC (along with Stina and Dylan). We got to see Wicked, and it was awesome. I also got killer food poisoning our first full day there and was unwell and cranky for most of the vacation. We came back to Virginia, where it was cold, with a lot of anxiety and depression for reasons beyond even the inhospitable weather to a girl who is temperature sensitive in old surgery scars and being in a rural, isolated community without a way to travel easily while I slept off nightshifts at a job I despised. This is not to say we didn’t have some excellent fun–we did!–it was just exhausting and saddening, largely.
February: Started off better than January did, Kitty still here, and with a lot of trips to the Blackfriar’s. But she had to go back to Melbourne at the end of the month, and that sucked a lot. Also, I began taking tompiramate to try to control my rising number of migraines again, and had an entertaining list of side effects to enjoy.
March: I decided I really was interested in pursuing med school (after thinking about it for months to myself), and my mom and I drove down to Savannah, Georgia, to check out the school I had targeted as my best option to finish my premed requirements. It turns out Savannah may actually be hell, hot and muggy even in March, with overpriced housing and a terrible number of bugs. Also, the university had stopped offering the premed program.
April: I turned 24 and had to find someplace to move. Because I had hoped to move to Georgia, Stina and Dylan were already set with a new apartment; luckily (?) there was a studio in the same house for rent, which suits my needs just fine. I mean, except the crickets. Those do not. But otherwise, yes.
May: Kit and I had our five year anniversary, separated by distance again. I can’t recall anything else of major importance, so May must’ve been fine.
June: Was long. I had a great job interview with a tutoring company, and found my car dead. I hiked to Whole Foods and spent a few hours on the phone with my mom, with her boyfriend, with Dylan, trying to get home. Dylan eventually was able to rescue me. I almost fell asleep in the bookshop waiting for him. Mom, her boyfriend, and I then had to load my car up on his tow (after they drove the 4 hours up here); it turned out that the battery was dead, after all that. I got a new car that was not evil. Kit came back to the US, and we again met up in NYC. I did not get food poisoning this time. I did have a major temper tantrum that lasted from evening of our last day in the city through to boarding the plane the next morning. But I also got to see Kate Miller-Heidke, wonder of wonderment (this is a semi-bad thing, as Kit did not get to see her–we forgot she’d need ID to get into the gig and she ended up missing most of it in traffic back to the hotel), and a lot of zoos. I love zoos.
July: Kitty’s vacation continued, with a trip to the drive-through safari (both awesome and scary) and the adoption of our evil kitten, Prosper. There were trials involving the loft bed necessary for my studio space, but this trip was a lot better than the January one as I’m at least now in some semblance of a town. Sadly, Kit had to go back to Melbourne again for school. I also completed my visit with my first adult psychologist, who turned out to be a bit of a nut with poor listening skills.
August: My migraines began really picking up again through August this year, starting an exponential increase that was sadly familiar. I got in contact with the great job interview again, to be told that they were restructuring and would get back to me soon. That never happened. I started seeing my therapist, who does not have poor listening skills.
September: I came off the tompiramate, as it was no longer stopping my migraines and the side effects were starting to get out of control. I had a quick trial of imitrex, which was useless. I also talked to Mom about this whole autism thing. I think it went well.
October: I had a brain MRI, which revealed a small lession, nothing to be concerned about–except that it made my GP panic and send me to the neurologist at the earliest appointment he could get (December?). I also got to see Kate again and, yes, it was awesome (Ben Folds was involved, and he was pretty fun, too).
November: Was long. Kit had a rough month, so I did, too, trying to be as empathetic and understanding as I can. She turned 23. I kept getting more migraines. I also started talking to my dissertation supervisor again. I booked my plane tickets to go see Kitty in May, for the whole month.
December: I applied to graduate with a graduate diploma instead of the MA (for now), which is an improvement as it’s doing something instead of pretending nothing is going on. I officially decided to move to Atlanta in April of next year, as Staunton has little to offer me at this point beyond frustration. I’m hoping being in a new place, a big city, will give me better job opportunities and the money to do my premeds. I saw the neuro, and he was mostly unhelpful. I started a trial of gabapentin against my better judgement. It snowed like a motherfucker–over 2 feet. I then slipped on black ice with apparently boiling coffee, and have burns across my shoulder and chest from it, some of which are looking like they may scar. I got some awesome presents and some silly presents. My car got hit and runned. I’m at work on New Year’s Eve.
I’m ready for 2009 to be over.
I like talking – when it’s a healthy back and forth exchange
I am so sick of doctors refusing to listen to what I say that I think I’m going to give up on visiting them. Clearly what I say has little to no bearing on their assumptions, so I might as well not go.
In September, my GP told me he wanted me to get an MRI of my brain to make sure that was fine. I said no. I was scheduled anyway, and left with a nearly $600 bill I cannot afford to pay.
He scheduled me for a follow-up with a neurologist for no clear reason. There is a small lesion on my MRI, but it’s very common in women with migraines (especially with auras), and I’m certainly well read on the various treatment options, so it’s not like his personal lack of expertise was detrimental to coming up with possible drug therapies.
The neuro started off quite nice, and seemed to be paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth. I gave him a pretty thorough history. And then came the big moment:
“So you’ve been on Zoloft, for anxiety?”
This question is the last thing I ever want to hear from a doctor. I will never, ever disclose this information again. I will make up an alternate medical history if I have to. This question means my concerns are no longer valid. Once a doctor knows this information, every single fucking thing I might be concerned over, like 4-5 migraines a week, can be attributed to a recurrence of my anxiety–even if I am not anxious beyond a reasonable level because I’m HAVING FOUR OR FIVE MIGRAINES A WEEK.
He asked me a few minutes later if I was stressed, currently. Well, FUCK, yes, I’m stressed. I hate my job, I have no social life, I am physically separated from my girlfriend by a couple continents and the largest ocean on earth, I’m struggling to make ends meet because of a stupid fucking MRI that I didn’t need, my car got hit and runned last week and now I have bills from that to pay, and I’m having four and five migraines a week. OF COURSE I AM STRESSED, ASSHOLE. But because I answer yes, and am not given a chance to elaborate, the answer to curing my migraines is not either of the drugs I was prepared to tolerate as suggestions (one of which is much less shitty than the other, but they were my two preffered choices having researched every single drug used for migraines on the market).
No. I clearly am just anxious and/or depressed again and need a reduction in stress. Have this pill. It will make it better.
“But I’m neither depressed nor particularly anxious,” I point out. “And the last time I took an SSRI, I gained 40 pounds and felt numb emotionally. I am not willing to try an SSRI again because of this. I would possibly consider an SNRI if we have to go down this route. But dulling my reactions to the stress in my life isn’t going to relieve my headaches, because stress isn’t a trigger as far as I can tell from the patterns I see. I told you that the fluorescent lighting at my work is a trigger, that’s why I get them there. Also, even if I bought your theory that stress is my underlying problem to be treated, I don’t want to do that with pills–that’s why I’m in therapy.”
But if you could just lower your stress, I really think–
“NO. I will not take that drug.”
Try some gabapentin, then.
I had dismissed gabapentin from my list of possible stuff to try very early on, and was annoyed that my experience of my migraines was being dismissed for some alternate cause, so I couldn’t remember quite why I rejected it. Then I got home. Now I remember.
These are the common side effects I get to look forward to:
“Back pain; changes in vision (double or blurred vision); clumsiness; constipation; diarrhea; dizziness; drowsiness; dry mouth; nausea; stomach upset; tiredness; vomiting; weight gain.”
The full list of side effects is horrifying. This is also an anti-epileptic, like topamax, which worked for a few months before becoming unbearable in its side effects. I don’t grasp how a different anti-epileptic for NOT SEIZURES is supposed to make any fucking difference.
Because I was already upset that he was ignoring my suggestions of triggers and ways to fix them, I let him write the script, and had it filled on autopilot. Now I have these drugs that I’m terrified to take and a follow up in two months to talk about them.
I never want to practice medicine with an office and patients and all of that bullshit. I think it must make you stupid, and an asshole. Every doctor I’ve seen seems to be–they start off nice, and then stop listening about halfway through and reccomend treatment for something other than why I’m there.
I am not taking this shit. It’s $10 wasted that I really can’t afford to waste, but I refuse to take this horrible medication. And I’m cancelling my follow-up with him, I think. Doctors who can’t be bothered to respond to any of my suggestions do not deserve my business. I just hope I don’t stroke, or kill anyone, from all the migraines.
Tags: ali, health, migraine, utter pedantry