Shit happens

Shit happens. It’s one of those proverbial laws of nature. Given that, I’m not so sure why it always seems to knock us for a loop when it comes to pass. The truth is that we craft our lives in ways we think will allow us to bypass the shit nature inevitably is going to splatter all over us. Until we can’t. Until one day you meet the shit storm of your life and it confronts you, collides with you, commands your attention. And when that happens, you’re almost always naked, or wearing your crummiest pajamas and no make-up. But shit is not something you can ignore. There’s no room for denial on the day the facade crumbles. No euphemistic way to steer clear of the storm that threatens to destroy you and decimate your home and family.

I had a friend who used to say, “The only way through stuff like this is…through stuff like this. There’s no plane you can take to rise above it, no speeding locomotive through the beautiful countryside, not even a Vespa.” You have to walk your path, wherever it leads. I guess that’s the scariest part. Once you realize that all the planning, precision and platitudes aren’t worth a hill of beans, you can’t ever go back to the myth that you’re in control of your own destiny.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t matter how you play the game. It matters — a lot. But sometimes the rules change and you didn’t get a say in it. At that point, you can sit on the bench and opt out of playing altogether. But the better options seems to me to be to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, resolve to memorize the new handbook and go at life with a renewed vigor and determination to win that’ll prove to the world who you really are and just what you’re made of.

So forgive me for sparing the details in this little diatribe. Suffice to know that we are regrouping, huddled tightly together as a family, and preparing to face the challenges and uncertainties of life’s fickle finger with bold, fearless persistence, tenacity and commitment.

It’s an adventure. As one of our newly proclaimed villains used to say, “We asked for a roller coaster. Life’s never going to be boring.”

With heartfelt gratitude to all for the love, support and positive energy.
d

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Shit storm

NOT how things work in my world!

It is 3:30 in the afternoon. I am late to pick up Eli from the bus stop and I am literally standing ankle deep in sewage in my bathroom. The toilet continues to vomit out shit like it’s a prop in some kind of horror film and my husband is too busy to come to the phone and tell me how the hell to turn off the water flow so I can stop the excrement from flooding the rest of my house.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you think, “Wow, this is just not how I expected my life to look?” I finally figure out that by pulling the small white handle thingy behind the toilet you can shut off the water flow. But this does nothing to lessen the reality that I am out of towels, covered in shit and watching the steady stream of sewage seep ever closer to my beautiful wood-planked bedroom floors. HELP!!!

I am thoroughly disgusted. Shit is just something that’s hard to move beyond. We talk about life being “shit,” of “shit” storms, crocks of “shit,” holy “shit,” “shit” for brains. It’s like we’re a nation obsessed with “shit.” People wear “shit-eating” grins, they get scared “shitless,” they pontificate about bears “shitting” in the woods. Our culture is full of “shit!” Maybe there’s a metaphor here for me to learn from, a symbolic rationale for why I am mired down in “shit” in the middle of the desert when it’s 113 degrees and there’s no sign of it ever cooling off again, EVER!

We watched this movie the other night on Netflix about a guy who was being tracked by a vicious killer and his dog. The guy was hiding in an out house and the only way to escape capture and death was to climb into the toilet and plunge himself into the sea of waste beneath the house. He immersed himself completely and was able to breathe using an empty toilet paper roll. “Do you think you could ever do that?” I’d asked my husband. “Of course,” He said, “If my life depended on it.”

“I’m not sure I could,” I had proffered. “Even to save my life.” I guess this is my punishment for not recognizing the value of life as compared to a minor bout of revulsion.

Oh well, they say shit happens for a reason. Let’s hope it’s a good one.

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Chiropractic Care…well, sort of

Okay, so I broke down and went to a Chiropractor. Now I’ve been to Chiropractors before. In fact, I believe they do good work and can heal certain muscular, joint and alignment issues. But after my husband’s constant barrage of scientific studies citing all kinds of devastating chiropractic mishaps, I’d pretty much sworn off them entirely.

Until last week, when my writing partner practically insisted I go see his Chiropractor or else stop bitching about my constant back pain. I succumbed to the not so subtle peer pressure and made the appointment.

The Doctor had asked me to bring my MRI films, X-rays of my back, and any doctors’ records I might have about my herniated disc (L5 S1 in case you were wondering.) This sent me into a slight panic since I am, without doubt, the least organized woman on the planet. I spent the next two days dismantling my house in search of those damn films and records.

Miraculously, I found a thick, overstuffed manilla folder labeled “Healthcare – Debra” crammed into my disorderly file cabinet. A cursory perusal of the folder showed various films, radiology reports, and several detailed drawings of recommended physical therapy exercises. I proudly tucked the folder into my tote and headed out apprehensively to meet the bone-cracking doctor.

After a lengthy interview, during which Doctor John, as he’s called, took a lengthy history from me and explained why chiropractic care could help me enormously, he asked to see the films. I happily complied and turned over the entire packet.

He paged through the documents carefully, offering a few compulsory, “mmm hmms,” and nodding thoughtfully. Then he pulled out the stack of films and began to inspect them one by one. I admit that his befuddled look was slightly alarming to me. I worried that perhaps he’d discovered something even more serious as he examined the magnetic images of my spine. Too fearful to ask, I simply sat, perched on the edge of my chair, awaiting his assessment.

He held up the final film, looked at me directly and said with a delivery as deadpan as Bob Newhart’s, “Thank you for bringing me your mammogram pictures. But I don’t think they’re going to be terribly helpful in relieving your back pain.”

I was mortified. OMG, how did I do that? What an idiot! He offered a few comic, yet tasteful comments about how we women always seem to work our mammary glands into any situation. But even his lighthearted, affable tone couldn’t minimize my embarrassment. After a while, I did regain my composure and we moved through the exam and treatment uneventfully.

I like this Doctor. I do. And I’m going back. Despite the fact that I’m certain to be the butt of humor at his next Chiropractic convention, and will forevermore be shorthanded in the office as the “breast lady.” I suppose it could be worse. I could have brought him a colonoscopy report.

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Confirmation craze

You are still coming to your appointment? Aren't you???

I know times are tough. I know Doctors have been given the shaft. They’re getting squeezed by the government. They’re getting paid less and less by insurance companies. Patients are suing them over mis-diagnosed hang nails. It’s not easy. Believe me, with a husband in the biz, I see the problems within the healthcare industry on a daily basis.

But still, this is ridiculous. Doctors need to suck it up, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and stop wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Showing your sensitivity and exposing your insecurities may be the ticket for dudes on the prowl, but it’s not an attractive physician feature. So I’m sorry if you docs out there are feeling insecure, but don’t be so obvious about it.

I do realize that people are flaky and often forget about appointments. I think that confirmation calls are a fine way to insure your schedule stays on track and doesn’t end up with holes the size of the Grand Canyon. But what’s with requiring patients to call back and confirm that they received the confirmation call and will actually be at the scheduled appointment? It’s a pain of colossal proportion and I resent it immensely.

I used to joke that my dentist had abandonment issues because he was the only one I knew who participated in this silly double confirmation call policy. I found it annoying albeit slightly amusing. But the practice has caught on and it seems that everyone from the kids’ orthodontist to the chiropractor is requiring patients to call back after receiving their reminder call to reconfirm their intention to show up at their appointment. Really?

It’s kind of like sending a thank you note to a bride for her thoughtful note of acknowledgement over the Lenox place-setting you sent her. It’s like an endless, interminable cycle. And honestly, I don’t have time to call back every friggin’ doctor my kids have appointments with. Look, I took the time to make the appointment. I’m a responsible adult. Have a little faith in me, for gosh sakes.

I know that life is tenable. Relationships are fleeting. Disappointment hurts. But, you can’t live your life worrying that everyone in it is going to let you down. It’s just not…healthy. This kind of cloying neediness is unattractive and I’m telling you, it’s gonna drive people away in the long run.

Trust that you are important and that people will show up at their scheduled appointment times . Believe in your own internal value. You don’t need this kind of redundant external reinforcement. Your good enough. You’re smart enough. And gosh darnit, people like you.

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He woke me! He really woke me!!!

This gallery contains 1 photo.

My mom, on the other hand awoke startled, bolting upright like an overdone pop-tart shooting out of a burning toaster. She’d accost you with a hysterical “What’s wrong?” or a frantic “Who died?” It was just…stressful to wake my mom.

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Shhh! I’m trying to listen to myself!

Paper tigers can scare you as much as real ones!

Why is it we think our kids can escape the struggles we’ve spent our entire lives battling against? That’s what I kept thinking as my 10 year old son’s “talking doctor” explained to him that some kids have “worry brains” that always imagine the worst case scenario in every situation. So when I called my husband last night and asked him to meet me down the block so that our puppies didn’t become dinner to a wandering pack of coyotes I’d encountered, my son was certain that the phone call that led my husband out the front door was a tragic announcement of the demise of both myself and our beloved canines. It took several hours and a great deal of cognitive determination on all our parts to calm my son and finally coax him into bed.

But as I listened to him retelling the story today, there was something unnervingly familiar about his process; almost an eerie sense of deja vu engulfed me. Why? Because he is me! The anxiety. The worry. The incessant voices predicting doom and gloom. My first “talking doctor” called it “catastrophizing.” My son’s dramatic reactions are no different from the way I respond when instead of returning home at 6:30, my husband doesn’t arrive until 7:30 and I take myself step by step through the difficulties I will have to face as a newly widowed mother of two young boys.

I can’t help it. I tell myself irrational stories that scare the bejesus out of me. I’ve done this for as long as I can remember. Frankly, it amazes me when I meet people who don’t live in this type of constant agony. I try hard to contradict the voices that drone on in my head. Sometimes I’m even able to convince myself that whatever impending tragedy awaits me is merely a “paper tiger” as my dad used to say when I was a little girl and my anxiety first surfaced.

But somehow I conveniently forgot about brain genetics when I decided to have children. I guess if I’d realized that my sweet young babies would one day grow up to battle the same mental demons that have pursued me with such unwavering commitment all these years, I might have thought twice about having them. But then where would I be?

Maybe there’s a cosmic challenge here, a symbolic gauntlet that’s been laid at my feet. I need to stop the worry voices in my own head so that I can guide my son to a place of peace and ease within himself so that he doesn’t spend the rest of his life held hostage by a bunch of menacing voices whose only purpose is to keep him from becoming the amazing person he’s meant to become.

Hmmm…easier said than done.

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Therapy queues

The doctor is in...if you're willing to wait a few hours.

In a million years, you will never guess where I stood in line this morning at 6:30a.m.

Go ahead. Try.

Ticketmaster for tix to see the next popular, but sold out Garth Brook’s concert?
No.
Top-rated, coveted charter school to secure a spot for my boys for fall 2011?
No.
Hip new yoga studio for Swami Krishna’s hot yoga flow class?

No.

I stood in line at 6:30a.m. to reserve an after-school therapy appointment for spring and summer for my eldest son. I’m not joking. In order to snag a 4:00p.m., every-other-week appointment, we had to line up, with a host of other patients, outside the doctor’s office for more than an hour prior to the office’s opening.

Has the world gone mad? Queuing up at a psychologist’s office, (who not surprisingly does not take insurance), as if we were trying to get a table at Pizzeria Bianco? I felt like a complete moron.

But what choice did I have? I’ve tried taking my son out of school during the day for what we like to call “talking doctor” appointments. It’s an utter disaster. The conspicuous nature of an early school departure creates so much anxiety in my son that it renders the therapy session completely moot. They need to spend the whole 50 minutes talking him down over his missed class assignments and never get an opportunity to address the deeper, more pressing psychological issues that are causing him distress.

So instead, I opted to wake up at 5a.m. in order to be on the road by 6 and in line by 6:30. We ended up being 2nd in line behind a woman in a folding chair with a thermos of hot coffee who looked as if she’d possibly slept there the night before.

Her son had some serious psychological challenges and she confided that she’d been queuing up like this for 12 years! She confessed to hating the almost humiliating “groupie-esque” process the office insisted on using in the name of fairness. But this doctor had saved her son and helped them to restore some semblance of peace in her family. At the end of the day, it was worth the quarterly degradation of standing on line to secure a post 3p.m. appointment.

We did manage to procure a coveted 4pm spot. And I suppose, if all goes well, I’ll be back mid July with all of the other patients, vying for a 4p.m. fall/winter spot. Those are even harder to get I was told by one of the other veteran moms in line.

Not sure why this irks me quite as much as it does. I guess it sort of takes the personal relationship feeling out of the therapy equation for me. But I’m not the one who needs to feel connected to this doctor. My son really liked him and felt he was someone he could talk to.

So I guess I’ll just accept the fact that being a parent is a lot like being a place-holder in the long line of life. You stand around a lot, wait for something allegedly great to happen, and then, you pay through the nose for whatever it is you thought would solve the problems that ultimately end up working themselves out in spite of your consistent interference.

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In defense of the peanut!

STOP BLAMING THE DAMN PEANUT!

Poor parents. We’re so misunderstood. We’re just trying to do the right thing and protect our kids from a devastating legume and then someone, well, a lot of someones actually, comes out and throws a bunch of annoying facts around and we have to face the truth. We are responsible for the plethora of peanut anaphylaxis plaguing our offspring.

I know, it’s like so hard to swallow (tee hee). Here we are delaying introduction of the dreaded edible in order to protect our youngsters, when incontrovertible research now shows that it is in fact this late introduction that causes the dangerous allergic reactions we are trying so hard to avoid. What was that? It’s true. The research shows that it is precisely our delaying the introduction of peanuts into our kid’s diets that’s responsible for the unprecedented surge in peanut allergies.

You see, there is a window theory that has dominated our nation’s feeding philosophies for years. It says that if you introduce foods too early, or too late, you will increase allergic diseases later in life. These allergic diseases include: Food allergies, Eczema (Atopic Dermatitis), Hay Fever (Allergic Rhinitis), wheezing, and Asthma. Many of us remember the dire warnings to avoid eating peanuts during pregnancy and to never feed a baby anything peanut tinged until at least 3 years of age.
In December 2008 the AAP released a policy statement saying that although solids should not be introduced before 4-6 months of age, there is no current convincing evidence that delaying their introduction has a significantly protective effect. This includes foods considered to be highly allergic, such as fish, eggs, and foods containing peanut protein.
Many studies now confirm this finding. One of the more comprehensive 5 year studies showed that delaying introduction of peanut protein to 2 or 3 years of age did not decrease the rate of allergies at all. In fact, there are convincing studies that show that earlier introduction of these foods actually decreases allergies. The best study that demonstrate why feeding early makes sense is a study done by Du Toit, et al in the Journal of clinical immunology, nov 2008. This study followed 5615 kids in Israel and 5171 kids in the United Kingdom, all of Jewish descent to assure a similar genetic makeup. The Israeli kids ate peanuts earlier and in larger quantities than the English children and had a 10 fold lower rate of peanut allergies than the UK kids.
Another paper, recently published in the January 2010 issue of Pediatrics by Bright, Et al., was a Finnish prospective cohort study. It concluded that late introduction of solid foods was associated with increased risk of allergic sensitization to food and inhalant allergens. Specifically, the study showed a significant increased allergic risk by delaying fish past 8.2 month and eggs past 10.5.
Here are a few convincing tidbits of information from various studies:
– Pediatrics July 2008; Snijders, et al: Delayed introduction of cow’s milk and other foods was associated with a higher risk of eczema (a type of skin allergy)
– Pediatric allergy Immunology, Feb. 2008; Prescott, et al: Tolerance to food allergies appears to be driven by regular, early exposure to these proteins during a critical early “window” of development.
– Acta pediar. May 2009; Wennergrad: Elimination of food allergens during pregnancy and infancy failed to prevent food allergy. Instead several studies indicate early introduction of foods like fish and peanuts may be beneficial. Conclusions: early introduction rather than avoidance may be a better strategy for the prevention of food allergy. (This was a meta analysis)
– Pediatrics Feb. 2006; Zutavern : Cohort study- no evidence to support delayed introduction of solids beyond 6 months of age to prevent Atopic disease.
Archive of Childhood Diseases 2004; Zutavern: late egg introduction increased eczema and wheezing.

The fact remains that food allergies are increasing at an alarming rate. (20 years ago we had never heard of “peanut free zones”). According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), in 2007, approximately 3 million children under age 18 (that’s almost 4 out of every 100) were reported to have a food allergy. The prevalence of peanut allergies has doubled in the 5 years from 1997 to 2002 (Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology Dec. 2003.)

Maybe it’s time to reexamine our feeding philosophies. The facts are clear. Early introduction of high risk foods is the best way to avoid allergies later in life. But we’re all so darn afraid of making a mistake that we overcompensate and choose to delay, or even decline, the introduction of certain foods, like peanuts, and we miss the critical window of opportunity for safe introduction. Our fears are actually causing more harm than good.

And because this is such a hotly debated issue in our culture, the media has shied away from reporting these findings.
Maybe it’s time to tell the truth about peanuts and offer an alternative view of the beleaguered legume. Especially when that view is based on solid research, clear clinical data, and scientifically sound evidence.
So dare to stand up for the unfavorable protein! Go on, I say, break out the pb and j for junior; and the sooner the better.

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Cough Suppressing

Eli’s home sick today and I’m feeling pretty cruddy myself. I just got over a two-month bout of pneumonia and am more than a little bummed that I feel it reasserting itself. I have my post antibiotic doc appt. at 1:00 and since I’m still feeling bad, I figure I should go. So I pack sick little Eli into the car and drive across town to the doc’s office.

Eli, who’s been feeling tired but not horrible, immediately begins to melt down the moment we step into the office. I sign in and shuttle him over to a quiet bank of chairs. He dramatically drapes himself across three chairs and places his head on my lap. Then he proceeds to cough rhythmically to the beat of the muzak that’s playing overhead.

I start reading some magazine about losing three dress sizes in two weeks and quickly lose consciousness of the coughing. Suddenly this elderly woman from behind the desk marches over to Eli and gets right down to his face and puts two pieces of tissue into his little hand and says, “Why don’t you use this to cover your mouth the next time you have to cough.” She then turns on her heel and marches back to the safety zone of her desk which is behind one of those waste high check-in counters.

“Excuse me?” I say barely audibly. She doesn’t turn around. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought this was a DOCTOR’S OFFICE. You know, where sick people come. To get better. Maybe I’m mistaken.” I am now working myself into a state of pure ire. I mean, he’s four years old. Forgive me that he doesn’t always cover his mouth when he coughs. Personally, I’m just happy that he says “excuse me” when he “boom booms.”

Am I wrong here? Is this lady out of line? Being the wimp that I am, and because of my rigid upbringing to respect my elders, I do not confront the offending woman. But I’m seriously irritated. I mean, we’re sitting in a doctor’s waiting room and my son is sick. That hardly seems like such a bizarre occurrence that it would warrant a rude talking to by the office staff.

But you’ve all disagreed with me before. Please, tell me who is right.