zeptember

Last night I went to the bar with two of my house neighbors, and I drank two glasses of red wine. It’s the first time I have drank alcohol since October 17th, when I got blackout drunk.
I did not feel drunk off of the wine until I got home, and then I felt a bit tipsy and rambly at my husband, who got home at the same time I did.

I drank some water before bed, then read for awhile.
I went to bed and woke a few hours later feeling dehydrated and agitated. I drank some water and went back to bed.

Before my alarm went off, I had a nightmare.

I was in the bedroom when my husband or my brother or both people saw a huge spider on the wall. I ran to get a container to collect the spider and toss it outside. I returned to the bedroom to collect the spider, only to find that it was a giant scorpion. The spider upon first look had been about the size of my thumb, but had become this scorpion the size of my hand. The scorpion was dark brown in colour.

Still, I tried to collect the scorpion into a plastic water pitcher I’d found in the kitchen. The scorpion was highly agitated, and ran down the wall onto the floor. I slammed the pitcher on top of it and the scorpion went wild inside, climbing the walls and settling upside down on the roof of the upside down pitcher. The scorpion began smacking its tail to sting the pitcher, and to my shock, the stinger tried coming through the pitcher! I screeched and jumped and felt a nick on my thumb or finger, but continued to try to get the scorpion out of the house. The scorpion came out of the pitcher and began racing after me. I yelped out and hid behind a door but the thing came right for me at a fast speed. I got out of the way just in time, and tried to figure out how we’d catch this thing. Thoughts of a shovel came to mind at this point… no longer want to collect it but to kill it.

I woke - breathing heavy and panicked. Got up, used the bathroom again, tried to go back to sleep to no avail.

According to Dream Moods,
To see a scorpion in your dream, represents a situation in your waking life which may have been painful or hurtful. It is also indicative of destructive feelings, “stinging” remarks, bitter words and/or negative thoughts being expressed by or aimed against you. Your dream forewarns of a self-destructive and self-defeating path. The scorpion is also a symbol of death and rebirth. You need to get rid of the old and make room for something new.

I had been talked into attending Dickens Faire workshops on Saturday with a friend. I’d created a faux pas when acting in hastily assembled (crazed lunatic) character for a group, I did not greet Mr. Dickens himself in the preferred way. I was told later that the guy who plays Dickens is seriously full of himself, but it didn’t matter - I felt I had already let the guildmaster down somehow by this faux pas, and I brooded over it all weekend.

On Sunday, after a long day of continued homework for the class which finished on Halloween, which I’m very late turning in, I went to the bar with my neighbors and drank for the first time in a month. I knew I was being bad, since I have been in therapy for drinking, but I drank anyway. I felt guilty when I got home but did not outright tell my husband I’d been drinking. I was rebelling a bit, not wanting to be “caught” or “get in trouble”, but wanting to do what I pleased, when I felt I have things under control. I feel like there is no leeway - I feel like if I drink, people assume I will automatically be out of control every time.

Hence the scorpion dream.

Remember yesterday when I was upset that I’d become sensitive to the yellow label Clorox wipes?

It’s not that at all. One of our staff put bleach into the Clorox wipes container.

The problem with that is that Clorox wipes do not contain bleach. They contain AMMONIA.

Today I asked her why the hell the wipes reeked so badly of bleach, thinking my chemical sensitivity was getting worse again. She replied that she was cleaning the bathroom and wanted it extra clean, but then got the great idea to use the altered wipes on the children’s lunch tables, too.

She left the tables wet, right before lunchtime began. I went through and wiped all the tables dry, and lectured her.

She thinks I’m joking - I told her the fumes can KILL her/us. She warned me not to tell the management on her, and then after I left her line of sight, she whispered to another co-worker that she’ll just keep mixing up the wipes and bleach and store it somewhere where SHE can access it.

Ten bucks says she’ll put it in the janitor’s closet, a.k.a. the furnace room.

…gah… I just called the school - she’s still on duty, thankfully. I asked her about the wipes, and told her again what damage it can do. She said she used them all up today, and promised not to make any more.

This is the same person who last week tried to store a 3″ sharp knife in our outdoor classroom cabinet, in order to access it during lunchtime to cut her fruit. I had to also lecture her on that, telling her that we can be shut down if licensing makes a surprise visit, searches the place and finds the knife. Even then she’d given me the “oh that wouldn’t happen” look. I had to tell her in a stern tone with raised eyebrows, “I am serious. We are not even allowed to keep adult-sized scissors out here. Put the knife away.”

Three strikes and she’s out - I will in fact go to the management.

November 18, 2009 Edit:
Her third strike was on November 17th.

Many children have sweets packed in with their lunches. It is a policy that the children eat their protein, first. Of course, like most children, they go straight for the sweets. We remind them every day. Some children throw fits, others begrudgingly eat their protein. It’s a daily thing, no big deal, part of what goes with children.

This same woman I’ve been having a problem with - she saw a child (we’ll call him “M”) going for sweets/snacks and ordered him to eat his protein.

M protested, and she got angry with him. I had to go deal with other children who were trying to have a food fight. There were a couple other assistant teachers on lunch duty, also tending to other children (about 4 adults vs. about 34 children, yes we’re short-staffed this week).

When I was finished putting out the food fight fire, I looked over and saw that M was bawling his eyes out, and the woman was not near him. I went to him and he told me through choked sobs, “She told me my lunch is trash and it’s not!” I looked at his open lunch box - the snacks he wanted were now bundled up in a paper towel.

I found the woman at the next classroom’s lunch table. I went over to her and asked what she’d told M. She gave a smirk and told me proudly that she’d told M that if he didn’t listen to her and eat his protein, that she’d throw his snacks in the garbage.

I told her she has now upset M to the point that he didn’t want to eat ANY food. I told her that we are supposed to encourage, not force children to eat their protein. I told her not to do this again to a child. She looked at me like I was overstepping my bounds with her. She’s used to bossing people around (I thought she was a supervisor when I first started working there).

I resumed monitoring the children, and saw the woman go to M and talk a little more calmly. She was able to convince him to eat some of his protein. She unwrapped his snacks from the paper towel. I came back around to check on him a couple of times. He recovered and was soon smiling and being his usual boisterous self again.

When I went on my lunch break, I reported the woman to her supervisor.
Surprise, surprise, supervisor said she’s been hearing from other co-workers that this woman is harsh towards the children, but she didn’t know about the bleach/ammonia or the knife incident. She said she would talk to the director.

Now I get to walk on egg shells, wondering if this woman will be talked to, and wondering if I get to bear the brunt of retaliation if she’s talked to.

I seem to have every symptom for flu except for fever at the moment. It started yesterday with a mild sore throat that persisted into today. Then, around 3pm today, everything else hit:

All types of flu can cause:

* Fever
* Coughing and/or sore throat
* Runny or stuffy nose
* Headaches and/or body aches
* Chills
* Fatigue
-courtesy flu.gov

In addition to the above, webmd.com lists “ill appearance with warm, flushed skin and red, watery eyes” as a common flu symptom. Well, I have that, too.

It all started yesterday, when I developed a mild sore throat sometime in the afternoon. I’d worked ‘holiday daycare’, which means I spent much of the day inside, rather than outside, in close quarters with preschoolers. Several of the little buggers have wet coughs and runny noses. Some have clear snot, some have yellow or green snot.

The day before that, on Tuesday, I’d opened a door to a teacher’s classroom, gone inside and asked her if she had any eyedroppers and bottles that my co-teacher and I could use for our seed propagation project. She’d said she did not have any. This conversation is relevant later.

By the time I got home from work yesterday afternoon, I was feeling run-down. I’d had a crappy dinner, and asked for Tuckers ice cream (thus violating my sugar ban on the fourth day). Tuckers uses cow’s milk, like every other ice creamery does. I’m not supposed to have cow’s milk. Hello cravings! Within a few minutes of beginning to eat the ice cream, my stomach began to gurgle wildly. Hello lactose intolerance!

An hour of eating the ice cream, I got sharp stabbing uterine pains. This is reproducible 100% of the time, and yet I keep going back to eating dairy foods. The reason I get the pain is that dairy, especially cow’s milk, contains inflammatory prostalandins. For more info on that, read here, here and here. This may be relevant later.

This morning, my joints were aching. My knees and lower back were bugging me, so I decided not to bicycle to work, and to drive, instead. It’s the first time since November 2nd that I drove my car instead of biking to work, so I felt like the break from biking was okay. Plus, there was a chance of rain today, and I didn’t want to get caught in it like I was last week.

The uterine pain continued intermittently throughout today. After the children went inside from lunch recess, I began sweeping up the yard. My co-worker brought out lemon-scented Clorox wipes and began wiping down the tables. I gagged, the bleach scent was so strong. I looked over to double-check the type of wipes she was using and it was indeed the yellow label - the only label I thought I was still okay with. Dammit. Stupid chemical sensitivities.

As I continued to sweep the yard, my eyes began to water with thick gooey fluid. That’s when I knew for sure that my recent bout of eye allergies are triggered by the workplace. This may be relevant later.

I was on my lunch break when I sat upright on the couch in the lounge and nearly yelped from the pelvic pain. It felt like my uterus had been locked in one place and I was moving against it. So having consumed ice cream still had its effects on me. This too may be relevant later.

Around 3pm, as I was closing up my classroom for the day, I went to the open children’s bathroom and emptied out a container of dirty water into a sink. The noise of the water emptying from the container made me nauseous. My mind flooded with images of me puking water non-stop. This imagery made me want to vomit of course. The last time I was this ill from hearing water or other fluids pouring was when I was on a mushroom trip. Immediately following this imagery, I wondered if I would be getting that sick in the near future, and this was my body’s way of giving me a head’s up.

I went back outside to my classroom and wrapped up the data for our daily record book. While doing that, I was seized with severe fatigue, low and mid back pain so strong I wanted to cry, and a general blurry feeling all over. It’s hard to explain, but it’s similar to how I feel when I’m in a lot of pain from endometriosis. The world around me looks different - not so bright, and kind of blurry - and my head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton.

By the time I got home from work, around 3:45pm, I had severe chills.
I turned on the heater fan, the house furnace and put a heating pad under the covers. I changed into pajamas and went to bed and napped for a bit. I was freezing under two blankets, with the heating pad set to medium, with the heater fan going, and the furnace set to 70°F.

The thing is, with all that I’ve listed, most of it fits the bill for the premenstrual pain and suffering that I routinely experience, up to two weeks before george.

However, I remembered the scene from early this morning when I got in to work - the office was scrambling to avoid having a teacher come in to work. She’d called to say she has the flu, but that she couldn’t afford for hers and her students’ sake to miss any class time, so she’d be coming in only for a little while. The office was trying to decide whether or not to go to her house to prevent her from leaving, or to meet her at the front door and shoo her away. As it was, I heard later, that teacher DID show up to work to deliver some classroom materials, and the office staff shooed her away.

This is the same teacher - I’d opened the door to her classroom and I spoke to her on Tuesday.

Could be that she’s the infection point. Could be the children with their wet coughs and runny noses every day. Hell, we’d had a case of swine flu a couple weeks ago, and the staff decided to suppress the news, saying the mother said the child developed symptoms at home, not at school, and she kept him home for days. I found out because his teacher spilled the beans to me. Good times, eh? Covering up swine flu, a teacher coming in despite knowing full well she has the flu. No wonder the world still gets epidemics and pandemics. Stupid people.

…When I woke from my nap this afternoon, I checked out flu symptoms at flu.gov and then called my doctor’s office. It was 20 minutes to closing time, but I asked if I could be seen. They’d just stopped taking patients 10 minutes before I called, but asked me what was going on, and then did a run-down of symptoms checking with me. I was told I’d get a call back.

The on-call nurse called me back, we went over the symptoms again, and she told me she was pretty sure I have the flu, and that the doctor herself would call me back. She asked if I have had the flu shot. I told her I’d refused it because I have egg allergy (many vaccines, including the flu shot, are made with egg protein). She replied, “Oh! No you can’t get the shot, then.” Glad she didn’t fight me on the decision.

A little while later, the doctor called, and we went through the symptoms one more time. By this time, I had facial flushing, headache growing worse, sensitivity to light getting worse (all the lights in the house were off). As I ticked off my symptoms, I mentioned the back pain which came on suddenly and so severe that I wanted to cry.

The doctor interrupted me and said, “yeah, ya know, I’m sorry, but you have the flu, and tomorrow you WILL have a fever. You can NOT go to work. I’m sorry.”

She faxed in a doctor’s note to cover me for tomorrow, and told me to call back if I need an extension for next week.

We discussed over-the-counter remedies to help me through the flu (Tylenol, Advil, Pseudoephedrine), and she mentioned Tamiflu. I told her I would not feel comfortable pursuing Tamiflu based upon the side effects I’d read about, the fact that I’m super sensitive to all medications (I’ve hallucinated on prescribed minimum dosages of Tagamet, for example) and well, the news reports in general over the years. The doctor did not argue with me - in fact she said that taking Tamiflu only reduces symptoms by 1-2 days, and there’s only a select group of people she’d be willing to press to take Tamiflu.

When I got off the phone with the doctor, I broke the news to my husband, and added “I don’t want to be sick. I want to think she’s got it wrong. Maybe it’s just early george symptoms.”

Maybe it’s allergies. Maybe it’s because of the cow’s milk. Maybe it’s all of the above, but still not the flu.

It’s taken me a couple of hours to chronicle everything. In that time, it’s gotten very dark outside and I’ve turned on the overhead light. The light in the room, as well as the monitor brightness (which I keep reducing) has not helped with the stinging eye pain. I’m sore behind the eyes as well as experiencing the stinging in the eyes.
Meh.

So there is my über detailed influenza report, should I need it for the doctor, and non-influenza report, should I need to refer back to it again in case of ingestion of cow’s milk.

Stupid cows.

I am still getting canker sores. This is an ongoing thing since September 18, 2009. Always in the same spot. I think the longest I’ve gone since that time without a canker sore is nine days.

This latest one popped out late last night.

I was trying to figure out what to drink this afternoon, because I am bored with water and I’ve made a conscious decision to stay away from refined sugar again. I can’t remember when I went back to it, but it’s time I severely limit the sugar intake again. Of course, I do this now, right before the holidays, because I’m a glutton for punishment.

Anyway, I reached for some orange juice, and before I knew it, I’d sucked down an entire glass. Go sugar cravings!

And that’s when it hit me - I wonder if the canker sore happens when I drink orange juice?

Way back when I was around six years old and had that allergy test done, it came up that I am allergic to oranges. The doctor told me to stay away from all citrus fruits. Of course, I didn’t listen to him. I figured out on my own around the age of 14 I think it was, that of all citrus, I was seriously sensitive to pineapple. I had thee worst stomach ache of my life after drinking pineapple juice at the restaurant at the top of the Renaissance Center in Detroit one Sunday afternoon with my dad. I cried and howled in pain.

So now I am wondering if the orange juice is triggering the canker sores. I had read somewhere when I first started getting the recurring canker sores, that they can be caused by food allergies.

According to this article, “Avoid coffee, chocolate, spicy or salty foods, citrus fruits or juices, nuts, seeds, and tomatoes.”

Hm. Well I just had spicy Thai food for dinner last night, too, and chocolate earlier in the day…and on Friday I had coffee…

Well shit.

It’s food log time again! Stay tuned!