zeptember

I have a pet peeve.

When I am telling someone about how bad my recent virus-turned-lung infection is, and that person says, “but have you tried Mucinex?” And I respond with “No”, it annoys the living piss out of me when said person gives me a look that says I have utterly failed as a person and worse, that I have brought this worsening of the condition upon myself.

I know that this person has no idea that the last time I tried Mucinex, my face wanted to explode. This person has no idea that doctors kept pushing the Mucinex on me and that in January, 2009, I gave it another try just to say I did it - to prove them wrong.
This person doesn’t know that I ended up having to go on antibiotics again, anyway, because Mucinex makes it all worse for me. Either I have tiny ducts or really thick constantly inflamed mucus in my sinus cavities, or both. Mucinex, which is guaifenesin, is supposed to thin the mucus enough to allow it to exit the sinus cavities more freely. It never works that way on me. The stuff gets thinned out in the sinus cavities, but builds up like a pressure cooker, because the ducts themselves are either too narrow or easily blocked.

Yes, I’ve tried Mucinex. It doesn’t work for me. Yes, I drink enough liquids. I’ve been on soup, tea, electrolyte water and occasionally Lemon Ginger Echinacea juice constantly for two full weeks, now.

I didn’t have all of this history in my head to recite back to the person who gave me a dirty look for not taking Mucinex. I just know that I shouldn’t take it. That was enough for this person to judge me - to think that I wasn’t doing all I could do to take care of myself, or worse, making excuses to seek pity for my illness.

So I am laying out my history here for myself and for others. The person who judged me today won’t even know or care what I’m talking about come Monday if I try to recite all this back to her - people judge and move on to other things and forget.
I’m the one taking it personally. I’m the one trying to prove myself to others every time they give me that look and say, “yes but have you tried…?”
But what happens every time - is that I get all crazy trying to PROVE MYSELF, to PROVE A POINT, and to SHOW THEM THEY’RE WRONG - and who gets hurt out of it?
ME!

So I get just a wee bit touchy. Just keep your goddamned advice to yourself, OR if you really really think I need to hear your advice or hear about some latest drug or remedy, DON’T give me that look when I say I can’t take that drug or remedy.
Take me at face value. Don’t make me feel like I have to go and prove myself to you. Don’t make me justify my reasons. You can take what I say on its own and be satisfied that I know what the hell I’m talking about, or you can go shove a hot poker up your ass. And leave me the hell alone.

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.

On Saturday, October 24, 2009, I hurried to our storage unit in the backyard around 7am to grab some luggage for a weekend trip.

As soon as I opened the door, I saw a puddle of water in the center of the floor!

Just four days earlier, a storm had spent two days attacking my classroom. It hadn’t occurred to me to check the storage unit when I got home from work earlier in the week, because it had never taken damage before.

But there I stood on Saturday, staring down at a wet floor. I looked around for signs of leakage but did not find any. I guessed that perhaps the water had come from between the wall or had leaked somehow from the light fixture. I felt the boxes and luggage and other things near the puddle - they did not appear to be soaked.

But the problem here was that I did not have any time to begin cleanup of the storage unit; I was late for class.

I left a note for my husband, telling him what had happened. He had the day off work, so I figured he could spend some time assessing the damage.

That’s the second problem - I assumed he’d even give a damn about stuff in our storage unit getting water damaged.

It was more important to him to sleep in, take his time puttering about the house, and go to band practice, than to be arsed to start the cleanup process. I still don’t know how he accounted for all the hours in the day on Saturday. I was in class from 8am - 4:45pm that day. When I got home, I expected the bags to be in the car and for us to zoom off to Mendocino.

The bags were in the car but again, what the hell did he do all day? This made me so mad. I told him I am severely allergic to mold. I told him I assumed he would begin cleanup, that a flooding out of our storage unit is a bad thing.

He seriously thought I was overreacting.

I explained to him again, as I have numerous times in the past, that I grew up in a mold-ridden house and had bronchitis and sinus infections every year of my life until moving to California. I told him that I am seriously allergic to mold in any form - that washing out a moldy coffee pot one time, some of the water splashed onto my forearm and immediately I broke out in hives. Same thing if I get penicillin - full body hives. MOLD == BAD FOR THE ZEPT.
And while we’re on the topic, last winter, my husband’s car flooded out, because the moon roof leaked. He got the roof fixed and the car vacuumed and cleaned, but did so MONTHS after the damage.

The car still reeks of mold damage, and of course is the best working vehicle that we have, in which to drive long distances with. I expressed my disapproval at having to spend 3+ hours in a moldy, stinky car on top of having to come back and deal with a moldy storage unit.

My husband reacted by getting defensive. He’s SORRY, OKAY?

I dropped the subject so we could enjoy our first year wedding anniversary trip to Mendocino.

The very next day, an unexpected arrival of endometriosis pain pretty much ruined the trip for me, anyway, and I had a nightmarish, harrowing ride home Sunday night because of the pain and the pain meds.

I’ve been bedridden since yesterday, with no sign of the endometriosis pain and bleeding letting up in the next 24 hours.

We’d had a lengthy discussion last night about how overwhelmed we both feel about everything this year. He feels like he has to take on all of the housework, because I’m always so tired after work, or sick, or both. As a result, he lets the housework just sit there and accumulate. Then we both get depressed because the dishes, laundry and catbox are not taking care of themselves. The house looks like a sty.

It’s been since April - since I started the teaching job - that everything has fallen apart. We talked a lot about how we got to where we are emotionally and physically. I rehashed the MCS complications on top of the endo issues, and how I’m still struggling to accept this new problem, which has steadily gotten worse since September.

But neither of us had a solution.

I told him we BOTH have to step up to the plate and start ACCEPTING the reality of how sick I am with MCS and endometriosis.

I told him he has to start accepting his own severe allergy diagnoses and man up about housework to keep us BOTH healthy.

To this day, his nose will suddenly start pouring and he’ll sneeze so much I fear he’ll pass out, and when I ask what brought it on, he slumps his shoulders in resignation and says he’ll never know. And I look around the house and see acres of dust on shelves and ask if perhaps his severe dust mite allergy had just been stirred. He responds that there’s no way of knowing, that his nose just does that every now and then for no reason. Any factual logic I apply to the conversation is met with resistance and “but how do you know for sure.”

So last night I pointed to the three-year-old list of house rules that I had posted when we first moved in. I told him I had grown tired of being the only one to adhere to the strict housecleaning rules, so I had gone lax, too. I told him this was a mistake, and said we BOTH have to adhere from this point on. He was NOT happy about it.
The list of housecleaning rules comes from a pamphlet my doctor gave my mother when I was about six years old. It instructs one on how to clean a room top to bottom thoroughly for the person with severe dust allergy. My mother scrubbed my bedroom from ceiling to floor every week when I was a young child, because of how sick I always was. She became a housekeeper to learn how to do the job properly. Of course, since she had no husband to help her, and my brother and I were just tots, by the time we became adolescents she had all but abandoned the cleaning practice. Her grave mistake is that she did not teach us from an early age to do for ourselves. She figured we needed to be children and play, not work. Well the work is for our home, it is not child labour in the mines for cryin out loud. But I digress. I need to learn from my mother’s early perseverance. I have her strength in fits and starts. I need to not be disillusioned and bitter like she ended up. I need to constantly channel my disillusionment with my illness, and my bitterness of lack of help - channel it for more positive ends - and that means more time for creating and maintaining an allergen-resistant home, and less time for social outings and farting around on the Internet.

I have up to four days a month bedridden to do my farting around on the Internet.

As of this morning, my husband still had not called the landlord to inspect the damage to the storage unit, so I called her. As soon as I told the landlady about the discovery, she replied that she’s going on vacation, didn’t I get her email?

Nice way to shirk your duties as landlady!

I told her no, I hadn’t gotten her email. The landlady then proceeded to tell me that it was very strange that our storage unit flooded out, because none of the other units did, and hers at home didn’t.

How the hell is that even relevant to OUR unit?

She said she’d stop by to check out the storage unit.

After I hung up the phone, I checked my email. She had sent the email at 8am today, while I was still sleeping, and just an hour before my call to her. What a little shit.

She came by and checked out the unit, and proclaimed she could find no water damage to our belongings, and no drips or brown marks on the walls or ceiling, so the water must have blown in under the door.
She then asked if we have renter’s insurance. I said yes, of course. She smiled and bid me good day.

Well then! Written off! Take it elsewhere! Good day!

I got on Internet chat and told my husband what happened, and urged him to begin the cleaning process on the storage unit ASAP.

He can’t - he has band practice tonight - gotta practice cuz he has a show on Friday.

So I asked, “What about tomorrow?”

He replied, “[a friend] might be coming over tomorrow though”

This is where I put my foot down.

Me: “Dude. Mold. Mold trumps friends. My health trumps friends. Do you even CARE what is in the storage unit?”

Him: “Of course. I’ll reschedule.”

Me: “Thank you”.

Me: “or better yet, ask if he wants to come help. :p ”

Him: “There’s an idea. ”

To summarise my long-winded rant: My husband and I are a couple of princesses who have refused to accept that our housework will NOT get cleaned by itself. We have steadily refused to give up our playtime for creating and maintaining an allergen-resistant household, because it is a lot of work. We would rather spend hours on the Internet, watching TV, playing video games, doing homework, doing side projects, working full time jobs and socialising with friends than to take on the hard work of keeping our home healthy and safe. We have consistently chosen ill health over good health because we are lazy, selfish and hedonistic.

We are 38 years old but we act like we are 19 and living in a dormitory.

Even with me having laid it all out in a public forum, I wonder honestly whether I can change my ways, and I know for a fact that I will not be the one changing my husband’s ways - he has to do it himself, and that’s something else I have to learn to accept.

Today I went to a dermatologist for the first time. I’d made the appointment weeks ago but forgot to mention it here. There were two reasons I went:

1. I have a small red spot on my forehead, which showed up a couple years ago and never went away
2. I have dermatitis from food and chemical allergies

I got to my appointment, the doctor took a look at me after heard my concerns and family history (my dad, brother and first cousin all had skin cancer - all survived), and said outright that I do NOT have skin cancer. He asked me if my family had basal cell cancer - I told him I did not know but that I could ask. He replied curtly that it would have been helpful to know already. He then said I have an angioma, and told me that those are nothing to worry about, it’s just part of aging and happens to everyone and “is a sign that we are human”.

I asked him about some brown round spots near my ankles as well - he said those too are nothing to worry about. I’ve already forgotten what he called those - I’ll call back to get the name.

Regarding the dermatitis, he said it’s caused by exposure to detergents and solvents, and that some people are more sensitive than others. He said it’s not an allergy. I told him that when I eat anything in the bean family, or when I eat or touch gluten, my fingers split open. He told me flat out that he didn’t believe that to be possible, that he seriously doubted my claims.
I replied that whenever I even knead play-doh with children, my fingers break open and bleed within hours. He gave me a look that seriously said he thought I was retarded. I told him play-doh is made from wheat flour, which I am allergic to. This did not convince the man.

He asked what lotions and ointments I’ve tried. I ran down the list, and told him I’ve also been given a cortisone type ointment, but it made my fingers break out even worse. I told him that my mother once had a cortisone injection and had to be hospitalised from a reaction to it.

The doctor wrote me a prescription for Mometasone and sent me on my way.

I looked up the name of the prescription he wrote when I got home - it’s a corticosteroid just like the other stuff I’ve tried.

At that point I looked up the doctor on the Internet (cuz once again, I didn’t do that before the appointment - just found someone listed in the insurance book and got an appointment). He has two reviews but one is quite telling:

“don’t worry” turns malignant
by rcraig
March 23, 2006

The doctor saw my mother for a new mole that she was suspicious of. He told her “Don’t worry”. She trusted him and followed his instructions, and didn’t worry for months and months. I wish he had told her what to watch out for while she wasn’t worrying, as it turned out to be malignant melanoma.

* Cons: poor instructions, laisser-faire attitud

Can we say FIRED!?

Time to get a new doctor. I don’t play around anymore. I fire them left and right these days.

Dear Doctors,

Yours Truly,
zept

Ever since taking office, President Obama has promised health care reform, and has been pushing for it.

In July, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, also known as H.R. 3200, was introduced to Congress. Since that time, public debate has been happening all over the U.S., and people have descended into morons.

But this! This time it’s gone too far.

Finger Bitten Off In Fight At Health Care Rally
The Huffington Post
First Posted: 09- 3-09 08:58 AM | Updated: 09- 3-09 03:29 PM

A 65-year-old man’s finger was bitten off at a health care rally Wednesday night in Thousand Oaks, California. KTLA reports that the man was part of an anti-reform crowd:

About 100 protesters sponsored by MoveOn.org were having a rally supporting health care reform. A group of anti-health care reform protesters formed across the street.

A witness from the scene says a man was walking through the anti-reform group to get to the pro-reform side when he got into an altercation with the 65-year-old, who opposes health care reform.

The injured anti-reform man walked to Los Robles hospital to have the finger reattached.

He had Medicare.

A blogger who witnessed the fight from the pro-reform side says that the finger-biter was provoked:

The man in the orange shirt hit the pro-reform guy (I’m going to call him PR Guy just to keep the players straight). Hard. … He punched him in the face, knocked him to the ground and into that thruway. … He got up, tried to get back up on the curb, but Orange Shirt guy was in his face. Finger in his face, PR Guy standing, steps up to the curb, and there’s a scuffle. Orange shirt seemed to have PR Guy in a hold, but again, I was across the street, so won’t state that as absolute fact. Next thing I see is PR Guy’s hat being tossed into the street, both yelling at one another, then Orange shirt walks away, PR Guy picks up hat and crosses to our side.

When he gets to our side, he tells a story in one sentence: “He punched me hard, straight in the face, so I bit his finger off.”

MoveOn.org released a statement in response:

“Yesterday, MoveOn held over 350 peaceful candlelight vigils nationwide, in which tens of thousands of people participated in, to call for immediate action on health care reform including a strong public option.

“We have seen press reports that indicate at one event in Southern California a regrettable act of violence happened. While we do not have any more facts about what happened then what we saw in press accounts, MoveOn condemns violence in all forms. We have seen passions run high on both sides all summer in the health care debate, and we strongly believe that this nation deserves an honest, peaceful and respectful debate about health care reform.”

“While we don’t know if either party involved was a MoveOn member, we regret any violence that may have occurred yesterday, and we support the Ventura County Sheriff’s investigation into the situation. It is our firm hope that this event does not detract from the tens of thousands who were out peacefully making their voices heard for health care reform and a public option.”