austin's first anxiety attack

knowing how to parent is similar i think to herding cats. there are no rules, is no organization, and you can't be guaranteed any kind of outcome. you think you can anticipate where the cats will go and head them off at the pass, but alas, most often we are foiled. there doesn't seem to be any pattern to cat herding, and for the most part, there isn't one to parenting.

the two phone calls i got at school describing the physical problem that austin was having made me suspect that his issue was anxiety related. he is home with round #2 of the flu; he is home alone without me there as sickness watchdog; there have been a lot of things stressful going on for awhile. it stands to reason that stress is going to become a problem for him. after all, it is for me.

i got him in my room and in my bed for a couple of hours, where he shook and shivered for quite awhile. he wanted me to call his father. i did. no answer. i did reiki on him to see if i could get him calmed down. it may have helped. it helped ME feel like i was doing something constructive. he kept saying he was cold, but he had no temperature, and he didn't feel cold. all of his symptoms pointed to anxiety attack.

how i am going to deal with it when he wakes up is another thing. having been plagued with these all of my life, i know the various stages you go through with them, avoidance being the big one, and being scared shitless being the other. you think you are going crazy. you think you have something really, really wrong with you. you feel alone and no one can help you. throw in shaking as if you are having a seizure, and you have a very bewildering and disturbing experience.

the real issue is what has caused this. no small amount of irony that this occurred exactly 2 weeks after kee died. throw in stress over baseball, being sick, stress over baseball, amy, stress over baseball, basketball season ending, well...gee, any ideas about what could be causing the problem?

so what is my role in all of this? what should i do? i guess i will try and gently herd a cat...or not. maybe i will just watch and wait. i don't know whether he will bolt for a closet or under a bed as a cat does when you try and outsmart it out of a place it shouldn't be. or maybe he will be docile and want to "sit in my lap" and have his ears scratched...we'll see...

flu again...but not me!

austin has the flu officially, again.

sigh.

so we are now a household of tamilflu, apple juice, frantic phone calls to school because he feels sick. and there is the new sleeping on the couch phase, musinex dm reactions (hyper all night and that was no fun), another missed pitching lesson, more missed school, orange juice, food when you want it, food when you don't want it, upset stomachs...all the wonderful things that go on when you have a sick teen.

it is kinda weird having him be at home sick by himself. he has gotten a little scared the last couple of days, and has called me at school when something frightens him. this morning it was his feeling like he was going to barf after he took the tamiflu. this afternoon it was his leg was "cold" and that upset him. it wasn't numb, it wasn't hard to walk on, it was just cold. fortunately, i had kerry in the classroom, so i left school about a half hour early. he was fine by the time i got home with orange juice and a wawa sub...

baseball tryouts are monday, so i guess we have to get him in shape for that hopefully. he is here this weekend vs. going to bebo's. might as well keep all of the disease in one place...

brisket days...

cooking things on the smokey cooker is one of my favorite things to do. i enjoy the smell of the smoke and the end result. i have a relatively new cooker which i got couple of years ago, a stand up brinkman. however, i have had a couple of disasters on this the last few days with briskets.

a flat cut brisket is really the ideal. however, because i am cheap, i bought a whole brisket the last time and cut it into fourths. i froze the two thick ends, and tried to take the biggest part of it and cook it for my dad for valentines day. i had it in the smokey cooker for 8 hours and overnight. but it did not cook. my father was left with an uncooked, tough piece of meat that smelled great, but didn't eat great.

the other frozen brisket i decided to do myself, and sure enough, same result. i put it in the cooker yesterday afternoon and this time i used mostly mesquite wood and chips as fuel. but it still didn't get hot enough to cook it, and again, it was out there all night. i put it in reynolds wrap this morning at 8am and started cooking it at 225. it is now 2:30 and it is STILL cooking. i cut it in half and put the halves cut side down in a baking dish with a little water and tightly sealed it. i tasted it, and it is getting there, but it isn't tender enough for me yet. the house smells good though...mesquite bbq indoors!

feeling very mortal

usually i don't think much about death and dying, but his week it seems to have been an ongoing topic. right now, i would like to turn that page, but i am still bogged down in dealing with the changes in my life, all seemingly involved in death.

this past week obviously i had the kee situation, which is still with me like a cape over me. also this week as student's mother died from cancer on friday. she was 36 and left 2 kids, my student being the oldest. a teacher in the building lost her father. two students in our school were expecting a baby over xmas. i saw on the email that she was back from homebound, and then i saw the two of them in the hall. i walked up to both and said "hey! how's the baby? are you getting any sleep?" i didn't realize then that the baby had been born stillborn. the father told me this after the mother walked away. i don't think anyone could have created a hole big enough for me to hurl myself into...i didn't mean to do any harm, but in that kind of situation, you just feel awful. but that wasn't the real problem there. it was that those two had lost a baby. they aren't married, but the boy had really stepped up to the plate and was taking responsibility for the baby. he is still there for her. and i felt so bad for her. i can't imagine losing a baby after having carried it to term. that was a whole new spin for me on parenting and death.

the 50th anniversary of buddy holly's death by plane crash was also last week, and there were so many incidents in the paper of some sort of death...plane crashes, fires in australia, bus crashes, and a whole week that the RTD spent doing a series in the paper on the virginia tech massacres.

tonight one of the teachers at school called to let me know that one of our assistant principals had a heart attack in the gym after school on friday.

all this is making me feel pretty mortal, and i don't usually dwell on that. i am not sure if my anxiety is about the future, or from the past. i have to admit that kee's death affected me in a way i didn't think it would. he was a link to the "old life" at the old house, a time when things were relatively peaceful and happy at our house. kee was also the first stray i "rescued" and he was symbolic in ways i don't think even i knew about.

it seemed fitting that all three of us were there when he passed, and all three of us had to deal with our grief and memories by ourselves, in our own way. all of these things make me think i probably need to STOP thinking, but maybe thinking isn't the issue here. maybe it is FEELING, and i am not too good anymore about keeping those things down. i have lived most of my life stuffing that stuff down, but now i don't. that leads to a whole new set of issues and burdens. in some ways, i guess i am not much different than a kid. dealing with my feelings now is sort of uncharted territory. very confusing.

kee's last day

putting down an animal, especially one you have had a long time, is never easy. it hits a place that you sometimes don't even know you have, and it rakes it raw. but watching your child deal with this type of death for the first time makes the passage doubly heart wrenching.

it didn't occur to me that i would be a part in any way of putting kee down, but i ended up being there when he went to sleep. bebo made the mistake of leaving austin with kee and going to work. austin called me at school, sobbing, saying he just couldn't leave him. austin doesn't cry. i took it seriously, and left school and went to bebo's to wait with austin.

kee was thin, and hadn't eaten in many days. he drank water, and appreciated the grand amount of stroking he got on his ears. but he was dull and listless, and it was apparent that the quality of his life was gone. it was the right decision to make, but it wasn't what i had thought it would be.

instead of bebo taking him to do it, we all went, crying. austin wanted to be there, and we were, and it seemed to take an extraordinary amount of time, but he just went to sleep quietly.

austin cried off and on all day. he tried to go to school, but he lost it in his physics class and just came home. he said he cried at amy's for about 45 minutes, he cried at basketball when he told andrew, and ryan farrar came and got him and took him to the basketball game. afterwards, he went out with some of the kids on the team to nacho mama's, where he danced and sang karioke with some of the boys. he said it got his mind off of it.

i stayed home, read in between naps that i was taking because of the massive tear induced headaches that i had all day.

kee had a long run, and a good life. he is remembered for being just sweet, and dumb, and having been a good mouser and a better rabbit catcher. he once caught a rabbit that was bigger than he was, and he brought it to us, still alive in his mouth. i made him drop it, thinking the rabbit was dead. it was not, and it took off, after it got over being stunned, and hopped away. it was a pretty amazing thing to see.

austin's reaction to the whole thing caught me offguard. i think it was because there had been no precedent set in this area. he had no particular reaction when thing died, nor did he cry when doris died. who would have guessed his attachment to kee. but i think he thinks of kee as HIS cat, not one of MINE. kee lived in austin's room here for about 8 months, and slept on the bed and had his only human contacts mostly with austin. and then he went to bebo's to finish out his life, and austin had him there as well. he was the solo cat, and sort of lived the life of riley once he got to bebo's. he certainly ate well! in any case, this was a big passage for austin, and another one for me as well. kee was really the last link to the old life, and to austin's childhood when bebo and i were still together and we all lived at melissa paige circle.

Kee

animals that have gone by...sierra has been dead since 2000, and tomorrow bebo is going to put kee down. he hasn't eaten for 3 days, he is a skinny mess, and is peeing all over everywhere. the doctors don't know what is wrong with him, but being 14 years old may just be the answer. making the decision to put him down hasn't been easy for bebo, but the quality of kee's life is obviously reaching the point where the drugs and therapy they are trying on him are having diminishing results...

kee was the first of the "rescue" cats, four that showed up in the span of a couple of months. we took him in on the day that the race car driver davey allison died in a helicopter accident. he had huge ears, and appeared to be a bit slow. austin couldn't say kitty, so he called him kee, and we kept that. he wasn't the brightest star in the sky, known for standing in the rain meowing to come in, while you stood there with the door open and tried to call him in. he also got into a pissing match with thing where twice he peed on our bed at night WITH US IN IT. it seems that the two of them were playing king of the mountain. kee didn't exactly win. he got booted from the house and was the only indoor/outdoor cat we had.

when bebo and i split up, we decided to keep kee at the house and not disrupt him. i took thing and olivia, bebo got chili and kee. kee got bounced around a lot more than we thought, in that he lived at jacquie's with her cats when bebo was living with her. then when he got kicked out of jacquie's, kee came here to live in austin's bedroom for about 9 months until bebo moved to his mother's house after she died. he has been living something of the life of riley there, going in and out of the house and being fed wet food. it took him awhile to get used to chili and precious, the dogs, but he seems to have done ok in the last years.

i went by bebo's last week and spent some time with kee in my lap. he loves to have his neck scratched and is very persistent when he wants that. he also drools...but i knew then it would probably be the last time i would see him alive. he had a good run. i am sad. he is pretty much the last link to the marriage, the early years. chili came just a couple of years before we split up and she was always bebo's dog, even though i paid for her with my money from mamama.

animals are often links to parts of your life, and that makes it hard when they pass. my marriage was never the same after sierra died, and neither was bebo. i truly think the marriage for all practical purposes died that day, even though it didn't actually dissolve completely for a couple more years. santini's death was hard for me, for i had had him longer than a husband, a house and a kid. he was the middle link between my college years and my "domestication." it just doesn't seem like it has been that long since both sierra, santini and even ruby (doris' rhodesian ridgeback) died.

i am kinda wiped out, no energy and a bit weepy...

Daily Om-the importance of napping

and this is why i want to be a cat...i can nap whenever i want and wherever!

February 3, 2009
Restorative Slumber
The Importance of Napping

As we focus on the many obligations we gladly undertake in order to create the lives we want, sleep is often the first activity that we sacrifice. We’re compelled by both external and internal pressures to be productive during many of our waking hours. While this can lead to great feats of accomplishment, it also disrupts the body’s natural cycles and leaves us craving rest. Napping represents a pleasurable remedy to this widespread sleep deprivation. Though judged by many as a pastime of little children or the lazy, the need for a nap is a trait that all mammals share and an acceptable part of the day in many countries. It is also a free and effortless way to improve our health and lift our spirits. A nap is relaxing and can improve our mood, vision, reflexes, and memory. Lack of sleep, whether ongoing or the result of a single night’s wakefulness, puts stress on the body and mind. It can negatively impact your physical and mental health. At one time, napping was considered a natural part of life. In the past hundred years, however, electricity and modern conveniences have provided us with more time to engage in personal and professional activities. Consequently there is now less time for sleep. A mere ten minutes of sleep in the middle of the day can leave you feeling more cheerful and alert. A half-hour long nap can sharpen your senses and refresh your energy reserves, and a shorter nap can even sustain you through a long day. Napping can help you make up for lost sleep and serves as a supplement to your usual sleep schedule. You may need to give yourself permission to nap by making naptime a part of your day. Feelings of guilt about napping or being preoccupied with other activities can keep you awake when you are trying to take a nap. If you need help, surround yourself with soft pillows and blankets or soothing music. Try to take a nap at the same time each day and use an alarm clock to ensure that you don’t fall into too deep a sleep. Learning to nap and enjoying its benefits can help you reclaim your natural right to nap. You nourish your being every time you take a nap

cymbalta blues...

For the most part, i would have to say that i am a believer in "better living through chemistry."

however, i am also a huge contradiction there as well. i take the antidepressants and know i really can't live without them. however, any other drug i worry about. my great fear is a drug reaction where i will go psycho and lose my mind and will never return to the world of the rational. i don't like to be out of control. in my younger days, i certainly abused the drugs to get high. or rather, to get away. in those days, if i took enough prescription or over the counter stuff, i could take a temporary chemical vacation and be numb. unfortunately, the optimum word here is temporary. all the alcohol and drugs did was postpone the inevitable, which was a confrontation with my own demons. they caught up with me in college when i had a complete breakdown the spring of my junior year. for the longest time i had no recollection what i did during that spring. all i know is that i woke up one wednesday after having had another bad experience with pot, got in my car and came home.

fortunately, it was one of the few times my mother did the right thing, which was to give me some space and not make me feel bad for what i had done. what i remember is that she sent me to southern states to buy seeds to plant a garden, which i did. she didn't ask me much about what i had done, although i did tell her i thought i was going crazy. i went back to school on a sunday, but for the rest of the quarter, my routine was to come home on every single weekend. i lasted until the end of the school year, but then came home and collapsed and pretty much didn't leave the house all summer. my only social outing was that tom and cindy came and took me to see the STAR WARS movie. my mother took me on walks around the neighborhood. other than that, i didn't see anyone or do anything and i don't remember much more than that. i did work 21 hours a week at texaco sorting mail in the early morning. but i was home most days by 1 pm at the latest, and i went into my cave. i was very fragile. going back to school that senior year almost didn't happen. the only way i would go was to get out of the apartment situation i had set up with 2 sorority sisters. i went back into the dorms and had a freshman for a roommate. my whole life, who i hung out with and what i did, changed radically. i quit smoking, drinking and drugs on that wednesday years ago and haven't gone back.

it took the onset of fibromyalgia and the need for the drugs before i could finally see how chemically bereft i was. i was 40. and within the span of 3 days, i was a whole new person, a new card carrying, banner waving member of the prozac nation! and that worked, for 7 years, and then it didn't work as well. my doctor switched me over to lexapro, the newest big thing then, when bebo left, and i started all over again. but i don't think the lexapro has been working like it should for probably 2 years. and so now, another change.

most people on antidepressants have played the drug shell game trying to figure out which one is right for your system. this one started out great, but now is leveling off with some irritating side effects. i think the joy ride i was on for the first 3 weeks was coming from the combination of the cymbalta going into my system and the lexapro coming out. i had both in there at the same time. but the lexapro is gone for good now, and i have leveled off. i enjoyed that level of energy and lessening of pain that i had during those 3 weeks. i miss it. i want it back. and i want the headaches to go away.

so what does all this mean? it means i am thinking about it. i am thinking about i might have to do to get this right, which would be to try another drug. i don't want to do that, because i don't like playing chemical poker. you can lose, you can win, or you can just quit before you lose or win. and i am not sure what to do on that account.

but i am thinking about it. hey, didn't i already say that? yes, i did.
i am thinking about it...and that's good, huh?