On Wednesday and Thursday, I had to “babysit” for Amy. Mom had to go to the doctor yesterday (Thursday) because she thinks one of her medicines is causing the rhabdomyolysis to come back. She may have been right. The family doctor ordered some tests, including one that measured her creatinine. Apparently, in the short time that has passed between her visit to the nephrologist and yesterday’s labs, her creatinine level has gone up. That isn’t a good thing, especially for someone who has kidney failure going on already. The doctor said that if the rest of the kidney function tests come back with poor results that mom will be referred back to her nephrologist for further care–even though mom is never really out of his care. (A good deal of the time, her other doctors have to consult with him before they can try new medications for her, just in case the drug might make her kidneys get worse. Some doctors don’t really enjoy the whole playing with others thing, which is usually what leads to badness.) So, we’ll probably find out next week what the next course of action is for her.

Mom had her recheck with the kidney doctor today. Her kidneys are continuing to get better from their failing state from last year. She’s still in kidney failure, but it is still improving. That’s a good thing. The only bad news that she really had from the doctor was that her potassium level was too high. She was told last year that she needed to watch out on the potassium, but it wasn’t as important to keep a watch on as her sodium consumption. She’s cut the sodium out quite a bit, but she started eating more and more potassium laden food (sweet potatoes, okra, etc.) and now she’s got to figure out how to cut back on that. She whined some today about how there won’t be any food left that she can eat once she adds low potassium into her low sodium diet. If she would lower her sugar intake, like she is supposed to, I might think that she was being a bit less over-dramatic about that comment.

Tomorrow I finally get to see my psychiatrist. I’m almost tempted to beg her to put me in the hospital so that I can get away from my mom’s whining (which can sometime turn into extreme bitchiness) and my dad’s whining (which usually turns into rage/anger). Honestly, their moods are not helping my mood. Part of the time I just keep my mouth shut and try to become invisible so that their attitudes don’t end up messing with my own, but it doesn’t seem to be working. With each whining, ranting moment, I end up getting more and more stressed out, which makes me more and more depressed. And when I say that their moods have made me feel, at times, like killing myself, I can stress that I am not being over-dramatic about that. (Their moods tend to bring up their somewhat suppressed feelings about me [i.e. that they think I'm lazy, rude, and a lifelong screw-up], which end up reminding me of everything that ever made me feel like shit in my life, triggering my lack of self-esteem and wacky, masochistic brain to think that the only good thing that I could ever do in this world is end my life.) So, yeah, going to the hospital might be the only thing that keeps me from going off the deep end from their moodiness. Of course, I won’t do it because I still have issues related to psych hospitals from the whole 2001 experience–ranging from the way I was treated there (being laughed at when I cried) to my mom’s suicide attempt after being contacted from the billing office at the hospital about my stay.

Everyone said that taking the prep was the worst part, and it was extremely nasty stuff. (Basically, it tasted like lemon dishwashing soap.) I don’t know if it was the worst part. It started working almost immediately, and everything was cleared out after two 8oz. cups of the stuff, but I had to finish 6 more cups. Anything else I drank came straight through. I almost gagged on the juice before the prep and afterward, I couldn’t stand any sugar in my system at all. Since the juice was hard to get down and I had to stay hydrated, I had to down 32oz. of water every hour that I was awake post-first round of prep. Obviously, since everything was coming through, that didn’t really do a lot of good and I was feeling completely dried out (and pretty weak) before the end of the night.

The next morning, I finished off the prep by 5am, like I was supposed to and got some more water into my system before sitting around and waiting until my dad woke up so that we could go to the hospital. My mom didn’t go because she’d had a procedure (five or six cortisone shots) on her back the day before. After getting checked in at the hospital and going upstairs, I had to check in once again–this time with the endoscopy nurses. They brought out the anesthesia booklet thing that I had to fill out, and I did. Before I was finished, I was called back to answer the same questions that were in the booklet for a nurse. The nurse was nice, so I didn’t mind as much as I probably could have.

After that, she had me change into the gown and socks, and she told me to get some urine so that they could do a pregnancy test. My dehydration made that part impossible. I came out of the bathroom and I told the nurse that I had no success. She said I could try again later, after they got fluids in me–via IV. I knew that that was a long shot and I told her that I was pretty sure that I wasn’t pregnant. Of course, she wondered how that was possible, and I told her that it was a biological impossibility to get knocked up when you have never had sex. This whole virginity thing became the talk of the nurses, anesthesiology folks, and doctors. It wasn’t really kept quiet and became quite the embarrassment. The anesthetist said that some people had sworn they  weren’t pregnant before and “burned” their service when they revealed later that they were and the anesthesia had messed up their kids. I told her I wasn’t lying. I pointed out the D&C/hysteroscopy, that had been clearly marked on my chart, had been done in a hospital and under anesthesia because I have panic attacks and screaming fits whenever anyone comes near that particular region of my body. This led to some problems later when we went over other parts of my history. According to her and to the different nurses, the anesthesiologist who was supposed to run my procedure was a real stickler for the rules and would require a urine test. I almost offered to have them bring a notary public up so that I could swear on some legal document that I was in fact a virgin because I knew the urine test wasn’t gonna happen. The rules-obsessed doctor finally came around and said it was fine to not have the test. I guess he figured that if a 29-year old was willing to have her lack of a sex life examined, ridiculed, laughed about, etc. by a bunch of strangers to get out of taking a pregnancy test that that 29-year old probably wasn’t lying.

Anyway, while that embarrassing escapade was going on, there was a bit of a struggle with trying to find veins for my IV. (I wouldn’t be me if there wasn’t a struggle over my veins.) I told them that I was a very hard stick–and I knew it would be more complicated due to the dehydration. One nurse bailed before even trying. (I liked that about her.) She offered to find veins for the other nurses, but when they’d go to check them out, they couldn’t find the ones that she had found. The anesthetist tried first, in my left hand, on the back of it, and it didn’t work. She felt a pop, so she thought she got it, but she didn’t. She even tried digging around to capture the vein, but it kept scooting away. She was a bit frustrated by her failure. Another nurse came around and tried my right arm, about two inches from my elbow, on the inside of the arm. She got a tiny flash and thought it would work, but it didn’t. Finally, the charge nurse for the center came over and got the IV started on the inside of my left arm, right at my wrist, where the bundle of blood vessels are pretty visible. (The last two sticks are still bruised, almost a week later.)

While the anesthetist went over my chart, she criticized my answers on the form. When I marked that I had trouble with anesthesia, she had an issue with that. I guess having your blood pressure drop and having trouble remembering to breathe in post-op aren’t significant enough to be put on her form. She also said it wasn’t important to know that sometimes the anesthetics could make me hyperactive. (I think she changed her opinion on that when I woke up right after the tests–while in the procedure room–and started talking a mile a minute.) I had marked that I do have a rapid/irregular heart rate. I’m pretty sure that a heart rate of 100-160 while I’m doing nothing qualifies as a rapid heart rate. She said I could just have a really fast heartbeat and that that could be normal. I told her that I had seen a cardiologist and he had told me that I had an arrhythmia, but he hadn’t told me specifically what kind. She didn’t believe that any cardiologist would do that. (Well, he did. Actually, his nurse said I had one.) I also told her about the murmur. By this point, she didn’t believe a word I said. She said that my heart was probably fast due to my having “constant panic attacks”–her words, not mine. Yeah, the anxiety can impact my heart rate, but I don’t think anxiety causes murmurs. When the anesthesiologist came in, he asked if I had ever had an EKG. I told him that I had. They got the last EKG that the hospital had done (during the July ER visit for the ant bites/faceplanting) and he kind of mumbled something about it. I didn’t really see the anesthetist again after the EKG debacle until after the procedure was over.

The test went smoothly. They found one polyp, in the upper left area of my colon. It was interesting that they found one there because I had been telling doctors for a while that I had some pretty bad pain in that area. (That may have had nothing to do with the polyp, though.) Because of that polyp, I have to have another colonoscopy in five years. Other than that, he didn’t see anything. He did send off tissue samples from the biopsies of my small and large intestine. He thinks that the diarrhea is a result of dumping syndrome, but I’m not really convinced of that since it predates the gastric bypass surgery.

So now I just have to wait to see if they found anything in those biopsies. It’s gotten to the point with all of these diagnostic tests that I want them to just find out whatever it is and get it over with. I’m tired of having tests done and finding out nothing. If I can know what’s causing me to be so sick, then maybe we can stop it and I can finally start to feel like a regular person.

I should probably be more worried about things like intracolonic explosions, which is apparently a legitimate risk with a colonoscopy. Honestly, though, if that happens and if I were to survive it, which is also possible, I would think I would laugh. Why? Think of all the jokes that could be told afterward. I mean, it seems like the kind of thing that you could never run out of jokes for–and if you did, then you’re obviously not trying hard enough to make them.

This is seriously the dumbest route that I have EVER seen. To get there (B) from HH Main (A), you’d actually just go from Gallatin to Governors and drive until you get there. It’s about 2-3 minutes max. Or if you don’t want to drive, you get in the tram between them, but that takes longer and causes dizziness. BTW – Every building on that side of Governor’s is part of the hospital complex.

Oh, I do have another thing I’m actually worried about: my veins. Anytime there is any sort of procedure and I have to get stuck, I worry about my veins. I’m not as worried today about them as I was earlier this week, though. Earlier in the week, I thought I was having the procedures done in the endoscopy center at HH Main. When I had my last endoscope there, they basically tortured me trying to get blood. I think that was the day when I got accused of causing my veins to be hard to see and for a couple of them blowing. (Yeah, more than one blew and that was all my fault because I guess they thought I enjoyed that sensation.) The hospital I’ll be at tomorrow is down the block from Main. The nurses at the one I’ll be at typically admit defeat when they can’t get my veins to cooperate. Typically, if they can’t hit them, they actually go and get the anesthesiologist to do it. Generally, I would much rather have an anesthesiologist, a cardiac nurse, or an oncology nurse start an IV on me than a nurse who isn’t used to hard sticks and gets super-nervous about it. (Health care professionals tend to forget that their anxieties can impact their ability to do things like IVs.)

It’ll be my luck that tomorrow W&C‘s Endoscopy Center will have the nurses from the Main Endoscopy center. I think many of the Endoscopy Center nurses end up working out of both buildings. So I guess I shouldn’t feel too relieved…yet.

Okay, I think I need to go find something to eat drink. My blood sugar feels like it is dropping again, and it’s been a little while since I last tried to down some juice. Besides, I start taking the prep in an hour. (Gross.)

Oy.

A 9:30 appointment is fine with me. It’s my dad that doesn’t believe in leaving the house before noon that leads to issues with the whole time thing. He was actually kind of okay with it, though, because he had to have some fasting labs done this week, so he needed to do those relatively early.

After getting the appointment stuff settled, my dad took my mom to the orthopedist (she officially got released) and to have her kidney labs done. (She goes for another check on that next week.) I was left alone with Amy, and I tried to get her to take a nap with me. (I was still seriously sleep deprived when they left, even though I got about 4 more hours of sleep before they left.) Amy wouldn’t calm down, though. It wasn’t her fault because Loretta’s lawn maintenance guys came by and were working on her yard. Then they started working on ours. This time was different, though. This time, instead of doing the grass and weeds, they started cutting some stuff down. One thing was a plum tree, which was totally fine with us. (The plums on it were godawful.)

The thing that wasn’t so fine was that they started cutting down the running rose bush that my grandfather planted a year or two (1994 or 1995) before he died. It wasn’t just any rose bush, either. It was one that was part of two running rose bushes that were at one of my mom’s dad’s dad’s brother’s house. One was red and one was pink. After a few decades of growing side by side, their pollen got a little slutty and the roses turned this kind of ivory rose color.

(This picture was taken from Nana’s house. The trees in the distance are at that house. There is still part of the rose bush there.)

Anyway, this rose bush is part of a rose bush that has been in our family for years. It is important to her because of that, and because it was planted by her dad. She adored this rose bush when she was a little girl and it was one of those things that she always wanted to have at her own home one day. She was so happy when it was planted. When she found out that it had been cut down yesterday, while she was gone, she was pissed and heartbroken.

She and my dad told off the yard folks. They said that Loretta told them it was fine to cut it down. (She thought it was something wild. She was very apologetic when she found out.) My parents and I were shocked that they thought it was cool to chop something down in a yard because a neighbor said it was okay. They (the company) thought it was cool because the person paying them was the one who said to cut it down. They didn’t knock on the door. They didn’t do anything to see if the homeowners might want to have a say in what was going on in their yard. I know that they had to see me in the living room. You can see shadows from outside.

I would have gone outside if I thought they were going to cut the bush down completely. I thought that maybe they’d get rid of a dead tree stump in the yard before they’d chop down a rose bush. I mean, it seems like if you were going to get rid of something in the yard, you might go for something that is dead before you go after something alive. And they should have known the difference between a wild plant and a damn rose bush.

Anyway, mom got some of the branches from the bush so that she can root them and start over again. So, hopefully that will work. Still, it is rather annoying.

This morning, I went to the new gastroenterologist. He was really, really nice. He said that they only way to figure out what was going on with my gut was to do a colonoscopy. He’s also going to do another upper endoscopy that day. He said he’ll biopsy part of my small bowel and colon. So, that will be fun. (Sarcasm, obviously…unless your Dottie, then you probably think that I’m jumping up and down over the idea of having parts of vital organs messed with.)  He thinks that it’s still possible that I could have Celiac or IBD, even though I’ve had the blood work that said it was unlikely. He said it could be something else. Cancer is one of the possibilities. So are hemorrhoids. (It’s bad when you start rooting for it to be hemorrhoids.) He also seemed to think it was a bit ridiculous that I’ve had these problems for so long and no one has really taken some of them seriously.

I had my mom go with me this morning because I was so worried that the doctor would be rude or intimidating or something. She didn’t need to, though, because (like I said) he was so very nice.

So I have a camera going up my butt and one going down my throat next Thursday. That kind of sounds like some kind of truly fucked up health care fetish porn. (I’m sure that I’ll get some more kinky people checking this blog out because I mentioned kink, porn, and fetish. And I try so hard not to judge fetishes, but sometimes it is almost impossible not to.) Wish me luck…and for you horny, kinky bastards, I’m sorry that this was a waste of time.

1. Carrots – According to my mom, I liked them in baby food form. That was the last time I liked them, though.
2. Celery – Never liked it.
3. Peanut butter – Never liked it, except for natural peanut butter. Since most people like PB, it’s one of those where people ask me if I’m allergic and I have to say that I’m just strange. (Everyone in my family loves the stuff, so I’m even a freak in the family when it comes to peanut butter.)
4. Asparagus – I had some in elementary school. I have refused to eat it ever since.
5. Seaweed – We ate some pieces of dried seaweed (or something like that) one day in third grade, during a friend’s show and tell type thing. It was nasty. I refuse to ever have anymore.
6. Muggy weather – This has to do with my breathing/asthma.
7. Tornadoes/severe weather – I was within about a mile of a tornado that hit Huntsville in 1989. (On this map, find where it says Chelsea. Above that, there’s a crooked gray line. That line should extend to the road that is labeled at 53 [at the top]. I lived right off road that was marked by the crooked line, but a little more toward 53.) Anyway, said tornado could be heard at our house and the anxiety from that led to ongoing panic/anxiety related to severe weather.
8. Wearing shoes and socks. I don’t mind sandals or even other types of shoes. I don’t even mind socks by themselves, but wearing both is uncomfortable. (I feel like I can’t breathe when my feet are completely covered by both, which I think has less to do with my lungs and more to do with the eccentricities of being me.)
9. Old Spice – My grandfather (Dadada–aka the bad one) wore it in excess. I associate it with him.
10. Puffs Plus – I’ve always had sinus troubles and the Puffs Plus tissue would cause my nose to hurt and itch more because of the Aloe. (Yes, I itched because of the Aloe. I know, it’s not supposed to work that way.)
11. The Office – I don’t know if I don’t like the UK version, but I know I sure as hell do not like the US one.
12. Chihuahuas – Nana’s brother had one when I was about 5. I accidentally stepped on it’s tail and it yipped at me. This scared the crap out of me and I haven’t ever really gotten over it.
13. Tom Cruise – I was sort of indifferent to him prior to his outburst on The Today Show in 2005. After he basically went on a tirade about how psychiatry is evil, I started a boycott of his films, interviews, etc. This boycott is still going on. Normally, I give up on boycotts after a while, but I refuse to get over what he said and how he behaved. (Obviously, I’m not a big fan of Scientology, either.)
14. Green – I don’t like the color. Whenever I would get green notebooks or binders for school, I would assign them to subjects I didn’t enjoy, like science or math.
15. Science, math/engineering programs/space program – I know science and math are important. I know engineering is important. I know the space program is important. I grew up in a school system where priority was placed on science and math and turning its students into engineers that could work on Space and Defense programs in town. I had teachers that thought it was more important to do things like Math Olympiad (which I was apart of in fourth and fifth grade) instead of Art and Music. I hated that the arts were being ignored, because I always liked them more. I hated that we put so much emphasis in school on space and not enough on classes that taught us about history and culture. I hated that it was expected that we like these types of programs. So, I did what any quiet person with a defiant streak in them would do: I learned to hate the thing I was expected to love.
16. The Lord of the Rings – I think that Peter Jackson is brilliant. I think the cast members are very talented. I do not like the trilogy. I do not plan on even trying out the Hobbit franchise.
17. Bananas – This relates to Dadada. The smell, the taste, the texture, and the word all make me nauseated. Pictures do, too.
18. Various forms of transportation – This is another phobia/anxiety thing. I’ve been in 4 car accidents with my mom, 1 with Nana, and the one with Jennifer from YSA.
19. Whistling – I hate the sound of it.
20. Justin Bieber – Okay this was pretty much a fairly mild dislike at first. I don’t think he’s very good at singing. He’s very nasal and tends to be off-key. Of course, his remarks in the guestbook for The Secret Annex did not endear him to me.

There are other things I dislike. There are things that I dislike more than the stuff on this list, but I thought that this list is a good (or bad) start.

Mom thought she had broken her left front leg. I thought it was a sprain. After being examined the next morning, we found out that she just had soft tissue damage–aka a sprain. (I know that those can be more painful than breaks sometimes, so I shouldn’t have said it was just soft tissue damage.) Anyway, the vet gave her something for the pain. They also went ahead and did the next batch of vaccines she would need this weekend. The doctor also said that she was doing well, other than her leg, and is growing at the proper rate for a puppy of her age and breed. (She gained an ounce since she went to get her worm pill over the weekend.) By Wednesday night, she was running circles around us like she had been before she’d fallen twenty four hours earlier. She hasn’t tried to jump out of our arms when we carry her, though.

Wednesday was also the day for my trip to see the family doctor about getting a referral for a different gastroenterologist. When I explained what had happened, he was more than willing to get me a referral to someone else. When I went to get said referral from the “referral person” on his side of the office, she had already gotten one prepared for me…for the same doctor that had laughed at the idea of doing the colonoscopy. She was going to refer me back to the doctor that I was trying to get away from. I told her this, and she had to ask why I needed to see a different doctor, so I told her that that doctor didn’t want to do a test I needed. She proceeded to laugh at this and say, “Well, another doctor won’t necessarily do a test that you want done if you ask for it.” This was when I finally snapped…or just raised my voice a little and got very snippy toward her. I told her that it wasn’t a test I wanted, but one that my hematologist said I needed. I was getting more annoyed by the moment and nearly started crying, because whether I’m angry or sad, the tears always seem to start flowing. I don’t know if it was my annoyed tone, the fact that I wasn’t just doctor-shopping so I could get a test that isn’t necessary, or the tears that were starting to pool in my eyes, but she started to take me more seriously at this point. She apologized and she tried calling someone and they didn’t take my insurance. This was when she did something that I found even more annoying: she told me to go home, call my insurance, get a list of doctors who take my insurance, and call her back with the one I want to see. Maybe she thought I would enjoy this or would make things easier for both of us. It doesn’t. She’s having me do her job for her. Other referral people, including the person on the other side of that very office, know which doctor accepts which insurance plan. It shouldn’t have surprised me that she lacked this knowledge and that she didn’t want to do the job herself, since this is a woman who always takes thirty minutes to an hour to do something that takes every other person with that position five minutes max. She’s not new to the job. She just doesn’t do it very well. And she almost always pisses someone off–either a patient, the patient’s family, a doctor, or a nurse at the nurse’s station that she works at. Honestly, I don’t know how she manages to keep her job at all.

Yesterday, we had some pretty bad storms and I, of course, had my typical anxiety related to the storms. Though we had a severe storm pass over, it wasn’t really that bad (damage-wise), but there were some that were relatively close that did some damage. I’m glad that it wasn’t any worse. (Sometimes this weather makes me want to go to some place like San Diego where there is no real weather.) Oh, and because the weather was so bad, a lot of schools and school systems around here closed early, which meant that my therapist had to cancel our group therapy session for this month. So I will have gone two months without any type of therapy.

Oh, and today, Amy officially got her lifetime license from the city. My parents had to go to Animal Services with her rabies info and apply for it. Now the city officially knows that we have a new pet. So anyone who is super judgmental and who thinks that the proper authorities haven’t been informed that Amy lives with us can rest assured that they do. And obviously, there weren’t any flags on our names or address or anything that keeps us from having pets. So…yeah. Basically, if you think we shouldn’t have pets and you want to be rude about it, you can kindly go fuck yourself now. You could have done that before, but now you especially can. Also, my mom asked and found out how much it costs for a person on Medicaid (i.e. me) to get a pet spayed or neutered in this area. Apparently, it costs $5. I guess that means that enough other very, very poor people have pets that they have an established rate for us. So, if you think poor people shouldn’t have pets…I refer to the kindly go fuck yourself remark. (Yes, those comments that were made still bug me. I’ve got to learn to stop obsessing over the bad stuff.)

Yes, I said that it was awesome because it was real. I know it is a work of fiction, but it was so realistic. It reminded me of a time in high school, just about five or six months after Columbine, when there was a lockdown at my high school because someone thought they saw someone walking toward the school with a gun. The panic that ensued in the episode reminded me of what everyone was like when the words “Mississippi Red” came over the intercom. The crying and anxiety that the characters experienced reminded me of what my classmates and I were like when we waited to find out if we were safe. And the relief when it was over reminded me of what it was like when we found out that we hadn’t been in any real danger. (If I remember correctly, the guy didn’t have a gun and he wasn’t even really heading toward the school.) We didn’t know that until afterward, so the anxiety that we had was real. The fear we had was real. And the fear and anxiety portrayed in the writing and acting on last night’s episode was very realistic. Even the way that it seemed like they were in lockdown forever, when it was really just a few minutes, was realistic. When you’re in that kind of situation, every second feels like an hour. That they were able to portray that on a sixty minute episode amazed me.

I know that people think that it is exploiting Newtown and Sandy Hook, but I don’t really think it is. Think about this little fact: within one month after the Sandy Hook tragedy, there were 5 other school shootings. Five. That was in one month. School shootings don’t belong to just one school. They belong to every school, everywhere. Blaming Glee for having the episode “too soon” after Sandy Hook isn’t fair. When would it have been acceptable for the school shooting episode to take place? Should they have waited until there hadn’t been a school shooting for a few months? Chances are that that, unfortunately, won’t be happening anytime soon in this country.

As for people upset by it being Becky (played by Lauren Potter) that brought the gun to school and thinking that this is Glee‘s way of demonizing people with Down Syndrome, I just want to shake my head at you guys. Becky didn’t bring the gun to school with the thought that she was going to hurt anyone. She did it because she was scared that she would need to protect herself. This is the kind of thing that causes a lot of kids to bring guns to school–most of them are not ones who have Down Syndrome or any form of disability. And, for the people who are jumping on the anti-Glee bandwagon for this without seeing the episode, they should know that Becky didn’t shoot anyone. The gun discharged twice accidentally. She didn’t hurt anyone. And she was just as scared by it going off as everyone else in the episode.

Would it make people feel better if the person who brought the gun in was someone who had a history of mental illness? Or would they feel better if it was someone with a history of violence? Would it be okay if it was someone who was poor? Or should it just be a some random white boy who happens to be a loner? Is it just because she has Down Syndrome that people are thinking that she shouldn’t be capable of bringing a gun to school? That doesn’t seem very fair. Lauren Potter’s mother, Robin Sinkhorn, commented on the outrage about Becky being the shooter, “The shootings are still fresh in all of our minds. If Becky’s going to be fully included on the show — which they’ve done such a good job about that and giving her these juicy stories — then why not Becky? Whether she has Down syndrome or not, it doesn’t matter … Why wouldn’t it be somebody with Down syndrome because she’s a kid. She’s a teenager. She makes stupid decisions just like other teenagers do.”

Another thing to think about is that Glee is not the first television series to have a show with a school shooting in it. In 1999, there was an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer called “Earshot” and it was originally scheduled to air the week after Columbine. (Obviously, they didn’t know Columbine was going to happen when they came up with that episode, but there had already been quite a few well-publicized school shootings in the year or two before Columbine.)  Buffy fans didn’t get to see it until September. Degrassi: The Next Generation had a shooting in 2004. (This one is rather well-known since one of the victims of the shooting was played by Drake Aubrey Graham.) In 2006, One Tree Hill there was a school shooting episode where a main character ended up dying. There have been so many more with shootings at schools. So this is not just some thing that only Glee did. This is something that has become a very prevalent part of television shows that are marketed to younger audiences.

School violence is reality. And we can’t expect for fictional outlets, like television, movies, and books, to completely ignore this facet of reality. This is the reality that kids face when they walk into school everyday, even if they don’t realize it. This wasn’t an exploitation of a single event, but a wake-up call about what life is really like in a society like ours. If the episode made you uncomfortable, good. No one should feel comfortable with the idea that, one minute, their child can be laughing and joking like a child should do and, the next, they’re on the floor of a room in their school, terrorized by the thought that someone could come to where they are and end their life. This wasn’t an episode that was supposed to make people feel happy or joyous or anything like that. It was one that was meant to make you think and feel. It was a reminder that this culture needs to change in significant ways if we expect kids to have safe environments to learn and grow up in.

He did say that the pain that I have could be caused by a hernia of some sort from the gastric bypass surgery, but he didn’t seem concerned by that thought. It seems odd that I would have developed said hernia almost 10 years post-op and that it would hurt worse when I eat certain foods. He suggested that I go see the former partner of the surgeon who did the surgery if I’m concerned about it. I don’t particularly want to go back to that clinic, even if my old surgeon has moved out of town. The last time that I tried to see my surgeon, I was told I had to see a nutritionist there and that it wouldn’t be covered by my insurance, so I’d need to fork over a lot of cash that day. The nutritionist’s office was more like an office where they sold their own mixtures of vitamins and powders and stuff. (Basically, it was retail operation and not a medical office.) Even if my suck-tastic surgeon isn’t there anymore, I have a feeling that they are still doing the same style of business.

My dad went with me into the appointment because I knew without someone there that I would back down easier. I also thought maybe his presence might make the doctor be a little less dismissive. It didn’t. Apparently the only family member that he (the doctor) is afraid of is my mother. (I definitely do not blame him for fearing her. She can be a force to be reckoned with.)

Anyway, after relaying all of the information back to my mom, and having my dad vouch for my actually standing up for myself with the doctor, my mom decided that I needed to find a different GI doctor. (I had already figured this out.) So we called UAB and found out that I have an appointment there next Wednesday and that I can get a new referral then. So I get to wait another week to find out which doctor I might get to see, and then I’ll wait however long it takes to see the new doctor.

In non-abdominal related news, Nana called this morning. She said she’d had a dream that we had gotten a dachshund, at which point my mom told her that we’d gotten Amy. (We hadn’t told her because she isn’t exactly pro-dog or any non-cat type of animal.) Anyway, she was actually excited and wants us to bring Amy down there so she can meet her. She even said that she wouldn’t get upset if Amy has an accident (potty-type) on her floors, which was shocking. (When we first got Xander, she wouldn’t let him in her house for long because she was afraid he would pee on her floors.)

She then said that my cousin and his wife had gotten three cats. Nana, who (as I’ve mentioned) is a cat fan, pointed out to my mom’s sister that three cats could mess up a house to the same extent as five dogs. (My mom’s sister is a bit anti-dog/pro-cat, but so is Nana, so it’s strange that Nana is challenging her on the cat/dog front.) We had three cats for a long time, so I know that they can get a bit messy. (My mom used to have to clean our hall’s carpet everyday because there was an ongoing pissing contest between two of our three cats. They were spayed, had 3 litter boxes, lots of toys, lots of attention, and each had their own places to hang out. These two just hated one another.) I think Nana was just trying to prove that we weren’t necessarily as bad as my mom’s sister seems to think we are. Anyway, I hope that they have fun with their new kitties and that they aren’t too much trouble. I miss having cats sometimes–okay, I miss our old cats a lot of the time, even though they’ve been dead for almost 10 years now.

I was going to mention something else, but I totally forgot what it was.

I’m sorry, didn’t you JUST lose custody of your dogs because you were unfit to own them? Do you really think it’s fair to a helpless animal to take her on when you guys can’t even take care of yourselves? What’s going to happen if she gets sick and you’re faced with a giant vet bill you obviously cannot cover? I understand the desire to have a pet, but she deserves to be with people who have the financial and physical capacity to take care of her.

Pet ownership is not a right, it’s a privilege. A pet is not a toy, and unless it’s a service animal, it’s certainly not meant to solve the owner’s life problems. The owner is responsible for the animal’s well-being, not the other way around, so your point concerning the positive effect she’s had on your family is moot. In your response to my previous comment, you mentioned that “we lost custody of the dogs last year because our house was unfit to be lived in and we couldn’t pay the thousands of dollars in fines that they were going to charge because they had to stay in the shelter while we lived at my grandmother’s house. It wasn’t because we were unfit.” – you’re clearly missing the point and/or not learning the lessons you should be learning from that experience. If you are unable to maintain your home in a state that is considered fit for habitation, you are unfit to own pets. It’s not about the house, it’s about you. The house didn’t get to that state on its own. I realize that I sound very callous, but this is a live animal we’re talking about here, and your track record indicates that you were unable to maintain custody of your pets when the going got tough. I understand your desire to make it out to be everyone else’s fault, but the bottom line is that when you take on a pet, it becomes your obligation to look out for its best interest. It is not the Humane Society’s (nor the vet’s) obligation to provide you with a safety net for the care of an animal you took on willingly – I can understand how such programs could help people who ended up inheriting someone’s pets, for instance, but this was a conscious decision on your part to take this obligation on mere months after other animals were forcibly removed from your care. Pets ARE a luxury (and you got a purebred, too, fantastically enough), and they shouldn’t be owned by people who will have to rely on payment plans and food aid should the tiniest crack occur in their current financial situation. They deserve stability.

You blog constantly about the difficulties your family goes through, difficulties which are clearly neither temporary nor easily resolved. Forget about yourself and how she makes *you* feel for a second – is it really fair to put an animal that will get attached to you in a situation where, at any given moment, these difficulties could spill over again and you could end up having her forcibly removed? You’ll say that anyone could end up in that situation – yes, anyone theoretically could, but for you, it’s not a hypothetical scenario, it’s happened before.

Having a pet isn’t about buying toys for it at Petsmart – it’s about taking on a multi-year obligation to do everything in your power to live up to the trust the animal has placed in you. The reason we have so many animals in shelters is that people seem to forget this all too easily. It’s not fair to the animals because they’ve done nothing wrong.

P.S. The Humane Society link you posted contains text that begins with the following words: “you’ve always managed to give your pet the medical care she deserves, but due to unexpected circumstances, you’re faced with vet expenses that are far beyond your ability to afford them.”

1. “You’ve always managed” – you haven’t.
2. “unexpected circumstances” – they’re not “unexpected” if you willingly go out and get a dog. It didn’t magically fall in your lap – you actively sought this animal out.

The first link was just a bunch of nonsense. “But I have to wonder about people who simply don’t have the resources to care for a pet in the best possible manner. Shouldn’t they be able to experience the joy, love and companionship that a pet provides?” – NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. If you cannot care for a pet *in the best possible manner*, you should not have a pet, end of discussion. I cannot stress this enough – it is NOT a right, it’s a privilege, and when you are entrusted with the care of an animal, that is a sacred obligation that you must fulfill. If you cannot take that on, you should not own an animal. Sure, everyone *wants* to experience the joy love yadda yadda, but what people want does not dictate what they should be able to get. If you want something of that kind, you have to work for it. I’m sure everyone wants to experience the joy and companionship of marriage, but that also requires some work – surely you wouldn’t advocate tying people down and forcing them to marry against their will just so someone else can experience “joy” and “companionship”? So why is it okay to force a helpless animal into potentially dangerous and definitely unstable circumstances?

Anonymous comment on LiveJournal:

I am honestly outraged and shocked and felt sick when I saw your blog post; and I pray that little puppy has a long and happy life – neither of which are likely to happen. How the hell you were allowed to own another dog is beyond me but I live in the UK so I have no idea how to alert authorities about this, but rest assure, I will find out from USA friends and see if anything can be done, even if it’s just having someone come by every week or so to check that poor little puppy is OK!
If you have any decency in you, you will give it to a shelter and let it be part of any family, one who can love and care for it properly! As that other poster said, who cares if it is helping you, that is not the point! If I lived near you, I would be in jail for kidnapping that puppy and smashing your evil face in!

I’m assuming that these commenters are actually two different people, since one is from the UK and the other is from around Washington DC.

I know that sometimes people think that they know everything about a situation based on what they read online, but unless you live that person’s life, you can never know the full story. Apparently, because of what happened last year, some people think that I should never be around animals again or that I’m evil or whatever. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. My blog entries, my tweets, etc. are not the full picture of my life and shouldn’t be taken as such. Most of what I talk about online is negative. Most of what I do is rant. I do online what I used to do in a paper journal. I do it to get out the anger and the frustration I have with life because I need an outlet where I do that without hurting myself.

My life isn’t ideal, but I know that the lives of every other person in the world aren’t perfect either.

I have sort of explained what happened last year, but I never wanted to go into the full story because it is long and painful. I did get a chance to discuss it with Debbie before we went to group sessions only. The City of Huntsville also knows most of what went on, and they have never said that we shouldn’t have animals.

When I’ve said that they (the City) said we should try getting a pet or two, that was true. When I’ve said that they would have allowed us to have ours back if we could have paid the thousand dollars (or more) in fines, that was true. When I’ve said that the reason that we even had them at the shelter last year was that my grandmother wouldn’t let us bring them to her house when it was condemned, that was true. (The people from the city were actually going to let us take all four girls to Nana’s house that day or let us let them stay with friends until we could get back into the house–I wish we hadn’t been shut-ins at that point time. And I begged on Facebook for someone who could take them in to please contact me.)

If we weren’t trustworthy with animals, don’t you think that the city would have said something? Don’t you think that my parents and I would have ended up on the news? We didn’t. Yes, my dad had to go to Mental Health Court, on an ordinance violation because the dogs had fleas, the house was filthy, and our house was pretty much falling down. Before you say that the dogs were mistreated because they had fleas, I’ll point out that we had been using preventatives, treatments, etc. and they weren’t working. Animals throughout this region were flea-ridden last spring and summer. No matter what their owners would do, the fleas would stick around.

When I brought up health in the posts and comments back to people, it isn’t because I’m being selfish. Last year, not only did we lose the dogs, we almost lost my mom to her kidney, diabetes, and blood pressure problems, my dad to his depression, and me to my anemia. I almost lost my entire family last year, so thinking of how this little puppy is bringing joy to us and improving our health is my way of saying that I no longer feel like we’re standing on the edge of some cliff, waiting for something to push us over and end everything. She gives me hope and for almost an entire year, I was hopeless. I was ready to die last summer. I was ready to just get it over with because I had no hope. I had nothing. Nothing mattered to me anymore because I was so overwhelmed by everything, by the growing realization that my mom and dad were definitely not going to live forever, and by the grief of losing five dogs. I’ve got a personality disorder that makes abandonment feel like the world is actually ending, and last year I felt completely abandoned. So my feeling happiness because of this little bundle of energy is something that I should get to celebrate.

Part of what led to the house’s condition in the past was our declining health, in addition to being overwhelmed by five dogs. We were too sick to keep everything up properly. But the dogs were taken to the vet when needed. Alice almost never needed to go, but she was the only one that was true for. When Gretchen would lose control for those brief seconds where she would attack one of the other dogs, we would get them apart, assess the injuries, and (if needed) take whoever was attacked to the vet. We would also change the way the dogs were fed or how they’d be allowed to be around one another to prevent attacks. Willow was on two medicines (Enalapril and Theophylline) that were administered every single day. Molly was taken to have surgery for the lumps/tumors that she developed, and when she had abscesses, they were drained, cleaned, and treated per the doctor’s orders. When we’d hear fireworks, Gretchen was given her medicine for the anxiety that the noise caused. And when it was stormy out, we would hold her under the covers and play music for her because it calmed her down. And that last full day of Xander’s life, I sat there and held him for almost 24 hours straight, trying to feed him, get him to drink water, and keep him warm. So, if you think that we didn’t take care of them or that we are evil or something, then obviously you don’t know what you’re talking about because you weren’t there. We did all that we could.

And this evil person that you are so quick to judge has had animals every year of her life except this last one. We’ve had cats. We’ve had dogs. We’ve had hamsters. We’ve had guinea pigs. We’ve had fish. Our cats lived to be almost twenty, except for the one that went to live with my grandmother and ended up getting hit by a car. We took our guinea pigs and hamsters to have surgeries, get medicines when they were sick, etc. And the payment plan that I brought up is because my mom and dad have been using the same vet clinic for thirty years and have always paid off their bills–including the months-long treatment of one of our cats for hemolytic anemia (a treatment that the vet thought was unnecessary because she figured the cat would die in a few days, but she lived another 10+ years), the treatments for another cat’s ongoing issues with kidney disease and asthma, the c-section that had to be performed on one of our guinea pigs, the surgeries Molly had. We take care of our family members, which is how we view our pets.

Last year, before we lost them, I tried to quit eating so that we would have the money to feed and care for them. I know that wasn’t the smartest thing to do now, but I was willing to be hungry if it meant keeping them fed. I would have sacrificed anything for them. And I would do that for Amy, too.

We’ve got one dog now. One little dog. One we can afford. One we can take care of. One that isn’t overwhelming us. One that we would all do anything and everything for. If you can’t see that, then maybe you shouldn’t read my blog or follow my tweets or read whatever it is that you read that lead to these awful assumptions. Please keep your nasty comments to yourself, not just for my sake, but for my family’s because they get to deal with the anxiety attacks and depressive spells that I have every time that I get one of these comments. You may think that you mean well, but these comments are cruel and hurtful and they really do impact me. I know that admitting that means they might increase, but not admitting it means that I’m not stepping forward and saying how much this stuff actually does impact my thinking and my daily life.