Julie Clarenbach

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Hello, Again

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Tree trunk with a fallen tree covered in moss, green grass, pine boughsWell, that didn’t go as planned.

Although the election made it clear that everything was going to hell in a handbasket, I kind of thought things at home were going to continue going along reasonably steadily. The Universe took one look at that assumption and laughed her ass off. Just to catch you up:

  • The night of the election, about an hour into the results, I felt myself going into a kind of fugue state. I had to stop watching, take myself to bed, and just … avoid everything but the very highest-level news. It took me about three weeks to get out of the full-body panic state, and I started looking for a good trauma-based therapist, because clearly the election was bringing up some old shit I didn’t even know was in there. I found one, thank everything holy, and I’ve been doing EMDR-based therapy since January. It’s been really helping, but I’m still having to curate my news intake, even though I get all my news from Twitter. (I follow awesome people on Twitter.) Sometimes I can keep up with what’s going on, and sometimes I just have to log off, for my own sanity.
  • We had an unusually horrid winter — multiple snowstorms, including one that closed in on a foot, and this in a city with like two plows, and us not owning a snow shovel — and then a summer that included a week of nearly record breaking temperatures that only avoided breaking records because of wildfire smoke that made everything look like a dystopian hellscape and us all cough like lifelong smokers.
  • Somewhere around the end of January, Catharine’s mood started a slow downward slide that culminated in her needing to be briefly hospitalized, something she hasn’t needed in 25 years. We found out a lot about the resources our current city offers, which are surprisingly robust. The subsequent meds changes are ongoing, and there was one recently she had an extremely unusual reaction to that gave us about five weeks of extremely labile, unpredictable moods. Super fun!
  • Around the same time Catharine went into the hospital, ElderStatesCat went into the cat hospital for a radioactive thyroid treatment that kept her away from home for 10 days. YoungestCat held it together through all the chaos, but when that all calmed down, spent about six weeks attacking me at dawn and dusk. Here in the Pacific Northwest, dawn and dusk at the height of summer are inside my sleeping hours.
  • Work has gotten both better (less chaotic) and worse (somehow also more stressful?)
  • On the upside, I finally got treatment for my migraines that has settled the daily headaches down to the week before my period and the occasional one in punishment for eating pizza, and an experimental treatment for my chronic fatigue, in combination with the EMDR, means I’ve had more energy.

As you can imagine, since our levels of cope weren’t high to begin with, we have been operating on “just the basics” mode. The problem is that “just the basics” mode doesn’t work as an indefinite setting. We have coped by throwing money at the problem. We both have therapists. People come to clean our house. Our groceries get delivered and we are experimenting with Blue Apron (we cook but we don’t really have to meal plan or shop for ingredients). We still get delivery more often than is ideal.

But we don’t live in a complete sty and it all leaves me enough cope to do the laundry, keep the plants alive, and manage things like meds refills and fetching cat food and remembering to get the trashcan to the curb. (Oh! And she got her damn driver’s license renewed, so I am not the only driver in the house anymore!)

And now, now it seems like things might be calming down (knock on wood). I went, alone, to watch the eclipse in its totality. I was able to drop the long-dead external hard drive off for recovery. I’m here, writing to you. There’s just a little more slack in the system. And there are so many things I want to talk to you about.

Can We Just Fire 2016 Already?

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img_5080It’s been a while since I posted. First I got hit with a fatigue flare. Then I was out of town for 9 days for work+family (with the fatigue flare still going). Then the election happened and we all went into collective shock and horror. We’ve spent the last three weeks alternately figuring out how to respond and disconnecting because the stress of it was exacerbating all of our various issues.

Any one of those things would have blown things up for us; all three has meant that we’re in “just do the absolute basics” mode, and the “absolute basics” are basic, indeed: everyone eats three meals a day at reasonable times, everyone has their meds, everyone goes to bed at a reasonable hour, the cats are fed and loved and have their litter boxes cleaned.

It means the house hasn’t been fully cleaned in two months, some meals have been questionable and too many others have involved ordering in, there have been some decidedly strange outfits because we’ve run out of clean laundry, and the plants may or may not make it. The chaos is stressful, but that stress is still smaller than the energy it would take to make things not-chaotic, and right now our available energy is not enough to make much of a difference.

I want to write about the trip — how we handle them, how this one went — and all of the ways the election is threatening to fuck up our lives. I want to write about how situations like this reveal, again, just how fragile we are, which is easy to lose sight of in a day to day that is, while not normal by other people’s standards, normal and functional by ours. I want to write about how awesome Dr. Mr. Rogers (Catharine’s psychiatrist) is and how grateful I am that we’ve got him on Team Her. I want to write about how difficult I’m finding this holiday season, even more so than usual.

I will write about those things. But right now I’m also just giving 2016 the finger, because it’s been a brutal year. And then I’m going to watch the Gilmore Girls revival for the third time, because we’ve got to find our self-care where we can, these days.

What We’re Dealing With

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plant with bright green leavesI don’t think I’ve really explained what we’re dealing with over here, the particular constellation of things we have to negotiate in our daily lives. So in the interest of contextualizing the rest of the conversation, here are the highlights.

Catharine’s main diagnosis is bipolar I with psychotic features (specifically, she heard voices). Her bipolar tends to the depressive side, but she’s had some mania, hypomania, or mixed episodes here and there. She also has anxiety, PTSD, and ADD. We’re lucky that her mental illnesses have been very responsive to meds, and that those same meds have kept working. (We’re also very lucky that my work gives great insurance, that we’ve been able to find excellent psychiatrists, and we’ve been able to swing paying them out of pocket when they didn’t take insurance.)

She didn’t get all of these diagnoses at once, of course. The bipolar diagnosis and treatment came first, and once that was basically stable, it became clear that other things were in play. She’s only been effectively treated for the anxiety since January, and ADD meds have only been in play for two months. Both of these have been game changers, but it’s early days.

On top of all of these things, she’s got physical limitations — dicey lungs because of pulmonary emboli, knees she sprained and injured multiple times without effective recovery, so that now they’re painful a lot of the time, and various other aches and pains and issues, some of which are related to her being fat, but none of which are simply reducible to her being fat. (Hey guess what? Fat shaming isn’t a thing we do here, just in case you were wondering.)

Me, I have the kind of chronic health problems that are both debilitating and vague, so that it’s hard to pin down a diagnosis or find effective treatment. My sinuses are consistently inflamed and congested. I get migraines, complete with prodrome (neck aches, moodiness, and vision changes) and postdrome (fatigue). I have varying levels of fatigue, and when the fatigue gets past a certain point, it comes with brain fog, muscle pain, and sensitivity to every damn thing. I have the characteristic Post-Exertional Malaise of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which means that instead of exercise gradually enabling me to do more, as is true for most people, going beyond my very narrow limits actually puts me in a fatigue flare that severely limits what I can do for several days or longer. I have endometriosis, which was fairly debilitating until I cut dairy and gluten out of my diet, but even though I don’t have the pain anymore, it’s still causing all kinds of wreckage to my abdomen. And, as one of my doctors once joked, I’m allergic to everything green and growing.

We’re a really fun household, is what I’m saying.