Symptom Diary

Sketch, 2010 or 2011

“I want you to document your symptoms.”

The statement is simple, at least on the surface. Take the time to keep track of all the ways in which your disease presents itself. Write them down. Notice patterns.

I’ve done this before with food. It was easy, clear. Eat food, write it down. Notice stomach aches, headaches, write them down. Look to see if certain foods cause certain feelings. Cause and effect.

Documenting symptoms is decidedly less simple is when your symptoms are emotional or behavioral—when you’ve lived with the “condition” your whole life. At what point do nagging doubts stop being realistic thinking and start being symptoms of depression? How do I separate my personality from overly negative thinking? When does being critical of yourself cross the line between having high standards and feeling worthless?

Documenting symptoms means writing down things that aren’t normal, that aren’t healthy. And labeling the way I think as somehow defective and worthy of correction? It’s not unlike the type of thinking that got me into trouble in the first place.

The “easy” answer seems to be more about keeping a detailed diary. If I can’t differentiate my symptoms from my personality, I have to write it all down. It’s not about whether my negative attitude is a part of my personality, it’s about where it gets in my way. It’s about being critical of when I’m critical. Write down how I feel. Write down what I do. Write down how I feel. Coax patterns out of what I wrote.

Record the ugly. Record the good.

Record.

The Most Tender Place in My Heart is for Strangers

LOLCaroline Courtesy of Mike Murphy

Over the past 4 years, I've reluctantly learned how to trust strangers with my well being. "Why?" you might ask. And it's certainly a valid question.

I have celiac disease. Or, as my boyfriend likes to say, bread is poison to me.

Celiac basically means that my body recognizes a protein found in wheat, rye, barley, and a few other grains as a foreign pathogen. When my body detects even a minute amount of gluten in my small intestine, it takes that as a sign that I have lost the will to live and tries to kill me slowly by attacking the walls of my small intestine. This damage builds up over time leading to super fun-times including miserable stomach aches, nutrient malabsorption, intestinal tearing, and rare intestinal cancers. The immediate damage is more irritating: painful stomach aches that can last about three days.

A few good things have arisen from my celiac diagnosis. I mean, for one? I cook a LOT. I've also been forced to pay a lot more attention to what I put in my body. That doesn't mean I eat healthier food. I am just much more aware of what I'm eating because I have to be.

What's not so great? If I have to eat out, I need to be able to trust that someone's going to make my food without first touching another order containing gluten. Or that my food won't be prepared on the same surfaces as a sandwich. Or that someone doesn't forget not to put croutons in my salad.

I need to trust a complete stranger with my health.

Me after being glutened:
"GAME OVER, MAN! GAME OVER!"

I know this sounds a little melodramatic. But when faced with a full 8 to 12 hours of feeling like gremlins are repeatedly gut-punching me? I'll pass, thanks.

When I explain celiac to people, they're usually incredibly understanding and considerate. People will go out of their way to make sure I am well fed and feel safe eating what they've prepared. Friends and family especially will go out of their way to make sure I don't get "gluten-ed." But I know these people. They aren't the anonymous waiter or man behind a deli counter.

Now, I haven't gotten gluten-ed in almost 4 months. But after the last time? A server had looked me right in the eye and said, "yeah, that'll be no problem." And then three hours later it was a really painful and awkward problem.  I felt lied to. I mean, more importantly I felt like a beach ball. A very painful beach ball. Ultimately, I felt lied to and taken advantage of. Regardless of whether it was the server's fault, and it likely wasn't, he had told me I would be okay. I felt like an idiot for believing him.

I know that getting accidentally gluten-ed is not the end of the world, but those little damages add up. Physically, my body has to take some time to heal from gluten ingestion. Mentally? I end up afraid of eating out. I end up angry and frustrated, and more than a little wary of letting strangers cook for me.

Holdin' On For That Teenage Feelin'

I have a pretty clear idea of what my boyfriend's taste in women is. Strange first sentence, I know. But considering that we've been together for nearly 4 years and friends for over 6, it's not surprising.

An Artistic Interpretation of Dating at a Small Private High School

It's sort of strange then that he doesn't fully understand my taste in men. What's even stranger is that he probably understands my taste in men better than I do. I've spent some time reflecting on why. The best reasoning I've come up with is as follows:

During their teenage years, most people figure out who they're attracted to. During my teenage years, I was more interested in figuring out who was attracted to me. This sounds pretty convoluted in retrospect.

To provide some context, I've always had a relatively distorted body image—like most girls and women, I'd imagine. I was (am) also cripplingly awkward and quitting sports had made me squishy. Going to a high school full of tanned and athletic teenagers certainly didn't help either. Teenage bodily insecurities aside, my experiences with boys in high school were pretty much what one might expect: experiences with boys in high school, which is to say, mostly disappointing.

Somewhere in my sophomore year of college I started gaining some self confidence. Because dammit, I'd decided, I was cool and if nothing else, I was totally adorable. I also started dating my boyfriend around then. It didn't hurt that I'd always thought he was majorly attractive and suddenly, he was crazy about me.

So where has this left me? After a few years of trying to form some sort of concrete opinion, I can boil it down to a few things that are pretty strange and pretty persnickety. I'm not wild about boyish faces. I don't give two fucks what someone's hair looks like, but something douchey and high-maintenance will automatically lose points. Not too much shorter than I am (though there are exceptions to this), and not usually any smaller than I am. I'm not into the emaciated brooding types, but I'm not into muscle-bound gladiators any more than most of my guy friends are into plastic tits. And I'm guilty of judging books by their covers: when guys look smart, I get a little swoony.

Of course, these are in no way absolutes, but hey. How's that for the first post in over a month. Now, to sleep. (Perchance to dream)

YOU REALLY LIKE ME!

I would probably not complain if these guys insisted on playing an encore.

I see a lot of live music. I used to go to school in Philadelphia and I now live in New York, so it is pretty rare that an act I like has gone on tour and I haven't at least had the opportunity to go see them. Besides that, my boyfriend plays in a death metal band. I frequently see them play in scuzzy bars with tons of character and basements encrusted in band stickers.

Seeing a lot of concerts means I've also seen a LOT of encores. I've stood there patiently, applauding and hooting and hollering, while bands put down their instruments and walk off stage. We, the audience, massage their egos for a little while, pretend that we don't know where they've gone, and then the band walks back out. They wave magnanimously at us, their fans. After all, they're being incredibly generous in giving us two or three whole other songs! I mean we definitely didn't expect that, right? Right?

The encore arose because audiences witnessed an incredible single performance and demanded more. Now bands plan encores. Some bands even play more than one. According to a Wikipedia article on the history of the encore (... devoid of any sources, so take this with a grain of salt), some bands have played as many as four or five articles in a single concert. The encore no longer has anything to do with how well a show has gone. I'm certainly not the first person to grumble about this, nor will I be the last.

Encores are blissfully absent from the shows my boyfriend's band tends to play. The show usually takes place in a small enough room that the audience occupies much of the same space that the band does. Instead of the encore, bands announce that they're going to play one more song. Sometimes people shout for another, and sometimes bands oblige. There's none of this ridiculous play-acting.

Some of the better concerts I've been to in the past few years have had encores. People expect to see them, so artists do them. However, there are artists who are refusing to perpetuate this bizarre masturbatory ritual. They range from confrontational and influential to commercially successful. Some artists preface their last few songs with a short rant about the practice of encores. Regardless of the how or the why these artists are moving away from the encore, it's refreshing. I hope to see more artists adopt this practice in the coming years.

Jaw Clenching; Stomach Aches; Back Pains

(Apologies for the sluggish updating. Hopefully that will change.)

As someone who has a host of health complaints, I often find myself toeing the line between being attentive to my health and body and feeling like a hypochondriac. I don't look sickly. I wouldn't really categorize most of these complaints as illnesses—that word carries a gravity I don't think any of my problems really deserve. At their worst, I consider them to be chronic conditions. They're wholly manageable and they don't usually interfere with my ability to live a pretty solid life.

However, I am a champion worrier. Like the other members of my immediate family, I've been pretty good at worrying my whole life. Combine my insatiable curiosity and my somewhat macabre interest in disease, and suddenly being an anxious person with pre-existing health problems moves a step closer to hypochondria. Where do I draw the line between paying attention to possible symptoms and making a big fat deal out of nothing?

In large part because of my interest in diseases and patient populations, I took a job that requires me to read about health and medicine all day. This means that I sit in front of a computer adding more and more possible conditions to the already crowded catalogue what has been, is now, and could soon be wrong with me. Most of these conditions are pretty preposterous. If any of them really were an issue, they would likely have been picked up by one of the many attentive healthcare professionals I've seen in my life. I probably don't have adult onset ADHD, fructose malabsorption, deep vein thrombosis, or uterine fibroids. Cancers of any variety, which make up the bulk of my research, are also pretty unlikely.

However, all this research does nothing to lessen my already overactive imagination. Often, I give in these hypochondriac impulses before I try and snap myself out of it. In some cases, all it takes is talking to someone else to help me realize how insane I sound. Where I really get into trouble is when my worries are plausible. And then, well, I have a hard time convincing myself I'm wrong.

To Test for Sharks, Of Course

My resilient computer 

Detail of the monitor damage and MacGyvered Solution

As I write this inaugural blog post, I'm accompanied by the mid-range shuddering whine of a computer fan limping slowly towards death.

My boyfriend's said that my computer's been on her last legs for at least two years now. She's cranky about the Creative Suite, she hates that I have—minimum—eight browser tabs open at once, and the monitor is now being held together by strategically placed drawing clips. I've dropped my laptop. I've accidentally poured an entire glass of water into the keyboard. I've had to replace the motherboard, two batteries, a stick of RAM, the trackpad, and the disk drive. The laptop itself is now tethered to a (replaced) power cord because I don't feel like paying the money for a new battery.

When I first got my computer, she was a shiny new MacBook Pro, purchased with money I made by working two jobs the summer after my freshman year of college. Every day I woke up before 6 AM and pulled on one of three blindingly neon-green summer camp staff shirts and a pair of shorts. I then blearily made my way to the run-down golf cart derisively (and affectionately) known as the Putt-Putt and drove the 100 feet to punch the clock at the buildings and grounds office. From there, praying the Putt-Putt would make it up the hill onto the main road, I drove down to the campus pools. I would then clean pools for two hours before racing home only to immediately leave to work as a counselor at the camp whose pools I'd just cleaned.

Admittedly, my work schedule bordered on masochism. Two hours of pool-cleaning followed by 8 hours of screaming children? Cleaning the pools took even more time when one of the cherubs saw fit to shit in the pool the previous day—not to mention the day after three separate pool-defecations. (Question: HOW do you lose control of your bowels in a pool??? Were the kids just abnormally terrified of drowning?) However, being able to demonstrate enough financial independence that I could buy my own computer was a pretty huge deal for me.

Understandably, it's with some amount of regret that I have to say goodbye to my computer. I understand that it's just a (very expensive) machine, but as I back up all of my data onto external hard drives I can't help but feel a small amount of sadness. This may just be a computer, but it was truly and honestly my first computer. I imagine this is something like how it must feel to say goodbye to a first car. The machine starts failing in some very real ways, but in the end something as insignificant as a worn out cooling fan can be the deciding factor in replacing it.