J. Keroac.

My dad’s 60th birthday is on the 6th of June.  Despite all the drama that is way in the past between us, I am not going to be singing that sad country song, “I wish I could have been there for that.”  

I also don’t have enough miles to fly home.  So eff it.  I’m going to drive.

The irony is, I have to drive my now boyfriend to Florence prison for his DUI on June 2nd.  I pick him up June 3rd.  Then I’ll take off for PA on the 4th.  I’ll admit:  If my life were a screen play, the story line would be as transparent as Janet Jackson’s warddrobe malfunction at Superbowl-IV-whatever.  Nixy meets drunk, falls in love, takes care of his ‘ace’ until all is well.

The dirty thing is, I’m hoping that while I’m in PA visiting, well, my Pa, I get to see the first DUI man I stood by.  The great Angel.  And, if I’m lucky, I can stay in humid hell central long enough to catch the Sawks playing the Sillies.  What the h-e-double-hockey-stick?  I’m driving, after all.

The irony never ends.  Thank God I’m getting an oil change on June 1st. 

I really want to know what all this is for.  I will be the first to admit that I am so tired.  I have big dreams, and little money.  I can’t let that get me down, though.  I have to think positive, hokey as it may sound. I know I can do it.  “Doing it” here means making enough money to survive and do the things I want to do. Keep my house, write books, help people.  Not necessarily in that order. I just want to be happy.  Is that so bad? 

I feel like one of the Beaudelaire orphans (and if you’ve never read Beaudelaire’s poetry, you totally won’t understand the apropos way Lemony Snicket used Beaudelaire as the last name of the protagonist orphans in his books).  Unfortunate things keep happening to me, and somehow, I’m always trying to puzzle my way out of my latest crisis.  A cross country drive might do me a world of good.

I’ll end this post on one word:  Crikey!

I Can Not Keep From Writing

I must admit:  I am drinking and posting.  Never a good combination.  I will probably look back at this post in the morning and delete it.

I have three days off. I repeat:  I have three days off.  I plan to spend them healing.  Going for a good run, doing a lot of yoga, doing a lot of writing.  Learning how to say, “doing a lot of,” properly in Spanish.  Going to church.  Singing badly.

I am grateful for this freedom.  Thank You.

Survey Says…

Okay, it’s been a long while since I’ve attempted any kind of code.  But I’m going to try to post a survey here to see what any of the readers of this site might be experiencing as a result of adrenal fatigue or failure.  Here goes:

http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?E6C2AEB3E2A6BAB4

Decompression Chamber

I know exactly how a fish in the Marianas Trench would feel if she were suddenly brought up from the depths…I’m about to explode from the lack of pressure!  Okay, okay, aside from the still-have-to-do-and-keep-my-jobs part, and the wishing for a miracle so I can go home for my dad’s 60th birthday, I feel positively free.  I aced all four of my graduate classes.  Pienso que mi reciber una A en mi clase de Espanol por que te di mi profesora un reir.   That means, with out the benefit of accent marks and tildes, I think I got an A in my Spanish class because i made my professor laugh.  The last oral question was, “Tiene que hacer Ud. despues de todos los examenes?”  I answered, “Tengo que beber una cerveza.”  I didn’t, but I did have the most well-earned glass of wine I have enjoyed in some time. 

It’s so refreshing to come home and not have to go back to work, cramming nine weeks of coursework into three.  But a part of me is itching for it.  I wonder if that’s a cause or a result of my condition?  I feel like I’ve gotten so used to 14 hour days that it’s the norm.  Is it just normal decompression? 

Of course, now I’m free to work on what I love.  I have time to write, and time to work on this website.  I have time to sit down and read a novel for pleasure, time to actually breathe through my yoga practice instead of it being just another obligation. 

But was my coursework really all that dreadful?  If I hadn’t been trying to cram it in to keep my job, I’d have to say definitely not.  It’s good to have my mind thinking again about something other than survival.  It’s wonderful to be enrapt by something other than, “How am I going to pay the bills,” and the next day’s lesson plan.

I’m trying to understand this aversion I have to all things “have to.”  Do I like my job?  Yes, but the fact that I ‘have to” put up with some of the ridiculous restrictions, stipulations, and otherwise bureaucratic bs makes me want to pull the sheets back over my head and call in sick (how does the joke go?  I’ve used up all my sick days, so I’m calling in dead).  I’m very proud of the fact that I am supporting myself and don’t have to rely on anyone (thankfully, given my past wiht my ex-husband), but every month when the bills come due, I wish I could treat myself to a nice pedicure and dinner out instead of another month’s worth of utilities.  I love both of my second jobs, but yes, every Friday night I wish it were truly the start to my weekend instead of the eve of my long-run-and-teach-at-he-gym-day.   It’s like I love what I do, but hate that I have to.  How fubar is that?

I think, relating it to what I am going through, and remembering my childhood, I can kind of understand this love/hate affair with survival and surviving.  I never, never, had personal time as a child.  Every moment I wasn’t in school, I was at the mercy of whatever chore my parents could think up for me.  You didn’t disagree with my father.  Not in those days when he was still a mean, stinking, ugly drunk 90% of the time instead of just 20% or so of the time like now (yes, the same dad I want to go home to see for his birthday).  Cut the back mountain of a yard with the heaviest power mower Rickel Home Center could come up with at the time?  You got it, Dad, even though I weighed maybe 80 lbs and the mower 100.  If you think I’m exaggerating to make a good story, then you’ve never had to mow an acre walking behind a monster that could cut your foot off on a 45 degree slope in the good old, damp, heavily-grassed, northeast (the damp grass made up for the majority of weight – and guess who got to go empty the bag?  Yours truly).  In the end, I figured it was good exercise.  This was after I had become a teenager, and bulimorexia had me in it’s grip.

My dad, love him as I may, did try to teach me the value of hard work.  I’m not quite sure I understand it in his terms.  According to him, hard work is a death-trip along which you buy up what little pleasures you can (mostly by treating people well so you feel justified in torturing them.  Do I see that sin in me?  You bet.).  I always thought – call me a died-in-the-wool liberal if you must, but I thought this even as a young child – that life was supposed to be, well, a journey you enjoyed, and work was something you did to better humanity.  Not that bettering humanity isn’t an arduous task – but the means employed in this endeavor are far gentler than those of my father, who told me to go to work at the age of 14 (never mind if that old creepy cook sexually harasses you – I got you this job, and you keep it!).   At least it got me out of the house.  Sad.  Just sad.

I’m tired of typing for the evening.  I apologize to any Constant Readers may be out there (besides the spam artists) for my disjointed memoir.  Again, this is just one woman’s journey, trying to understand why things are as they are so I can hopefully change them for the better.

Completion…off topic…

Somehow or other, I managed to pass the four graduate courses I needed to take to keep my teaching certificate (and, hence, job) with straight As.  I give the creds to a power higher than my own.  I almost thought I would go clinically insane.  I think, quite possibly, I passed the oral part of the final exam in Spanish for Educational Settings because I made the professor laugh.  The question was something like, “Que tiene que hacer despues de todos estos examenes?”  I replied, “Tengo que beber una cerveza.”  Which I did not.

I did have wine, though.

In all honesty, it’s  huge relief, and I can hardly believe I did it, given I was working one full time job and two part time jobs during the whole deal.  No wonder my adrenal glands have taken the royal shit of the century.  It’s not the stess in my life that’s the problem.  It’s the overwhelming stress that I carry on my back like some paltry female Atlas day after weary day that does me in.  But I got  a freakin’ four point freakin’ oh, so there is some joy in Mudville. If you ever wanted to know how to swim through quicksand, give me a shout.  I’ll tell you what it’s all about, and it ain’t no freakin’ hokey pokey.

I used the word “freakin” three times in the last paragraph.  God, it feels good to not have to edit my writing to make sure it’s at a graduate level, complete with endnotes.  Freakin’, freakin’, freakin’, freakin’, freakin’!  There!  I have overcome my fear of redundancy!

Speaking of endnotes, I found a great site about adrenal fatigue and adrenal failure.  So I’m off to get that to add to this blog.  So good night, ladies and gentlemen, good night.

To my Friends and Family…I’m sorry…

I’m in a FUBAR way, emotionally, stress-wise.  Still, I have to apologize to the people I’ve neglected in this mess I’m in.

M.,  I’m sorry I didn’t return your call to go see A.  play.  I know I’ve been out of touch.  I love you.  I hope you know this, and I hope you are doing well.

T., I’m sorry I’ve been such a moody bee-aach today.  Hang with me until I get through this, and maybe there’ll be happiness.

B., you are the best brother ever.  I want to come home, more than anything.  Thank you for thinking of me, and being supportive.

K., I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry.  I’m so fucking sorry, and I can’t take it back.  I blamed you for all the things that you were supposed to solve in my life, when I didn’t see all the things I might have been able to save in yours.  I hope you find happiness, and I pray each morning that this will lead you to where you need to be.  I hope for your health, and I pray for your happiness and success and getting out of the depressed mix I couldn’t fix.  I’m sorry I abandoned you.  Please know I didn’t know. 

****************************

I’m so sorry I can’t be there.  Sometimes I just can’t.  That’s the thing I can’t explain to everyone I love.  I want to be at birthdays, at parties, at celebrations.  I want to keep in touch with my friends daily (or at least more often than I have).  I want to be there for my family, even if over the phone, to remember birthdays, anniversaries.  God, I wish I had the funding to go home for those events.  But everything I hold dear is hanging by the gossamer thread spun by the silkworm of fate, and I am so run down from this sickness to do anything but fight to maintain what I have.  That is enough of a battle.  I know I am failing on the friendship and family fronts.  And I am so sorry.

I offer only this white flag up for armistice, the flag of all I am going through.  I am myself fighting to survive.  My job is on the line, and there hasn’t been a day I’ve worked less than 11 hours or more non-stop just to get caught up on coursework that might – still “might” at this point – save my job so I don’t have to look for another.  It wasn’t because I didn’t perform.  This whole mess is just another ghost haunting me from my divorce, and the years I spent not teaching because I believed in supporting my husband in his dreams.  His dreams included a house miles from anywhere, but that’s old news.  If I don’t finish these last two grad courses on time (mental pat on back; I passed the other two with an A), I will lose my job.  Then, it’ s either find another, or?   Who knows in these times.

All I know is I work so much, and I’m getting too tired to write.  I know that time with my loved ones is important.  I’m just too exhausted to make the effort.  I’m so sick right now, too…this week started with a migraine that has progressed to a full blown cold…but I have to keep plugging along.  It’s like Maslov’s heirarchy of needs right now – what I need is to survive.  Food, shelter, they come with keeping my job.  Needs for acceptance and friendship come second.  I’m down to my primordial self, sick and fighting to survive.  Maybe this episode will lead to me finding what my higher purpose is, or maybe it’s a downward spiral beginning with me being mean to K.  I don’t think so; I think we have some determination over who we become.  I refuse to become a victim to fate. I will continue to dream and to fight for my survival.  I will fight for the right not to party, but to become part of the human race again without being a run-down sickly soul.  We all have the hands we are dealt, and all we can do is play them the best we know how.

I, for one, choose to play on.  We all die, I want a chance to truly live.

Please, friends, my loved ones, support me in my fight.  Forgive me for what I have not done in the past. I will try be better.  Isn’t that all we can strive to do everyday, be better?   I want to live a life I will be remembered for.  I want to live a life that helps others.  I have failed in the past.  I pray to God that I don’t fail again.

Please, don’t let me fail again.

Some Days, Nobody Gets It

I wish I knew a word for a stage beyond exhaustion, pre-giving up, but almost there and just-one-more-thing will push a person over the edge.  That’s how I’m feeling.

Well, hell, as Monty Python says (at least through his characters in The Life of Brian), “Always look on the bright side of life.”  I aced two of my classes.  Yay.  Had to take the finals in person this past Saturday.  One step closer to keeping my job.  Two more classes to pass, both online.  I get the Spanish, but the microphone hasn’t worked as of yet.  Maybe on my boyfriend’s computer it will.  The other, well, it seems that I have 100% thus far, but I have two assignments as of yet ungraded.  The members of the school board and human resources have given me direction as to keeping my job.  My partner and I got our big end-of-the-school-year assignment done today.  Yay.  My aforementioned boyfriend is loving and kind, and my roommate is finally kicked officially out of my house (though half her crap is still on my porch).  All should be right with the world.  Right?   Then why do I feel like total hell?

I’m so crashed right now.  It is that time of the month.  Makes my experience even more jolly.  I am literally forcing myself through the motions of everything I know I have to do.  And no one understands why I am so unenthusiastic and grumpy and downright not wanting to associate with humanity. 

Some more good news:  My boyfriend just brought the electric bill in, and it is last than last month’s bill.  Seems the “go green” measures I have been taking have been working.  Yay!  Go planet, go $$$ savings. 

Why do I still then feel like complete and utter death?  I swear, if I could afford to take off a day of work, I would.  My only solace is that after this week and next, I’ll be done with my graduate coursework.  Then, God willing, if my transcripts come through in time, I’ll have my standard certificate renewed on the 15th, and God willing, I’ll have an assured job for next year.  Then I can finally get some much needed rest.

My business cards for my life insurance, annuity, and long term care business came in today, too.  Yay!  God willing I’ll get some business that can help pay for what  my teaching salary doesn’t.

God willing, God willing.  I have no energy, so I’m going to have to go on faith.

Still, right now, I’m glad my boyfriend left to be with friends.  Sometimes you just want to be left alone.  Sometimes you want to go to bed at a ridiculously early hour even though the sun is still up.  Sometimes you’ve been wanting to sleep since three this afternoon, because the internal alarm went off at two am the night before.  I think I’m going to take advantage of this isolation, and have me a rest.  A short rest, but a rest.

God willing, I may soon get out from this stress that wears me down like an engine trying to run with no oil left.

Moody Wednesday

It’s a moody Wednesday. I accomplished what I had to, not much more than that. I went to court. Yay. Got my charge reduced (speed greater than reasonable and prudent). Yay.

I feel like horseshit. I am so frigging tired right now, but I can’t sleep. I’m in one of those moods where, it doesn’t matter what I do, it will come out like crap.

So I write in this blog. Sorry, Gentle Reader. Welcome to the Wonderful Adrenal Roller Coaster Ride. Be wary in sudden dips in moods and ups in energy. Whoopie!

In other news, I wrote a lousy poem, belly danced, and now think I’m going to go write a bunch of lousy haiku so that I can get a “April Poem A Day” badge to put on my groovy blog hereabouts.

I can’t believe they frigging suspended Josh Beckett for six games. Bogus. Did I just say “bogus”? Yep. Sue me.

I just can’t do this anymore. I’m going to go drink a glass of wine, say eff it, and go to bed. After all, I have to go to work tomorrow. Whee!

How Did I Get in this (adrenal) Nutshell? Part Two

After surviving my childhood, my parents and I came to a semi-peace after I moved across the country.  3,000 miles can make all the difference in pleasant parent-child relationships, I guess. 

I moved to Arizona with my now ex-husband, managed to get our first home by securing a teaching contract, helped him build a successful business with money I borrowed from my credit.  This falls into the more blah-blah-blah category, except that I did everything I did with my ex in anticipation of growing old with him and helping each other.

He decided to build a palace after his business broke into the black, did so in one of the oft-mentioned-on-the-news new towns destined to become one of the  foreclosure capitals of the world.  I supported him in this.  I supported him when he bought investment properties.  I never dreamed that one day he would drop the D-Bomb (as in divorce) on me after finding someone new (presumably at one of the “clubs” he would frequent till all hours of the night).  But he did, and out I went with nowhere to go, a job I had left behind in our old home miles away, and no idea what to do.

I figured it all out, eventually.  I first went for my real estate license, then the market fell.  So I basically walked from school to school in our little town with my resume, saying, hey, I need a job.  At this time, I was living in one of my ex-husband’s investment properties that I fully intended to buy – had he not re-fied it out the wazoo up until it was worth less than a third of what was owed.  Nonetheless, I found a job, and the R/E license came in handy when I was able to lease-purchase one of my listings after my ex foreclosed on yet another investment property.  Our divorce decree stated that he would pay the mortgage for two years; I ended up paying the first after less than one with no income to speak of, and he was supposed to pay the second.  Yeah.  Blah.  Blah.  Blah.  It bores even me.  But I figured things out as I always seem to, and moved to a home I could afford.  In the meantime, I had secured myself a teaching position, since I had found myself stuck in the investment home with a depressed roommate who had big dreams but no rent money.  Because teacher’s salaries don’t pay the basic cost of living out here (let alone the line of credit I had run out paying the first mortgage on my ex’s investment before securing said teaching post), I went and obtained my life, health and accident insurance license as well.  And during this time, I kept my fitness training and first aid/CPR/AED certs current while teaching at a local gym.  And finished a novel that I’m still trying to sell.

Basically, I was your proverbial hamster, running on the proverbial wheel, trying to maintain, while all around me the world was going a certain somewhere in a handbasket.

I started getting sick all the time.  Every little bug that would come down the pike would end up knocking me out until I wanted to sleep for days.  But day after day, I kept getting up and kept on going.  All of this took its toll.

I put on the good face for the world.  I try to be as cheery at work as I can.  I try not to let anyone know I’m dying inside.  Maybe not dying, but it feels like it.

I went from extreme hypothyroidism to extreme hyperthyroidism within a few months.  As I got tested and re-tested, stuck by every needle known to man or womankind, my hormones were doing a flipping whirling dervish on me.  Finally, after extensive Internet research, I requested a test for adrenal function (this, after every online test I took told me I was in extreme burnout).

The results?  I’m going to the Mayo Clinic to see a specialist endrocrinologist.  My adrenals are fried, my thyroid is a mess, and basically my whole endrocrine system is so FUBAR that it takes a mammoth effort just for me to think straight, let alone function normally (while taking four college level courses to keep my teaching job, still working full time, still working part time).  I have to keep running like that proverbial hamster, and at the same time try to get well.

I know there are people out there who say that adrenal disease is all in the mind.  I would like to invite those folks to have my biology for just one day, and see how well they were able to function in their normal position.  It’s not easy.  I do it because I have to.  I have to keep my job to keep my home and my benefits, as I certainly can’t afford COBRA or my lease on unemployment.   Luckily, I have doctors, and friends, who believe my condition is real.

If you are suffering from the same condition, take faith.  There are others like you.  We can pull through this. 

If you suspect you think you are suffering from adrenal fatigue or burnout, try this online assessment:  http://www.altmedsolutions.com/listing/Adrenal_Questionnaire.pdf

Since it’s a pdf, you can print it out and take it to your primary care physician.  Hopefully, from there, you can find yourself the way to heal.

Yours in Health,

Nixy

How Did I Get in this (adrenal) Nutshell? Part One

If you want the scientific cause of adrenal burnout, doctors will tell you it can be caused by one single extremely traumatic event, or an accumulation of repeated stressors.  In this, and other posts with this title, parts one till ? (I’ll stop when I get too tired to write), I’m exploring my personal descent into adrenal hell in hopes that it will lead to resurrection.

Let’s skip the, “I was born,” blah, blah, blah.  My first traumatic memory occurs when I was five or six.  My dad came home in a drunken stupor, and wanted dinner.  My mom made him a sandwich.  She forgot to toast the bread.  This lead to him holding a gun to her head.  I don’t distinctly remember the rifle, but I do remember picking up the peices of the sandwich he had thrown across the living room before dragging my mom downstairs.  I remember putting the bread in the toaster.  I recall stacking it all back together as well as my small fingers would allow and offering the now toasted sandwich to my dad, who was still astride my mom with a gun to her head.  This could have been a bad choice, but what did I know then?  It worked out for the best.  My father didn’t shoot my mother.  I don’t recall if he ate the damned sandwich or not. 

That moment sums up a lot of my childhood, but it leaves out the good parts, of which I do have fond memories.  Still, the majority of the time, I felt chronically not good enough.  Got a “B” on my report card?  Why wasn’t it an “A” (or, if quoting my dad, “Why the fuck isn’t this an A, goddam it,” while drumming his pointer finger on the end table).  One half of me was always trying to be good enough, the other half trying to rebel, all of me trying to figure out why I was such a retarded loser (as I was quite convinced I was at the time).  The majority of my teen years I spent finding out new and creative ways to either get into or get out of trouble. 

My father insisted I work, so that I could leaern responsibility.  So during the day, I would go to school.  At night, I would work until I got off shift.  I wasn’t allowed to have a car, so I was responsible for my own way home the majority of the time.  That meant biking or walking.  This didn’t bother me, as somewhere along the line, I had slowly developed a s bit of bulimarexia.  I kept a mental diary of everything I ate.  If I was “bad,” well, I now had my own money to stop at the local grocery store and pick up a dozen cookies and a box of Ex-Lax.  If I ran home from work, or biked, it was my “penance” for overeating.  Looking back, I’m sure these behaviors weren’t exactly doing wonders for my endocrine system. 

Under constant pressure at home to work hard at school, to, “live up to my potential (a phrase I’ve come to both hate and love), to work after school at a job I loathed just to learn responsibility, led me to mistakenly choose to do what I should not have been doing at all – focusing all that fury, that frustration, over the things I did not have the power to change or the grace to accept, into obsession with my weight and eating.  What I put in my mouth, and what I forced my body to do gave me a sense of control.  I couldn’t control who my parents were, and what I did with at least 12 hours of my day.  I could control what I ate, and how I spent the time off, which was exercising.  I became addicted to running at this time, an addiction I carry on today.  Some would call it a healthy addiction – I agree with them.  I also can mentally see that I’m not a total failure if I skip a daily run.  That fact hasn’t reached my heart yet, and I tell myself (probably quite truthfully), that running is my time for me, to release endorphins, to pray, to center.  I know that many doctors would not recommend my current exercise regimen, but it keeps me sane.

Sometimes, though, I would allow myself to be bad.  Given that my dad always had copious amounts of alcohol in the house, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I could take a wee nip now and then without being caught.  This soon became my Friday unwind – I would get home from work at 10 p.m. or slightly thereafter, put on whatever bad horror flick was on TV, and steal some of dad’s forgotten Sex On The Beach peach schnapps or Midori.  I’d drink until I fell asleep, then get up and do it all over again.

Fortunately, I had the brains to make decent enough grades at school to get into college, and fortunately I had enough of the common sense my parents said I was lacking, to keep myself out of serious trouble.  Little did I know I was getting myself into serious physical trouble.  I did what I had to do.

That’s enough for tonight.  If you’ve read this, thank you.  I will try to find more links and resources later.