David After Dentist
"I didn't feel anything."
I left my job because it had left me an emotional shell. Distant from friends and family, I went from being hermit-like to just plain hermit, I only came out of my cave to tell people to get the hell off my lawn. My friends (bless them for staying friends) came to know that an email or IM from me was going to be bitching about my job, or bitching about my spouse, who made me get the job in the first place. I was content to be a housewife. I wasn't angry, or sad, or anything, I was just tired.
"Is this real life?"
In many ways, this was my first 'real job,' in that all my jobs before had been college-related, and I liked that, I like the college community, I like serving education. I assumed that everyone worked 50 hours or more a week, and that everyone came home to pass out, woke up the next morning and trudged to work, and did it singing like the seven dwarfs. I put my job first, and my family second, and hated myself for it, but I assumed it was normal. Perhaps worst of all, I would be the first to say the nickling and diming of the American Worker was causing him a slow death, that people make dumb political decisions when they are too tired to watch the news, let alone The Daily Show, and not see that I was part of the numb masses...the dumb asses.
"I have two fingers...four fingers..."
At first, I stayed political. I read the newspaper at lunch, I received the NBC Evening News and Countdown via podcast and watched them on the bus and train to and from work. But after the election, when my job duties suddenly increased, I found myself unable to focus even on these topics. It was, in fact, a drone at my job who saw me one day, walking the halls like I was in a coma and stopped me and asked me what I was doing. I honestly could not tell her. I was so stuck on autopilot that I could get from point A to point B, but if anything was inbetween I couldn't function.
"I can't see anything."
At some point, I stopped being me. I put my faith and attention in little things that I found interesting, but anything more than an hour was too long for me to pay attention. I couldn't even follow the plotline of television shows made for the lowest common denominator. It became a noise box in the background making me feel less alone....honestly, for the first time in my life I understood why people liked Soap Operas. If I missed an episode of the 2-3 shows I did watch weekly I felt like I'd missed part of my life....people in the noise box had lives outside of the lab...I lived through them.
"WAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
When my brain didn't tell my mind that things were bad loudly enough for me to hear, my body got in on the act. A shoulder that froze up and wouldn't bend for a week, bronchitis, high blood pressure, weight loss (hey, that's good,) a tremor that went from mild to worse, migraines, cluster headaches, including one that sent me to the ER thinking it was a stroke (the pain was similar to a migraine, but different, and I'd never experienced it like that.) Screaming at my son, screaming at my spouse, going into the lady's room and sobbing. I didn't tell anyone because I thought it was narcissistic to mention it....even to blog about it (I still think blogs are narcissistic, but if narcissism can be therapeutic then so be it.) This was my new normal, I thought, a part of aging.
"I don't feel tired."
Your spouse, boss, friends, co-workers, bus driver and child all point out that you're looking ragged and you proclaim loudly that you're fine, just a cold, you need some rest over the weekend. Of course, you haven't had a weekend in months, and the December you were supposed to take off became 3 weeks, and then you had to come in twice during them...but you're fine, right, just a little out of it...not tired...head loll.
"Do I have stitches?"
One night, after a particularly hard day at the lab, I fell in the bathtub...An embarassing thing for a not-yet-40 year old. I actually fell regularly while employed at the lab, but this was a doozie. I had to be at work the next day, so I got up and finished washing, took 800mg of Advil, went to sleep, took 1000mg of Advil and went to work. I had a stripe on my leg that was the color of merlot and the swelling was so bad my leg was 1/3 again its size, but there was no one to do my work for me so I limped around for the week it took for me to heal. I showed the bruise to a couple of people, and even lied and said that my family doctor saw it. Ha. I've missed my last two appointments, because I haven't had time to go... Oh, I took the days off, but I got told at the last minute I was needed.
"You have...four eyes...."
'Maybe everyone but me is some kind of alien.' I understand why people come up with whackjob views like Indigo Children and Reptilian Conspiracies. I once was given a large dose of epinephrine in the ER to curb a severe allergic reaction. When the swelling in my skin did not respond to the normal dose, they essentially doubled it, as I was young at the time (23, IIRC) and they had no fear of it doing me serious damage. The swelling went down, they gave me benedryl and sent me home. On the way home, I told my family the car in front of us was following us, that the traffic helicopter was the CIA and that I thought my doctor might've been working for the government testing new compounds on me. I had what was called 'adrenochrome induced paranoia,' which is caused by the oxidation of epinephrine. I did not have a degree in Biology and Psychology at the time, but I somehow knew these delusions were not real. It didn't stop me from experiencing an hour of what it means to be a paranoid schizophrenic.
Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, or TSPI, is a sign of borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, sleep deprivation, PTSD and a number of other problems. I was sleeping an average of 5 hours a night. Left to my own devices my sleep need is about 11 hours/day (I know this from participating in a sleep study.) When I was younger it was closer to 14. I'll probably hit 8 when I'm 70.
When things got very bad at work, when my cells were dying, I couldn't do math, I needed to necropsy mice and payroll needed a form stamped, I suddenly would begin to think other people were making my life bad. They were poisoning my mice....they were changing my figures...they were unstamping my forms. The four-eyed monsters were doing me in incrementally.
BUT I WAS FINE, remember....
"I feel funny."
After a while my remaining cognitive function acknowledged this was not the right way to think. I knew something was wrong, but I could not place my finger on it. Two neurologists and my GP told me it was probably stress, but that it could be Parkinson's, ALS, cancer, a ministroke, Multiple systems atrophy. Since I considered myself an able handler of stress (I mean, other things that stressed people out had always flowed over me) I assumed it was everything that wasn't stress.
"Why is this happening to me?"
Do the gods hate me? Have I been exposed to toxins in the lab? Cosmic Rays, Radiation, HIV?
IT WASN'T STRESS! I DON'T GET STRESSED! I have tea and meditation! I have a well-defined spiritual center! I have a sense of proportion! My job isn't stressful, my boss said so! Obviously, it's something wrong with me, not the situation. I should just commit suicide! That would make everything better! (Did I just have a suicidal ideation?) But suicide would be too stressful on my family! (To sleep? Perchance to dream? And in that sleep what dreams may come?) Maybe they'd understand? Wouldn't the looney bin be nice? I could rest, and...but then my cells would die, the research would stop and some small child would die of cancer before the drugs got to her! There is no time for suicide! Put on the cape, the Labsignal is in the clouds! Here I come to save the day! This is normal, right? Normal? These thoughts are what life is supposed to be like, right? And anyways, he's hiring a second person ANY DAY.
"Is this going to be FOREVER?"
"Due to the economic downturn/change in labspace/help from other labs/ your competance in juggling tasks/ lack of grant money/ BS reason that includes me forgetting you manage my grants and know how much money there is... we can't hire anyone else." The economy sucks, if you quit you won't get unemployment, you're stuck with us and you can't get out. Muahahahaha. One of the PIs committed suicide, and it's the only way out because quitting is the same as suicide....you'll die from lack of a job....
****
Never infer to someone who is already suicidal that the reason things can never get better is because changing is suicide. There is always the chance, albeit small, that they have a family who loves them and can support them if they don't get unemployment, and will understand when they break down sobbing that they feel useless without a job and it's all too hard, and that begging the neurologist and GP for documents saying yes, stress was killing them, hurts and they suck up their pride and do it anyways.
One day, the tech you abuse will believe you when you say that losing their job is losing EVERYTHING, and they will realize that losing everything is better than keeping this crappy job because it's already cost them everything...and after a few weeks, and several days of fourteen hours sleep sessions, they might start realizing that the everything they thought they'd lose when they left the job was what they would've lost if they kept it.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Picking and choosing my environmental battles
As a biologist by training, I am also an environmentalist. I am, however, a reasonable environmentalist.
I eat meat. It is tasty and delicious. I 'normally' have almost no b12 and iron in my blood. To deal with this, I eat red meat for 2-4 meals a week.
I do not approve of cutting down the rainforest to get my red meat, so at least half of that red meat, and hopefully someday ALL of it, comes from bison (buffalo) farmed in the United States. Since the bison farms nearest to me don't deliver, that meat mostly comes from USwellness meats and Northstar Bison (which supplies USwellness' bison.) I generally refuse to buy outside of the Northeast, but Wisconsin was blue before it was popular, and a dairy state, and has a lot more in common with Central New York (where I am from) than most other places, so I pick the battle in letting the fact that they use UPS and I don't drive win over my view of doing things locally.
Likewise, a friend of mine is an agricultural scientist, and she is complaining about grassfed non-organic meats getting the shaft from the public and not being good for beef cattle. Why?
Well, according to her, when an organic farm gets a cow with a surface infection, like you or I might get from playing outside roughly, many of these farms will sell or kill the cow rather than give it minor treatment with an antibiotic and risk losing their organic status. This, of course, reduces the quality of life for the poor cow and raises the cost of meat. Some less concerned farms, she suggests, actually use antibiotics and just don't mention it.
My partner is deathly allergic to penicillin....go past puffy rash and right into not breathing and death...
So we avoid uncooked things (heat kills penicillin fairly well) with penicillin relatives in them even at small amounts, blue cheese (mmmmmmm....blue cheese,) unpeeled citrus and non-organic milk. Our bread, for example, goes into the fridge, which means we've become accustomed to cold bread. The amount of penicillin allowed in non-organic milk is skirting the amount she can react to, so we don't risk it, even though she probably would not get enough to react to. (BUT....she reacted to my saliva when I was on penicillin, for crying out loud.) [NOTE: The **vast** majority of people who are allergic to penicillin do not have this sort of reaction, it is like the difference between the kid who gets hives from peanut butter and the kid who gets death from eating chocolate formed on equipment also used for peanut butter.]
So back to the friend with the dairy knowledge....
She states, and I believe her, that grassfed, hormone free Ruminantia are probably cared for better than "organic" ones, because they are getting neosporin on their cuts and scratches and they are being allowed to frolic out in the field rather than be kept in small "organic certified" pastures and fed grain from organic farms. She believes that there is probably less chance of getting penicillin from grassfed meat that might be openly treated with antibiotics as needed as opposed to those who might be given it and hidden. So we pick our battles on that front. Grassfed over organic.
So, now we have my new coffeemaker....
I bought a (hangs head) Keurig mini, which takes those evil little kcups.
I bought the mykcup, to use to make my own coffee pods, but these little plastic ones are so easy to use, and I am no longer wasting coffee. It is typical for me to drink 1-3 cups a day, but when I make a pot I toss 2/3 of it out. I mean to drink it, but it doesn't happen....
So I'm picking my battles.... I'm getting fair trade organic coffee in plastic, and not wasting a drop of it. Right now, I'm tossing out the spent kcups, but it seems to me they will work nicely in the garden for seedlings, so I'm thinking I might start saving them at some point... but
I eat meat. It is tasty and delicious. I 'normally' have almost no b12 and iron in my blood. To deal with this, I eat red meat for 2-4 meals a week.
I do not approve of cutting down the rainforest to get my red meat, so at least half of that red meat, and hopefully someday ALL of it, comes from bison (buffalo) farmed in the United States. Since the bison farms nearest to me don't deliver, that meat mostly comes from USwellness meats and Northstar Bison (which supplies USwellness' bison.) I generally refuse to buy outside of the Northeast, but Wisconsin was blue before it was popular, and a dairy state, and has a lot more in common with Central New York (where I am from) than most other places, so I pick the battle in letting the fact that they use UPS and I don't drive win over my view of doing things locally.
Likewise, a friend of mine is an agricultural scientist, and she is complaining about grassfed non-organic meats getting the shaft from the public and not being good for beef cattle. Why?
Well, according to her, when an organic farm gets a cow with a surface infection, like you or I might get from playing outside roughly, many of these farms will sell or kill the cow rather than give it minor treatment with an antibiotic and risk losing their organic status. This, of course, reduces the quality of life for the poor cow and raises the cost of meat. Some less concerned farms, she suggests, actually use antibiotics and just don't mention it.
My partner is deathly allergic to penicillin....go past puffy rash and right into not breathing and death...
So we avoid uncooked things (heat kills penicillin fairly well) with penicillin relatives in them even at small amounts, blue cheese (mmmmmmm....blue cheese,) unpeeled citrus and non-organic milk. Our bread, for example, goes into the fridge, which means we've become accustomed to cold bread. The amount of penicillin allowed in non-organic milk is skirting the amount she can react to, so we don't risk it, even though she probably would not get enough to react to. (BUT....she reacted to my saliva when I was on penicillin, for crying out loud.) [NOTE: The **vast** majority of people who are allergic to penicillin do not have this sort of reaction, it is like the difference between the kid who gets hives from peanut butter and the kid who gets death from eating chocolate formed on equipment also used for peanut butter.]
So back to the friend with the dairy knowledge....
She states, and I believe her, that grassfed, hormone free Ruminantia are probably cared for better than "organic" ones, because they are getting neosporin on their cuts and scratches and they are being allowed to frolic out in the field rather than be kept in small "organic certified" pastures and fed grain from organic farms. She believes that there is probably less chance of getting penicillin from grassfed meat that might be openly treated with antibiotics as needed as opposed to those who might be given it and hidden. So we pick our battles on that front. Grassfed over organic.
So, now we have my new coffeemaker....
I bought a (hangs head) Keurig mini, which takes those evil little kcups.
I bought the mykcup, to use to make my own coffee pods, but these little plastic ones are so easy to use, and I am no longer wasting coffee. It is typical for me to drink 1-3 cups a day, but when I make a pot I toss 2/3 of it out. I mean to drink it, but it doesn't happen....
So I'm picking my battles.... I'm getting fair trade organic coffee in plastic, and not wasting a drop of it. Right now, I'm tossing out the spent kcups, but it seems to me they will work nicely in the garden for seedlings, so I'm thinking I might start saving them at some point... but
Sunday, March 1, 2009
well, that's it then.
Friday was Labgrrl's last labday. I'm slowly recovering from some dread disease (influenza? stress? both?) and I'm still numb. My job jumped the shark a while ago, and I spent the last week phoning it in, but I feel like we should have some sort of formalized ritual for leaving a job of 3.5 years.
In the department of too much information, two doctors have suggested my period, last seen while I was on vacation in December, had gone away due to stress-related Amenorrhea. I didn't feel *that* stressed out, but I took a clinical version of this test and scored a dangerous level of stress. (on the linked stress index I scored a 22 "dangerous stress" level.)
I've got to say I wasn't really buying this whole "everything wrong with you is stress from work" thing until today, the day after the day after I stopped working, in which I slept thirteen hours in a row and woke up with my period.
In High School, I did Drama, three Choruses, Newspaper, kept an active social life and wrote a (terrible) novel.
In college the first time, I majored in two subjects with little overlap, plus did enough classics classes to get a minor, and I could've had a major if I was better with languages, while being a housewife to a partner with bipolar disorder and homeschooling a problem child. (Gifted but not motivated.)
I live on stress, or so I told myself then....and my good health (healthy as an ox and approaching that weight) backed it up.
But I hit 36, and I hit a brick wall. The thyroid disease I'd told everyone I had but which tests did not show finally showed up on the tests, and my thyroid antibody load is through the roof. My weight, which had been creeping up, hit the obese level, and hit it hard, and I was eating 1000 calories a day and still gaining weight. My migraines went from twice a year to once a month to once a week to twice a week to every day. My period, regular enough that I could tell the moon phase from it (I ovulated on the new moon) stopped, then came back for 45 days....in a row....then stopped again.
My fasting blood sugar was 99, which was twice what it had been when I was 33. My "good cholesterol" was high (>70) and my "bad cholesterol" was very good (<100) but my trig was high and my blood pressure, fine a year before, was suddenly DANGEROUSLY HIGH (150/120).
My essential tremor, a nuisance before, suddenly kept me from doing my job.
I felt like I was dying. I was warned I might be developing Parkinson's, ALS or something called Multiple Systems Atrophy.
I suggested it might be stress to my boss, and he was insulted.
My GP suggested stress, and I suggested stress to my partner, and everyone else was insulted.
Finally a neurologist didn't suggest stress, he diagnosed it, and gave me an antidepressant for "mood disorder not otherwise specified."
And then I quit my job. I'd gone from doing the job of three people (lab manager, tissue culture person, general lab tech, secretary, fetch and carry, archivist) to doing the job of four (lab manager, tissue culture person, general lab tech, secretary, fetch and carry, archivist, animal technician, necropsy-ist, lab mover, therapist for stressed-out PI and the person the lab of our collaborator blamed when HIS PEOPLE failed to do things) and I was coming home sore and in tears more days than not. Plus I was working EVERY WEEKEND.
And now I'm here...and I'm numb. Or something. I feel guilty for quitting, and I worry that I won't get unemployment, even though the state papers and my union both say that quitting due to a dramatic change in duties to the point that you can't perform your job is the same as being fired....and I'm scared, but damn I'm tired, and I'm also bloody embarrassed...which is why, I suppose, that I've written this....because maybe some other former stress junkie now just too old to handle it will read this and get a clue before their health declines....and maybe, just maybe, getting my stupid period means I will get better...and it's NOT Parkinsons or some other death sentence for which there is no definitive cure.
In the department of too much information, two doctors have suggested my period, last seen while I was on vacation in December, had gone away due to stress-related Amenorrhea. I didn't feel *that* stressed out, but I took a clinical version of this test and scored a dangerous level of stress. (on the linked stress index I scored a 22 "dangerous stress" level.)
I've got to say I wasn't really buying this whole "everything wrong with you is stress from work" thing until today, the day after the day after I stopped working, in which I slept thirteen hours in a row and woke up with my period.
In High School, I did Drama, three Choruses, Newspaper, kept an active social life and wrote a (terrible) novel.
In college the first time, I majored in two subjects with little overlap, plus did enough classics classes to get a minor, and I could've had a major if I was better with languages, while being a housewife to a partner with bipolar disorder and homeschooling a problem child. (Gifted but not motivated.)
I live on stress, or so I told myself then....and my good health (healthy as an ox and approaching that weight) backed it up.
But I hit 36, and I hit a brick wall. The thyroid disease I'd told everyone I had but which tests did not show finally showed up on the tests, and my thyroid antibody load is through the roof. My weight, which had been creeping up, hit the obese level, and hit it hard, and I was eating 1000 calories a day and still gaining weight. My migraines went from twice a year to once a month to once a week to twice a week to every day. My period, regular enough that I could tell the moon phase from it (I ovulated on the new moon) stopped, then came back for 45 days....in a row....then stopped again.
My fasting blood sugar was 99, which was twice what it had been when I was 33. My "good cholesterol" was high (>70) and my "bad cholesterol" was very good (<100) but my trig was high and my blood pressure, fine a year before, was suddenly DANGEROUSLY HIGH (150/120).
My essential tremor, a nuisance before, suddenly kept me from doing my job.
I felt like I was dying. I was warned I might be developing Parkinson's, ALS or something called Multiple Systems Atrophy.
I suggested it might be stress to my boss, and he was insulted.
My GP suggested stress, and I suggested stress to my partner, and everyone else was insulted.
Finally a neurologist didn't suggest stress, he diagnosed it, and gave me an antidepressant for "mood disorder not otherwise specified."
And then I quit my job. I'd gone from doing the job of three people (lab manager, tissue culture person, general lab tech, secretary, fetch and carry, archivist) to doing the job of four (lab manager, tissue culture person, general lab tech, secretary, fetch and carry, archivist, animal technician, necropsy-ist, lab mover, therapist for stressed-out PI and the person the lab of our collaborator blamed when HIS PEOPLE failed to do things) and I was coming home sore and in tears more days than not. Plus I was working EVERY WEEKEND.
And now I'm here...and I'm numb. Or something. I feel guilty for quitting, and I worry that I won't get unemployment, even though the state papers and my union both say that quitting due to a dramatic change in duties to the point that you can't perform your job is the same as being fired....and I'm scared, but damn I'm tired, and I'm also bloody embarrassed...which is why, I suppose, that I've written this....because maybe some other former stress junkie now just too old to handle it will read this and get a clue before their health declines....and maybe, just maybe, getting my stupid period means I will get better...and it's NOT Parkinsons or some other death sentence for which there is no definitive cure.
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