Thank you, Lupron

I am now about five pounds away from an overweight BMI! Oh, how things have changed.

Ever since I had my tonsils out at age six, I have been extremely picky. The shitty thing is it's not just a matter of "not liking" something -- it's a matter of involuntary gagging and heaving. And my appetite, for as long as I can remember, was inordinately small. I could eat maybe a quarter of a modest-sized meal before I was at the point where I actually could not swallow any more food, because I would start gagging once it hit my throat.

My neurologist indicated in my records that I was visibly undernourished. At the time, I was 5'8", around 115 pounds. That's a BMI of 17.5, or 1.0 past the cutoff for "underweight." And a bra size of 34notevenA. (Different brands call it different things, but the one constant is that the bra would be a bit too big for me.)

(I hated my weight, for the record. My shoulder blades hurt anytime they were pressed up against anything, even a soft bed. My hips and pelvis cried out in pain from grating up against a hard plastic chair (i.e. 2/3 of every weekday ever) or even just against a fitting pair of jeans. I always felt like my bones were ready to snap at any moment. Weak, fragile.)

Right before new year 2005 I got on the Lyrica, which has a side effect of weight gain/increased appetite. I saw both. Yay! Within six or ten months I saw my body become more and more padded. It settled down around 150. BMI 22.8. Recently re-fitted for a bra (I was still wearing my stretched-out 34As) at 36C. Took some adjusting, certainly. I had always had a bit of a roll on my upper tummy, even when I didn't have much of any fat there at all. That remains. My legs are nice and firm and muscle-y now, since I started working at a place that requires me to be standing or walking all day, but besides that I am basically composed of significantly less muscle mass than a "normal" woman, and make up for that with a bit more fatty tissue. It's how I've been whether I'm completely sedentary or whether I am active and regularly exercising.

The first of these two pictures were me around my high school graduation in 2004. The last is me as of this month (taken to earn discounts off Threadless shirts. Whee!). There's a significant difference.

I've grown to be mostly happy with my body. The fact that I have extra tummy fat -- or just that my breasts are fairly small proportionately, which has the effect of making my tummy seem bigger in my mind -- is really the only thing that gets to me sometimes; besides that, for the most part, I'm certainly comfortable walking around nekkid all day, and I can admire even the unconventional things -- like the multiple scars on my back and my side, my silly slightly-crooked nose (the Hungarian in me) and my wide, full hips and butt. I like those.

Those are fuller now, though; I weighed in at 158 at the doctor's office yesterday, and I am sure over the course of this six-month treatment I will see a little bit more gain (it is only just today one full month since my first shot).

I should get used to this, right? Of course, people only gain, bit by bit, as they get older -- and it's usually better for them to do so, in terms of health and mortality. And I do plan on going through pregnancy at least once in my life. And for as much fucking medication I'm on, I can't expect not to see some weight gain. Really, which would I rather have: another five pounds around the hips and tummy?, or debilitating neuralgia, crushing anxiety, or endometrial implants growing and spreading and scarring up my insides, creating an awful amount of pain and frustration?

And culturally, which do women often choose? Not every time, but enough times that clinical trials do often see patients dropping out early for the side effects, the most common of which in medication for women is weight gain.

This is a lot for me to get used to. Really, four years later, I still have an image of myself as the skinny minny. I still expect people to recoil when they hug me because they're afraid they'll hurt me if they squeeze too hard, and remark with a concerned tone on how little I am. I still think of my breasts as exceptionally small, rather than absolutely average -- and when I think of it that way, I think that they can't be counted that way because I have more than enough tummy to make up for it. I still expect to be able to fit into Mediums and Smalls on the dress rack...

I know I am measuring against a fictional standard. But God it's just all over, and I can't escape it. It's woven down around every thread of thought that has anything, anything at all to do with outward appearance, even in the most indirect way. And I know that even if I can somehow purge myself of it, clear my own head, it's still permeated throughout our culture in an even worse way. I can't escape it -- I can never escape it.

I try, little bit by little bit, to be positive about my body around other people, and to be positive to them about their bodies, and to remind them that it's better to live a happy, healthy life in the body you've got than to stomp all over your health and happiness to change your body. But that doesn't mean I, myself, am unafflicted, unconflicted on the matter.

I was hesitant to include this next picture with those above, because it doesn't just show me as "average" -- I immediately see that spare tire below the breasts, how it pops out over the top of my jeans so obviously, how plump my thighs are juxtaposed with those skinny little toothpick calves and arms.


But you know what? I shouldn't be tearing myself down over these things. I shouldn't.

This post was originally going to be just that first line.

I'm trying to make sense of all this. I guess none of us ever fully do, do we?

Proposed Moratorium, The Third

GODDAMMIT, PEOPLE.

"Psycho" is not a stand-in for "bad person."

It is used by people who want to Other a person who is behaving in an unfortunate way, predictable or not.

"Crazy" and "insane" are similar words, but the connotations of those are so generic by now as to be less harmful.

But psychotic, schizophrenic, and other actual mental illnesses should not be appropriated by right-thinking people to mean, simply, Shoot! Someone Is Being Mean To Me Again.

I mean. Just. Fuck.

Inspired by the recent prevalance of people referring to Hillary as "the psycho ex-girlfriend." Of course, this particular stereotype combines ableism with sexism to reach grand new levels of insultingness. To these people, I can only say: FUCK OFF.

Simple Answers to Stupid Questions

Errr... except the question is not stupid and the answer is not simple.

On May 8 I received a visitor via a Google search for:

is chronic illness something they label you when they can't find out why you are in pain?

Well. Yes. And no.

No, because often they understand why you are in pain (for a rather simple, surface meaning of "why": that is, you have a diagnosis, even if they don't know shit about why your body does what it does): you have arthritis, or neuralgia, or back pain, or a really fucked up ankle, or whatever. And the best way to describe that, really, is chronic pain. (Chronic illness, etc.) Because it's pain that isn't going to just go away -- which needs distinction, because the latter is how pain is thought of culturally in the US. It's something you're going to be living with, if not for the rest of your life, then for a long while yet. And it requires a somewhat different approach.

But yes, in a sense, because doctors do love to punt. It is a rare doctor who does their job when it comes to the difficult patients, and patients who present with symptoms for which there seems to be no cause are hard to deal with, both because of the obvious, and because they are, honestly, just a general pain in the ass. They hurt and they need help, but you don't know why they hurt and so you can't really treat them effectively, and because the treatments are at least initially ineffective they keep coming back to try to fix it, and you don't have the faintest clue where you should go next.

This is not to say that doctors -- and other medical professionals, from the nurses to the receptionists to the therapists to the recordkeepers and the billers -- are therefore bad people. Most of them are doing the best job they can. Most of them have at least half a conscience. Most of them are trying to make as many lives as better as possible.

But good intentions do not erase bad results (as is so commonly thought). A lot of doctors are really behind in the research on most chronic pain conditions. A lot of doctors believe pretty backwards things about chronic pain patients (I'll give you two words that sum it all up: faking it). A lot of doctors are too busy managing other things to really connect the dots properly. A lot of doctors drop the ball in referring a patient to someone who can take care of them properly if they know that they cannot (and simply offering any ol' referral to get them out of your hair does not count). A lot of doctors fail to follow through, period.

And their patients suffer for it. Understandable or not.

The medical world is a busy, busy world. There's a lot going on at any one time and no one person can carry the entire burden. Sometimes, mistakes are made, because the people doing the work are human.

But sometimes, it doesn't matter why. Because someone is suffering as a result.

And someone had damn well better pick up that ball and set it rolling again, history be damned.

To patients who don't know what to do, where to go, who to see, because nothing seems to go right: Keep trying. Keep faith. It's not all in your head. You aren't imagining it. If one professional fails to diagnose or treat your condition to a point where you get better, then find another. Because that professional is not doing hir job.

And you deserve one who does.

It's exhausting sometimes. But keep moving forward.

"Dogs get better care in the dog pound"

Too exhausted to comment, or even to finish the remaining 2/3 of the article. It is devastating.

I will just repeat: Immigration is a human rights issue.

Sez Ez (about a different subject altogether),

One nice thing about blogs is you can say the same thing over and over again without any editors getting pissed at you. When you're coming up with story ideas, "what's new" is always the first question you're asked. But on a blog, by making the same arguments in response to different news pegs and events, you're actually much more effective at conveying your points. Few writers are so persuasive, and few arguments so instantly convincing, that one bite at the apple will transform the thinking of your audience.

I just wanted to highlight this, because it's something I've been chewing on for awhile re: my growing radicalism over the last several years. On my introduction to feminism, I was, initially, repulsed by a good many arguments even as there was something at the core of the community I felt drawn-to. As time went on, through the repetition of arguments in different ways, in response to different events, I began to understand those arguments better. That is, without a context, the arguments offended my status-quo sensibilities. But as I came to understand the context -- as I saw how seriously rampant harassment and assault are -- as casual misogyny in so many different places was pointed out to me, over and over again -- I began to understand where those arguments came from.

Conditioned blindness is what I called it in conversation with a friend today. We are conditioned from birth to deliberately not see the evidence of oppression in our society. Recognition of it leads to a dangerous place, after all. But if a person has a notion to de-condition hirself, even if not everything is tasteful to hir at the beginning, sie will eventually come to understand where those speakers are coming from.

That's really at the heart of the mainstream's rejection of feminism. They don't understand it, and they have been told from day one that understanding it leads you to want to change it, and that's an extreme position to take, and mostly it just annoys the hell out of your peers. So hey, be cool, don't get on us for shit, just go with the flow. Wouldn't want to put a damper on the mood.

Anyway, I think there's a reason blogs are at the center of a growing feminist community these days. Well, one of many reasons, anyway.