Category Archives: Health: Mental and Physical

Stop!

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I am trying to stop smoking.

It’s really depressing.  I have tried to stop I don’t know how many times.  I won’t go into that.  It’s a pretty pathetic story.

I am at a spot in the process I know all too well.  It’s the I-Am-Stuck spot.  I have cut back for several days to 1 cigarette one day, then 2.5 the next, then back to 2, and I can’t seem to get over that final hump.

Meanwhile the withdrawal is killing me.  I can’t concentrate on anything.  I can’t read. I can’t write.  If I try to watch a movie, the damn thing irritates me so much I want to throw things.

I ache all over.  My face hurts!

I saw my psychiatrist Friday, for one of my thrice annual visits; I told him what I was doing and so we decided to up the Wellbutrin from a mere 75 milligrams per day to 150.  So far that has made no difference.

Well, maybe it did because last night I tried to go sleep but had this ringing or more like high pitched screaming in my left ear. Tinnitus, I guess.  So I couldn’t get to sleep.  I got up and walked around and jumped up and down and hit myself up aside the head and opened my mouth as far as I could and squirted liquid in my ear, and still the noise wouldn’t go away.  So I got maybe 5 hours sleep.  Not nearly enough—by about half.

This morning, thank god, it’s still there but much, much reduced from last night.

But now I feel anxious that I am going deaf…maybe that noise was the last squeal of a dying ear nerve or something.

And anxiety is really not good when one is trying to stop smoking.  I have plenty of that anyway without having to worry about going deaf.

I need to clean my ears more because I lot of ugly stuff came out when I squirted water up there with a little plastic squirter.

eGAD

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I think I have read too many Victorian novels.  Possibly in one of those, a character actually said, “Egad!”  Possibly the same character said, “Gadzooks!”  I don’t know that I have heard either spoken in real life.

But my GAD in “eGad” stands for Generalized Anxiety Disorder.  Trying to give a name to my current wretched emotional state I went on line and took a little self-diagnostic test for GAD.  Questions like the following appeared:

Yes or No? Are you troubled by:

·        Excessive worry, occurring more days than not, for a least six months?

·        Unreasonable worry about a number of events or activities, such as work or school and/or health?

·        The inability to control the worry?

Are you bothered by a least three of the following?

·        Restlessness, feeling keyed-up or on edge?

·        Being easily tired?

·        Problems concentrating?

·        Irritability?

·        Trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, or restless and unsatisfying sleep?

·        Sad or depressed?

·        Disinterested in life?

·        Worthless or guilty?

I responded “yes” to each of these questions.  I mean, natch.  What else could the answer be?  So I guess I have GAD, though maybe these are trick questions or just stupid ones. 

How much should I trust a site that uses “disinterested” incorrectly?  “Disinterested” means “objective” and should not be confused with the word they want, “uninterested.”

This appeared on the American Association of Anxiety Disorders site.  You would think an organization with such an imposing name would have a proof reader or at least one person among them who knows something about usage.

eGAD—something more to worry about.

Anxiety Abatement

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Started warming up on Friday, and wham! yesterday, Saturday, we hit 90.  Out of nowhere.  Today still supposed to be hot, but according to the weather service tomorrow promises a “tremendous” (their word) temperature drop of between 30 and 40 degrees.  These sudden comings and goings of hot air are called the Santa Ana, a phenomenon responsible for the occasional strange Christmas of 80 degrees or better.

On another front, the flood of anxiety that threatened to engulf me this last week (part of a three week long anxiety weather pattern) has abated somewhat.  I am reluctant even to mention it though, it being something of a knock-on-wood issue.  Knock-on-wood!  This weather pattern can be very unstable and the stuff could fly back in my face at any second.  If I could figure out why it has abated I might be able to figure out what started it—but I can’t figure out either.

Maybe it’s something I ate.

I was lying there watching TV last week some time.  I don’t know why but when I watch TV I don’t sit in a chair or on a sofa like most people.  For years I would lie down and stretch out on the floor with my head propped on the bottom of the sofa.  A year or so back though we got one of those TV chairs, a rocker sort of thing, that sits low down towards the floor, and I use that some, though sometimes I don’t sit on it, but drape myself, lying on my side across it, using it for some upper body support.

In any case, lying there watching TV (this was last week some time) and I become aware that I am about to have a righteous panic attack, complete with being unable to breathe.  I am quite positive, lying there, that I am going to die at any second, and if I don’t do that, I am positively doomed to experience a horrible lingering death that will utterly wipe away any possibility of what people used to call the “golden years.”  I mean, the jig is up. But then this voice comes into my head that says, in effect, “Hey Nick.  If you just think about right now, this moment, as you are lying here, you can see quite clearly that you are not dead or you couldn’t be thinking this thought, and further at this moment you have no concrete evidence either medical or experiential that you are going to die a lingering painful death.”

And strangely, thinking these thoughts, it was as if I had reached out and pushed the anxiety over to the side of my consciousness.  I even remembered to stomach breathe a little while.  Funny.  Odd.  The anxiety was still there, but more distant.

Who knows maybe thinking such thoughts on future occasions will help, though I rather doubt it.  Anxiety is a protean creature and slips up on you from all angles.  Still, I do wonder if perhaps at that moment I managed to push my way just a little bit towards the Zen now that promises some released from the wheel of transience.

Kleenex

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If I were one of those Atlas Rockets and anxiety was missile fuel, I would be half way to the moon by now.  I seem to be in the middle of a flood of anxiety; it’s as if I have a black hole inside eating up my energy.

I have always been prone to the stuff.  It’s as if an alarm goes off and gets stuck.

Lately it may have been aggravated by my having terminated my 28 year relationship with my 85 year old therapist, and then calling later to see how she was doing to find out she had been in the hospital for two days because her heart was beating way, way too fast.

And last week a new quarter started and for some reason, even after 30 years of teaching, that still makes me a little anxious.

And add to that—tomorrow, April 10, is the one year anniversary of Joan’s death.

What a long year it has been.

A little while back Brother Dan was thinking about Joan.  He wrote:

Ok so into the Joan. Joan. Joan K. Tingle. JKT. She had a Kleenex in her hand, her right hand or her left hand, I can’t recall which. It doesn’t matter…. I can’t help thinking of her and her Kleenex.

Ah, yes…the Kleenex.  She always had some of it, mashed up in a little ball, somewhere on her person.  Sometimes, if she had a sleeve, a piece would be rolled up in that, like how sailors used to store their cigarettes in those t-shirts with no pockets.  Or if she was wearing a belt, a piece would be stuck behind that.  Or lacking any other place, it would be sort of behind the opening in her blouse at her neck, maybe tucked behind a bra strap, I guess.  And Brother Steve reported that later she kept the Kleenex in her hand and that trying to hold onto that while using her walker made the whole walker business precarious going.

And it is a sign perhaps of my distracted mood that while I can remember the Kleenex a-ok.  I mean I can see it behind her belt there, I can’t for the life of me remember her ever having blown her nose.  I can’t remember either the sight or the sound of it.  And I have tried to visualize it too.  I have looked at a picture of her to remember her nose better and we have Kleenex, so I looked at that, and I tried to visualize the two together.  But the life of me I can summon up no memory of an actual nose blowing. 

If you look out the window and there’s snow on the ground, you can pretty safely assume it snowed last night, and if there is Kleenex, well there should be a nose blowing.  I can assume it happened.  But lacking a memory that’s all I can do.

 But that’s my mood lately—bits and pieces of this and that—all fragmented.

Termination

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Well last Tuesday—that would be March 25, 2008—I drove away from my shrink’s house for the very last time.  I suppose I will drive back to that house again, but when I do, I will do so in the capacity of an ordinary person and not my shrink’s client and she, my shrink, will be an ordinary person.

We have terminated.  That’s the word shrink people use when therapy stops.  It terminates.  

People terminate for all sorts of reasons.  Sometimes, the person goes for a while; the problem seems to be taken care of and they terminate.  Or maybe the person doesn’t like the whole process of therapy or the kind they are getting is not the kind they want, so they terminate.  Mostly people terminate, whether they want to or not, because their insurance will cover only a certain number of sessions.  Call that a forced termination. Sometimes, a shrink and a client have a big fight and call each other bad names and they terminate.  Sometimes the client moves to another town and they terminate.  Or maybe the shrink moves to another town with the result being termination.  Some times the client dies or the shrink, thus leading to termination.

I have been seeing my shrink since the fall of 1980, I think.  For years I figured we would terminate when I got a job someplace else, and then for a while I thought I would terminate when Carol got a job someplace else.  I got really pissed at my shrink over the years, but somehow that did not lead to termination.  And the way therapy seemsto have worked for me, I would sort of get over one issue, only by managing to dig up another that was deeper down that the first one.  So then I began to think we would terminate when one of us died.  I figured that would be her since she was older.  Though I did not rule out sudden death for myself, thus resulting in termination.

But my shrink beat me to the punch.  She decided to let her shrink license lapse.  I mean she decided not to renew it.  For one thing it costs money to renew the license, and then to qualify for renewal you have to take a certain number of units of classes to stay up with developments in “shrinkland.”

Of all the reasons that one might terminate I had never thought of the idea of termination by failure to renew shrink license.  That seems pretty mundane and insufficiently dramatic.  Sure I should have seen the writing on the wall.  My shrink is 85 years old, I think.  She is still pretty spry, but she doesn’t get out all that much anymore, and she has that macular degeneration thing going on. 

I guess I am thinking about it because for maybe the last six months, I would call her about now on a Monday morning to see if she would available for Tuesday (tomorrow) which is when we have been meeting for the last couple of years.  I started calling six months back to see if we were still on for 1 pm Tuesday because she started having different medial issues that sometimes interfered with the Tuesday appointment time.

But today I will not call because we have terminated.

Circadian Rhythms Again

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Sometimes I can’t tell if the things I have to do and the thoughts I think are making me feel bleak or if I simply don’t have the energy to do the things I do or think the thoughts I think.  Today I am inclined to think the latter.  I managed, by some stroke of luck, to get almost 7.5 hours sleep last night, and I have to say for the first part of the day I felt, in any case, more perky. Perky!  Makes me sound like a cheer leader.

Made me think of an article in the LA Times a few days back.  Some health organization is thinking of declaring the night shift “carcinogenic.”  I am used to thinking of toxic materials as carcinogenic and possibly milk, what with the hormones in it.  But the night shift?  Turns out however that people who work the night shift are more at risk for obesity, cancer, reproductive health problems, mental illness, and gastrointestinal disorders. 

Those pesky Circadian Rhythms again.  Cells all over the body function as clocks–; and guess what?  They are set to respond to light and darkness, because, guess what?—life on earth, and that includes human life, evolved to respond to light and dark, because and guess what—it’s light and heat that makes things grow.  Another thing we can blame Darwin for I guess.

But to me it just seems common sense.  Something that seems in short supply today.  One doctor announces, “It’s a myth that we alone, among all the animals, have the power to sleep when we want.”  Frankly, I have never heard of this “myth” and am glad I have not. If there are people who have heard this “myth” and believed it, they are idiots, lacking all common sense.  But doctors like to go around correcting myths they make up because it makes them sound scientific. But maybe such people exist because another doctor sees fit to say, “People think of sleep as a waste of time…. But it’s essential.”

Who the hell thinks of sleep as a waste of time?  For God’s sake?  I can only believe such people have never done an honest day of physical labor their entire lives.  Admittedly, it has been a while.  But I have done on occasion day after day of unpleasant physical labor, and I can tell you what.  Sleep is not a waste of time.

This superstructure—this so-called society or civilization—has taken us further and further away from our nature as animals.  Maybe the whole thing—the whole superstructure—has been built up to keep us from remembering that we are animals, flesh and blood that dies because it lives.  And we forget that—tell you what—at our own risk because that animal being, in what Freud might call a return of the repressed, is going to rear up and bite you in the ass.

I believe—perhaps Cousin Beth will join me—we should start a campaign to outlaw daylight savings time.  This is a nationally mandated screw up of our circadian rhythms.  Some states didn’t get with the National Plan until after WWII.  Maybe we could start at the state level and work from there.

Day Light Savings Time is Carcinogenic!

greenbluffs 

While a few April showers may lie ahead, this is about as green as it’s going to get out on the bluffs. 

Dukkha

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In hot pursuit of the zen of relaxation, I failed.  But decided maybe I could get out of my skin a bit by taking our walk to the ocean, even though Carol is now back in NY, NY and not here to take it with me.  So I poneyed up and armed myself with my Ipod.  Strolling along the golf course listening to Jimi Hendrix singing, Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?

Some guy on a golf cart started waving and yelling my name.  I waved back but didn’t know who he he was.  A guy from the club, I think.  Suddenly, I am known on the golf course.

I bought the Ipod classic, 180 gigs of memory.  I haven’t used a half of a half of an ounce of that.  So far though I have manged to “synch” in a collection of Jimi, and some Beatles, and Bruce Springstein, and about 17 tunes from a collection of oldies.  So there I sat on the bluff listening to Blueberry hill in one ear and the ocean in the other.  Finally I decided the ocean was best—and stopped listening to Blueberry Hill.

atbeach

Brother Steve recommends meditation as a route to relaxation—well, not relaxation exactly, something more than that.  He recommended a website “Mindfulness in Plain English.”  There I found in the introduction to that document:

Suffering is big word in Buddhist thought. It is a key term and it should be thoroughly understood. The Pali word is ‘dukkha’, and it does not just mean the agony of the body. It means the deep, subtle sense of unsatisfactoriness which is a part of every mental treadmill. The essence of life is suffering, said the Buddha. At first glance this seems exceedingly morbid and pessimistic. It even seems untrue. After all, there are plenty of times when we are happy. Aren’t there? No, there are not. It just seems that way. Take any moment when you feel really fulfilled and examine it closely. Down under the joy, you will find that subtle, all-pervasive undercurrent of tension, that no matter how great the moment is, it is going to end. No matter how much you just gained, you are either going to lose some of it or spend the rest of your days guarding what you have got and scheming how to get more. And in the end, you are going to die. In the end, you lose everything. It is all transitory.

Relaxation

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Funny to think but at the moment of this writing (730, March 24, 2008) Carol is in an airplane flying somewhere between California and Texas.  That’s where she will next set down in Dallas TX for transfer to a flight to La Guardia.   She is going to NY, NY for a conference, where she will participate in an international panel on creativity and dance.

I could have gone.  I like Manhattan.  But the last few springs I have traveled off to conventions, I come back and within a week I am sick with something, sometimes just a cold, but one spring I got bronchitis, so I decided a few weeks back that I would not go with her and felt bad about that, until it came time for the trip and then I was glad I had decided not to travel because I am feeling so darn pooped out.  

I am getting my usual spring allergy attack and still do not seem to have adjusted to the change in the clock.  I wake up these days at around 530 and can’t get back to sleep no matter how I try.  So I get six or six and a half hours sleep.  That’s just not enough.

I have a few days here that I might use to rest up.  The last quarter isn’t quite wrapped up.  I am waiting for the Teaching Assistants I supervise to post their grades, but I do have things pretty well set up for my class next quarter.  The problem though I am learning is that to rest up one must be able to relax.

Being tired and having a little time off might seem an opportune time to relax.  But being tired is not the same thing as being relaxed, and having the time to relax doesn’t mean one will do so.  I mean I would like to give it a go, but I don’t think I know how to relax.  I need perhaps to take some classes in the art of relaxation.  I should perhaps consult with niece Caroline who majored in Leisure Studies on some things I might read about how to relax.

But that’s a problem itself.  Reading up on relaxation isn’t the same thing as relaxing.  In fact getting up a reading list on how to relax seems a kind of chore that runs contrary to one’s overall goal—i.e. to achieve a state of relaxation.

The metaphor is low but it seems to me there should be some sort of relaxation sphincter somewhere in the psyche.  When I attend to my bodily functions I am only able to do so by the relaxation of certain sphincters, and I must say—at the risk of appearing perverse, polymorphous—that I experience the relaxation of said sphincters as very positive.  Yes, true nothing is done precisely but something is accomplished.  Or the other way around perhaps.

I should go no further with the sphincter metaphor.  But the fact that I can’t find that sphincter, if there is one, and that I can’t even conceive of relaxation as something other than a problem with possible metaphysical dimensions would seem to indicate I am pretty far from being relaxed.

Outside the Gates of Eden Still

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My classes yesterday were a bust.  I am there all pumped up and ready to go and in one class maybe two thirds show up and in the other, the 3 o’clock, maybe half.  I don’t know the exact number because I decided not to take roll.  I am lousy at taking roll anyway.

The last two weeks have not been good.  Full of midterms.  Also I have received more emails saying, I am sick, than I can recollect having received in recent memory.  You never know of course, the students could be yanking your chain.  But the way these emails are written suggest either that students can’t write or are the product of a fevered delirium.

Other evidence suggests something nasty is going around. A number of my fellow teachers have something or recently had something.  One student came to my office to catch up on what she had been missing.  She had mono last quarter, she said, and it had come back.  If she could she said she would cut out her tonsils.  They hurt so bad and keep getting re-infected.  I made her sit clear on the opposite of the room and said, did she have to cough, do so away from me even though she said mono is not airborne.

Another reported that he lives in a house with 9 people and that 3 of them had pneumonia.  He was pretty worried about getting that, though I don’t think pneumonia is airborne either (though what do I know).  One reported the wait for help at the student health center was two to three hours.  And one couldn’t show up because she had an allergic reaction to the antibiotics she had been taking for two weeks.  Her whole body was covered with a nasty rash, she said. 

Neville Sanford says, college is a developmental stage.  Students must be challenged, so they can stretch themselves, but if the challenge is too great they will feel defeated and cease to move forward.  So here I am all upset that maybe what I have asked them to read about and write on is too great a challenge, and then I realize that the challenge of my class may not be the problem at all. Maybe they haven’t had the energy to engage my challenge because of all the other challenges they are facing.  Hell my class is just a drop in the bucket in the ocean of student malaise.

So part of the developmental challenge of college involves basic stuff like eating every now and then and getting some sleep (preferably not in my class) and not getting so drunk so constantly that you screw up your immune system.  This involves developing “self-regulation” itself a central part of autonomy and that is, of course, the responsibility of the student.  Still, while the sickness seems a bit over the top at the moment, students at the end of each quarter are hacking, spitting, and snorting up a storm as finals loom on the horizon.

I have long wondered about an educational system that tends to make students sick.

Outside the Gates of Eden

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I saw my shrink.  She’s like 84 or something like that, and I told her about my students who said they didn’t want to get old and all wrinkly.  And we are both sitting there looking pretty wrinkly, but she is more wrinkly than me.  She said perhaps I should ask my students what they think or feel about getting old.  I said, yea, maybe I could do that, but I sort of doubted that they knew or would be able to offer any explanations for their thoughts and feelings.

As usual I was projecting.  I realize that had some teacher bothered to ask me that question when I was back in college that I wouldn’t have had much to say (and so assume that my students wouldn’t have much to say).  Back in college I didn’t think about getting old at all.  True, I thought about dying nearly every day.  But that could happen at any time, the way I saw it.  Getting old was not a pre-requisite for dying.  So had I been asked, I might have said something like, “Getting old?  Hell, it happens.”

So I said to my shrink, I didn’t think about getting old because I was mostly interested in just surviving.  Getting from one day to the next and not somehow screwing up completely, or dropping dead in the middle of the whole thing. And she said that had been true of her also.  She spent her high school years studying to be a concert level pianist in the middle of the Nazi Occupation of Paris.  She had plenty to think about besides getting old.  The future was uncertain.  Getting old might happen or maybe not.

So I started thinking again about what my students had said.  With a special emphasis upon getting all baggy and wrinkly.  The young woman who didn’t want to get old was an attractive young woman.  So maybe that’s what she meant.  Getting old means becoming unattractive.  So perhaps for this young woman and the others that seemed to know what she was saying being attractive was a central part of their identities.  Probably she works at being attractive.  It takes time and effort.  So perhaps—still speculating—her self-concept centers on the very idea of being young.

We live—or so I have read—in a youth oriented culture.  The culture celebrates youth and accordingly the young feel celebrated.  The other night I was watching TV and the anchor woman for the local news I swear didn’t look more than 23.  And of course she was attractive.  So getting old means losing in effect a source of power—a way of being the center of attention—simply because one is young and attractive.

The stuff I had students read from Erikson was written back in 1968.  He wrote partly in response to the big youth boom of that time, the baby-boomers hitting the market.  Certainly, though, the youth culture and the ideal of youthful appearance have intensified since that time.  Still, what he had to say back then fits with now.  Any step “forward” in development means losing something (as well as gaining something).  He writes of the step from childhood to adolescence almost as if it equaled being kicked out of Eden.

So the step into college for some young people might mean psychologically being kicked out of the Eden of Youth.  In fact, one student spoke of college almost as if it were the end of the road.