Category: life and living

And finally, the last in my spate of early morning/can’t sleep updates: I apologize for not updating as frequently as normal. I typically try to update once a day, for two reasons: to dust off the cobwebs in my brain and become more comfortable writing daily, in preparation for writing my thesis, and because I actually enjoy having a written record of life/school (the two are so much the same at this point). (There is also the side reason that Kanna suggested a while back, in that I use this to work out my feelings on life, specific people, and the idea of leaving Seattle for graduate work.) Given all that, then, my lack of updating is a bit disappointing, but justified.

For those just tuning in, I have a chronic pain problem called chronic regional pain syndrome (descriptive, that). Do you know that feeling you get when you hit your elbow/funny bone really hard? That sharp, shooting pain that races up and down your arm for a moment before the tingling sets in? That sharp pain is what it feels like, 24/7, in my right arm, from fingertips to shoulder, unless I control it with medicine. The tingling feeling is often thrown in on top of it, just to mix it all up.

Sadly, and somewhat frustratingly, CRPS can spread when you injure yourself in other parts of your body, and it did just that, moving in to my left wrist and hand post-December badness. This was not entirely unexpected, but it still sucks.

Anyhow, I stopped being stubborn and changed and upped my medications, and I’m doing much better. But one of the side effects I sort of forgot about, a side effect of the CRPS and not the medications, is that sometimes my arms don’t feel like they belong to my body. It’s the oddest dissociated feeling; I’ll be sitting on the couch or in class with my hands folded in front of me, and it will occur to me that I can’t really feel them, or that I feel my fingers touching my thumb through a very long distance, which is the best way I have to describe it. Like there is miles of saran wrap between my fingers, or that there are simply these odd and sort of fleshy appendages attached to me.

It comes and goes, sometimes worse and other times barely noticable. Like, right now, I feel like they mostly belong to me, but there is this odd numbness from the elbows down on both sides, as if someone had injected lidocaine into me without my noticing. It’s a vaguely unpleasant thing, to feel like bits of my body aren’t really mine – body dismorphism in its mildest form.

I’m having a surgical procedure done on March 14th, something called a stellate ganglion nerve block, and I hope that one of the effects of it will be the return of my arms to me.

We live in a capitalist society that expects you to consume. Consume food, more and better and pay, until your flesh jiggles and body spreads. Consume the services that will shape and mould your body, through effort and sweat or sedation and surgery. Consume the clothes Macy’s lays out, and if you can’t fit into any of them, consume that box of Franco’s by the door. Consume until your body weighs you down, or until your body fades to nothing. There is no perfect, there is no place of resting, no finished and done – just always circling, consuming, trying to reach a point so undefined and tenuous, it is an abstract idea at best, and obsession at the worst.

Have you ever thought about the fact that it’s not okay, not socially acceptable to admit to others “I’m smart.” Doing so will invariably result in one of two things: people either saying “well yes, I’m smart, too” or thinking you’re conceited. If you actually have the nerve to admit that you’re more intelligent than other people, well. You’re arrogant, at the very minimum. But if you admit to being pretty, people will just nod and say yes – at least, if you actually are pretty. Sure, if you say it constantly and often, you’ll get labeled conceited and stuck up, but to just occasionally admit it, no big deal. You’re expected to flaunt it, and well, if you’re pretty, everyone can see it, so you’re just talking about something that everyone already knows. There’s no visual referrant available to determine intelligence.

If you’re not thin and pretty, you’d better be smart and funny – an old adage that still rings true. If you’re smart and funny, people will still pay attention to you. If you’re pretty, that’s all you need; no one will notice anything else, anyhow.

My fat, it insulates me. It protects me. My curves and lumps and softness force people to see my mind, to see my intelligence. If I lost that fat, if I slimmed down and became that social ideal, tall and blonde and thin,… would anyone notice anything else? If I lost what protects me from being labeled nothing more than a bimbo, would people see anything other than a disjointed Barbie ideal?

I don’t want to be sold on the necessity of being thin. I don’t want to embrace the ideal that says I should be nearly six feet tall and at least a size 6, if not smaller. I don’t want to be dismissed as just another pair of breasts with nothing to say. My fat protects me from these things. But even in its protection, I can’t love it or embrace it, or see it as anything other than that which makes people see me as a brain, not a body. And therein lies the contradictory nature of being me, and perhaps of being a woman. No matter the rational thought process, the idea, the ideal of the thin blonde beauty, is still in my body, my blood. Passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter and more, I can’t seem to escape the ideal of the good body.

California has postponed the immediate execution of an inmate because two anesthesiologists recruited to help inforce a judge’s ruling about how the execution had to take place to avoid cruel and unusual punishment have backed out.

The unnamed anesthesiologists have said that if Michael Morales, the inmate, were to wake up or appeared to suffer pain, they would have to intervene, and that intervention would be medically unethical. This might leave you scratching your head, but the thing is, if the anesthesiologists were to adjust Morales’s medication levels, they would then be participating in his execution, which would be against their oathes as doctors.

Confused yet? After all, doctors are required to attend executions and monitor the patient/inmate, by law. Well, those doctors neatly step around a lot of the ethical “participation” issues by monitoring the patient/inmate remotely, via computers and monitors in another room. They only enter the execution chamber once the patient/inmate is officially dead (as recorded on the monitors) to call it.

In the ruling passed down by Judge Jeremy Fogel, the prison officials could either bring in doctors to insure that Morales was properly anesthetized, or execute him by a lethal overdose of barbituites. Of course, that injection must be provided by someone licensed to inject medications intravenously…