Unwellness

I am now a part-time rheumatologist

and I have decided that I undoubtedly have lupus.

Yes, yes, I know there is that whole medical school obstacle to overcome.

But my ANA titer is 1:160 with a homogeneous patter, and even though that is not the most prevalent pattern seen with systemic lupus erythematosus, my sed rate of 24 is at the highest of the normal levels and could mean a high rate of inflammation.

I picked up my blood test results. Can you tell?

OK. Scratch that.

Well, the doctor called and had a whole new story. Upon seeing some final test results, she found something. My ANA levels. That's something like auto-nuclear-antibodies or something. It means a possible autoimmune problem, which could be either lupus or arthritis. I am not particularly fond of either of these possibilities, as both mean a sort of lifelong pain management sort of thing.

And as I tried not to panic - I have a week until I see the rheumatologist she referred me to - I dug through our boxes of books looking for anything health-like to read. I have no Internet at home, that balm of the undiagnosed. So I found my book about pre-conception health and read that people with lupus need to be in remission 3-6 months, preferably six, to avoid a quite elevated risk of miscarriage or other problems. It's that sort of disease, the kind with remissions.

Here we go - countdown to rheumatology, that exciting field of medicine I barely knew existed until approximately one hour ago and which is now my most researched topic.

At last, I can paint in peace

The silly little housewarming party is over and now I can stop trying to get everything done before it happens. I was starting to get Wes-like, overly-ambitious given the actual number of hours in a day. Trying to slide in a task or three too many. Let me bake dozens of mini pizzas and six flavors of sorbet pops and some whole wheat sourdough bread and then let me be sure to paint the new wall and plant grass in the backyard and then build planters and benches out of concrete bricks and wood in my spare time. Yeah, I know.

So I have started taking on these tasks at a more normal speed. Today is painting. I started last night in between making the pizza dough for dinner and the bagels for breakfast.

I think I found my OB/GYN by accident. I just went because my new doctor told me to but I seem to have stumbled upon the foremost queer-interested obstetrician in Park Slope. It was the usual script - the line of questioning turns away from what relatives had cancer and towards what method of birth control I use. None does not normally suffice, as the next question is "Are you trying to get pregnant?"

(Wait. A brief interlude about my old-ness. That is a new question. They used to look at me reproachfully when I said none, and I would quickly explain I slept with girls. But there was a supposition in that look that I was too young to have children. I am now very ready and excited to have a baby, but I also don't feel that much older than before. Than 10 years ago. And so, I was sort of blown away by the new supposition that I must be trying to get pregnant. When I told him, "Not yet but in the fall," he said "Great! 29 is a good age to get pregnant!" I was taken aback. What happened to the reproachful look? What happened to my youth? Yikes! It is really time. I am really 29 now! OK. Let me go on.)

I had an inkling he was cool because he knew the Callen-Lorde Center, where I went for health care until now. He said he was planning to volunteer there. Most of my doctors do volunteer there. Because most of them are queer. So hmmm...

Once I told him a brief version of the Wes story, and he nodded a lot and smiled a lot and expressed his support, he started to stumble over pronouns.

"He," I said firmly. "When we met I was a lesbian but now I don't know what I am. I don't worry about it too much." (I like to try to add something memorable so they can possibly stop stumbling.)

He laughed. He launched into "Don't worry about this at all. I am totally cool with this." And then about how he and this friend of his, a reproductive endocrinologist (fertility doctor) are starting a group for lesbians who want to have babies and "I know it's not the same but it's... the same process." (Extra points for acknowledging this!!) And he offered to call this friend so we'd be all set to see him in the fall.

Whoosh. This was an unexpected meeting, let me tell you. But it looks like, for once, I managed to stumble into the right thing without over-librarian-ing myself, researching it to death.

Also

Yesterday was my birthday and I am 29.

And we just found out there will not be cable or a cable modem in our apartment for another month, at least. And my funny cafe/theatre place is closed for the next month, at least. Hello, my new job, two blocks away and full of dependable Internet access. Next week, I think I will be spending a lot more time getting to know my collection.

This week, however, my father and stepmother are here.

Feeling like a NYC UPS man

On the way here, I saw a policeman giving a parking ticket to a UPS truck. And there were several of us gawking and I got to wondering, what the fuck is the NYC UPS man supposed to do? Just where, exactly, would the NYPD like the UPS truck to park when its person is running about with packages? And isn't part of driving in a city like this one just learning to navigate the giant, double-parked trucks? What the hell choice does the UPS man have?

No choice. None.

So, there is nothing wrong with me. I haven't talked to the doctor yet - Wes got the message. I may call her tomorrow. But maybe not because I am having a hard time facing this. I wanted to be overweight for some mysterious health reason. I did not want to be told to do some cardio and take some B vitamin and it will all be fine. That's not at all what she said. That's my own brain. But how can this be nothing? How can it hurt this much to get out of the bed each morning if it is nothing?

She is going to send me to a neurologist.

What the fuck ever. Truly. I have decided to swing on ahead. It is time to think baby. I wrote a long diatribe about this topic on Monday night after returning from the Cape, where babies were more than a bit on the brain of half of us younger set. I wrote about how scared I am that it is going to rip out Wes' heart - he wants so badly for it to be a creature we create together. As that is impossible, we will forage on in the usual alternative way, but it will be sort of sad. And I worry that he will have built up such a block about how it isn't "his," and then he will not love it and I will be left barefoot and baking bread with a baby on one hip and a chihuahua on the other, all of us crying our eyes out because Wes wants no part of us.

Yeah, I know. I'm just telling you how sick I am.

Today I almost fell out of my own skin trying to get up the nerve to deal with the guy who is putting up the walls and doors for our bedroom. There was a misunderstanding about a certain little part of the project, and the concept of broaching this topic was enough to make me lose it entirely. I refused to kiss Wes goodbye - if he loved me, he would not go to work, but stay and deal with the construction guy for me.

Yeah, I know.

Really I do.

Slow Boat

I wrote a story for that contest. I don't think it's very good, but it has to be in England by the 23rd, so my sister says I should just send it. What have I got to lose, I guess...

I went to the doctor today about my numb extremities. She mentioned the thyroid. She set me up with a massive rash of blood tests and now we wait some more.

Sourdough bread making is my new passion. It takes a long time and appeals to my gross side. And I have a lot of time for grossness right now.

My father and stepmother arrive on Monday. Today I am off for my weekend at the Cape, at Jenya's. It is my favorite place in the United States.

That is all. I am so, so tired. Everything is just so, so slow.

I should walk around more. I guess I will when I start working again. Maybe. Then again, I may just walk the straight two blocks to work and back. We'll see. Anyway, I just walked to the ATM and then to my funny cafe/theatre place and had those swelling crescendos of love for my neighborhood, for the rasta guys in the Brooklyn Public Library truck, for the women discussing parking spaces in front of the Mexican cafe, for the black-robed Muslim woman with a baby in a Bjorn on her front going into the check cashing place, for the same two cashiers at the Associated supermarket who were there back when they only sold Goya products - now it's just as much soy milk and pomegranate juice and organic garlic rosemary crackers as anywhere else. Which is also something I love. Count me in on the gentrification wagon (obviously), as long as my two cashiers still live here, too.

The thing I had been dreading happened this morning, which is that Wes gave me my birthday present. This is how twisted and sick I am. I knew what it was going to be because my husband is loud and has too much faith in closed doors, so he was talking to my sister about it. Also, he writes absolutely everything in his Palm and then leaves the desktop open on our shared computer. Also, I just know him. Anyway, even though I knew, he had somewhat convinced me I was wrong. So I was not sure I would be receiving tickets to Rufus this morning, but I did. And then I started my fussing and panicking over how I was going to have to meet Wes at the park and how I was going to have to get the teenaged child and the (barely) teenaged sister corralled into the city and he wanted me to get dinner at Whole Foods to bring with us, and are you allowed to bring food in and what if I can't find the right entrance to the park and what if the child whines or what if he sulks or what if he farts a lot and keeps telling us about how he farted (he does this, frequently). What if I am there in what should be my perfect, happy birthday moment and the child is farting and there are loud people smoking cigarettes near us or there are bugs or bats or the grass is itchy?

And how is it possible that I have disintegrated into such a bad, bad person that I panic over such a sweet, wonderful present from the love of my life?

I have been doing really well with unknowns lately. I think this is making me freak out because I am so excited about it and I get so ahead of myself, already imagining the disappointment of the ruining of the perfect moment even before the moment gets perfect, and so then it never does, you know?

See that? I don't need fucking therapy. Take that, Orla on sabbatical.

I must thank Hera, whenever she pops by this blog, because without her I probably would never have started listening to my darling Rufus. He is my first purely Internet music love - I was told about him on my blog, I downloaded him from iTunes, I listen to him purely on computer. Until recently, that is, when I couldn't stand not to have him near me while driving, even just to downtown Brooklyn, so I burned a CD of my favorite songs.

Did you know Rufus won an Outmusic Award this year? And did you know that they did, too?

Here's something I like

I like the funky theater/cafe where I come most mornings/afternoons as the case may be, and where the woman plays country music and sings loud, and where there are other strange people who are here taking advantage of the free wireless Internet.

Except that right now I think that on the stereo, Jimmy Buffett is singing a duet with... could it be... Willie Nelson? And the song is "Hey good lookin', what you got cookin'?" And that is just wrong.

What a strange thing it would have been to know how we would all turn out. If I had known how smart we would all be, how expert in our fields, our arcane our knowledge, how much we had to learn. If I had known what it would feel like to have a broken heart and then to actually feel my heart break. If I had known what it would feel like to fall in love and then to settle down into it for good, to feel safe enough to be the bitch I was anyway, to fall deeper and float in it and seethe in it and roll around in it on weekend mornings. If I had known how long-lasting the love was. If I had known how long a grudge can last, and with it, love.

By the time the Tuckahoe roommates moved in, I had filled the place with new Ikea furniture and summoned the cold, functioning part of myself long enough to unpack the boxes of things that had belonged to my mom, things my grandmother had packed even when I waved my hands at her and told her I didn’t need them. I already had a set of measuring cups, a hand mixer, a frying pan. She listened, she nodded, but she packed these things anyway. The kitchen was full even before the roommates arrived with their own contributions. I had to rearrange, store things in the bottom of the pantry so that each time I went in for food, I saw random bits of my childhood on the floor – the 70’s pitcher with the bright orange lid, the avocado green mixing bowls. The familiarity was almost bodily felt, the pit of my stomach contracting with the feeling of using these items, of seeing them in her cupboards, as dependable as Arizona August, monsoon season, and my mother smoking a cigarette with the front door open, her face Zen-like calm at the sight of lightning slicing desert sky.

Wanna know a secret?

I am trying to write a short story. For the first time since college. It is hard.

I was inspired to try by finding a contest in the British Harpers we picked up in the airport on the way back from Europe. I have never entered a contest. I have never been published by anything more than my college literary magazine, and then only because I was friends with the Editor.

It makes me very nervous just thinking about it. Luckily the deadline is very, very soon, so I don't have time to worry about it. I'm just trying to do it.