💗MY VERY LAST pandemic hair update: blessings in adversity💗

I swear, this is my LAST. Even with the new variant. 

Weird dream #496: on the bayou

Weird dream #496. This one seems more pandemic-related, like everything these days. I had a hair appointment AT LAST, after nearly a year of cutting my own hair. But even though I had been going there for fifteen years, I couldn’t seem to find the salon. “Someone” pointed and said, “You have to walk that way.” Stretched out in front of me, I saw a long, long foot bridge – almost a rope bridge – suspended over a flooded area. Half the bridge was underwater, and I said, “I can’t walk over that!” “Someone” said, “This IS the bayou,” as if I was being silly and demanding. I kept thinking of Hurricane Katrina and wondering how it could have come here. Then “someone else” (looked like a nurse!) told me, “Oh for heaven’s sake, THAT’S not how you get there!” Then I was on a boat. I thought “water taxi?” (thinking of Venice), but it was more like a small pleasure craft. We zoomed along on choppy waters for a long time. Then I realized we were going nowhere. I woke up, got out the razor comb, and trimmed my own hair. AGAIN.

Making A Sh*tty Dress To Mark The End of a Sh*tty Year

I haven't even watched this yet, but the title was irresistible! I love this woman's videos - she's a costume historian from Poland, and very funny as well as knowledgeable. Hope you enjoy this! If it's not so good, I'll take it down. I promise. 

The circuit-breaker: how long can you hold your breath?

My brilliant daughter Shannon Paterson reports again. Here are my thoughts from the comments section.

These two-week bursts of severe restriction are called "circuit-breakers", and what they generally do is force everyone to hold their breath, figuratively speaking. But sooner or later you have to breathe again, and when normal human social impulses are kept suppressed, they tend to burst out again as people try desperately to re-connect. It's so hard-wired into us that I doubt if we can adhere to such brutal abstinence from the way we have evolved as humans. 

Besides, statistically, the circuit-breaker method is a desperation ploy which so far shows no clear signs of working. It's a fire-break against a raging blaze. Health experts are trying it, inflicting it experimentally on populations, because THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO. This is all just one big seething petri dish of experimentation, worldwide, and it has never happened before so NO ONE knows what to do. But they can't say that because they need to instill trust in people so they will "believe the science". If only it were that simple!

Right now, most of us are shoving the thought to the backs of our minds that there won't be any Christmas this year - and there won't, not like we have ever known it. People are carrying around, not just resentment at what they're having to do without (human contact being the most desperate), but a lot of shame if they feel angry about it or don't want to adhere to it or feel they want to rebel. Myself, I've had wild, subversive, "wrong" thoughts that this is all a bad joke and an attempt to force people to obey and toe the line, a la Big Brother. Then I give myself a shake and say, What is wrong with you? and feel shame. So the anger gets pushed under. 

There are teeny peeps here and there, sparsely-written and infrequent news items about how some "vulnerable" people who are already in heavily-marginalized categories (chronic mental illness or addiction) are having negative emotional effects, but they are people who are going to get more depressed anyway in the winter, or are never going to get better. Then, quickly, comes another stat - we HAVE to have stats every day, you see - that suicide rates are actually DOWN, so everything is obviously OK unless you're one of "those" people (who would be messed up anyway, and we all know most of them can't be saved. Harm-reduction is the best we can do.) If these remedies turn out to be as effective as society's remedies for addiction and mental illness, then God help us all.

It's Good News Week!

"It's good news week!" A sprightly announcement on my local news broadcast: "And there's some GOOD news on the mental health front! Suicide rates were actually DOWN during the first few months of the pandemic. Mental health experts are attempting to analyze this unexpected development and generate statistics for further study." So that means if you are suicidal, you are definitely in the minority.

BUT. . . I just had a thought. Perhaps there was no one in the mental health field who was available to KEEP accurate statistics, or even notice them. Suicides often fly under the radar as "accidents" anyway, to spare the family stigma and shame. Meantime, all the "professionals" were hunkered down at home, particularly in the first couple of months. There's a pandemic on, for God's sake - let's get our priorities right! It also seems to prove all those distressed souls actually do better without all that attention paid to them.

Unmet needs: why we're afraid to talk to our doctors

 

This is a Facebook comment that I want to turn into a blog post, because these are important issues, and I assume I am hardly the only one who is struggling. It's an unpopular view about which hardly anyone speaks, and I think this is due to guilt, shame and being intimidated by the labyrinthine nature of the medical system right now. It causes more stress than it solves, so I try to avoid it as much as I can, and avoiding medical issues and hoping they will go away is NOT a good strategy over the long haul - and I don't even think we're at the midpoint yet. I normally use a lot of images to break up text, but this is going down as is. 

I have one of those phoned-in "doctor's appointments" scheduled in a few minutes and am waiting by the phone with my stomach in knots, though I was told the call could come any time between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm. 

I am dreading it. After six months, I have so many unaddressed issues built up that I don't trust myself NOT to spill them, become angry and alienate the only source of help I have right now. She has a history of discounting and countering virtually everything I say. Medication is also a huge problem, and based on past experience I fear she will withhold some things in a way that "shouldn't bother me" because it didn't bother anyone else she has treated. 

I am being told, not WHAT to feel, but the only way TO feel, because, surprise surprise, there's a pandemic on and we're made to feel very guilty and even shamed for having medical needs that have gone unmet for half a year (and most of this stuff has been going on for 2 years or so while I have actively searched for a better doctor). 

In my case, it's psychiatric, so I virtually don't have a leg to stand on, and based on 50 years of dismal experience, this almost cannot go well. Everyone has their own bag of bricks to lug around, and each one is different, but I have been trying very hard to convince myself that this stuff isn't important, and I should just be a big girl and suck it up. That is the impression I get, anyway. 

I try to keep negative medical things off my Facebook page because it is NOT a popular view to criticize doctors, who have been lifted up to the status of selfless heroes when many of them are just not doing their regular jobs and are leaving people (not just me) with no safety net, which is considered some kind of indulgence, I think. My main hope is that she will have an anonymous intern handle it, which she has frequently done over the past two years. My encounters with her, though rare, are incredibly stressful and leave me feeling drained and discounted. And I can't "just get another doctor", so that door is closed to me. 

Wish me luck, please.

Are we being shamed for needing medical help?

I am about to express a very unpopular view which I believe everyone is afraid to talk about.

No one needs reminders of the COVID pandemic and how it has utterly swallowed the energy and attention of the medical industry worldwide. I believe people are being shamed into keeping their medical concerns to themselves and not taking up their doctors' valuable time. I have not spoken to my doctor in four months and am told to "just go to Emergency" if I have a serious problem. My last trip to Emergency yielded me a wildly off-target diagnosis (made on the fly by whoever was on call), prompting my doctor to become very angry with me and accuse me of "trying to diagnose myself" when it turned out to be wrong. 

I am seeking another family doctor, but I realize this very likely won't happen. I am not trying to whine about this, but over the long term, people are going to die from medical neglect and the absence of the kind of preventative care which can intercept relapses and prevent bouts of very serious illness. Elderly people who are already isolated and chronicaly ill are being cut off completely if they have no computer access. 

We all seem to feel very guilty about asking for help, but this is a situation created by dismissive doctors who do NOT make their regular patients a priority. I even feel bad about posting this, because I will be seen as disloyal to the cause and not praising doctors enough for being so heroic. But I'd have more respect for them if they would so much as attempt to do their jobs.

I know a woman who is afraid she is having cancer symptoms. When she finally got through to the intern filling in for the intern who is filling in for her doctor, she was told, "No, that doesn't sound like cancer to me, but if you're having anxiety about it, just go to Emergency." She did not, because Emergency triggers overwhelming anxiety and panic about past abusive treatment, and (once again) she has been conditioned to feel guilty for taking up the doctors' valuable time. 

The fact that she has a "history" of anxiety and depression seems to negate her credibility entirely. But to even mention this scenario as a possibility only results in more anger and dismissal. It comes across as a completely unfair and even cruel and selfish accusation. "Of course" they "would never" do such an unprofessional thing to the public, their dedication has never wavered, and you are wrong to even think it, let alone express it to anyone.

In any case, the "care" in Emergency is based on diagnoses made in a few minutes, with no medical history. There is a strange silence and a hole in media reporting on this issue that makes me very uneasy. The ONLY article I have ever seen on this taboo subject was about young people in Latin America, the shortage of support for mood disorders, and how young people have newfound medical and emotional/social support through Zoom calls. This is the party line. After fifty years of brick walls, I am getting tired of defending behaviour which is not only arrogant and uncaring, but completely unacceptable in a "first world" country. 

So how DO we get through all this shit?

I find myself posting outrageous Trump stories (most of them connected directly to a jaw-dropping denial that COVID-19 even exists), then feeling bad about just passing all that negative energy along. But there are times I honestly do not know what else to do.

I keep vowing I'll learn to ignore all this, but if you're a sentient being who cares at all about the world, you can't just tune it all out. You can't "process" it, as the expression goes, because nobody wants to swallow toxic shit. It just runneth over, kind of, and though I do try to deal with one day at a time, and though PART of today was really good (sandhill cranes on Burnaby Lake, a blackbird eating out of my hand), my day can take a hairpin turn towards incredulous dismay and even depression. And I keep saying to myself, my God, why are you getting depressed about THIS? 

I have no control over it, except, as the trite saying goes, "my attitude towards it". So am I supposed to be optimistic, neutral, or what? I don't know how to feel about it. I am not at all surprised liquor consumption is through the roof now, especially with people who do not usually drink heavily. I stopped drinking in 1990 (darn it all), so that rather self-defeating avenue is closed to me. I want to stop posting Trump stories, but I feel like I have to share them to take some of the crushing load off. I try to not post long blurts, and at least part of today was great, but one thing does not cancel out another. The evening news is now so breathtakingly grotesque that I sometimes flee the room halfway through. 

We cannot escape the primitive workings of the reptilian brain which is supposedly in charge of the free world. I also realize with dismay how heavily satirized and sent up Trump has been for more than four years, and how it has done nothing at all to change an astonishingly dangerous situation. In fact, satire and laughter is a way to escape and make things LESS awful. Humor is a distancing tool and a survival mechanism, but it's also a way to put unpleasant things away from you. I always used to think: yes, Alec Baldwin is brilliant in this role, but it just ain't funny, folks. It's making a completely unacceptable situation palatable through the endorphin-burst of a good laugh. Not that much different from taking a few stiff shots.

I have bipolar disorder and have started writing about it more lately, thinking, well, what have I got to lose? I'm not protecting anything, and (as the kid in the playground said long ago) nobody likes me anyway. But if this revelation affects how people feel about me, either way, well, that's not why I'm doing it. Right now, I'm doing it because some days, like today, I am trying to hang on to a rope bare-handed that is coated in a particularly deadly, slick oil, and though my desperate hand-over-hand is now so fast it's a blur, I feel I'm losing ground a lot of the time because there is nothing but an abyss below me. At present, I have NO medical support whatsoever, NO avenue for counselling, and basically have to keep my problems to myself. So the hackneyed exhortation to "reach out for help" isn't very helpful right now, as it doesn't seem to apply to me.

Will I get through this? I really don't know. Everyone is doing an awful lot of whistling in the dark - again, as a survival mechanism, and as a way to put the unpleasantness away from us so we can get on with some kind of a day. I have never known the world to have this many overwhelming problems on this scale, all at once, and even with the best President in the world, things would still be harrowing, a long and heavy grind for everyone, and downright catastrophic for some.

I tell myself: OK then, I'm a Canadian, I might have this mental condition but I'm not quite hospital material (yet!), my husband and I are well and have a roof over our heads, our kids are employed and doing well and so are THEIR kids. I tell myself all this, many, many times a day, but the dismay still pours over me and creeps into every crevice like a thick and very toxic fog. 

So. . . I keep getting up in the morning like everyone else, with no safety net medically or mentally (and it's ironic that during my long years of stability, I had more "help" than I ever needed, even if it was the wrong kind). Now there's just nothing, and many times a day I say, OK then, I'm being thrown back on my own resources, and might this not be a test of my ability to - to - oh fuck, I give up! It's not like that at all. I want my Mum, and even when she was alive she was indifferent to me, to the point that I was not even mentioned in her obituary, a fact which most people find hard to believe. But I want SOMEBODY'S Mum, and I am tired of trying to reflexively "mother myself" when I just don't have anything left in me to nurture anyone at all. 

Pandemic Blues: my cat, my dolls, and getting through sober

I! CUT! MY! OWN! HAIR!!

I! CUT! MY! OWN! HAIR!

It was madness, I know. But it made me even more mad to look in the mirror  at the sticking-out-in-every-direction MESS which could not be combed, styled or even flattened down. 

I had a razor comb (not scissors, God forbid) so began carefully, gingerly thinning out the flapping wings at the back. Gradually I grew more bold as the bits of hair accumulated in the sink. Hey, why not – go for broke! It can’t look any worse, can it?

 When I thought I had taken off enough, I ran downstairs, all excited, and said to Bill, “Notice anything different about me”? He looked at my face, then at my blouse, and said, “Yeah?” and I said “WHAT DO YOU MEAN you don’t  see anything different!” and he made a “shrug” expression with his mouth and said, “You look nice.” 

Then I made him take my picture, which he never does because I hate it. This mad impulse came after I read a four-page manifesto from my stylist (likely a generic one from Health Canada or somewhere) which basically described the salon as a police state. The tone of it was: things will never be the same, and you will never enjoy a trip to the stylist again. So I thought: how long is this going to be, and how could it look any worse than it does now? 

I don’t think it does – I think it looks better – my head is lighter – and though I’m definitely greyer, I can more or less look at myself without alarm and have SOME hope I can keep it in shape until, gowned, masked, in full hazmat suits, my stylist and I will meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

COVID-19: the new etiquette