The Notes and All the Alterations
When it’s a good day, I don’t think “I’ve run out of positive and will just hide in the corner,” Instead I say “New paradigm ok, how to work with it, within it, not against it.”
And new paradigm with me almost always seemed to lead to diagnosis of a previously unknown long standing impairment or illness. I had five that were previously listed. Now one has been reclassifield and one is brand new.
So, like always, a personal history digression. Excuse it, but it’s one of these blog posts I have to get down, if only to get the chronology recorded for the next disability review.
1966-2010
“How could you possibly lose that? You just put it down! You can’t tell me you don’t know where it is? My sudden short circuits about where things are remains legendary. (That, and other characteristics of my professional and academic life have recently (2009) been brought out and presented to me as adult ADD. I have been dealing with that since I was five years old. Still diagramming how and whether to medicate.
And, it hit me at a pivotal point in my life, with very life changing and regretful results.
1988
A masters thesis in history was beginning to take hold of my brain…I’d finished two years of TA’ing. I had an outline. I had notes (pre computer on 3 x5 index cards) of the murky first draft that I wanted to do. I remember (and memory can play tricks of course) I remember putting a backpack full of notes and my husband’s Bible under my desk in the teacher’s assistance room.
When I went back, the backpack was gone. I searched my apartment, I had my mom search her home, I searched our car and my mother in law’s house.
Those notes the bible, the backpack itself… were never found, and I bailed. I was irrational about continuing at that point…to start from the beginning seemed impossible. It had which sources I would use, the outline etc.
So I did not become a history professor. In, part…because my brain short-circuited. Nothing was in there worth stealing, maybe I left them there earlier than I thought and they were taken as a “lost and found’ thing. I have no thought that anyone stole them. That way lies paranoia.
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And, the effects of an unknown aggravator of an existing impairment.
1983. Fell down a flight of stairs and probably damaged something internal l which I now believe was my gall bladder Have had specific constant back pain in the tissues ever since which has not been investigated properly ’cause, you know, I’m fat, and there was some diagnostics my insurance wouldn’t allow. In 1995 I was having a massage (ah, the 90’s. Money!) and after I had signed a waiver, they pressed too hard on that quadrant of my back and I felt something go…but as I said no investigation…
2009. When my gall bladder emergency surgery was done, the surgeon described it as “infected and crushed.” So, backtracking it makes sense. I still have pain, so I figure more may have been damaged, by these original injuries so I’ll find out in the next ten years what got damaged. Having an imperfect gall bladder or none at all) is often the cause of really ramped up gut problems.
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1996 “You may have low thyroid, but not enough to medicate.” 2008 “You have low thyroid and it could have been responsible for up to one-third of your weight gains.” Damn. Just Damn.
Now on cheap medicine for that.
Again, not for sympathy points, but just for documentation.
The list of impairments now stands at.
Born with ataxic cerebral palsy.
Existing gut trouble aggravated by bile. (The bile problem may be gradually lessening due to a specific med for that part.)
Carpal Tunnel
Asthma
Tendon deformity, arrival 2008
Depression/anxiety
Adult (and probably childhood) ADD.
And, I am very angry that I lived with some of these not knowing they were happening.
Some of the new stuff wasn’t known about till the 1990’s or so like the ADD and I get that.
But these others?
Feh.
Midlife And Treachery 
