nccotus

I mentioned butterfingers in my last post.

it takes all the little pleasures out of the little tasks like opening up a package or a grocery store product.

similarly, the gentle comfort of defecation and urination passed out of me in stages since the de facto torture in the ICU in ’86 when they clamped a catheter on me because I was trying to pull it off of me saying “it hurts.” I already had issues there obviously, I must have had a urinary tract infection and my clitoris was already damaged.

so I had issues with defecation at Harvard, liquid diarrhea in the Quincy House dining room where I went to do my reading and write English papers, drinking coffee and hot chocolate with saccharine.

had issues with this even at my high school, Kent School, a boarding school in Connecticut. Stole chocolate laxatives and ate them as food, sicked out of my classes that way had a complex eating disorder, didn’t wash.

My GI disorder took many forms over time; it is about as well as it can be now as far as regularity where I am out if the battali9ns of laxatives and just take henna twice a day and Miralax as needed. Stay up all night with liquid diarrhea every so often and wear incontinence briefs all the time.

the urinary problems are worse. I had issues there even as a child. I was improperly potty trained, wet my bed. Then, I started to get UTI’s at age 11 or 12, likely because of being kneed in the crotch by my brother at around age 5. Triggered by puberty.

then it became a horrible ordeal to urinate, especially when out at a restaurant. Hard to explain. That was in the later 80’s. Then I went through a phase for a long time where the urine stream was broken and I pissed backwards or sometimes upwards out of the bowl. I tried to get help with this but was so ill in other ways that nobody could really take an interest. My bladder was so distended. That was one thing that was found when I went see a urologist in Clearwater, Florida but a hurricane got in the way of my following up there.

Now I rely on the incontinence briefs in case I leak a little during the day or at night. There is an absence of pleasure and I never really know if I need to go or not, I usually hold it for a bit and then the trickling passes without a sense of relief.

I describe myself as a person with the habits of a lifelong invalid. Who lived an “As-If personality.” I can’t remember where I gleaned that expression but it is a very good one to describe how I was living, driving from diner to diner for cigarettes and coffee “As If” I was still a Harvard student going to cafes in Cambridge with a book. That was back in the 80’s, after I got out of the state hospital when I was living at my mother and father’s place, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in their garage. Showering about once every 4 days and failing to brush my teeth.

then, my husband took me out of there and we ended up out West in California south of LA where everything made sense in a weird way until I got pregnant with my son Ian and then there I was in Germantown, Maryland screaming my head off all day long after the malpractice at Hopkins after giving birth in Buffalo 10 mm 9nths earlier, listening to the Talking Heads song 8n my head: “Stop Making Sense!”

ultimately it was about my sexuality. Bit by bit, it has been ripped out of me.