The Pleasure Center Is Closed for Repairs

Following on the last post, my lab results yielded some other information as well.  After my heart attack in 2021, I was put on a blood-thinner as well as a statin for lowering cholesterol. Earlier this year, I had some bloodwork done that revealed increased liver enzymes. An abdominal ultrasound revealed that my liver was very slightly enlarged. I likely have the beginnings of fatty liver disease.  And why not? I have fatty everything else, so it would follow that my liver would also take a hit. 

I had read that statins could cause an increase in liver enzymes, so my doctor was willing to try taking me off it for a few weeks and then having me take another blood test. Me being me, I couldn’t get my shit together enough to even make an appointment for a blood draw, so months passed. When I got my labs done for the hormone lab in July, I still had not gone back on the statin yet.

When I received the results this past Monday, I noticed that my cholesterol numbers had gone back up because I was off the statin, but my liver enzymes were still high.  I intend to forward those results to my doctor, who I assume will tell me I need to lose weight and ease up on the drinking. 

I don’t drink much, but I definitely drink regularly. I have a cocktail or cider whenever we go to a restaurant, which is often. I get a shot of bourbon or a cider when I take myself out on my Friday lunch date. I have a cider or a cocktail sometimes when I get home from work. Rarely do I have more than one drink a day, but I do look forward to that one drink.

So I decided to be proactive and quit drinking for a minute until I can get another blood draw. Y’all. Y’all! I quit on Wednesday. Today’s only Saturday, and the struggle is real. I’ve thought about it 100 times today. My body doesn’t want it; my mouth does. My pleasure center does. It is 100% related to my sugar/carb addiction. I don’t want a shot of gin or tequila; I want something sweet and fun.

The last time I saw my doctor, he said, “You know every meal isn’t a celebration.” I beg your pardon! He had found my weakness…well, one of them. I live in a beach resort town. I have bars and restaurants in all directions. Life at the beach is fun, so meals can be fun, too, right?  Nope. They do not all need to be fun. Why not, though? This evening, I spent over an hour trying to decide what to do about dinner. Normally, when my partner is out of town (which is many if not most weekends), each meal is a chance for me to take myself out on a date to get dinner and a drink and read a book alone at a table. In my one-hour decision-making torture session, I kept thinking, “What fun is it to go out if I’m not going to get a drink? Why bother? I have food at home.” Yeah, but I hate that food. It needs to be cooked, and I can’t be bothered. I took myself out to the beach instead. I sat my ass down in the sand for over an hour, finished reading a book on my iPad, and came home after the sun had gone down.

I need to change my relationship with alcohol and food, I know. We’re not friends. We’re frenemies, really. A love triangle that is trying to kill me. A love triangle that wants me dead. They scheme against me at every turn. They're trying to tell me that I've become a third wheel now. 

This is the curse of the alcoholic personality. I saw it with my mom: she replaced each addiction with a new one. She replaced alcohol with smoking, and then replaced smoking with sun worship. Then replaced the sun with her college education. Every addiction replaced by another, good or bad. My dear friend E referred to it as a recovering alcoholic filling the hole with other addictions. I’ve seen it in myself, too. From the time I was 11, I filled that hole with things: food, social engagement, music, rock shows, drinking, smoking, writing, romantic relationships, playing in bands, work, weight loss, distance running, CrossFit, work, and food & drinking again. Now, the obsession is my mental health, which is a good thing and a bad thing. I’m focused on getting better, but I’m also focusing on how fucked up I am, and I can get caught up in that, I admit. Especially if I have someone to talk to about it, which I have rarely had. Now, I’m focusing on this blog and documenting the contents of my lonely, frightened, chaotic brain. I need to find healthy ways to sate the pleasure center in my brain.

Regardless, not drinking is hard, yo. Boo. 

50 Incoming

Earlier this week, I got some test results back from a lab. But before I go into those results, there are about three years of backstory I need to explain...quickly. Bear down. 

The pandemic began in March 2020, right? Two months later, in early May, my dad died of cancer. I was able to be with him for a couple of weeks before his death, for which I will be forever grateful. It was awful to see him in pain and so fragile and diminished. It was an incredible relief to watch my father's chest rise and fall for the last time. Two months later, I had an as yet unexplained heart attack. I was put on blood thinners in August as a precaution. The blood thinners made the fibroid tumors in my uterus and abdomen grow at an incredible rate to the point that I could no longer sit upright in a chair by the end of November. By January, I was completely bed ridden, the tumors were the size of a 24-week pregnancy, and they were pressing on one of my ureters causing fluid buildup and damage to one of my kidneys. I needed a hysterectomy sooner than later, but because of COVID, non-emergency surgeries were all cancelled. In early February, my OB/GYN was preparing to go before the Duke surgical board to plead my case the days that Duke lifted the non-emergency surgery ban. I had my hysterectomy the next week. She removed my uterus, a number of fibroids, and my fallopian tubes. I kept my ovaries.  

Six months later, we moved to Wilmington. For the last two and a half years, I have had little idea about where I am in my cycle or if I've even got a cycle at all. For the last year, I've felt the absolute deepest despair of my life. I've felt unmotivated, undesirable, lonely, unable to focus, unable to finish what I start, desperate—pitiful, really. I don't know anyone my age who has admitted to the same situation. 

Because of the difficulty I was having focusing, I asked my doctor if I might have ADD, and he recommended I see a psychiatrist who specializes in treating ADD. The shrink thought it was sleep-related because “there’s no such thing as adult-onset ADD.” I felt thoroughly dismissed, so I returned to my doctor and asked if my feelings could be hormone-related. He referred me to a clinic in Missouri that will do my hormonal testing and then set me up with a doctor who can prescribe hormone replacement therapy as needed.  My insurance doesn’t cover hormone testing, so I paid out of pocket and got my blood drawn at Lab Corps.  They never sent the results to the clinic as I had requested, so after a brief period of Marco Polo, I finally located and received my results this past Monday. I forwarded them to the clinic and immediately received notification that they wanted to go ahead and set up some telehealth appointments with a nurse practitioner and a physician.

I went back to the lab report to see if they might indicate why I needed two appointments. It was all right there in black and white: postmenopausal. Not perimenopausal. Postmenopausal.

Post

menopausal.

I was so relieved. And then devastated. I’m 49, about to turn 50 in two months. I already have gargantuan feelings about that. And now I’m officially postmenopausal. I didn’t think this would be such a big deal.  When I decided in my 20s that I wasn’t interested in having children, I wondered why I needed a cycle at all and prayed that I could rid myself of this hideous curse. Now that it’s gone, I feel like I’ve had the wind knocked out of me, and I can’t seem to catch my breath.

I’ve become an old, scratched, dented empty suitcase that’s been beat up by decades of overzealous baggage handlers, and now the zipper doesn’t work, the wheels don’t turn, and the handle won’t collapse properly. The travel stickers are all rubbed off so you can’t see where it’s been. Now it stands alone in the dark at the curb with all of the overfilled garbage cans waiting for the pre-dawn trash collectors to take it away to the landfill. That’s me.

I thought it would be a relief.  It was for about an hour. Now it’s not. What I’m left with is my remaining years filled with discomfort, aggravation, and disgust. Weight I can’t get off easily, a totally weird body, inappropriately overactive sex drive alternating with annoyingly underactive sex drive (Oh, no! They don’t tell you about that!), less hair in the proper places, more hair in the wrong places. And overall invisibility.

Yes, I’m overreacting. But that’s where I am right now. Wrapped up in the realization of my own cosmic irrelevance. 

Intro to Oldschoolkitty’s Depression

The only way you’d find this blog is to look for it, and I hope you never do. I’m 100% falling on my face right now. My work life, my internal life, my health, my friendships, my heart are all a shambles. I can’t explain why; I only know that. Just when I think things are looking up, they turn back down toward the ground and begin that intense nosedive toward the surface. Everything should be absolutely perfect, really. I have an awesome (tiny, cramped) apartment overlooking the Atlantic. I have a great job, a great partner, fucking amazing friends, a stable life, but it’s all just a little off. But off enough to skew my orbit and push me out of sync with myself and the rest of the world. 

In the film Moonstruck, Cher asks Olympia Dukakis why men cheat, and Dukakis replies that it’s because they fear death. I think this is true for a lot of other errors, too. I’m turning 50 in two months, and I can’t stand it at all. Not at all. The realization that my best days are likely behind me and my relevance socially has dwindled to nothing makes me withdraw from everything and hide under my covers, where I am simply watching more valuable seconds tick by. 

A sweet friend whom I love dearly tried to make me feel better about this, but it seemed disingenuous, especially when followed later by a blatantly untrue comment, presented as damage control to soothe a crying baby:“You’re not fat.” No, I AM, in fact. And your denial of that to my face makes me question everything you’ve ever said to me. Every “I love you” likely proffered out of transactional obligation, every flattering word said because you want to be liked too, every kind gesture out of what? Pity? Everything. The worst part is that the word “fat” bears no judgment or negative connotation to me, so there’s no reason to deny it.  It’s a mere descriptor. It’s ok. That’s not the sadness. The sadness is the desperation, the uselessness, the wasted time, the undesirability, the disgust, the loss of youth, the forfeiture of options, and, frankly, the inability to generate a thought product that could at least make me feel creative or contributory somehow. Instead, my feet are cast in cement, my overheating ever-expanding body is pulled to the ground by a constantly increasing gravitational force, and I’m incapable of identifying a single friend or loved one I can trust with this pain. The aforementioned sweet friend doesn’t need more carry my luggage.

This is the curse of our move to the coast. I left my friends behind, and I suspect my absence goes mostly unnoticed by them. I’ve worked for decades on some of my favorite friendships; I don’t have decades to create new ones. I won’t live that long. What have I done to myself?  

I don’t have the option of presenting myself cryptically in visual media as my friend does. I don’t have the energy or talent to write the music that could encrypt my truth. I no longer even have the chops—or the desire—to write confessional poetry that lays my heart out for the reader. I have no way to ask for help except these glaring blog screens, and I don’t even want them found. I used to keep journals (there are so so many), but I don’t want my partner to ever read of the pain I have been enduring. I don’t want them to even know how much there is. They would feel guilty for not helping, not understanding, and I can’t bear that. 

I do discuss it with my therapist, though. I’m truly honest with her. She knows the good, the bad, and the ugly. But she makes it seem so easy to solve. So why do I still feel so bad? She asks me what I think I should do with some of my more inappropriate or troublesome feelings, and I know what I should do. I really do. I know the right answer, the answer a good person would offer, but I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to do what I should. 

But it’s all such a waste anyway because it doesn’t matter. It’s like I’m trying to buy this amazing cake at a bakery. The cake is gorgeous, and it’s crafted with love and endless skill and talent and ingenuity, but I know I shouldn’t be eating cake; it’s not good for me, but dammit I wanna eat that fucking cake. However, all of this is moot because the baker would never sell to the likes of me anyhow. I don’t have enough money. I’m too imperfect in too many ways. I’m too old, I’m too fat, I’m too unattractive, I'm too unhealthy, I’m too married, I’m too pathetic, I’m too fucked up, I’m too obsessive. I’ll never be able to have cake that good again, and it sure as hell won’t be from that bakery. That’s the irrelevance. That’s it. And a grown-ass woman who has seen some serious shit in her life should be able to get through it, but I’ve never felt weaker, needier, or more alone. Not ever. And all I want is that fucking cake because it is so sweet and so pretty.  

The only way you’d find this blog is to look for it, and I hope you never do.