Sleep

So, I'm sorry about the cistern piece.  It was really lame and crabby.  It's been hard to be funny, even to write about anything that isn't happening right now. Yet, I've been avoiding this subject, the one that's really important to me. See, Mike's been having trouble sleeping. At the doctor the other day, I realized that he can name the day, so now I can name it. He's had trouble since April 20th, when he started taking an antibiotic called azithromax. He thinks there could be a link. The doctors went right over that one, but there are plenty of comments about it on the Internet. Now, when I say Mike's having trouble sleeping, I'm not talking about sleeping five or six hours and slogging to work sleepy. I'm talking about not being able to sleep more than an hour without help from a prescription. And now we have prescriptions in the house that make me nervous to leave laying around.

Mike isn't napping either. Most people who have insomnia can sometimes nap during the day to catch up a little. Long-term sleep deprivation can result in depression, hallucinations, lowered immune system, and even, in extreme situations, death. This doesn't even include the fact that your decision-making abilities are altered with sleep deprivation.  Remember that warning not to use dangerous machinery while using certain drugs that affect your ability to make decisions?  A car can be dangerous machinery.  So these days, I'm just happy when Mike gets home from work.

By now, Mike has three doctors for this problem, an endocrinologist, a sleep specialist, and a psychiatrist. And he's a changed man. I can't tell you how disturbing that is.  I don't mind taking up the slack with things that need to be done, but the quiet shuffle of his feet and the way his pants hang slack on his backside bothers me. He doesn't know the answers to questions and he has lost a lot of his sparkle, including that snarky sense of humor that used to drive me nuts. I miss that sense of humor. He has very little appetite.  I miss the way he enjoyed the food I made for him, too. He has been extra affectionate, but I think that's just because he really doesn't feel well and he needs me. Many nights, I've slept in the recliner as he's lying on the couch when he can't sleep. It makes him feel better that I'm there with him, even though I'm asleep. I wonder if I'd wake up if he was in trouble. It's a problem that's a lot like what I have when Nickie is having trouble breathing.

Nickie has been worrying about him too.  Mike hasn't had the enthusiasm with Nickie or the energy to do what they usually do together.  Last night, Nickie couldn't get to sleep because he told me that he'd had a bad thought. He said that he had started to think about what would happen to him if something bad happened to one of us. 'Well, Nickie,' I wanted to say, 'something is happening. No wonder you're worried.'  I didn't. I just listened for a minute longer as he talked.  Yeah, I actually managed to listen to him instead of talking myself. Amazing. Then I told him that we were doing okay so far and trying to get help for his dad's problem.  I couldn't tell him that there was nothing to worry about. I can't lie to Nickie that way.  Instead, I sat in the chair in Nick's room as he fell asleep and read my favorite blogs. Have you read the sweet blog by Nat the Fat Rat?

So here's what Mike has done to get help. He started with his regular doctor who did no tests and put him on Ambien.  He treated it as a classic case of insomnia and said that Mike's blood tests from last year were fine, so ....  Somehow, this doctor missed the fact that Mike was sleeping last year when the blood tests were taken. Mike tried the Ambien, but he said he felt like it was just masking his symptoms. He slept for about five or six hours a night for a couple of weeks until the Ambien abruptly stopped working. Kaput. Nothing.

So then, I managed to get him an appointment with an endocrinologists who didn't require a referral. This doctor really got going, bless her. She took eight vials of blood in a fasting blood draw, scheduled an ultrasound to check his gall bladder and liver, and scheduled a sleep study.  She said that problems with the liver can sometimes show up as an inability to sleep.  Thankfully, his ultrasound was fine, no liver or gall bladder issues, and his blood work only showed three things: an elevation of LDL cholesterol, the bad one, (no surprise considering Mike's diet), an elevation of cortisol, explaining the lack of sleep, and an elevation of ACTH, a hormone released by the pituitary gland. She told him that the ACTH causes release of cortisol and is usually related to stress.  So she prescribed Lorazapam and Effexor and referred him to a psychiatrist. She also said that if it wasn't stress, the problem could be a pituitary tumor. Now, that's going to make it hard to calm down. I think my ACTH levels are rising.  Still, I'm glad she was honest with him. 

So Mike came home that night and whispered with me in the kitchen while Nickie did his reading. Mike didn't want Nickie to hear the word tumor. I didn't want to hear the word tumor either. I swear, the weeks before any test regarding a tumor are the worst. In my mind, I've been through the whole process before it's happened.  You might remember that when I was just a little older than Nick, this same process started with my dad, ending in the worst possible way, except that for my dad, it was colon cancer and not anything near the brain. The test for the pituitary tumor has a glitch: anxiety can cause a false-positive. So they need to get Mike as calm as possible before they do the test. Right. Calm.

The problem with the Effexor the doctor prescribed was that it got Mike going instead of slowing him down. He had jolts of adrenaline, was jittery, and didn't sleep all night.  That was an awful Sunday night.  The next day, Mike wasn't able to do ordinary things like remember where to put dishes away when unloading the dishwasher.  So then, we went to see the sleep doctor. He told Mike that he didn't want to change what the endocrinologist told him to take, but that the Effexor can sometimes have the opposite effect on a person and it looked that way for Mike.  He was thorough. I give him that. So, he prescribed Trazodone, a drug that is supposed to help with sleep and anxiety.  That night after taking the new drug, Mike's heart rate went up to 112 and he got a really awful case of dizziness.  Those were two of the four symptoms the drug notes said to seek medical help for, so we called over the neighbor to hang out with Nickie as he slept.  She came quickly and we got to the ER in no time. I kept telling myself to calm down and make rational decisions regarding driving. By the time we got there, the symptoms had subsided, so Mike wouldn't go in. He was embarrassed. Oh, poor guy. I tried to talk him into going, but he just wouldn't, so we went home. After 48 hours, the side-effects of the Trazodone finally went away, but we missed the first night of weekend camping with the Cub Scouts.

Mike spent the next couple of nights on Lorazapam.  In the mornings, he almost looked rested and he functioned much better during the days. I asked him why they wouldn't let him stay on that and he said that it has real dependency issues and withdrawal usually includes anxiety that is much worse than what it was prescribed to treat. Shoot!

On Monday, Mike called his endocrinologist and she changed him to Citalopram for anxiety and Lunesta for sleep. The Lunesta has allowed him four to five hours a sleep in the night, but he's still waking up a lot.  Yesterday, Mike visited the psychiatrist who, he said, was kind and thorough.  He wants to monitor how Mike's doing on the Citalopram and send him to a psychologist for talk therapy and to learn some relaxation techniques.  I believe that anyone can benefit from talk therapy, so I hope Mike goes.  I'd much rather him have issues with anxiety than a tumor.

Last night was Mike's first night on the Citalopram. At first, he sweated profusely. It was an annoying symptom, but not a deal-breaker. Then Mike said he felt weird, as if he had eaten something that was going to make him sick. His stomach was irritated and he felt weak. He had more anxiety too. I'm wondering if all of this extra anxiety is made worse trying to find a single drug that doesn't have wicked and debilitating side-effects. This morning, he said it was still with him and he felt as though he had to talk his way through what he needed to do next.  He's going to call his doctor again. Citalopram may not be the answer either, but the doctor may want him to stick with it for a few more days to see if it evens out. What Mike has to decide is if the side-effects are worth the benefit it offers. We have yet to see any benefits to the anti-anxiety drugs.

In all of this, it feels like Mike's body has become a stew pot into which the doctor's can throw different chemicals to see what happens next.  Is any of it helping? I don't know. Mike is getting about four to six hours of interrupted sleep a night on most nights. That's an improvement, but not enough to live on long term. I'm really hoping his sleep study next week reveals something that we can work with.

I'm really hoping that one of these drugs starts to help Mike without disrupting his life with its side-effects. I'm hoping that the doctors stay curious about his problem. There's no doctor better than one who is curious. I'm hoping that the therapist can teach Mike some useful techniques for relaxing and let him talk out his issues. And I'd love to see Mike napping on the couch.

Please keep my dear Mike in your hearts and thank you for listening, jb

The Problem with Filling the Cistern

I'm standing in the neighborhood pump house waiting for the cistern to fill. The wet cement smell is making my nose itch, but the cranky boy in the house is more difficult to bear. He missed the bus, didn't finish the homework he needed to do, and is nervous about talking to his teacher about it. I'm not just avoiding his crankiness. The shut-off valve to our thousand gallon cistern broke and we're periodically filling it then shutting it off before it overflows. I have to go pick up the new one on Wednesday morning when it comes in.

We have lived in this house for twenty years now. My least favorite thing about my house and neighborhood is the community well. No, that's not true. My least favorite thing about living here is human nature. See, we used to divide the work and cost of taking care of the well. When we first lived here, the other neighbors took care of billing us, paying the power bill, and maintaining the system. We were oblivious. Then, the main pump quit and we all met to discuss what to do. Together, while sitting in our living room with cheese and crackers on the coffee table, we decided to divide the work. That seemed fair. So Mike and I took responsibility for billing until it was time to rotate again. We also decided, as a group, that each family should pay fifteen dollars a month until we had a monetary buffer of fifteen hundred dollars for when something failed. That way, a family didn't have to face an unexpected cost of three or four hundred dollars if a line broke or a pump died. The money would be in the account.

Either Mike or I sent out monthly bills for ten years. Seldom, did more than half of the neighbors pay the bill. It bothered me since the county wanted to take over the system, and everyone fought it because that would more than double our costs.  If one of our neighbors had decided not to pay the county, I'm sure they would have turned their water off, but they knew we wouldn't do that to them. I also took a sample of the water to be tested every six months. It wasn't a hard job, but it involved bleach and lots of calls when the water failed the test. We figured out that the tests only failed when it had been raining a lot and leaf mold seeped down into the well. I could smell it. It smelled like autumn leaves. The people at the testing company said we were all probably used to the leaf mold by now, but we decided to get a water cooler for our house anyway. I love my water cooler. It was funny that when we first got it, it made me feel truly wealthy. It wasn't that expensive and suddenly we all drank water instead of something else. That's a healthy choice. Nickie was only three then and he called it 'glug glug.' He still asks for water more often than juice or soda.

Eventually, I got aggravated enough that people didn't pay and convinced another neighbor to take over the job of billing. She sent out bills regularly for three months then quit. After four years of no one contributing, the account was emptied and the power company threatened her that they were going to turn the power off. No power. No pump. No water. In the meantime, there were people who had moved into the neighborhood and moved out again and never once paid for water.  Now that really yanked my chain. See, there's that human nature.

Last Sunday, Adrian's mom called saying the water was off and my responsible husband, Mike, took care of it. She was having a party. Mike and I were invited to the party, but Mike was going to be busy for the next hour or two.  Another of our neighbors, Clive, came down to try to help, but Mike gently shooed him off. Clive likes to try to do stuff to the pump, but he thinks he's better at mechanical things than he really is and Mike has to fix almost all of what Clive fixes. Mike is always the one that people call when the water goes off or turns brown. I get aggravated that everyone assumes that he should be responsible, as if he has nothing else important to do and they can spend his time however they want. We have another neighbor, Bill, who is good at that kind of work, but he and his wife aren't friendly neighbors. I brought a pie and a hooded towel set over when they had their baby, and his wife only opened the door a few inches to talk through it to me. She took the gifts though. No one calls Bill when the water goes out.

My parents were wrong when they taught me that people should be fair and I'm still paying the price for having that ingrained into my psyche. I get really irritated when people don't even try.  Remember, I said I hate human nature? I try not to let any of the neighbors know how irritated I get when they call at dinner time or 11:30 pm, but Mike knows. If they are on the phone, I try to sound pleasant. Clive got it into his head to call Mike every time he bought a new appliance and wanted to save the twenty bucks, the cost of having the delivery guys haul it off. And he used to expect us to take care of their cats on a moments notice when they went away on vacation. Clive never asks, just tells me to send Todd up the hill. He never thanks us and it pisses me off. So, there's that human nature again.

Even though it's our water too, I'm too resentful to go help the neighbors by filling the cistern. They don't deserve it. Still, I am willing to help Mike. Mike is a good guy. He's worth helping and he's had a really hard time lately, so I freely help him. And maybe that's human nature too.

Thank you for listening, jb

Camping in a Lawn Chair

Tonight, I'm going to sleep in a lawn chair inside a bivy inside a sleeping bag under the stars. I love sleeping this way. The lawn chair keeps my old back from aching and the bivy is like a one-man tent with no poles and keeps the dew, light rain, and mosquitos out. I still get to breathe fresh air and look up at the stars in the middle of the night. I miss being in with Mike, but it's worth it. Nick is in with Adrian and his parents in a two-room tent. We are camping with about nine Cub Scouts and their families on an island in Puget Sound. People have brought sisters, brothers, two dogs, and one puppy.

Dinner was great. It's amazing how good hamburgers and hot dogs taste outside. They even had salads! Mike spent all afternoon making peach cobbler and pumpkin-pie cake in Dutch ovens over the camp fire. I only had a bite of each, but they were delicious.

We had a great campfire too. Mike, usually a quiet guy, gets up at Scouting events and tells stories, leads songs, and encourages the boys to do skits. They are usually really bad, but the boys love doing it and we always seem to laugh at the right time. The favorites usually involve rolling in the dirt and making gross sounds.

I'm going to tuck in now.

Good night and thanks for listening, jb

Hopefully Humane Uses for Dry Ice

I have to confess something. It felt right. It felt wrong. I don't know which feeling to trust. Maybe it's only accurate to say I must feel both at the same time.

I just killed my son's hamster.

She had a tumor that had grown out of control. It had grown into the makings of a horror movie, a large fleshy mass at her side. If she had a mean bone in her body, she would have been scary, but she was so very sweet. My friend Kris wanted me to do something last week. I wanted to bring her to the vet, but it got past that. I didn't want to hear the question, 'Why did you wait so long?' even in my own head. Tuffcake was struggling, to move, to eat. Two days ago, I gave her a lettuce leaf and she took it with some enthusiasm.  Tonight, I gave her an asparagus flower, one of her favorites, and she held it for a moment then dropped it.

This was a completely premeditated killing. I woke up this morning knowing that I was going to do something. Anything. One Sunday when I was just twenty, my cat came home with a baby rabbit that she had caught. Somehow, she'd peeled most of the skin off of this poor thing. She was proud of herself. I was in tears. Before I could chicken out, I grabbed a large rock and smashed the bunny's skull.  It twitched and was dead. It was awful. I cried all the way to church and well into the services. I'm sure it hurt that bunny a lot even though it was quick. I thought about getting a big rock for Tuffcake, but I knew I couldn't do it that way again.

I looked it up on the Internet. Did you know that if you google 'humane small pet euthanasia' it shows you how you can set it up using vinegar and baking soda to make carbon dioxide? I remembered that in the movie Apollo 13, they had an excess of carbon dioxide building up in the lunar module and the engineers had to use parts the astronauts would have on board to design a square plug to go into a round hole for the filter they had up there. 

I switched my evil plan to dry ice and added melancholy music because I understood how to use dry ice and I felt that Tuffcake deserved the higher quality that dry ice and good music would bring to her services. I set up the dry ice to go into a bowl with water, covered it with saran wrap, and then I taped a bundle of flexible straws into the edge.  This is the part where I started feeling how creepy the whole thing was. Then I retrieved an extra large bottle that had contained olive oil from the recycling bin. I cut it in half and made it so I could fit it back together. I thought that Tuffcake might like the smell of the bottle. She liked trying different flavors, avocado, kitty kibble, olives, kale, chard, strawberries, cherries, unsalted peanuts in their shell. I hoped she'd like the olive oil smell, but I cleaned it out anyway and dried it well. Being desert creatures, hamsters don't like being wet. Then I filled it with tiny fabric scraps from my quilting basket. I put in sesame treats, yogurt treats, peanuts, a green bean, a carrot, and the other end of the asparagus. I knew she wouldn't eat any of it, but I hoped the smell might make her happy, well, happier. I pulled out a bottle of vinegar and a box of baking soda in case I ran out of dry ice.

I handed Tuffcake the asparagus before I picked her up. I figured it might hurt to touch her, but she just sniffed my fingers. She always seemed comforted by being picked up except the one time Mike tried to pick her up with vinyl gloves on because he was trying to clean her house and she bit him. Mike was really sweet with me today despite the rift that bite had made between him and Tuffcake. I cried in the morning when I told him about my plan and he held me. I cried after we got back with the dry ice and he hugged me some more. I cried again when Mike took Nickie into bed and read to him even though it was my night to read from our book. I cried as I wrapped Tuffcake in pink and green ovals I'd once thought I'd make into a wedding ring quilt. I knew I'd never find a better use for those pieces. I wanted Tuffcake to be wrapped in something nice, not just scraps.

Just then, Nickie got up to go find an action figure he wanted and he asked Mike to get him a drink of water. There I was, running into the laundry room and hiding with Tuffcake wrapped in those quilt pieces, snot threatening to run down my nose, and nothing to say if he caught me. Thankfully, Nick didn't look at the setup I had going on in the living room in too much detail. I stayed quiet.  I had half a thought to bring Tuffcake to Nick for a little petting, but I really didn't want him to make any connections between her and that contraption. Mike herded Nick back into his bedroom and I prepared myself for another killing.

I put Tuffcake down into the bottle. She was so sick, she didn't even try to get out. She just sat quietly while I got the lid put on and the straw bundle jammed down into the neck of the bottle. Then I peeled back the saran wrap and dumped in all the dry ice, hoping it was enough.  The worst part of the whole thing was when she squeaked and tried to get her nose out to the edge where I had cut the bottle in half. The bottle didn't go back together as tightly as I'd like because of the grips on the sides. Oh, she squeaked. Four times, she squeaked before she settled down. It took five minutes before she stopped moving, but I wasn't convinced yet, so I waited. And I waited some more.

I'm glad about the music I put on because Nickie got up again, this time to go to the bathroom. The dry ice was still bubbling and despite the music, he wanted to know what that noise was. I wasn't about to leave and I gave Mike those 'please help me keep my boy from seeing this' eyes. By that time, Tuffcake hadn't moved in about twenty minutes. Oh, it was almost as awful as those four little squeaks, to hear Nickie chatting to Mike through the bathroom door. He wanted me to write that silly thing about the puppies:

C M Puppies. (Here you say the letters and it sounds like 'See 'em puppies.')
M R N Puppies.
O S M R Puppies.
C M P N?

There are things that make a killing surreal.  Reciting kid jokes, even scrambling for a piece of paper to write it down, all the while hoping that your poor anesthetized hamster didn't wake up while you were absent, is one of them.  I really wanted to have a proper ceremony, but the contraption and trying to hide it all from Nick make it strange, even creepy. It was hard to try and sound normal while he chatted with me through the door too. I just wanted to be standing there to block the view into the living room.

It sounds strange, even to me, to go to such lengths to shield Nick from all of this.  Nickie and I held his last hamster on our laps when she died of old age four years ago. The only thing wrong with the picture then was that we watched television while it happened. Nick knows death in a small way, but I didn't want him to see Tuffcake die, especially this way, especially with the hideous tumor trying to take over her tiny body, especially in a strange contraption that looked an awful lot like the experiments we did when we got dry ice for something. Nick liked doing experiments with dry ice. Throwing a hamster into the mix wasn't a part of that schooling.

Mike finally got Nick to sleep, the dry ice was fizzling out, an hour had passed, and Tuffcake hadn't moved. We decided to tell Nick that Tuffcake had died in the morning. I wrapped Tuffcake in more fabric and put her into a cardboard box so I could bury her in the morning. Prayers and services will follow the burial. After I was finished, I sent a text to my friend, Kris.

"I just killed Nick's hamster. Dry ice has sinister and hopefully humane purposes I'd never imagined."

Her reply came quickly.

"Ohhhhhhh. I'm glad you found a good solution. Sweet dreams Tuffcake."

Yes, sweet dreams Tuffcake. I'm sure there are asparagus flowers in hamster heaven.

Thank you for listening, jb

We're Going Biking

It's sunny and 68 degrees. We're in the truck and headed to Alki to bike on the trail. Since it's one of the first sunny days, a weekend day no less, everyone and her brother will be out too. I don't care. We're going to bike in the sun at the edge of the Puget Sound. Maybe it'll be low tide and we can see starfish and sea anemones. We have Rainier cherries and carrots and some other snacks. When we get hungry, we'll stop at Spuds for fish and chips! I love Spuds. I wish we had time to take the water taxi to the Seattle waterfront, but the summer is young. Adrian is coming over for a sleepover with Nick and we're going to roast hot dogs and marshmallows in the fire pit. My house is a mess, but life is too good to hang around at home and clean.

Thanks for listening, jb

Sleeping in a Covered Wagon

I am sleeping in a covered wagon in woods with two ten year old girls. One girl was scared and the other wasn't, but said she wished that her mom had come, that she was trying to be more grown up. I told Sara, the one who was afraid, to tuck into the quilt I'd made, close her eyes, breathe deeply, and name the people who love her. That's what I do with Nick when he can't sleep. Their teachers are talking quietly in the wagon next to ours. It's a comforting sort of sound. Tree frogs are singing. They almost sound like crickets, but it's a fuller sound and a little more sing-song. I can hear horses and an occasional car on the road.

I'll be able to sleep after spending the day helping twenty-nine kids in groups of six cut potatos, carrots, and potatoes for stew, apples and crumbles for apple crisp, and dough for fry bread. The kids were so proud that they made most of the meal and I was happy that no one cut themselves. Some of them had never held a knife. I was glad that Nicky knew just what he was doing with the knife.

He's in an open-air cabin. It has a roof, but it feels fresh and a little dewy already. I hope he can sleep. I hope the dad who is with him is kind if he can't. Most if the men here are kind, but there was one that I was glad didn't end up being in a cabin with Nick. His boy is rough and bullies the other kids. Dads usually have a lot to do with that.

I'm going to sleep now. I brought all of my pillows. I should be comfortable and warm in my sleeping bag.

Good night and thanks for listening, jb

Going to Pioneer Camp

I'm just about to leave for Pioneer Camp with my boy.  I can't wait, but he's not happy. He says he's going to miss his dad, his cat, and the television. I think he'll have a great time once he gets there. We're supposed to imagine that we're traveling by wagon train across the country before it was settled. I'm going to be working with the kids to cook. We're having jerky, beans, stew, buffalo burgers (made out of real buffalo), pancakes, and bacon. I packed a bag with some salad, fruit, and just a little chocolate. I'm going to be sleeping in a cabin shaped like a wagon with four girls. I figure if any of them has trouble in the night, I can slip them a square of chocolate and it will help.  It's like the way the professor gave Harry Potter chocolate after the dementors tried to suck his soul out of him.  I've embraced that since I read it and it's just supported all that much more since I learned that chocolate helps to release endorphins in your brain.

I'm almost in camp mode. I like being outside. It makes me feel better. I sometimes wish I had an outdoor kitchen and shower for when the weather is warm enough. Our camp this weekend is going to be cold and wet. It'll get down to 50 degrees tonight and no higher than 56 degrees today and tomorrow. Welcome to the Pacific Northwest. I'll be living in my layers with the long red Goretex jacket Mike bought for me a couple of years ago.  When he gave it to me, I told him that if I'm ever lost in the woods, they'll be able to see me via satellite. Ha! Never buy your child a green rain jacket. Red. Orange. Those are good colors for people who might get lost in the woods.

So, I've got to go. Wish me luck. I think we'll all have some fun, but you never know with camping. Since we aren't far from home, I won't worry about being stuck there.

Thank you for listening, jb