Health

Getting Vaccinated

By / March 29, 2021

The place was tucked away behind a gym, marked only by a sign that said “vaccine clinic” with an arrow. We had to park far out in the parking lot because the only available close spots were marked as being for the gym customers with signs atop those road construction barrels. A simple, practical way for the gym and the clinic to temporarily share. Six month from now the gym will still be there and the vaccine clinic will be gone. Mass vaccinations complete. The day was exceptionally windy, and tugged at the papers in my hand. Forms confirming my appointment and that I’m not likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine.

I did not expect the man at the clinic door to be wearing the fatigues of a national guardsman. Though as soon as I saw him, I realized that it made perfect sense to use personnel trained in discipline and service. He asked if we were there for our first or second shot, then waved us into the building to a table where a different guardsman looked at our papers. Then we walked down a hallway into the large warehouse space, aisles and lines defined by traffic cones topped with caution tape and tape markings on the floor. We moved from station to station, no chance to go astray. At each step a guardsman directed us to the next station. Nurse to read through the papers again and write some things down on the admin section. Guardsman to scan our IDs and print labels for us to carry forward. Guardsman to show us which table to sit at. Nurse to put a sticker on the form we brought with us and to schedule our second appointment. Guardsman to tell us which table to sit at next. Nurse to afix the second sticker onto vaccine cards which she hands to us and tell us about possible side effects from the Pfizer vaccine. Guardsman to send us to the next room and assign us a table. Two nurses, one for each of us, with alcohol swabs, needles, and bandaids. Then some nurses to send us into a forest of individual chairs, six feet apart, where we are to wait for fifteen minutes.

It is all very efficient, despite all the stops. Except for that last fifteen minutes, we never have to wait for more than a minute for any station. We never bunched up with other people. All of it tuned to get people through and back to their lives. I wonder if all the vaccine sites have developed a similar efficiency. Probably. Efficiency just sort of happens when people have to do the same thing hundreds of times in a day. For the guardsmen and medical personnel, this is their job. They’ll do the same thing tomorrow and the day after. I want to take pictures of it all. Record the extraordinary mundainity of it. All of the mass pushes for childhood vaccination happened before I was born. The only vaccinations I’ve known happen as part of regular doctor’s visits. This is something else. This is community mobilizing, collective effort, expense, and organization to save lives. My only participation being to pass through and get my shot without causing a disruption.

Today’s shots were for me and one of my adult children. Later this week I will return with the other two adult kids. Since I won’t be getting a shot, I’ll wait in the car. The clinic people don’t want or need an extra body in there, and my people will navigate the process just fine without me. They too will pass through and participate in this historical moment.

Six weeks from now, we’ll all be fully vaccinated. We’re already beginning to have conversations about what that means and doesn’t mean for our household. I really thought I would have more emotions about my vaccine day. Maybe I had them already. Maybe they’re out there waiting for me after my brain shifts out of dispassionate-analyse-this-moment mode. For today, the thing is done, and now I move onward to the next thing.

Depression, Breathing, and the Path Ahead

By / April 13, 2020 / 1 Comment

When something as significant as depression hits, it ought to be obvious, but frequently it isn’t. Instead I manage to deduce it from outside evidence days or weeks after the mire begins. The trickiest part of mental health is that a flare up actively interferes with my ability to identify and manage the flare up. So it is this morning when I realize it has been four days since I blogged when I blogged almost every day for the month prior. I suppose some of that pause could be the Pandemic settling in and therefore requiring less processing. Yet there are other signs, the day I spent mostly in bed for instance. I am tired. I feel silly for being tired and depressed when my current existence is so close to normal. I have my house. I eat food that is pretty close to what I ate before. I still mail packages when orders come in. The things I can’t do are things which I didn’t do often anyway. Yet the not doing of them seems to accumulate.

Howard’s breathing was bad yesterday. Since his illness in January he’s been on daily asthma medication and taking hits on his inhaler multiple times per day. Some days this regimen puts him in a place where he can do light exercise. Yesterday he got out of breath standing and doing a puzzle. Then sitting and doing a puzzle. We were scheduled for a pulmonary function test in mid March. It got rescheduled for last week. Last week it got rescheduled for June. I know the decision is smart, that we must act as if Howard has not had Covid 19. Because if we stack Covid-19 on top of whatever is going on with his lungs, it would kill him. So taking him to a hospital (which probably has Covid-19 patients in it) for a test is ill-advised. But it means we don’t know what is going on. We have no way to know if it is getting worse or better. We can’t be certain if our treatments are optimal. We can’t even consult with a pulmonologist until May 19. That was the earliest appointment they would give me when I called in early March. I’ve ordered a pulse oxymeter so we can see what his blood oxygen levels are, but that won’t arrive until April 17-29 because Amazon has slowed down deliveries of “non-essentials.” (Or possibly because demand for oxymeters has gone up.) So I stand next to Howard, working on a puzzle together, and I listen when he suddenly takes several extra deep breaths in a row because his body has suddenly realized it needs more air. I wait when he has to pause mid-sentence to breathe and try to remember what he meant to say.

I ran cross country in high school. I was never particularly good at it, but I learned a lot about perseverance from doing it. I learned how to keep going even when I wanted to stop. At the beginning of a race there was something of a rush as people tested their speed and tried to get at the front of the pack. (Or in my case drop to the back.) That first pace was always too fast to maintain over the long run. After the first burst of energy, all the runners would settle in to a slower pace, one that they could keep up for two or three miles. That’s where we are with the pandemic. We’ve had our first month’s sprint where everything is jostling around and shifting. We had to adapt and adapt again to changing circumstances around us. Now events have spread out and it is time to settle into a pace we can maintain over the long haul ahead. The finish line is not even in sight, all we can see is the path ahead. All we can do is take one step after another. I remember settling in at the front end of a long run, feeling my body already start to be tired, yet knowing how much longer I needed to move. It frequently discouraged me to the point where I stopped running and started walking instead. The thing which cross country taught me was how to run when I felt like walking, and how not to defeat myself by letting discouragement win. Time for me to dredge up those lessons again. The path is long and I need to keep moving.

Edited to add: Howard has good breathing days and bad ones. The problem comes and goes. There are still more good days than difficult ones, but we’re tracking it.

Ala Carte Health Care

By / March 10, 2017 / 3 Comments

Prior to Obamacare we had health insurance with a deductible of $10,000 per person per year. The only thing it provided to us was a vague reassurance that if something catastrophic happened, we would have help for all the expenses between $10,000 and 2 million dollars. Mental health was not covered. Maternity was not covered. Birth control was not covered. Dental and vision, not covered. Also my premiums went up every year like clockwork.

We made the switch to Obamacare the second year it was offered. I watched that first year to see if it actually worked for people I knew, and it did. On Obamacare my premiums were about the same as they had been on my old plan, but my deductible per person came down to $3000, and there was a $7000 cap per family. Suddenly a catastrophe which affected my entire family would put me out $7000 instead of $60,000. And there was no upper limit on how much the insurance would spend. Mental health, maternity, birth control, annual check ups, and vision check ups for my kids were all covered. True I still had to pay out of pocket for these things, but all those payments counted toward a my deductible rather than being unrelated to it.

I would have loved to have all those things covered in my earlier plan, but adding things like Maternity care were called riders. They cost more money. Not only that, but you couldn’t add a maternity rider to your plan if you were already pregnant. You had to add it several months before you got pregnant in order for the insurance company to agree to pay for anything. Mental health care wasn’t offered at all, not even as an expensive rider. I suppose that there were people whose coverage was provided by their employers who had coverage for mental health stuff, but I didn’t know any.

That is what the newly-proposed ala carte model for health care means. It means that those who have health needs, like maternity care, will have to pay more than those who don’t have needs. Guess which person will have less ability to work to cover the cost of their health care? Ala carte means that some things won’t be covered at all, or will only be covered at rates which are so high no one who has the issue can afford to purchase coverage for it. I suspect I’d be back to out of pocket for my family’s mental health care.

It is true that year after year I saw increases in my premiums for Obamacare. This past year my monthly premium went up by $600, an increase of almost 60%. That was alarming and has put a serious strain on my budget. I had to drop down to a plan with a $7000 deductible per person and a $13,000 deductible for my entire family. Yet those deductibles are still lower than the ones I had before Obamacare. And visits to mental health professionals count toward those deductibles. Also, I believe that my premiums would have skyrocketed anyway. There are other things driving the increase in medical costs than just giving coverage to more people.

There were definitely things to fix, but prioritizing the profits of insurance companies is not how to help people. Ala carte may help a few healthy people lower their premiums, but it will cost everyone else more.

Thinking About Health, Weight, and Society’s Obsessions

By / January 6, 2016 / 3 Comments

Of late I’ve been paying quite a bit of attention to American society’s relationship to body weight, especially on women. I’ve read articles on body positivity. I’ve seen Whitney Way Thore’s “Fat Girl Dancing” videos, she’s amazing. I’ve seen “Fat Girl Yoga” with another woman who can do things that I’m not currently capable of doing despite my smaller size. I’ve also read some articles that express concerns about the effect that body positivity will have on national health. I skipped all the articles that wanted to teach me one cool trick to lose weight.

I’ll admit that some of my interest has been due to the fact that the last time I weighed as much as I do right now, I was nine months pregnant. Back then my body was carrying around a tiny human being and lots of extra water. Now all that weight is stored in fat cells. I’m still not obese. In fact many people would look at me and say I look fine. Yet I have more fat on my body than I have ever had before in my life. I look at myself in the mirror and work to think body positive thoughts, which is good. Bodies change as they age. I can’t expect my body at 42 to be shaped the same as it was at 22, or even 32. Things soften, years write their stories on my skin in scars, freckles, and wrinkles. I don’t mind the wrinkles, but the rapidity of the weight gain is of concern. It indicates that something is out of balance in my body and it is time for me to find a new balance.

This morning I came across yet another article talking about weight loss and gain. The writer had finally recognized the weight loss industry as a racket where companies who sell weight loss programs actually profit when their clients fail. People come back again and again. I read it and thought “Why is gaining weight a failure?” Weight fluctuations are the natural response to changes in lifestyle. If a person wants to be a particular weight, then they need to be willing to live the life that induces their body to be that weight. Of course all of that leaves out medical and genetic factors which play a huge role in how our bodies gain or lose weight. Some people can attain a weight that makes them happy with work. Others are not able to do so no matter how much willpower they apply to the problem. This is not fair. Life is not fair.

I am very aware that as a person who has spent most of her life in the socially acceptable weight range, I do not understand all of the nuances that factor in to how people feel about their bodies. Part of me feels like this might be an area where I should listen more than I speak. Yet this conversation belongs to everyone. We all have to come to terms with the bodies we have. I don’t think that naturally thin people have it all easy either. This topic is so complex and so emotionally charged that part of me wanted to file my thoughts away in my folder of things I don’t post to the internet.

It is a tricky balance between accepting my body as it is, and striving for better health, which requires making changes that will affect my body shape. In order to reconcile these, I’m approaching it all as an experiment. What happens if I eat mostly vegetarian for a month? What happens if I count calories and teach myself more about the caloric content of foods? Where does my weight stabilize? Do I feel different when I eat differently? How does exercise affect my mood? Do I notice a difference in my depression and anxiety? Is what I’m doing sustainable over a long period of time?

The goal is to find a combination that includes happy, healthy, and sustainable. Note that while being thinner is the likely result of my experiments, it is not my primary goal. I do feel cliché making changes to my eating and exercise at the beginning of January. Yet it feels like the right time for me to do this. My head is clearer than it has been for a long time. It is time to experiment.

Disorders in Hiding

By / January 26, 2016 / 6 Comments

Sometimes autism doesn’t flap arms or drone on forever on the infinitesimal details of one particular topic. Sometimes Autism can look like a friendly kid who calls his friends over and is the instigator of group play. Autism can be wearing the exact same outfit every single day because your clothes are part of who you are and you don’t feel like yourself in different clothes. Often this means duplicates of clothes. Autism can be standing in a group full of people who are all talking and laughing, wanting to be part of it, but they only talk about things you don’t care about. Autism can be refusing to go into the lunch room because it is too loud and ending up sitting in a hallway off by yourself feeling lonely. Autism can be feeling certain that you made an agreement with another person only to discover that they understood what you said completely differently from how you meant it. Autism can be being unable to do an assignment because you can’t wrap your head around how to begin. Then everyone gets angry with you because it looks simple to them. Autism can look like stubbornness and laziness.

OCD does not always flip light switches, count posts, or line things up in rows. Sometimes OCD is becoming actively uncomfortable and antsy if someone else is sitting in the spot where you expected to sit. This discomfort may cause you to lash out in anger. Then you have to face the consequences of your angry outburst. OCD can be carrying all of your books and school papers in your arms because that is the only way you can constantly be sure you have everything. OCD can be not throwing away any school papers and carrying them all in the ever-growing stack because it would be terrible to not be prepared should the teacher ask students to pull out an old assignment from three months ago. OCD can be wrapping every thought with a cloud of tangential and descriptive information which obscures the thing you want to tell other people. Only you can’t skip any of the information because it is all connected. And if anyone tries to interrupt the thing you’re saying, you get angry, because you weren’t finished, and the thing you were saying is important and must be completed. OCD can be correcting the pronunciations of the people around you because if a word is said wrong, your brain can not let go of that word until it is spoken correctly. One of these things is a quirk. All of these things together is a disorder that affects pretty much every hour of every day and every relationship in your life. OCD can look like disobedient defiance, rudeness, and disrespect.

Anxiety does not always worry about things. Sometimes anxiety is a heart that races and palpitates even though there is nothing going on and the person feels calm. Anxiety can be feeling antsy and agitated, like post-adrenaline shakes, even though nothing happened. Anxiety can be imagining a dozen possible futures and making plans to be prepared for all of them. Anxiety can be hyper-organization that other people praise, and which is actually useful, except that it never allows rest, vacation, or breaks. Preparation that never switches off. Anxiety can be needing to leave an event because there are too many people moving around and talking, making you unable to track everything. And you have to track everything, because if something goes wrong, you must be ready for it. Anxiety can be skipping work opportunities because they require face-to-face interaction. Anxiety can be checking up on other people’s work until they get annoyed with you, but you can’t not check because you have to be prepared if they didn’t do their job. Anxiety can look like a nagging and controlling personality.

ADHD is not always easily distracted. ADHD can be so focused on a project that suddenly you realize that people are standing over you angry because they’ve been trying to get your attention. ADHD can be the sound of pencils scratching on paper overpowering the thoughts in your head. ADHD can be deciding that today you will REALLY pay attention and make sure you get all your assignments, only to realize that you missed hearing an assignment because you were busy planning how not to miss assignments. ADHD is being lost in the thoughts in your head. ADHD can mean always feeling lost or out of step because everyone else knows what is going on, but you haven’t any idea what the instructions were. ADHD can be a jittery leg, all your pencils chewed to bits, and fingers that twist and play with whatever they touch, all without you intending to do any of it. ADHD can be lost items and missed appointments because at the important moment your thoughts were on something else. ADHD can look like chronic disorganization, negligence, and a person who doesn’t care enough to get things done.

Depression does not always stay at home lying in bed feeling in a pit of despair. It is not always dramatic or suicidal. Depression can be doing all the tasks that are required of you, but enjoying none of them. Depression can be feeling like things will never be better than they are now. Depression can be binge watching television shows on Netflix, because then you don’t have to listen to your own thoughts. Depression can be playing endless games of solitaire to fill the spaces between required activities. Depression can be deciding to stay home rather than go out with friends because being social sounds too exhausting. Depression can be having friends drift away because you’re not the person you used to be and you don’t have emotional energy to maintain the friendships. Depression can be crying at seemingly random times over things which wouldn’t normally cause tears, like a happy song playing, or the store being out of the cereal you like. Depression can be a messy house because you only have so much energy to do things and laundry didn’t make the list this week. Depression can be not bothering to brush your hair or change clothes because it is too much work. Depression can look like a person who is standoffish, slovenly, and unfriendly.

So if you have to deal with a person and they are awkward, rude, nagging, standoffish,or negligent, pause a moment before you condemn them. It may be that they do have the character flaw you perceive in them. Or it may be that the person is fighting a daily battle you can’t see, and they need your compassion instead of your anger.

Finding the Right Therapist, or How to Recognize You Have the Wrong One

By / August 31, 2015 / 7 Comments

“It takes a few tries to find the right therapist. Don’t give up.”

I was told variations of this multiple times by multiple people. They were people who had struggled in similar ways, so I believed them. Except that it was repeated often, in almost the same words. Following this seemingly simple instruction turned out to be very difficult that I began to wonder. Is this just a platitude? A thing we say to offer hope in a hopeless situation? Ultimately I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not just a platitude. It is a fact and a necessary process. By the end of this post it will be clear why.

I had no good methodology for finding the “right” therapist. Sometimes I went on recommendations from friends, neighbors, or primary care doctors. Though most of those recommendations were “I’ve heard of this therapist and have a vaguely positive impression attached to the name.” The few times I got an extremely specific recommendation from someone who had worked extensively with that therapist, the therapist was invariably closed to new patients.

I was left with trial and error, which is not a great process for someone who is struggling with feeling hopeless. Unfortunately this mirrors the medication treatment process for mental health as well. So we spent a couple of years trying this therapist and that medicine before switching things around. One kid got better, but not in any way I could relate to the therapy sessions she’d had. Two other kids got much worse. Until lately they’ve been better at least partially because of our experiences with therapy.

I’ve now had direct experience with seven different therapy relationships across four family members. At this point I can tell you far more about how to tell when you have the wrong therapist than I can about finding the right one. It finally occurred to me that this is actually useful information. No one told me what should constitute “not working” and so I stayed in several of the therapy situations much longer than I should have. It is hard to make good judgement calls in the midst of emotional chaos. It is even harder to abandon groundwork that you’ve spent effort, time, and money to establish in order to start over with yet another complete unknown. The thought of having to start over kept me doing “one more session” for weeks. So I’m going to tell you the knowledge I gathered from my experiences. Then I’m going to tell you the stories of how the therapists we had were wrong. From the combination you may be able to glean information to inform your decisions.

Knowledge

My experiences are not universal, some of what I say here may not apply in your situation or may be wrong for you. Listen to your own instincts, which can be hard in the midst of emotional chaos, I know. Listen anyway. Only take the pieces of advice that help you. Discard the rest.

It should only take 4-6 sessions for you to build a rapport with a therapist and start doing emotional work that is beneficial. If you don’t feel these things, move on.

It is not rude to abandon a therapy relationship. You don’t have to apologize or even explain. You can say “this isn’t working” or you can simply cancel your appointment and go elsewhere. Therapy professionals will not be offended or hurt. They understand that some relationships just don’t click.

Your therapist should never make you feel judged. If you feel judged you are not safe to find out what you really think and feel.

If you’re helping someone else with their therapy, how they feel about the therapist matters more than how you feel about the therapist.

It is normal to sometimes resent your therapist, but if that is happening week after week, it is time for a different one. Resentment is a sign that you feel attacked, which means you don’t feel safe with the therapist.

It is easier to have a regularly scheduled appointment than to have as-needed appointments. If you need a non-regular schedule, don’t leave the therapist’s office without scheduling your next appointment.

A sign of a good therapist is that they’re willing to change tactics when one is not working.

One of the reasons it may take several tries to find the right therapist is because you don’t know what you need until you start dealing with one. It is an iterative process.

There are different methodologies in therapy, what helps one person will be ineffective with another. Sometimes the therapist is a mis-match because they’re most comfortable with a methodology that doesn’t work for you. (IE: cognitive behavioral therapy when what you need is PTSD focused therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy.)

The financial cost matters. Sometimes a therapist can be wrong for financial reasons, because high cost can give your brain yet another argument not to go. This stinks, but it is true. Many universities have low-cost clinics where their grad students get to practice being therapists.

The therapist should be respectful of the anxiety and emotional energy that goes into admitting help is needed. One who doesn’t answer phone calls or drops you as a client is the wrong therapist, no matter how good they might be when you actually have an appointment.

Stories

Therapist #1: For Gleek. The therapist was young, a grad student. I thought this would help her build a relationship with Gleek. But all the sessions ended up with me and Gleek together sitting on the couch. The therapist spent most of her time dissecting the parent/child relationship rather than digging in to find out the inner workings of Gleek’s thoughts which Gleek hid behind a shield of chatter. I came away from most of those sessions feeling resentful and judged. It is likely I was projecting my own self-judgements onto the therapist, but she wasn’t sensing or solving that. The therapy relationship ended because the therapist graduated and moved away.

Hindsight: The therapy format was wrong for what we needed. It was set up to treat the parent/child system and ended up giving me lots of parenting advice that I already knew and had already applied. The next time I set up therapy I specified individual therapy.
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Therapist #2: For Gleek. She was a woman in her fifties with a long practice dealing with children. I deliberately sought that out because I wondered if my reaction to the other therapist had been an inexperience problem. This therapist was recommended to me by Gleek’s church leader, specifically because the therapist did art and play therapy. I found the therapist good and easy to talk to, but Gleek became increasingly resistant to going. “I don’t like how nosey she is.” Gleek said. Ultimately Gleek was doing so much better (because of medication and changes at school) that the therapist and I agreed we could stop therapy for a time.

Hindsight: Gleek did not have the right rapport with the therapist, so the therapy was not working as it should. It is possible that the therapist and I could have banded together to push through her resistance. Instead we opted to give her some control. That turned out to be the right call. We did establish that if life gets hard again, back to therapy we’ll go. But we’ll pick a different one.
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Therapist #3: For Link. I chose to go through the comprehensive clinic at BYU in part because it was far less expensive than other options and we were paying out of pocket for everything. I also thought that a young male therapist might have a better chance to connect with Link. This meant a grad student therapist again. By week four the therapist was having trouble getting Link to open up, so he brought me in for a joint session. It went really well. Unfortunately this meant that the therapist always brought me in for all the sessions. It became relationship therapy between Link and I rather than the individual therapy that Link needed. He needed solutions which did not include me. Also I think that speaking with me was more emotionally rewarding for the therapist than speaking to Link. The therapist could poke at my pain and induce me to open up. He was completely unable to do the same for Link. I kept trying to keep him focused on Link, but we ended up talking about me half the time anyway. It took weeks of me being increasingly stressed and resentful of the therapy, and Link feeling the same way, before I recognized the problem and called the clinic to request a different therapist.

Hindsight: This was a similar problem to the one with therapist #1. We had different visions for what the troubles were. I probably could have had a meeting with the therapist and re-calibrated the treatment, but starting over was less work and Link was more likely to cooperate. Continuing to make Link go to a therapist he didn’t like would have damaged my relationship with Link.
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Therapist #4: For Sandra. This was actually the same therapist as #2. She hadn’t worked for Gleek, but I’d enjoyed talking with her. The interactions with Therapist #3 had forced me to see that I was struggling, so I made an appointment. It went well. So did another one. Unfortunately she was by far the most expensive therapist we’d gone to and everything was out of pocket. We finally got onto an insurance plan which covered mental health care (Yay Affordable Care Act!) and she wasn’t listed on the plan. I’d paid her prices for Gleek, but it was harder to justify paying her prices for me. So I’d delay between sessions until I was in crisis. Then I’d call for an appointment…and she’d fail to call back. I’d call again and she texted two days later saying “I have an appointment available in two hours, does that work?” It did not work. Also, I’d requested a phone call to make the appointment, not a text. Ultimately these communication issues were the reason I dropped her. If I gathered the emotional energy necessary to call and set up an appointment, I needed the process to go smoothly rather than stretch out for days adding stress to my life.

Hindsight: She was a good therapist, but her business running skills interfered with my willingness to go to her. My next attempt at therapy for me will be an office with multiple therapists and a full time secretary who handles appointments.
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Therapist #5: For Link. This was the therapist we were assigned after therapist #4 went badly. I’d considered changing away from grad students, but decided to give it one more shot. By this time I’d been told the advice about giving a therapist 4-6 sessions to connect, so that was the plan. Right around session four, the new therapist ran aground in almost exactly the same way as the prior one had. Link wasn’t opening up. He’d give answers, but they were mostly shrugs or “I don’t know.” This therapist met with me separate from Link and hammered out a new plan. He started playing games with Link. The whole goal was to connect first and then gradually use that connection to teach Link how to connect without games. Then they could get at emotional issues. It was a brilliant plan. I approved. I think it would have worked. Unfortunately about a month later the therapist made a personal decision that took him out of the grad school program. He worked to hand us off to another therapist, and was as conscientious as he could be, but it was still a big blow to Link and to me.

Hindsight: Not much useful to offer here, except that this process can be hard in unexpected ways.
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Therapist #6: For Link. This was the therapist that therapist #5 handed us over to. They had this nice transitional plan where the new therapist would attend sessions with Link and the prior therapist. She was a young and pretty grad student. Link met with her twice and told me that he wasn’t comfortable with her. I wasn’t surprised. There had been a young pretty female math teacher at school that Link had refused to go to for help. Talking to people is hard for Link. Talking to girls is even harder. I called off the appointments and put Link on a therapeutic hiatus while some other things settled down in our lives.

Hindsight: Link needed an older brother/ role model and a young female therapist was not going to work in the same way. An older, motherly or grandmotherly woman would probably be fine. Any future therapist selections for him will keep this in mind. I’m also likely to try a therapist with a different approach, such as dialectical behavioral therapy instead of cognitive behavioral therapy.
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Therapist #7: For Patch. I think we began seeing this therapist before Link’s good therapist quit, but I’ve put her last on the list because she’s the only one whom we’re still seeing. She’s a grad student at the same clinic as Link’s therapy. She and Patch hit it off right away. It helped a lot that I recommended that games be part of the therapy. (Having learned from Link’s experience that this can foster connection.) I can tell the therapy is working because Patch doesn’t resist going. Often he is excited or happy to go. Also the therapist usually brings me in for the last few minutes to let me know what they talked through and what would be a good focus for the week ahead. I know that they really are beginning to dig down in and untangle some of the emotional knots that Patch has been carrying around.

Hindsight: This is how you know when therapy is working, life feels easier. It is subtly easier so that you may not even be sure if it being easier is because of the therapy.
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I don’t have many concluding thoughts, except to say that writing up this post helped me to see why it is sometimes necessary to try multiple therapists before settling. Each therapy relationship helps you learn more about what you need and want in a therapy relationship. It is not a failure to need to ditch one therapist and try out another one, it is a refining process. I wish I’d known that when I first started, it would have made the process easier.

Medication is Complicated

By / May 11, 2015 / 2 Comments

It was a routine trip to the pharmacy. I had seven prescriptions to pick up. That right there says something. Somehow a seven prescription pharmacy trip has become “routine.” Three of them had been called in over the phone. Four required me to hand signed pieces of paper to the pharmacy staff. I understand the reasoning behind requiring paper with signatures, yet the need for it adds layers of complication to my life. Any time the prescription needs a refill, I have to call the doctor’s office and either physically go get a piece of paper or plan ahead to allow time for them to mail the paper to me. Add in the fact that the insurance companies keep track of when they last filled the prescription and they won’t fill early, so there is a window of only a few days during which I’m allowed to refill a prescription before we run out. I always try to hit the early end of this window because sometimes the pharmacy doesn’t have the pills on hand and they have to be ordered in. Tracking all of this has become routine. I’d done the math, calculated the windows of time, and taken myself down to the pharmacy to pick things up.

Then the pharmacy register rang up at $500 instead of the $35 I was expecting.

When I picked a healthcare plan last November, I paid close attention to the prescription copays. I picked a plan with $5 copays for their Tier 1 medicines. Tier 2 costs $35 and Tier 3 is $175. It is a system designed to encourage people to switch to the Tier 1 medicines. I don’t really know all the reasons that medicines get assigned to various Tiers. We had some stress in January because my kids had to be switched to a different form of their medicine because capsules were Tier 3, but caplets were Tier 1. Then we had to get special permission for Howard to be on the same medicine because anyone over the age of 18 needs a doctor’s approval, but under that age the insurance company doesn’t require preauthorization. So we jumped through hoops, and settled everyone onto their medicines. And all was well for a couple of months. I was relieved each time I picked up a prescription and it cost only $5. We’d paid much more than that in years past and it had been a financial burden on our family.

“That price can’t be right.” I said.
“You can call your insurance company” the pharmacist said. So I stepped over to a bench and called the customer support number on the back of my insurance card. It was a long phone call with multiple waits on hold while I watched my frozen groceries in my cart slowly thawing.

The systems around health insurance are arcane and complicated. I have to make far too many phone calls because automated systems aren’t as automated as they should be. Yet any time I’ve talked to an actual person on the phone, both for my insurance company and for the government healthcare marketplace, they have been very kind and helpful. The pharmacists are helpful. I end up with this sense that we’re all tangled up together in some weird bureaucracy where the key focus is not on best treatment, but on appeasing the computer system so that treatment can be extracted.

The customer support lady looked up the pharmacy order and found that I’d been billed at a Tier 3 rate. She looked up the medicines and they were all listed as Tier 1. Then she looked at another place and they were listed at Tier 3. Ultimately she had to put in a support ticket to…somebody… to figure out which Tier is accurate. There might have been a change in the formulary listing for these medicines or maybe it was just a mistake. She says she’ll call me back once she hears back. I have her name and number, because I fully expect that in a day or two I’ll have to call her because she hasn’t yet called me.

In the meantime my kids are taking medicine once per day and we’re running out of pills. It may be that the insurance company has changed these meds to Tier 3, which would mean that I have to research and figure out which medicines are comparable and are Tier 1. Then I have to call their doctor and discuss a med change with him, discussing the options and what possible consequences there might be from switching medicines. Then I would either have to drive to Salt Lake City (2 hours round trip) or wait two days for the prescriptions to be mailed to me. After which I then have to make another trip to the pharmacy (40 minutes round trip).

Just today my “routine” trip to the pharmacy cost me 2 hours and significant emotional distress. And I still don’t know how much more time it is going to cost.

So when people accuse parents of putting kids on meds for the parents’ convenience, excuse me if I laugh out loud in derision. There is nothing convenient about this. I would dearly love to be able to skip it all. I wish that willpower, diet, and exercise had worked for us. That would have been lovely. I track and manage all of this medical mess only because I can see that the medicines make a positive difference in the lives of my family. As an ancillary effect, my life is better too, for which I’m grateful. But better is not the same as easy and it definitely isn’t the same as convenient. The minute my family members don’t need medicine anymore I will ditch the stress and expense. I think that some of them will reach that. I suspect that others will need medicine for most of their lives. For this week, I’ll be tracking remaining medicine, waiting for phone calls, and making phone calls. Again.

UPDATE: The insurance company called me back the next day. It was a glitch in their system. The pharmacy re-ran the prescriptions and they came up at the correct $5 rate.

On Unpleasant Medical Screenings

By / March 5, 2015

A mammogram is a simple test really. It is a little embarrassing and a little uncomfortable, but the whole thing is complete in less than ten minutes. The hard part is that I spend those minutes thinking about how my sister had cancer and the weeks of radiation therapy that I went through fifteen years ago. I can’t feel completely calm about the process or the report that will come from it. It dredges up old emotion that had settled out. Not my favorite. But the thing is done and I move onward in my day.

Diagnostic Appointment Delayed

By / December 11, 2014 / 4 Comments

I made the appointment three months ago. I made it after a hard day where I realized that I needed guidance on how to help my teenage son shift into adulthood while managing his own particular mix of capabilities and disabilities. I needed a doctor to talk with him about the medicines he takes, so that my son is prepared to make rational decisions about those medicines rather than making reactionary decisions.

A month passed and things did not get easier. We ended up meeting with a general practitioner to adjust meds. I met with the school to adjust his schedule. I learned about programs that become available with a signed diagnosis letter. I was glad to be able to say “We already have an appointment scheduled.” We were struggling and muddling toward solutions, but I knew that an appointment was scheduled with a doctor I trust. I was willing to wait so I could see this particular doctor.

It was all lined up. The appointment was today. I could get the school form signed. I could get prescription refills. Howard went on the run to get the college kid from school. I arranged for my neighbor to pick up the elementary carpool. I’d cleared and defended the day. I didn’t know all the results that the appointment would bring. Maybe a new diagnosis. Maybe a process to switch medications. Maybe just affirmation that we were already doing all the things that were necessary. But at least I knew that I would no longer be waiting for an appointment. We would then be on the patient list rather than the New Patient list, which meant follow up phone calls and appointments would be handled far more expeditiously.

This morning I got a phone call. They had to reschedule. Next available appointment is January 5, twenty-five days from today. I get another month of muddling through and waiting for an appointment. I’m not mad at the doctor. He didn’t want to have stomach flu today. I’m certain he would much rather have spent his day meeting with me. Yet the cancellation of the appointment hit me hard. Today has been hard. Sometimes I don’t realize how much emotion I have riding on an event until the event is cancelled or changed.

I think this is one of the hardest aspects of mental illness. After making my way over the hurdle of admitting I needed professional help for my child, I had to wait. Then I had to talk about the appointment to school staff. Then I had to go explain to a general practitioner why I needed an interim prescription until I could see the psychiatrist. With the appointment moved, I had to have all of those conversations over again. I had to call the GP and say “Would you please write this letter that the school needs?” because my son can not afford to wait until January for the services. I had to ask the GP for a prescription extension so that we won’t run out before we have the chance to meet with the psychiatrist. Across the middle of this, our insurance will be switching over to a new plan on January 1st. This will probably be to our benefit, but it still requires me to adjust for the new company.

I have enough force of will and comprehension of what needs to be done that I can wade through all of that. I want to cry for the families who have no idea how to navigate to get mental health care and who don’t know what questions to ask at the schools to get help. It has been confusing and exhausting. Instead of exiting today with a new health partner and a new course, I am facing another month of stopgap measures. I don’t like stopgap measures.

So we do the only thing we can do, which is to keep facing each day and do the best we can. The good news is that something in the medicine switches, therapy, and schedule switches has been helping. Life is better for him now than it was two weeks ago. We’ll just keep on doing the things that seem to be working until we can have the diagnostic appointment that we need.

Bumps in the Road

By / March 12, 2014

Life is rolling along and everything is feeling good, then whump. I hit a speed bump, or a pot hole, or maybe it was both a speed bump and a pothole. Anyway my tire is flat, which seriously impedes my ability to keep rolling along happily. It’ll all be fine. I just need to find the jack and change out the tire. Then I can roll along again. Right now I’m in that moment when I’ve rolled to a complete stop at the side of the road and I’m trying to remember where on earth I keep the jack. I’m hoping it is here in the car with me.

The things which flattened my tire today:

I looked at the list of things I really should have gotten done already, the list of things I ought to do today, and I compared these lists against the actual hours I have available between now and midnight. The numbers of things are far more than the hours.

I thought about the parenting things which I have left to do this week and how they are going to interfere with the work things. Or maybe it is the other way around. Either way something important is going to have to slide.

We had a boom year financially last year. That means that this year we have a boom year for paying out taxes. I planned for it. I saved for it, but the number still feels a bit like a gut punch. I end up revising my plans for what I think we can afford this year. It is time for me to go over the budget again. I’ll just add that to the list.

Related to the finances, all the old anxiety demons have come howling out of the dark places where they’ve been hiding. “why can’t you plan better?” They howl at me. They blame me for spending too much, for not saving enough, for not being as frugal as we once were. And then once they get up a head of steam, they’ll start in on the many and varied ways that I’m a failure as a human being. So I’m spending psychic energy not listening to them and trying to shoo them back into their dark holes. Out of my head forever would be better, but I’ll tackle that when they are not surrounding me in a swirling mob. One at a time I can get rid of them. En masse, I’ll settle for having them shut up.

Howard has been suffering medication-related insomnia which has not helped him feel calm and happy. So we’re tinkering with that this week. The big bill punches his anxiety buttons too. That’s extra fun. His internal howling voices get restless when he’s having a depressed day. So later today Howard and I will, no doubt, be conferencing about these negative thoughts, both his and mine.

That’s it. I really thought there would be more things, but I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes and everything else that has floated through my head lands firmly on the good side of the ledger or is covered by the list above. Howard and I have both been writing prose fiction. He’s under contract. I’m not, but I know I’m writing the book that I need to write. Maybe I’ll find a contract for it later this year. Kiki is home with us for the week, and that is really fun. Link has been taking control of his homework and is going to bring all his grades up to passing before the end of the term even though he was out of school for a month. Gleek is excelling at horseback riding and I see the things she learns there spilling into other areas of her life. Patch hasn’t been showing signs of anxiety. He just earned his arrow of light and will go to scouts for the first time tonight.

So very many things are going well. I just wish there were two of me to keep them all going.