Posted by
Anni
on
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
Image source: Stress-problems.com
I always know I’m not going to be able to sleep right when my head hits the pillow. There’s this jacked-up feeling, nervousness mixed with terror, like I’m about to have my driver’s test or get on stage before congress. Sometimes my brain just won’t shut down, no matter how hard I try. This only happens to me every now and then. I think it happens to everyone sometimes. For my husband though, insomnia is a regular thing. He says it feels like his eyes are popping out, like those people we saw on Oprah one time.
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Posted by
Anni
on
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
Image source: Newsone.com
Yeah, depression is something I have too, along with my migraines, anxiety, and chronic constipation (something you’ll undoubtedly encounter in a future post so get excited). I had my first bout of major depression when I was about 12. Suddenly one morning I woke up convinced that my family didn’t really love me and, worse, that I didn’t really love them. It was a strange sensation. In retrospect I think it was the loss of joy that depression brings, misinterpreted by my young mind as a loss of love. But back then I was terrified: what had I become? And I was ashamed: how could I stop loving my own family?
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Posted by
Anni
on
Monday, February 27th, 2012
Image source: Sciencephoto.com
Pretty soon now you’re going to realize that I have a lot of weird health problems. Overall, I’m a happy, reasonably well-adjusted person who doesn’t let her ailments get her down. But boy howdy, the ailments are here… also they’re queer. I’ve had migraines since I was about six years old. They started as just really bad headaches—so bad I couldn’t move my head around or really stand up. I remember crawling from my bedroom to the bathroom to avoid the intense throbbing pain that hit me every time my head rose too far above the rest of me. My dad gets migraines and my grandfather had them, so we all knew what was happening. Sometimes I imagine, if my family hadn’t had the history, how terribly frightening my headaches would have been for all of us.
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Posted by
Anni
on
Friday, February 24th, 2012
Image source: Howtocalmanxiety.net
I suffer from anxiety. It’s not nervousness over something in particular. It’s not triggered by spiders or clowns or children wearing makeup (though I do find each of those things deeply disturbing in a primal fight-or-flight kind of way). Rather, my anxiety is an every-day hum, like a generator with such a constant sound you kind of stop paying attention, until it blows a nut or starts to overheat. I’m just anxious as a baseline and it’s not a healthy way to be. My kind of anxiety is associated with all sorts of chronic health problems—heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and many other systemic disorders too numerous to mention. It’s very unhelpful to know this. As you might imagine, knowing your anxiety could be causing irreparable damage to your health isn’t necessarily calming.
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Posted by
Anni
on
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
Image source: Ayruveda.ygoy.com
We all know the feeling—the clench, the abdominal pain—the intense embarrassment when our exit strategy goes horribly awry and we’re caught red-faced, stinking up the joint. It’s happened to the best of us, from politicians to movie stars to the Queen of England. Oh wait… this just in: the Queen has a lady’s maid who does all the farting. Ah, my mistake. But what a dream job that must be!
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Posted by
Anni
on
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
Image source: Webmd.com
My little sister talks in her sleep. She always has. My brother and I used to sit by her bed and whisper—for some reason that triggered the talking—and she’d say things like, “Oompa loompas don’t sing in heaven, they tidy up the clouds.” It was endlessly fun… for us. It gave her some problems when she got to college. One night, sleeping soundly, my sister shouted at her roommate: “You’re feeble minded! You belong in a bag!” The fact that her roommate got mad instead of cracking up means she was the wrong roommate for my little sister.
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Posted by
Anni
on
Friday, February 17th, 2012
Image source: Vaccinenewsdaily.com
Being in the hospital is bad enough. Nurses whiz down the halls, passing each other like motorcycles in the night, maybe doing a high-five tag-out for shift change. If you’re in the hospital long enough (and it doesn’t seem to take very long) you’ll be familiar with shift change. It’s the 100% replacement of the nurses you’ve gotten to know and love because you’ve shared some real moments together. They’ve wiggled your bed up and down, they’ve poked your hurting parts just to make them hurt, they’ve whispered sweet nothings whilst sucking your blood like a medically authorized vampire. But now it’s time to prepare yourself for the new class—ready to rehash all your problems, re-asking you the same old uncomfortable questions while you lay there feeling like a run-over bug who never had a chance to love.
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