Tag: #anxiety

Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed!

…and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men didn’t want to put Humpty back together again.

I’m not Ms. Dumpty, but I pushed myself over the edge…again. And now I’m AGAIN trying to put myself back together. I want to be put back together again because the heights I reached when I was whole was GLORIOUS. I’m sorry you we’re along for the ride, but as I explained in One Ball Juggler I can only really do one thing at a time without completely overwhelming myself. So, I’ve been working five to six days a week as a vampyre and spending my off days writing for five to seven hours at a stretch. The week I took off for my birthday in July I finished the first draft of my second-go-round of a book I’m breaking into three parts. I jumped straight into editing.

I hate editing. It’s a journey into everything that’s wrong with your writing, with you, and it screams why you shouldn’t be a writer. Amazingly it went smoothly and I was proud of the finished product. During this time I was aware I was feeling unnaturally drained, loss of appetite and wanting to crawl into bed long before the sun goes down. So I ignored it and pushed past it, like I used to do because this was more important. I would go to my room and sit at my desk, give myself an hour to do some more editing, and push beyond the hour and then try to turn off the chatter of the people in my head trying to explain to me how I can better present them on the page. (I know it sounds crazy to a non-writer but the fiction writers out there are just nodding their heads). The task was to just edit on my lunch hour but I kept pushing for more and more to get done.

I got time off work in October to attend a writing/media conference where I want to make some contacts (Maybe meet someone special: an agent!) so I’ve been trying to get the second pink edits done. This round is editing the edits and approving the edits before I actually make the edits in the computer. The goal was to have the lavender edits done before the end of October. (Pink and Lavender are just the color of paper I print on to keep track of where I am in the process) Every night I would go to sleep reminding myself that I only had X amount of weeks to have this done then calm myself with sweet words of “It’s plenty of time. You can do it.”. I was excited by the challenge and so proud of myself for getting so much done so quickly.

Then life happened.

Before I could manage the stimulus I tripped over old habits and I was crying in fear and rage and I think disappointment in myself. Physical manifestations of anxiety began to run roughshod over my emotional state; palpitations, shortness of breath, sleeplessness. Walking from the bathroom to my bed (maybe 10 steps total) felt like I did in PE class when I had to run the mile for the first time. I was overcome with the fear I was dying but I was too afraid to do anything about it, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to alert anyone in the family of what was going on. I went to work because I thought if I ignored it it would go away and it did when we were busy, but it always came back. I asked to leave early and I talked to a doctor in my car, he agreed it was probably anxiety but suggested to keep a low threshold and go into urgent care if it doesn’t subside in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of medication. I told my family I was sick, they assumed it was gastro-intestinal which wasn’t far off because anxiety viciously works both ends in my life.

Luckily, I had therapy scheduled for that evening. We worked through the anger I was feeling, the fulcrum which catapulted me off the wall. I felt better emotionally and not horrible about my choices to protect myself. I felt safe again. Physically I was still dealing with the palpitations, shallow breathing and a rapid heart rate. I did more deep breathing before I went to sleep and slept fairly well thanks to the wonders of pharmacology. In the morning my Oura Ring told me my resting heart rate was 123 which wasn’t good. (It’s back down to it’s normal mid-50’s)

Deep breathing has healed a lot and has allowed me to rebuild my center. Pulling back on my mad-dash to get my book done before the end of October has been painful yet when I sit to work on it I feel like I’m trying to stuff myself into a box where I can’t breathe. What editing I have done has been, dare I say, revolutionary and changing some of the tone of the story. I respect the voices that are showing up on paper.

In the clear light of rationality I realize I broke on some of the old mended cracks, pieces that might not have had enough E6000 to weld them together, so I am going slowly and not pushing myself. I need to get back to the other things in life which were left behind in my pursuit of publication; journaling, blogging and just chilling. I’ve not picked up my journal since my birthday. Journaling and blogging has often been the alert bell when the cogs and wheels of my inner-workings are in need of a little oil or TLC. I’m back scheduling journaling, blogging and looking forward to Sunday drives and playing with my parrot. Writing to publication is my raison d’être it can’t be all there is to my life.

Warped

‘Tis the season of giving thanks and showing thanks and making at cheery and bright. Grosgrain ribbon is a popular adornment of the season because it cuts so cleanly. One of my favorite things to do is to pull at one of the small ends and pull until the weft is loosed and the warp is freed from it’s interwoven supports. Eventually the weft snags and the whole construct is lost and there is a snarl of ribbon left to be thrown away with the ripped paper. This time though, I’m not the one pulling the uneven thread and I feel powerless to stop fate from tugging at the carefully woven ribbon until nothing is left but the warp.

It has to be the season plucking at my anxiety strings. My thoughts blink from one dire situation to another. For example….I am sure I can keep my job if I just keep working yet I’m still terrified they are going to find out I’m a fraud and fire me. I’m making plans, deeply committed plans for my future, and I’m terrified I’m going to sprout a tumor or die just on the cusp of realizing my life’s ambition. What if Sammy dies? My control over what I can control is spiralling again, though I’m not binging at pre-apocalyptic proportions, I’m eating more of what I shouldn’t than I should. I’m forcing myself to eat because I’d rather just not. I want to just go to bed and stay in bed and be done with it.

I’m not that person any more, and I know it. Yes, anxiety still plucks at my strings trying to create a soothing melody for me to stay abed but the melody is discordant to me now and is more like scratching on a chalkboard, but it’s still there trying. Trying just as hard as I am not to give in, but it offers chocolate, and I succumb. I don’t know where I am in the unraveling process, at the begging, the even free flowing warp or the snarl of disposable threads of what is left. Wait, I just realized, I’m not the ribbon in this metaphor, it’s a part of the package, but it’s not all of me. I am the gift, wrapped in God’s love and support and even when anxiety tries to snarl my decorations I have confidence in me and in Him that even through the most stressful season of the year (in a year of stressful seasons) the whole of me won’t be warped, maybe just frayed around the edges for a short season.

As Simple as a Cup of Tea

My monk, Titch Nhat Hanh, practiced something called a tea meditation. It’s said he would spend an hour drinking a cup of tea with his fellow monks. It sounds glorious. Honestly, I’m saying that without rancor or sarcasm. In his book Anger: Wisdom for cooling the flames, he talks about how a cup of tea, when drunk with mindfulness, will bring us back to ourselves. The whole world melts away when you spend the time thinking about nothing else but drinking the warm infusion of leaves, smelling the botanical aromas and feeling the concoction infuse your soul with each sip.

I have started my own tea ritual at night before bed. I’m not able to completely concentrate on the tea, I don’t quite have the discipline yet. I also have a bird who demands my complete attention after being left alone all day. I have a small one-ounce cup I try to put out for her when I drink but she doesn’t seem as interested in the tea as she is in pushing the small cup off the desk. She makes me smile. The tea does make me pause, to inhale the floral bouquet (tonight is lemon balm) and try to exhale the feelings of being overwhelmed, overworked and inactive in the direction I want to go. The herbals I drink at night are designed to promote calm and restfulness of mind after the long days I’ve been having, and the spice teas I drink during the day are to get more liquid and less chemicals into my body for better health.

I didn’t practice last night. I was too tired to do anything, including sleep. I was irritated because work was long, lunch was gastro-intestinally distressing and the work environment dredged up some old forgotten feelings from long, long ago of people long since passed. I watched TV eating salted caramels from Costco and stayed up well past my bedtime (8:30pm!) and still couldn’t sleep. I eventually got up around 10pm took some Tylenol then rubbed a melatonin infused lotion on my legs and feet and eventually fell into a quasi-restful slumber. I blamed my restlessness on the family interaction from the night before, I blamed it on working too much, I blamed it on being too tired to sleep. In reality, I didn’t bring myself back to center with a cup of tea after being scattered mentally, physically and emotionally from the day. Rituals are powerful tools, even when they are as simple as a cup of tea.

Roadkill

It was in the pre-dawn hours this morning while driving to work a baby deer bolted in front of my car. It wasn’t even big enough to make the car shutter as it threw off the small animal like a dog with rain water. I had no time to react, to hit my breaks or to even swerve, which would have put an abrupt end to my day. I pulled over about 100 yards away from the impact and as the morning began to shimmer in the sky I could see the dark body of the fawn on the side of the road. It was too dark to see if it was breathing and it wasn’t cold enough to see the steam from it’s breath. I wanted to believe it was okay and at the same time I wanted to believe it’s death was swift and painless. How those two diametrically opposed outcomes could rest peacefully in my mind still boggles. I couldn’t go to it because I didn’t want to know. It was cowardly, it was inhumane. If it was in agony I didn’t have any means to end it’s suffering, I couldn’t do it for Dotty, a creature I loved, I couldn’t pick up a rock and bash in the brains of a terrified animal to ‘help’.

Many images and thoughts have come from this experience unbidden and not totally unwanted.

  • It’s warning of jumping too soon into my plans for resolution with my sisters.
  • There is the guilt of thinking it was following it’s mother across the road and it was too intent to be with her it didn’t hesitate.
  • Anger at the house which allows the deers to graze in their yard so close to the busy road. It’s not a kindness befriending wild animals.
  • Shouldn’t I feel something more than just casual remorse for the loss of life. I’m too numb.
  • There should be a company you can call where someone quickly comes out, slaughters the venison and distributes it to the poor and hungry before the body starts to break down and spoil the meat.
  • What am I suppose to learn from this? Why did a baby deer have to die in order for me to learn whatever the lesson is? And how many more animals will need to be sacrificed before I learn it?
  • How completely blessed I am because it could have been so much worse.

On my drive home from work I didn’t see the body. I’m clinging to the hope I just stunned the little tyke and it’s with it’s mother being suckled back to health.

Competent Confidence

A hundred years ago I used to (try to) sell mobile homes, or the proper term is Manufactured Houses. These weren’t trailers and none of them could be hooked up to the back of a truck and moved in the dead of night to skip out on space rent. When I started in the business the licensure was a step above used-car salesman. I worked at a now defunct firm in Santa Clara called Roney and Associates where the broker was ga-ga over a real estate sales guru called Tommy Hopkins. He was big in the business at the time and he did seminars, boot camps in Scottsdale AZ and sold all sorts of books and cassette taped lectures. Though he was an accomplished real estate salesperson, he made his hard core money selling his classes, books, boot camps and cassette tapes. My mother internalized a lot of it as a professional way to manipulate the family. Her mistake was to let my sister C and I listen to the tapes and we could hear the “close” coming and realize we were being played. I bring him up because one portion of a lesson has always stuck with me…

The Stages of Competence

Stage 1: Unconscious INCOMPETENCE

This is a euphoric state when you realize everyone around you is floundering and you’re sailing through. All the square blocks are effortlessly falling into the really large round holes but you’re too pleased with yourself to notice. You keep plugging along because it’s working and you aren’t sweating it.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence

Suddenly the euphoria erupts into chaos. The round holes are smaller and the square blocks were actually pyramid shaped and they HAVE to go sideways into the only visible hole in front of you. You throw your hands up and scream to the heavens but you don’t quit because you know you can and will get it…..maybe……someday…..if they don’t fire you first. I will have to say, at this stage it never occured to me I could go back to my old job. Like I said before, the benefits are just too good to leave. So, the only thing to do is remember all the kind encouragement, barked instructions and training and keep pushing toward stage 3.

Stage 3: Conscious Competence

I think I hit this stage today. Our float to help out didn’t make it, probably had to cover for someone who didn’t make it to their site. It was steady and I wasn’t overwhelmed by a throng of patients. Luckily. I found myself pausing when stressed and taking a deep breath and (I hate to admit it but…) the trainer from Training Is Fun-Da-Mental‘s advise of highlighting everything (even though it eats into the wait time) is helping me catch things like stool samples that also read as blood, duplicate orders and other things I’M SUPPOSED TO BE CATCHING but generally don’t. We’ll see how well this works when it’s busy tomorrow, especially if I’m alone at the desk but it was nice to evaluate myself today as not drowning at the front desk for the first time EVER.

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence

The hithertofore yet to be obtained stage for my work at the front desk and in the lab.

This is the goal.

This is the ultimate of ultimates.

I know once I subdue the beasty known as the front desk my next battle royale will be the lab. I’m doing okay, I have help if I have any questions, but I need to go faster. But I’m not beating myself up about it because I’ve learned in the post apocalypse, I can’t handle more than one challenge on my plate at one time. It stymies me into inaction which doesn’t help anyone…..especially me. So, for the front desk, I’m hoping by the end of this month or the middle of next I will have a handle on it and the aforementioned trainer won’t have too much of a need to bark instructions at me from over my shoulder. The lab is just a matter of accurate speed. Speed is a matter of muscle memory. Muscle memory in a body which feels like it’s wrapped in dementia most of the time is the hurdle I need to clear. But that, my dear reader, is a blog for another day…..soon.

Heart Beats in Time

Back in Uncomfortably Numb I mention my heart was constantly racing and I was dealing with runs of palpitations. I willed it not to be a cardiac problem because I didn’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to deal with it. I convinced myself it was the anxiety flipping switches in the my electrocardio system. I believed once I moved, got settled, got my unemployment paying my bills while I looked for a job everything would settle down back to normal. It didn’t. I’m able to track my heartrate thanks to this cool device called an Oura Ring. I learned about it when I was doing home exams and was told a big research hospital (either Johns Hopkins or Mayo, can’t remember) and the military were using it to predict COVID symptoms days before they were visible. It also tracks sleeping patterns, tells you how hard you should work out depending if you recovered enough from the day before based on your body temperature, restfulness, and heart rate through the night. It also tracks activity, not steps. Steps might be better because when I do a marathon stretch of crocheting it says I’ve walked 5 miles….without leaving my chair.

When I first got the ring my resting heart rate when I slept was in the 45-50 range. When I did my EKG training we had to give one another EKGs and my strips actually were marked as bradycardic (a slow heart rate under 60 bpm) but just barely. I bought it in March 2021 and wore it for about 5 months then it disappeared. I put it on it’s charger, went to the bathroom and when I came back it was gone. I cleaned out my room looking for it and didn’t find it. When I was moving at the end of this May it had miraculously found its way into a caddy I kept under my bed; a caddy I searched twice. Paranoia has provided a list of suspects and reasons, but I won’t go into that now. I charged the ring and when I first uploaded the nights report I was astounded to find my lowest heart rate was in the upper 80’s. Sometimes it would dip to a low to mid 60’s bpm but it still was hanging out in the 80’s. This was the week I was unpacking, so I wasn’t too worried. But it became a constant. I would take my pulse during the day for a whole minute and I would get the same numbers, plus I could feel the premature atrial contractions (PACs) which make up the palpitations. I figured I just needed to settle into my life more and find a job, so I tried not to worry about it.

Once I got the job my heart rate did decrease down to the low to mid 80’s. Still double when my consistent heart rate was when I first got the ring. All through the LabCorp training my heart rate was consistent with my pre-employment rate. I wasn’t having the palpitations as often as I did before but I was still having them when I sat still and cleared my distractions. I started working at my site. And then I got paid. And then my resting heart rate went back down into the low 50s. I’m still feeling the anxiety because I’m worried I’m going to fail, but that’s a normative state for me and I’m still having problems making ends meet right now because I’ve only had one paycheck and several months of bills but my sister C has been helping me (Thankfully!). Having the consistency of a job, of a schedule, of an income seems to the the balm my anxious heart needs to settle down into a normal rhythm.

This is something I’m going to need to keep in mind when I finally do make the big move. I need to have more money in the bank and a job in place so I won’t have to deal with my heart racing three paces ahead of me for months on end until I finally catch up to it.

Training is Fun-Da-Mental

So, I’m employed. I think I mentioned that. If I didn’t, sorry.   I spent one looooong week in a school-like training in front of a computer reading, no thinking required, and it completely flattened me. The second week was learning how to read, and enter orders then mock draw and process the ‘blood’. This week marks my first full week putting the second week’s processes into practice. I draw more in a day than I used to in a week, and after the first few very painful days I’m starting to get the hang of it.  I am picking things up quickly but as per usual with me, never quickly enough.

A question I get from my family is “will you be able to do this job?” Their meaning is are you going to be able to do this long term without going around the bend.  I think I can.  It’s not rocket science, it’s just sticking people with needles. It is very fulfilling when you think you know where it is and you’re right.  It’s rewarding when people say they didn’t feel anything or when they say they’ll ask for you next time because you’re one of three people to EVER to get the vein on that arm.  It is nice to have validation from perfect strangers that I am doing the job I am meant to be doing.  (To clarify, writing and being a writer is who I am, vampire is what I do to be who I am).

I’ve been thinking back to the late nights spent with my  journal planning for after the apocalypse.  The plan was I would go to the two week vampire school, I would get a job, I would move away and happily become who I want to be instead of what I was.   I expected it to take about a year. I was a little short sighted as to  how long it would take and how hard of a slog it would be and, of course, COVID. The joke about parents walking to school ten miles in the snow barefoot uphill…both ways, barely describes the process it has been. (Note ‘it HAS been’, not ‘it is’.) I’m still pushing forward on those plans concocted alone in bullet-proof ink only now I’m stronger, a bit wiser and just a little germaphobic.

Training was an exercise in keeping the anxious ‘I can’t do this’ and ‘I’m going to fail’ carefully cordoned off with a rope of self-talk and prayer. I did better than I thought I would even though I over-thought the simple stuff. The last few days of this week I purposely stretched my back and shoulders between the waves of patients, found comfortable shoes and meditated during lunch. Basically, figuring out what I need to do to do my job with the way my mind works. I’m enjoying the people I work with, they aren’t off put by my anxiety and understand I will do more and go faster I just need to settle a little. We had a float/trainer come in on Friday who, I don’t know if she meant to or not, but did a great job in shaking those foundations I had already built. She’s one of those trainers who believes her way is the best way and just barks instructions over your shoulder while you’re trying to learn something. Telling me to put in a code isn’t training me to find the code when she isn’t there. I’m sure I’ve been that kind of trainer when I was younger but I sincerely don’t appreciate it now and I strained to hold back my comments on her ‘training’ skills. How do you tell someone they need to be trained to train? My experience for training is from training volunteers. Two different animals, I know, but the process is the same.

So, the tally is…two weeks at an off-site training facility, one week on site, one paycheck that is already spent and my first six day week coming up. I’m looking forward to September 5…..Memorial Day…..a paid day off. What a concept. I balked at the two week off-site training we were required to endure when I was hired, but because of it the first week onsite was far more fun than mental.

The Rest is Silence

I lost a member of my flock last week. Dotty was a budgerigar which is more commonly known as a parakeet. I adopted her from a foster mom back at the height of COVID in 2020 as a companion for my bird Blu. Blu had lost his mate, Fluffy, a few years before and as social birds I thought having a companion would be good for him. Blu, sadly passed away a year or so later at the beginning of 2021. Dotty lost her mate as well and came from a home where human/bird interaction wasn’t very high on the young families list. I’m a hands on kinda bird owner but I learned to respect her boundaries. She was never let out of her cage before and I’m a big believer in free flight in the house. She smacked into the sliding glass door a few times and resented me having to hunt her down behind furniture to put her back in her cage. Sammy, the macaw, kinda wanted to see how comfortably she could fit the little ones head in her beak so I never let them play together. She liked to be sung to. I used to sing “Hello Dotty” to Hello Dolly. The most remarkable thing about this little feather-ball was she was always trying to talk and master the sounds around her. She always sang, chattered, and made vocalizations which were solid attempts to talk. I should have spent more time with her to aid her speaking ability but shoulda/woulda/coulda seems to be the refrain which serenaded her life.

When I lifted the cage cover to check on her after she had been making odd noises I found her with her wing caught in one of the slats on the bottom of her cage. I extricated her and moved her over to my bed to observe her. She was breathless from the struggle with the bars, both wings drooped in exhaustion but she wasn’t fighting my hold on her, and when I uncurled my fingers from around her she didn’t try to fly away. In fact, she held fiercely onto one finger. She started having some sort of fit where she would try and bend her head all the way back to her tail and fly. The first time this happened she landed on the floor. I got her back on the bed and made a nest in the blankets for her but the fitting kept coming over her and she would get dislodged. I had never seen this kind of behavior before and I was terrified she was dying. Frantic, I found a site that connects people with questions with experts with answers and paid the $1 sign-up fee and was passed off to a vet who wanted to look over the techs notes before she continued. I never heard back from the vet. By this time I had Dotty blocked on the bed with my leg, she was still fighting the seizures but she was getting tired. I took a video of an episode and sent it to the vet. She was against my leg a little on her side when I saw her wing quiver; then she was still. I informed the vet she was gone and put my phone down and picked her up and gently held her to my chest and sobbed. I cried harder over that small bird than I did for my mother or my two brothers deaths. It’s taken me almost a full week to clean out her cage and move her out of my life. I miss her singing.

I wish I could say my mind allowed me to make this all about her. Recriminations rained down on me like a flight of arrows calling to mind every mistake I made, when I didn’t keep her cage clean, when I didn’t let her exercise, when I kept her in front of the window on a hot day, how I never took her to the vet, how I shouldn’t have let her suffer and I should have just rung her neck and put her out of her misery. Then a shield came up and deflected the arrows with comforting words (which has never happened before, at least not this consciously); You didn’t know her age, birds hide their illnesses, budgies don’t have a long life in a cage. You loved her, you took care of her and you were with her up until the very end. I don’t know which voice is true. I know which one I want to believe and for the first time in my life, it isn’t the negative telling me it’s all my fault. The self talk I’ve been practicing in my daily life, when it doesn’t seem important, has built up the muscles of support when I was to weak to block the old ingrained mantra of self loathing and disappointment.

The emotions of mourning have unsettled me, tho. I spoke to my sister about it briefly because I’ve not been able to talk to anyone about it without tearing up, and she speculated it might be an accumulation of all the changes, deaths if you will, I have experienced in the last five or six months. She might be right, I’ll have to talk to Ellen about it at our next session, but having these emotions so close to the surface is troubling for me, well, emotionally. Crying is so foreign to me, I feel like I’m forcing the emotions so I try to stop it and it comes back up to the surface in the most inopportune moments. I’m trying, on one side of my brain, to allow myself to cry when I’m alone and where I’m supposedly safe and the other side decided it wants to watch TV, write a journal entry or a blog, play with Sammy, crochet or do anything other than the needful. I guess I will cry when I cry. Maybe once the tears are all dry I will find the peace which comes with silence.

Psyche Stew

I realized yesterday I am stewing in anger…..not drowning in it like before…..but stewing in a thick savory broth of anxiety with juicy pieces of frustration at myself and the world. Quartering my accomplishments like new potatoes into my “inabilities”; not being able to or have a way to take care of myself, to think clearly, to get a job, to pay my bills. With some self-assessed failure and corresponding flagellation like peas and carrots in one big InstaPot life.

What this means is I am going back to the basics, the meat and potatoes if you will, of my recovery and try to gain the ground I’ve lost. I haven’t really lost it, I know where it is, I just need to deconstruct the stew, portion it out into easy-to-deal-with sizes, and trust in myself and God that this isn’t my last supper.

I Do Declare

Now that I’ve moved, still whole and fairly well settled I have started the process of looking for a job. At the end of my four hour slot each day of searching I just want to crawl back to my old job (but in a new city) and go back to what I know, after all the devil you know…. I try to research and apply for five jobs a day, which doesn’t sound like much but phlebotomy and EKG tech jobs aren’t as ubiquitous as one would think. One company is waiting to move over their hiring platform onto another and after thanking me for submitting my application they would prefer I do it again on the 19th. So, I’m waiting for the days to tick away.

At the end of these arduous application processes they have self declaration pages. Am I a veteran: No. Am I of any color: No. Am I binary or non: Binary. Do I have a disability…..Do I? I asked Dr. W once if I could go on disability for the major depression and anxiety disorder he diagnosed me with but he said he wouldn’t. Not because I didn’t qualify but because he felt it wouldn’t be good for me. I don’t feel like I’m depressed any longer, I feel like my problem is more trying to learn the basic human skills I should have gotten from a normal dysfunctional childhood to navigate the world around me. My mood still goes up and I come back down but, then again, everyone does. I’m still on medication but I’m on blood pressure medication as well to keep that on an even keel, not because of an acute problem. I don’t want to be disabled. I understand they have requirements to hire people who are challenged by life one way or another and there is a little voice in my head that wants to abuse every option to get a job, but I don’t want to be disabled. If the site doesn’t have specific things that qualify me as disabled, I check refuse to identify. If there is a list and depression and anxiety are on it I check yes, but I’m not specific. I feel my answers should be consistent but this is as consistent as I can get.

How am I supposed to handle this? Is there anyone out there that can give me advise or share how they handled this in the past? Or am I just sticking my head in the proverbial sand hoping I can convince the world I’m perfectly healthy, nothing to look at here and just keep moving along. Sigh.

UPDATE:

Now they’re getting crafty. They ask “Do you have a disability OR a history of a disability.”. Its like they read my mind…..or my blog…..and are requiring me to declare whether I want to or not. Grrrrr.