My readers who don't have access have seen precious little of me lately (and I've been scarce locked as well). Two big reasons.

First, and most delightfully, I am in some sort of relationship; the details are still being worked out, but the important part is that we have each other now. So that's been taking a fair chunk of my social time.

Second, when they took out my uterus and its baggage, ( it wasn't good news, but it could have been worse. )


I lost my long-term job in February. (I've had some gigs, but nothing long-term or offering coverage.) When the host company switched contractor management providers in 2015, I lost the crappy insurance I'd had through the first contractor management joint. (It would have paid up to $10,000 of something -- which burns through pretty fast if something major happens. I was terrified that something major would happen, and avoided doing anything that would get me diagnosed with a pre-existing condition.) The new contract management joint didn't give health benefits to anyone in their first year. (People with good tech jobs whose workplaces use contract labor: apply pressure to make sure your contractors are taken care of, either individually or by their management companies.)

Since 2015, I've had health coverage through the Affordable Care Act. I was able to sign up after losing the crappy insurance. I picked a plan with good coverage and good reviews, as I was aware that I probably had lurking health issues, and it would finally be safe to treat them. A decade and a half of little to no health care and untreated depression will do a number on you. A decade and a half of consciously avoiding health care to avoid getting a "pre-existing condition" sentence on my record made me avoidant even when I did have coverage, so I wound up avoiding check-ups, avoiding things that would give me poison diagnoses in service of a future when it became a crisis and I would need to be covered. But in 2015, I finally got a diagnosis for my depression. (I should have been diagnosed in 1993. I should have been treated in 1993. I wasn't.) I got some other things diagnosed and treated.

Since my sweetie and I are polyamorous, we're being intentionally careful about our sexual health. On my end, we figured it would be a good idea for me to get some sort of long-acting contraceptive. (My opinions on body-birth for me were well-established; reversible was not a deep concern.) I'd heard that "vaginal bleeding" postcoitally was a sign of cancer, but figured that wasn't me; I had a PCOS diagnosis, and the blood was quite definitely coming from inside the uterus, even if it happened after sex.

PRO TIP: WHEN THE BLOOD IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE UTERUS, THIS COUNTS AS VAGINAL BLEEDING.

So I'm a cancer survivor now.

I'm still paying quite a lot for my insurance. But.
Under the Affordable Care Act, I still get insurance.
Under the Affordable Care Act, if I switch insurers, my pre-existing conditions (cancer, depression, and other things) are still covered.
I don't have to worry about contraception anymore. My cancer ensured that I will never experience pregnancy or body-birth. But the Affordable Care Act would make sure that I could get access to contraception without worrying about the cost.

It's a fluke that I planned on becoming sexually active again this year. It was endometrial cancer gone rogue, so the surface cells of the cervix tested fine. I wasn't due another pap smear for years.

"How do you feel about having saved your partner's life?" a mutual friend asked my sweetie.
My sweetie looked uncomfortable: they didn't feel they'd done that much. Surely it would have been caught and treated, sooner or later.
Without them, it would have been later. Without them, it likely would have been post-ACA. I've seen friends struggle and beg to get live-saving operations that their insurance wouldn't cover. I thought we, as a country, were past that.


I still have conditions that can and will kill me if left untreated. The cancer may also spring up again. My best hope for a long and happy life is if I jump on a symptom immediately, even if I think it may not be a big deal. I'm scheduled for four pelvic exams a year for the next few, and it'll only drop off to yearly at the five year cancer free mark.

If the Affordable Care Act goes away without something better and more protective in place to catch the people who fall through the cracks of work insurance, private insurance, and insurance through a family member, I am likely to become uninsured. I tend to land jobs that put me above the poverty line, so programs intended to help out people in truly dire financial straits don't apply to me. The job that I worked four years and loved gave me utter crap insurance, because they were allowed to. The insurance disappeared after three years, because they were allowed to do that, too. The insurance I'm paying for now, under the Affordable Care Act, is still about 25% of the value of my rent. (Welcome to the San Francisco Bay Area.)


In a future without the ACA, I'm looking at a few possible outcomes:

• Hope my state continues to think it's a good idea to strongarm insurance companies into covering people like me.


• Hope my insurance company thinks it's a good idea to keep covering people like me without government intervention. (Ha ha ha. Ha.)


• Hope that I land a job that thinks it's worth paying to keep its employees healthy, and does not treat them as disposable once they get sick.


• Hope that I can marry or otherwise become legally partnered with someone whose job thinks it's worth paying to keep its employees and their spouses healthy, and does not treat them as disposable once they get sick.


• Hope that if there's someone willing to marry me and share their health care (among other reasons, hopefully), that it remains legal for us to marry.


• Hope that I get a job that offers health care, at all, period. (The place that only offered health benefits after one year, and stopped employing people at the one year mark, that one was hilarious.)


• Hope that I can continue to access all of my current medications.


• Hope that I can continue to access the medications that keep me from dying painfully within the next 2-5 years, and the medications that keep my depression a temporary and treated problem rather than a likely permanent and lethal one. (Again, this is the first year since age 13 or so that I have felt that I'm no worse a suicide risk than any other member of the population without chronic depression.)


• Hope I don't get sick. Hope the depression doesn't flare up. Hope the ADD lets me focus well enough to hold down a job. Hope I find a job that works with my sleep schedule, rather than against it. Hope the sleep schedule lets me hold down any job, period. Hope that any minor illnesses I get don't jeopardize my job. (Fun fact for those who have never worked a service-industry type job: you find yourself going to work contagious and miserable because you've got to save the sick leave for when you genuinely cannot function or need a doctor's appointment during your normal hours of work. A doctor's note for a multiple-day illness has you spending a day's pay on a doctor visit co-pay or urgent care fee, and the first day of absence may hit your attendance record anyway. Or, if you're a disposable temp, they'll just drop you, because they only care about you not being contagious in their office and they need someone to do the work.)


• Hope my family doesn't bankrupt themselves trying to keep me alive if I get badly sick.


• Die, maybe. Probably painfully, with the added indignity of trying to navigate a bureaucratic hell while doing so.

Every one of those options fills me with terror. ( Bad psychological stuff, and news of the sudden death of a member of my extended circles. )


I'm not okay right now. I've been crying off and on yesterday and today. I am afraid, and I don't know how much the protective bureaucracies that surround the executive branch will be able to shield health care access and workers' rights from the predation of cheap-labor conservatives and the gig economy.

I know I have it much, much better than many. I have a protective and loving family who will try to do what they can to keep me covered and alive. I live in a state that generally wants to take care of its people even when they do it bassackward. I am destined for a state that's of similar opinions.

I am lucky. And I'm terrified.

So last night the box of one dozen starving, angry brainweasels immediately latched onto my face and started bitin' me all over.

This morning I woke up, and on my way past the hall mirror, I went "... wait, how many zits is my nose hosting? GODDAMMIT." And just now, Clue is asking me if there's anything that I want to tell it today.

I hate it when this happens. The fucking hormones fuck up my mood, and then any little thing can just set it the fuck off, and I implode for a miserable few hours until the bupropion helps me reset.


Because I have learned that even when the reason I'm so upset about something is all out of proportion with the actual problem, and if it seems at all like it might be a legitimate beef when I'm not actually having An Episode, things go better when I address it -- this way there is less opportunity for resentment and misunderstanding and noncommunication to creep in.

Therefore this evening I asked Purple whether it would be possible to schedule a meetup before he leaves, if by some mean twist of fate he didn't make it out this way for the party. (And that I trusted his intent, but that bad fortune had a habit of striking his trips out this way.)

Purple reassured my paranoid brain that, barring some kind of incident involving bouncing off the repellent forcefield surrounding certain nasty public figures or coming down with something contagious, he would be there, and in fact he had rearranged his schedule quite substantially in order to make that happen. He's had the brainweasels before, and he doesn't like 'em. He conveyed sympathy.

Also there's beer bash tomorrow, even though it's also 2600 night.

Further to last night's inquiry about mood tracking services, I'm putting together a Google Docs form. Basically it's going to dump things in a spreadsheet and then I can worry about what to do *with* the data later. So far I've got 0-10 scales going on, with some rather more suited to me factors of measurement.

I am also taking the opportunity to, like Hyperbole and a Half, set the definitions of the extreme ends more appropriately.

Anger: None - Thermonuclear
Happiness: None - Best. Ever.
Apprehensiveness: None- DOOM!
Irrationality: None - Jesus Christ is a Lion Get in the CAR
Irritability: None - *explodes*
Focus: None - Holy Timewarp, Scully!
Pain (physical): None - Motherfucking *ow*
Pain (emotional): None - Bring on the Strikethrough*
Gloom: None - Fucking lousy.
Calm: None - Cucumbers are less cool than Dave Strider.
Numbness: None - I have lost the capacity to feel any more of the things.
Paranoia: None - Everyone and everything is out to get me.


I know I'm missing some; any suggestions? (I of course reserve the right to not actually include them, since this is supposed to be useful for me, but I know I've got to be missing things that would be useful.) I may need more good (or at least good-in-moderation) items. (Focus is one of those tricky ones: "None" is bad; missing-time levels is also perhaps not the best thing for actual functionality.)


* Okay, so that one may require a bit of context. Strikethrough was one of the objectively worst times to both be an LJ volunteer and a member of fandom. During that general time, I had events in my personal life blow up such that the DDoS following Strikethrough, and all the attendant woes, were actually a pleasant distraction from my inner state. Given the contempt in which the CEO steering the ship through Strikethrough is still held, this is not a small amount of pain. There are two times in the past ~5 years I haven't been safe to be alone, and that night was one of them.

Tuesday 2/1
Having a warm fuzzy bathrobe really does not get old. I did have some trouble locating my red interview sweater for the interview, and eventually went with something else. I did break a shoelace.

I showed up early and nervous. The interview went well. denise was a reference (also Kat and Management from the Call Center Hell) and D was a totally excellent badass reference.

Wednesday 2/2
Twitter was talking about the stigma associated with mental illness. Some things, like my presumed-depression (wreaked hell on my life, never formally diagnosed, kept under control by St. John's Wort, assumption not challenged by my AZ general practitioner) are chronic and I can't assume that when they stop bothering me they're OMG CURED and I can stop treating it; if the St. John's Wort is not in my system, my ability to bounce back from routine mood-dips is impaired.

I got the call confirming the temp job, ending my way-too-long time out of work. So relieved. Then Tif and I went to a Silicon Valley Google Technology Users Group meetup for Google Refine. We've got a fairly large spam dataset...


Thursday 2/3
First day of the temp job. I had a hell of a time actually locating the building, as the buildings in question are part of an office complex where all the buildings are on the same large chunk of property, all of the buildings are sequentially numbered with street numbers that the property has a right to, but they are arranged in a ring that means that the street numbers have little to do with their actual orientation to the street.

The office was interesting, painted in bold colors (lots of lime green and white) and decorated with various Delightful Swag.

I came in just a bit early, and the receptionist had me wait. The guy overseeing my position ran past (literally ran), was hailed by the secretary, she explained that I was here, I think he jogged back to shake my hand, and then ran off again. She accepted this with a very this-is-all-part-of-a-normal-day sort of demeanor, so I got the idea that he did this a lot.

My cube was right by the small kitchen, making it very easy for me to get tea and coffee. Tea and coffee are good. They had a nice array of tea choices, which I found delightful compared to Arizona office tea, which is basically the cheap black tea. (There's a place in my cup for cheap black tea, and this is made 2:1 with strongly flavored orange tea, brewed too strong and too sweet, for use while writing.)

The commute was, of course, hell both ways. 101 is a pit during the 8-10 & 4-6 commute windows. Lucky me.


Friday 2/4
After work, I went to see my aunt. There was hilarity and also shortbread. She took frozen butter and used her handy-dandy crank-driven rotary shredder to cut it into tidy little bits, making the shortbread process amazingly fast. Tasty shortbread, too.

I speculated on Twitter about a vaporware-y technique in mental health care, which assumes enough resources (monetary and available people) to carry it out: ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

11:53 PM 4/5/2010
Via my cousin, omg what is this:
http://gay.fleshbot.com/5505952/this-is-the-gayest-thing-weve-ever-seen?skyline=true&s=i

12:21 AM 4/7/2010
Things you should probably know about sithjawa and me: we will occasionally shout "BANTAM HENS BANTAM HENS BANTAM HENS" at each other, completely without warning or provocation.

2:35 PM 4/7/2010
I have been having bad problems with ear-noise for the past day or so. I hope it settles down. (All the little background sounds are really loud, and when MissKat called, I got distortion when she talked. I could hear her just fine, but there was speakerphone-like ringing *around* it.) Am thinking part of it may be related to sleep-dep.

Also, reading Peter Morwood's The Dragon Lord, and unexpected Anne McCaffrey is unexpected!

1:20 AM 4/8/2010
Maybe I'm just having too much white noise around me. Too much, too loud.

4:38 AM 4/9/2010
Delays on BART "due to a civil disturbance" does sound ominous. I wonder if I'll hear what happened.

Also, desktop just unbooted itself. D:

9:39 AM 4/10/2010
Last night's fun: dinner with my aunt, crocheting, carrot cake, Mythbusters, my cousin showing off his Rugged Alaskan Man Beard and the midriff-baring steampunk shirt he's to be wearing to kestrelct's wedding today.

11:38 AM 4/10/2010
My ear-noise seems to be doing better. So far today: 2 cups of coffee. There was a whole little container of it that I made; I'll see if I want some later on. Didn't get enough sleep to want to drive in traffic or face up to crowds. Aunt may be Up for Stuff later. (So, I, like, went to bed at 3, turned off the light at 4, and then at 6:30, pop pop, there I was awake; listening to my cravings, apparently coffee (not soda, but coffee, which I don't have that often) was on the list. So here I am awake.) Meanwhile, I just discovered that my cellphone's Driving Mode is supposed to recite any calling number aloud to me, which is apparently just what I wanted for when I am In Bed, Dammit, with my headset, but my phone is on the other side of the room.

I earwormed Ursie: http://earwormhole.dreamwidth.org/18782.html

2:14 PM 4/10/2010
I was going to say something but I forgot what it was.
Oh! I remembered. When I eventually get published (and it is on the List, remember!) I may be one of those Crazy Cranky Authors who Has Weird Thoughts on Fanfiction.
My particular Crazy Position on Fanfiction is likely to be "Sure, write all you want, but IT'S ALL AU. ALL OF IT."

8:13 PM 4/10/2010
I might be awake. Then again, I might not. I hate my sleep schedule.

9:42 AM 4/11/2010
I seem to be awake yet again. It's also possible (she says after having read half the internet) that the head-buzzing of a few days ago, which did resemble high-blood-pressure side effects, was in fact due to a drug interaction between St. John's Wort and a too-ripe avocado.

Something somewhere said reminded me of the meds battle.

So you're depressed, right, and you wind up on meds (for me it's St. John's Wort, for others it can be something else) and you take them and take them and one day you're just living your life and out of the blue you notice hey! you're happy! where did this come from? your life almost feels ... normal!

And you realize, looking back on it, how very much of your personal mental clutter you have worked your way through, that all of those things that bothered you back when you were unmedicated and unhappy, you know how to deal with those now, and things are really not as bad as they were.

So you drop the damn meds (or you taper them, if you're on the hard stuff; I hear brainbuzzes are not funtimes, and if it's the thing where your head zaps like you're turning on an oldschool monitor, then no not at all; I had those in high school) and maybe you convince yourself that you know, you were just going through a hard patch. You don't really need drugs to cope with real life. You were weak, but you can handle it just fine now that you have got all these shiny new skills.

And you sail along without the meds and you're doing just fine. And then either BAM! life hits you out of the fucking blue, and one of those situations comes up and you're down for the count! -- or maybe you're sailing along with each day not much different from the last, and you're living your life and out of the blue you realize that god damn you are MISERABLE -- or even that it's not quite that you're miserable, but you ... just can't seem to remember the last time it was that you were happy.

Maybe this isn't the first time.

And you pick up that bottle again, and you hate yourself a little, but you take them. Day in, day out. And gradually, life starts to sail on again, and the black cloud, or the gray fog, starts to lift. Or there's a way to climb out of the hole. And life is good again, until you realize that hey, perhaps you don't need those meds, since you're doing so well...

Congratulations! You are enjoying the company of one Lunatic. Your model should be blue in color. Some fluctuations in energy level, giggliness, personality, handwriting, and sanity are normal, and are no cause for alarm. Individual variation is part of the charm of the Lunatic. However, like most things, the Lunatic has several error modes. For maximum uptime for a Lunatic, consider these troubleshooting solutions if your Lunatic begins to function in an erratic manner or ceases to function:

• Water. Lunatics carry around a gallon sport-top bottle of water as a matter of course. If this is missing or empty, apply water to Lunatic. This bottle is refilled at least twice daily. If your Lunatic attempts to go somewhere with the bottle less than half-full, make sure the Lunatic fills the water bottle and takes the opportunity to drain.


• Blood sugar. Lunatics are the daughter of someone with issues that border on hypoglycemia, and Lunatic does need to make sure that she eats right things regularly. If Lunatic's right arm are bandaged at elbow, Lunatic has probably given plasma recently, and should be seated and refueled. Do not attempt to refuel the Lunatic with milk products, bananas, or walnuts, as malfunction may result, but if the Lunatic chooses these items to refuel with, it is her Own Damn Fault, and interference is not necessary.


• Temperature. Lunatics are nonfunctional at low or high temperatures. If Lunatics have been sitting without coverings in temperatures lower than 70°F or been sitting in temperatures higher than 75°F for more than an hour or two, malfunction results. Apply motion and heat if chilled; apply motion, fresh air, internal and external water, and a cooler environment if overheated. Temperatures are approximate and may be subject to change, but Lunatics are sub-arctic creatures and can tolerate low temperatures with covering far better than even moderately warm temperatures. Low temperature often results in moodiness, depression, sulking (or curl-up-under-blanket-and-go-to-sleep); high temperature often results in incoherence, sleeplessness, and panic.


• Shock. Lunatics have a disturbing ability to go into a state of shock with sufficient emotional provocation. Standard treatment for shock applies. Additionally, apply bondmate or big brother.


• Sleep. If Lunatics have been in an active state for more than 16 hours, giddiness and/or crankiness may occur. If Lunatics have been in an active state for 24 hours or more, they should be promptly made horizontal and calm. Note that sleep may not be possible if temperature is outside of operational ranges or water settings are low. Lunatics should have at least 7 to 9 hours of sleep in order to resume full operation. If Lunatics sleep before midnight, lo, they will be Up All Night.


• Bonds. Lunatics are unstable without the constant invisible presence of their bondmate. To reset bonds to baseline, make sure that Lunatic's silver star is applied and Lunatic has been recently grounded/centered. Bond may require /renew from time to time, and may not /renew automatically in absence of silver star prompt. Bond is security-enabled and will not connect properly if both ends are not secured; check all firewalls and ground/center before attempting a reconnect. Bond uses address filtering and will not admit additional users who are not whitelisted.


• ( Read more... )

Everything's fiiiiiiiiiiiine when your body chemistry is adjusted decently. And then you forget to take your St. John's Wort (along with the multivitamin and the allergy medicine) and everything's fine even though you've gotten out of the habit of swallowing those things every morning -- until something whacks your decent mood.

And then it's all "I've fallen and I can't get up!" mode.

And you can't figure out why.


... Next time I go all wacked, somebody pull out the Clue Hammer and ask me if I'm taking the St. John's Wort, 'k? 300mg/day seems to keep me fine once I've re-stabilized, stepping up to 900mg/day if I'm not stable.

Some bad places going on right now. Am taking careful care.

There was just a locked post about something that hit me two months ago, but is now hitting me again as the real-world implications of it catch up to me. And that's stressing me the fuck out, but it's an old stress, now. I can deal with it.

Darkside was there for me five minutes after it hit me, and dealt with me gibbering and trying to cry but failing, dealt with me starting to slip into shock, dealt with me laughing in very disturbing ways as my universe flipped upside down and started raining bits of mental foundation down upon me. Figment was there for the aftermaths, and was the first person I allowed to touch me after the first shock started to slip away.

Incidentally, I should never be given bad news when there isn't someone trusted around who can physically hold me, because I can and will start slipping into shock. I've learned to recognize the symptoms, and will dutifully get something to drink and wrap myself up in a warm blanket, but if my mental processes have been derailed, my safety features may have been affected too.

I'm a social creature, but no company is preferable to bad company in a time of stress. I need someone I can safely fall apart around. I trust myself to do that around very few people. There are far more people who would offer hugs and shoulders and their company -- and say the wrong thing when I was vulnerable, and run the risk of planting something in my psychsets that would grow there and trigger off things that would have been better left untouched, or touched only by someone who could successfully read from the Black Book and banish the fishy tentacled thing into rich black fertile soil instead of a slimy, writhing mass of venomous self-doubt. When I'm vulnerable, I shrink back from physical contact except with people who are known to be safe.

I become Disturbing when the foundations of my sanity shake. I keep telling myself that I've been to the rock-bottom, and there isn't any less sane I can ever get, and then someone tosses me a shovel, and I just keep on digging... Paradoxically, the further down I dig things, the more stable I get, because I know where so many of the faults lie now, and I know how to brace them and compensate for them. And people who haven't explored their own sanity in such depth get very scared when someone talks conversationally about where all the holes in their head are...

Freud didn't get it all right. Childhood builds the base structure for the personality, so if there are any down-deep flaws, the mistaken ideas kids get about the funkiest things, it's going to be in the childhood. But some of the deepest damage can happen when an adult earthquake shakes the foundation, or worse, pulls chunks out of the foundation and sets them on fire. If you're lucky, at least, the foundation gets removed before it's set on fire. And the teenage years are just as crucial to the adult personality as the childhood years are to the base personality. Some forms of adulthood are the mask we wear when we pretend we don't want to have fun anymore; those are the bad ones. Some forms of adulthood are figuring out that we don't have to do stupid and dangerous stuff to have fun. I like that kind.