Birthdays and gratitude

I'm feeling a bit dull because I'm nearing the end of a four-day weekend during which I did not much of anything. Whenever I have any significant time off I'm always tempted to spend it staring into space, to make it last longer, although usually my desire to go out and run around is stronger than my urge to savor the time, and my weekends fly past at top speed. This weekend, though, I've had my biennial cold, which forced me to spend a good deal of time at home, resting. It was a pretty wimpy cold, but for some reason it's made me really tired. It hovered all day on Thursday and then descended in earnest on Friday, but even at full force it wasn't anything to write home about. My head was congested and I blew my nose fairly often, but that was all, except for the aches and the fatigue. A head cold always seems to turn me into a ravenous pig, so I dragged myself to the grocery store on Friday morning, in my pajamas, and stocked up on food. Pretty much all I did on Friday, apart from the trip to the store, was lie around, doze and eat. By yesterday I'd stopped blowing my nose much at all, but I was still tired. I managed to jump on my trampoline and clean my house, but that was it until I went to the meeting last night, and today hasn't been much better. My weekly trip to the laundromat wiped me out.

I'm now thinking wistfully of bedtime, which is a mere six or so hours away. I know better than to go to bed earlier than my usual time; whenever I try it, I wake up at some unearthly hour, like four, and can't get back to sleep. And with all the extra sleep I've had this weekend, probably I'll have some trouble getting to sleep even at the usual hour. But I'm sleepy, and my bones ache, so I may not be able to resist climbing into my cozy bed with its clean sheets, just for an hour or so, even at the risk of dealing a fatal blow to the plan of going to sleep at the usual hour. Maybe if I put a movie in the DVD player I'll be able to keep my eyes open.

So, the first hurdle in the course which makes up what we call the holidays has been surmounted, without much difficulty on my part. I make holidays easy for myself by simply opting not to participate in anything I don't feel like doing. Like, for instance, spending Thanksgiving with my family. Don't get me wrong; I love my family, but I find them exhausting en masse. Besides, we're all so scattered now that it would take a miracle of planning to get us all together for one holiday. It was different when my mom was alive, but now it all just seems like more trouble than it's worth to get together. So I spent Thanksgiving with the people I think of as my real family: members of Narcotics Anonymous. We have a tradition, those of us with no family in town, of meeting up at the Tee Off restaurant in the afternoon and celebrating the holiday together. If it was up to me, I would not choose the Tee Off, being as it's overpriced and the food isn't very good, but the tradition began before I moved to SB and nobody asked for my input. So I show up every year and keep my mouth shut about the bad food. It's not about the food, anyway. It's about showing appreciation for the people who help to keep me clean year after year. This year was very enjoyable, even though the party was rather small -- or perhaps because the party was rather small. I had a chance to talk to my friend Kelly at length, which I rarely get to do, and I also got to listen to her talk horses with Sue. I love listening to people talk about their favorite subjects. It was a lovely, stress-free way to spend Thanksgiving, and afterwards Kelly and I went to the women's meeting, which rounded out the day nicely.

My eleven-year clean-time anniversary is coming up soon. It's next Saturday, in fact, which seems unbelievable. Where did this year go? I think I'm still stuck back in August someplace. And I'm not the only one. Last night when I asked Rhonda to bring a cake to next week's meeting, she and several people sitting with her said, essentially, "What, already?" It seems not very long ago that I was taking my cake for ten years. Perhaps because of that, I haven't thought much about my birthday this year, which is a big change from the fanfare I gave it last year. But ten years is a big deal, somehow. I was so excited to be entering into the double digits that I just couldn't contain myself. I expected that once I was on the other side of ten, everything would fall into place and make sense, and I'd learn the secret handshake and be given the keys to the forbidden cupboard. But nothing like that happened. It was just another day clean. I'm only half-joking about that, and it isn't really true that nothing happened. I expected transformation and have had a transformative year, but though it may partly have to do with length of clean-time, I'm sure most of it is because I've worked a lot of steps, throughout my recovery but particularly in the last few years.

Even after nearly six years in Santa Barbara, I'm still not quite comfortable with the idea of celebrating a birthday rather than an anniversary. In Minneapolis, where I got clean, you don't go to a meeting to "take a cake" like you do here, where they sing Happy Birthday and you blow out your candles before speechifying for five minutes or so. Out there, you take a medallion, and it's all very dignified and decorous, with no off-key warbling or singed eyebrows. The thing I like the most about the way they do it in Minneapolis, though, is that someone presents you with your medallion. Here, someone gives you your cake, which means they hold it up while you blow out the candles, but out there they take it one step further. You both stand up in the middle of the room and before you can express your gratitude for another year clean, your presenter, who is usually your sponsor, makes a little speech about you. It's hard to take, all those nice things people say. When I took my one-year medallion and my sponsor stood in front of me and told me what she saw in me, I had a strong urge the whole time to turn around to see who she was talking to. I got a bit more comfortable with it over the years, but even at four years it was difficult. Still, I think it's a great tradition, and I loved presenting medallions to other people. I think it's good for us occasionally to hear how others perceive us, and I loved watching people go from polite disbelief to almost full acceptance over the course of a few years.

I'll finish up with a mention of Interferon and its effects and reverberations, shall I? I've been persuaded by several NA members not to shave my head just yet, but I don't know how much longer I can stand to deal with this mess that used to be hair. I keep saying that and I keep not shaving my head, but I know eventually I will grow tired of being driven to tears in front of the bathroom mirror every morning, while I attempt to put this limp, spongy stuff into some kind of order. It's only a matter of time.

I've discovered another odd side effect: the skin on my fingertips is thin and easily torn. I've noticed this for awhile but didn't connect it with the Interferon until someone I talked to at a meeting told me that he spent much of the last half of his year of treatment with Band-aids on most of his fingers. One nice thing about it is that my fingertips are extra sensitive, which makes feeling things like silk and cashmere and flower petals even more of a luxurious experience, but apart from that it's a pain in the ass. Like most people, I use my fingers a lot, and it's amazing how many formerly innocuous objects have become hazardous. I get paper cuts galore, and when I helped out my friend at her garage sale a couple of weeks ago I ended up with raw and bleeding fingers. The cuts I sustained that day only finished healing a few days ago. I even had to go buy some Neosporin and swathe the cuts with Band-aids because I kept re-opening them.

Ah, well, I'm still grateful that my Interferon experience isn't worse. I've been thinking a lot about that lately and feeling surges of gratitude about it. It could be so much worse. I'll put up with thin hair and nails and skin and be thankful for the absence of nausea and vomiting and chills, not to mention blood transfusions or shots to boost my immune system.

All about my pincushion

Slacker. Yes, I missed another week, but I'd rather skip a week than write when I have nothing to say. I think I've been working too much. I need a vacation: two weeks to go have fun and then two weeks to laze around and rest up from my vacation.

Today was lab day, and I arrived in good time. Having blood drawn has been a terrible ordeal ever since I got clean, but, happily for me, I discovered a functioning vein in my right hand just before I started the Interferon treatment, and it has served me well. Until now. Even with this nice new vein, I have my own phlebotomist at the lab: she knows just where to go, and we've had almost no trouble up to this point, but today she had no luck. I think there's too much scar tissue around that vein now and probably its heyday is over. So instead of having a quick two-minute blood-draw, I spent an hour and a half at that lab, with a team of phlebotomists hovering over me, poking me here, there and everywhere. After seven sticks, we filled almost all the tubes. There's one left unfilled, but the lab people said they would put in a request for one of the others to do double-duty. If it can't, they'll call me. I was an hour late for work, and on a Monday, too, which puts an unfair burden on my co-worker because Monday is always the worst day for phone calls. Next month I'll do a bunch of push-ups before I go to the lab and see if that helps. I already drink lots of water before I go, and I use heat packs when I get there, but none of that made any difference today.

Oh dear. I just realized that I forgot to order my meds today. I use a mail order pharmacy for the Interferon and Ribavirin, and I cordially loathe them. Their phone menu is one of the worst I've ever had the misfortune to deal with, almost as bad as Sparkletts water. It infuriates me every time I have to call to place an order. It's slow and repetitive and misleading and incredibly obtuse. Usually I end up frantically pushing zero over and over until I get a human being. I do my best not to yell at the person on the other end because I know it's not their fault, but sometimes it takes all my self-control to keep a civil tongue in my head. A month or so ago I asked if there was a way to reorder online and was told that, yes, they had a web site. I went there and signed up, and that's as far as I was able to go. Every time I sign in and click on "refill prescription," the page takes about a hundred years to load, after which I see a message saying, "service unavailable at this time," or some such thing. So I'm back to the phone orders. This time I have to talk to a human being because I need a new sharps container and because, for some reason, when I entered my prescription number over the phone on Saturday I was told that it wasn't valid. And now, since Thursday is a holiday, I have to order tomorrow or I'll run out of meds.

On to other topics. Like hair, which I still have. I've been putting off shaving my head from day to day, but I don't think I can hold out for very much longer. At the lab this morning I saw a woman who is way more bald than I am, and she didn't seem to mind it at all. I don't know what her trouble was, but her hair was really thin on top. To accentuate this, she wore her hair parted in the middle and combed straight down over her ears, leaving a wide strip of scalp showing on the top of her head. Has she not heard of the infamous comb-over? I, on the other hand, still have enough hair that there wouldn't be a swathe of scalp if I parted it in the middle, and yet I'm considering shaving my head because I can't deal with the inconvenience of styling it the way it is. Each hair is so thin and sickly that when I wash my hair it feels like I'm washing my head, and no matter how much product I use, it stubbornly retains the texture of angel hair, and I end up with little filaments of hair waving merrily on the top of my head. It makes me crazy every morning. Lately I've taken to wearing headbands, which helps a little, but I'm really just getting sick of the whole damned thing. Besides, it's now time for me to bleach my roots, and I seriously doubt that the pathetic strands I have left will withstand ten or fifteen minutes under the dryer with bleach on them. I'd end up having to shave my head anyway. Perhaps by the time I write next I will have taken the plunge.

My mood has improved considerably in the last two weeks, and I'm no longer jumping down people's throats at the slightest provocation, which saves a great deal of trouble, as I don't have to keep going back to people to say I'm sorry. I'm still overly emotional, though. I watched a movie last night and sobbed like a heartbroken child through the last ten or fifteen minutes of it. The movie was a tearjerker, but still, half a box of Kleenex is a bit excessive. I'm happy that I'm able to feel, though, no matter what I'm feeling. Becoming a living, breathing, feeling human being is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I'm grateful for the gamut of human emotion which is now available to me because I'm clean.

Principles before personalities

I'm not really in the mood to write an entry, but if I don't do it now another week will go by and I'll feel like a big loser for having abandoned my blog. Instead of writing last Sunday I went to the NA speaker meeting at the Harbor and stood at the podium for forty minutes, telling my story. Speaker meetings are common as blackberries in NA, and I've spoken many times, more than I can count without racking my memory, but I've never grown used to telling my story. I don't like speaking in public under any circumstances, in which I realize I'm not alone -- public speaking is the number one phobia -- but this sort of speaking is even more terrifying than most because it requires the speaker to talk at length about the intimate history of her addiction. Anyone who has never tried it probably thinks that you can edit as you speak and choose which facts to divulge and which to keep to yourself, but that's not quite how it is. Yes, there are things I've determined never to share from the podium, and as long as I make up my mind about them ahead of time, I'm pretty safe from blurting them out, but otherwise anything goes. I never know what's going to come out of my mouth. Anyway, I didn't commit any fearful indiscretions at this particular meeting, as far as I can remember, but as usual I was afraid I was boring the audience to death. The room was packed, and it's disconcerting to look out across that sea of faces and know that every single one of them is looking at me. Mercifully, the ordeal doesn't last that long, and soon enough I was able to make my escape.

Earlier that day there had been a slight explosion at the Area Service Conference, which left a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day. I made a brief announcement that the members of the step and tradition study had decided to allow that meeting to fold. We felt that a quick and painless end was preferable to a long, drawn-out deathbed scene, and the meeting was doomed anyway. Attendance had dwindled to the point where often there were only three of us there, week after week. This announcement had the effect of stirring up a shitstorm. As soon as I said my piece, one person said, "I don't think a meeting should be allowed to end like that, without letting the Area know ahead of time." My response to that was to quote tradition four at him: each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or NA as a whole. Then several more people chimed in, saying, essentially, that step studies are so important that more effort should be made to save this one.

At that point I lost my temper. "Whose effort? Mine? Because I'm finished making an effort on behalf of this meeting. I've opened the door and set up the room every week for six months, watching every other person who made a one-year commitment to that meeting drift away, until the only people who were left were Allen, Christopher and me. If you all are so concerned about keeping this meeting going, where the fuck were you when the three of us were sitting there staring at each other for an hour every Wednesday? We discussed it more than once at our business meetings; had you bothered to show up, you would have been given a voice in the decision-making process. Now, if anyone really wants to keep this meeting going, I've still got the binder with the format and readings in it, and I'll give you the key to the room. You can take over. If you're not willing, then I suggest you shut your mouth."

I thought that would be the end of it, but there were still a couple of diehard Mrs Grundys who were determined to blame someone for what they perceived to be mismanagement. Finally my friend Paul spoke up. Paul has been clean for 21 years and is every inch an elder in NA in Santa Barbara. He has only to open his mouth and people stop what they're doing to listen. Which is as it should be. He never says anything that isn't worth hearing. He reminded everybody, once again, that each group is autonomous, and then he added, "I think you all owe Hep Cat a vote of thanks for all her hard work and her commitment to keeping that meeting going as long as she did. The fact is that some meetings don't last, and Santa Barbara has had a hard time keeping a step and tradition study going. So instead of sitting here blaming her for doing what would have had to be done at some point anyway, maybe you should try being grateful that at least we had a step and tradition study in this town for six months." My hero. That at least shut everybody up and the meeting was able to move on to other topics.

That episode, though, sent me over the edge as far as the ASC is concerned. I've had Area level commitments for years, and have been at nearly every ASC since early 2005, with a break of a few months when I moved away briefly. I think I have burned myself out on the ASC, at long last. I need a break. I'm still willing to sit on the ad hoc committee I'm on, but I need to take at least a couple of months off from ASC attendance. I'm sure I'll miss it and come back refreshed, but if I keep going I may end up souring myself on Area service for good.

Do I have anything to report about my Interferon treatment? Well, I'm getting closer to the day when I'll have to shave my head, but as of today I still have a few hairs. I've noticed that my hair isn't growing. I have an easy way of seeing how fast my hair grows because I have it bleached every six weeks, so I can see the growth as the roots come in darker. Hair grows at the rate of about half an inch a month (mine actually grows a bit faster than that, normally), but after five weeks of growth, my roots are not even a quarter of an inch long. My hair is much lighter than it used to be, too. The roots are barely visible unless I look at my head from a certain angle in a certain light. I'm hanging onto what I've got for the time being, although it takes more and more effort to hide the patchiness, and probably I'll just be relieved after I take the clippers to it. Out shopping I've seen some cute hats, and I even saw some pretty headbands which would do to make the bald effect less stark without my having to swelter under a hat. Probably that won't be much of an issue, though, since winter is approaching, but I do live in Southern California. You never know.

Apart from that, things are pretty good. I talked to a friend last night about some recent spasms of ungovernable temper I've had, including my having snarled at everyone at the ASC, and he told me that his friend had the same problem. He said his friend is normally the nicest guy in the world, laid back and tolerant, but since he's been on the Interferon he's been snappish and nasty. So perhaps that explains it. I've got two other reasons as well -- quitting smoking and perimenopause -- which makes me think that maybe it's a combination of all three. It's only come up in the last month or so, and I'm hoping it will fade away, at least somewhat, before too long. I don't like having to apologize to people all the time.

And that's enough for today.