the adventures of me

I had some strange dreams last night.  Not that I am trying to turn this blog sound into an exercise in dream analysis, but I often write in the morning and sometimes my dreams are “interesting” – if only to me and if only because of the subject matter.

I haven’t been sleeping well.  This is a normal problem for me, but it is not usually so consistent and doesn’t usually last several nights in a row.  To be honest, I think I’m caught up in a vicious cycle:  I’m more tired than usual during the day so I don’t do much of anything physical, and then I don’t sleep well at night because I haven’t exerted myself much during the day, so then I’m more tired than usual the next day, and then I don’t sleep well the following night … and so on and so forth.

I decided to smoke some marijuana yesterday.  Since leaving San Francisco last month I have been in one of my “smoking less to not at all” phases.  However, besides helping to calm my unruly bowels, marijuana almost always helps me to sleep better – not if I smoke at bedtime but if I smoke sometime during the day.  After tossing and turning so much the night before, I was really feeling in need of a good sleep last night and had the opportunity to partake in the smokable pleasures.

Instead I woke up in the middle of the night to the clacking of high heels on the floor above me.  The woman who is renting the apartment clacked around quite a bit before taking the damn things off.  She must have been getting home from a night out on the town.  It took me a while to get back to sleep after that.

Then I dreamed that my ex-boyfriend (see previous entry) had bought some marijuana and hid it in the room where we were sleeping.  (Were we sleeping in the same bed again, as we had done – without sex – for six months after we broke up, because neither one of us could afford to move?)  In the dream, I think we were living in the building where I used to live on Turk Street, where they have the tiniest apartments (studios/efficiencies/kitchenettes/whatever you call them) that I have ever seen in my entire life, in all my travels and visits around the country and around the world.  Security in the building was such that police entered your room periodically to check for contraband.  My ex thought it was a joke and only half-heartedly tried to conceal his stash, since he “knows” that the government is persecuting him.  He felt sure that this was some kind of show to intimidate him in some way.  I on the other hand was very concerned that he would be arrested again, besides being worried that I might get into trouble, even though I have a medical marijuana card.

I was so angry at him that I punched him – which is not something that I am known to do, even in order to defend myself during the few times that I have been physically attacked.  (Does that make me pathologically pacifist, or abnormally averse to violence, or something?)  I think that’s what made it feel like a “nightmare”:  one of those times when I woke up feeling emotionally down, out of sorts, traumatized even, and which usually only happens when I have a dream that takes me back to my abusive childhood.

I also dreamed that our dog had pissed all over our carpet.  After not doing this for months and months, she has suddenly started doing it again lately, since my return from the U.S.  We can't figure out why.  She doesn't seem angry or resentful about anything, although the household has been a little topsy-turvy lately with the comings and goings of myself and visitors and that kind of stuff.  Guess what?  When I got up this morning, she had done it again!

Posted by Me at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve got the first credit card I’ve been able to get in years, during this time when all of the news reports are talking about the credit crunch and how hard it is to get these days.  I haven’t been able to get credit for over ten years, when I was diagnosed with HIV and did what so many people did – and still do – in that situation:  I told myself that I had to do everything I ever wanted to do before I died.

I had thought about moving to San Francisco for several years but was afraid to do it because I had this fatalistic idea that I would end up infected with HIV, since it was so prevalent out there.  Then my best friend moved out there.  I was living in Washington, DC at the time, and got infected anyway.

By the way, fuck all of you who say that people infected in the 90’s and up through today are just “stupid”.  I got infected in a way that they say is literally almost impossible, but besides that, there are all kinds of other things that can happen.   To give only one example (and this is not what happened to me), is it stupid if someone is taking every possible precaution and the condom breaks?  Grow up, you people.  Life is not so cut and dried – and you’re part of the problem, not the solution.  But I digress …

Anyway, I up and moved to San Francisco.  For the first time in my life, I made a major move across the country with a place to live (my friend was between roommates, so he was living alone in a two bedroom apartment at the time), a job (albeit part-time and low-paying), and some friends and other people I knew.  The other two times I had done that, I had none of those supports.  Life is an adventure, isn’t it?

I left all of my stuff in D.C., in storage or in the condominium I had bought a few years earlier.  I tried to rent my apartment as a furnished, corporate rental, but it didn’t go well.  It was very well situated, but it was just a little bit too far from the ascending K Street lobbyist corridor, Capitol Hill and the government buildings, and the booming suburban office complexes of Maryland and Virginia.  I couldn’t rent it as a regular apartment and cover the mortgage, and I couldn’t sell it without a loss as the real estate market has become slightly depressed since I purchased it.  I didn’t have the money to cover the differences in either one of those scenarios.  Besides, I thought I was going to die.

I ended up walking away from a condo that was appraised at between $75,000 and $80,000, but that I could sell today for about half a million.  The real estate market in D.C. has changed just that much.  Imagine if I had those capital gains to live on the rest of my life, instead of constantly stressing about money?  I truly can’t think about that or I’d drive myself crazy with regret and envy and self-loathing.

They always tell you that after a bankruptcy, the credit card offers come pouring in.  That certainly didn’t happen to me, and I had impeccable credit before that.  In fact, ten years later I was still trying to get a new credit card from time to time, and constantly being turned down because I didn’t have credit.  I wanted credit more for emergencies than anything else.  Finally I saved some money (while I was still working) and gave it to my sister, and asked her to put me on one of her cards.  She was agreeable to that, so at least I had that emergency resource.

Then I read an article around six months ago about how to re-establish credit, and it advised readers to start with retail cards.  Much to my surprise, I got some.  By then I had saved a little more money – I had resolved around that time to save ten percent of my disability check, despite the additional financial struggles that this would cause, with my boyfriend’s blessing and encouragement – and I opened a secured credit card account with that.  None of it amounted to much, but it was something, and suddenly I had a credit rating.  Finally, dashing through the airport to catch a connecting flight a month or two ago, on a whim I stopped by a booth and filled out an application for one of those cards affiliated with an airline, which earns frequent flyers miles.  Much to my further surprise, I was approved.

This month, as an experiment, I’m “spending money” (that is, using my credit card as if I have the money) to see what my expenses would be like if I lived closer to a normal life.  I mean, I’m not going crazy with purchases.  I talking about buying food as if I didn’t have to depend on my boyfriend to eat much of the time, and paying a few more of our shared bills and expenses – stuff that I couldn’t normally even think about doing.  I’m doing this partly because I am now determined to give us a clearer picture of what we spend and where we could cut back, and to get myself – and us – on a budget.  He has long-term goals, I have long-term goals, and we have long-term goals, and none of that is going to happen if we (he, in particular, since I simply don’t have the income he has) don’t change the way we spend.

I’m a little worried about how I’ll pay the account later.  However, my sister will be giving me back the money I gave her, since I transferred my balance on her card to my new card, and I have a couple of other unexpected bits of money coming in over the next month.  In addition, I am continuing to work on developing more income for myself.  So hopefully it will all work out in the end.  At the very least, I should have a shit-load of frequent flyer miles.

Posted by Me at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I had a dream that I went out to dinner to a five-star restaurant in San Francisco with my ex-boyfriend.  I visited Brazil almost eight years ago and had fallen in love with the place, and met this man who turned my eye.  I think he reminded me of Brazil:  warm and sweet, romantic and affectionate.  We started dating over that long, long distance.

Over several months I realized that there was something about him that I didn’t like.  I noticed that he was very untrusting of others, always looking for their hidden agenda, always suspicious and critical.  I knew he was frustrated with his life and he felt like he was stagnating, professional and personally, and I thought that maybe he just needed a change.  I have since come to see this suspiciousness as a trait of Brazilians in general, a product of the vast chasm between the rich and poor here and of the tremendous amount of crime and corruption.  You HAVE to be somewhat suspicious of others in order to survive, in a physical and well as economic sense.  Nevertheless, he had it in spades.

I invited him to visit me in the U.S. and he was finally able to get a visa to do so.  I was curious to see if he would be different once outside of his usual environment.  Basically, he wasn’t.  Within weeks I knew he wasn’t the one for me – there is enough negativity in the world without surrounding yourself in it – but he wanted to stay in the country and he asked me for help.  I told him what I knew about his options and told him that I would help in any way that I could.  He has been in the U.S. ever since, legally.

A few months after we broke up, he started dating a guy who introduced him to the wonders of crystal meth.  He loved the stuff.  He started smoking it from the time he got up in the morning until the time he went to bed at night, even joking at one point that it was his “coffee”.  Almost everybody who uses that drug eventually begins to experience paranoia while using it, but a significant percentage stay paranoid (including delusions and psychosis) after they stop.  He didn’t even use it regularly for that long – maybe nine months – but he sure did himself some damage.  Give a drug that induces paranoia to someone who already tends to be paranoid, and you have a recipe for disaster.  I won’t bore you with all of the horror stories I experienced with him, but suffice it to say that he has lost apartments and jobs and most of the people who might have been friends, and was assaulted and arrested, blah, blah, blah.  The stories are often very similar with serious addicts, crystal meth or otherwise; only the names and the details change.

There is almost no one who maintains contact with him any more, and he is painfully, painfully lonely.  He talks non-stop about his delusions:  the government is persecuting him, through everyone and everything he encounters, and spying on him via the television and his computer, etc; if someone clears their throat near him, that is some kind of (negative) message to or about him; the banners hanging from the light posts on the street are signals of some sort to or about him; there is no war in Iraq; it goes on and on and on, without end.  Needless to say, his “conversation” is extremely tedious and boring beyond description.  He is like a broken record, and the music isn’t remotely interesting or beautiful.  Who wants to be around that?

Nevertheless, I have tried to remain a friend to him, to whatever extent that is possible.  After all, he has no one else, and I feel some combination of pity and responsibility and affection for him, because I know what he once was and perhaps could be again one day, if he got treatment.  According to him, there is nothing wrong with him; all of his problems are a result of his persecution at the hands of the U.S. government, since I “brought him here”.  Miraculously enough, he has mostly been able to maintain a job, although he eventually loses whatever job he has or gets another one.  I think he eventually makes enough strange remarks at his place of employment that people get creeped out by him and they find ways to get rid of him, or drive him away.  Imagine if a coworker of yours told you that he didn’t believe that there was a war in Iraq?  That’s just one of his crazy beliefs, and one of the interactions at work that he has related to me.  Imagine if you had already lost a parent or a sibling or a partner in that war, and heard something like that from someone at your job?

At times I am afraid of him, because if I brought him to the U.S. and I continue to be involved with him on whatever level as he is persecuted by the government, then I must be part of the conspiracy.  What’s worse – for him – is that I don’t tolerate his crazy, bullshit talk.  I am constantly confronting him, so frequently our interactions are not very pleasant.  He screams at me and voices his bizarre accusations against me, although he has never physically attacked me.

He asked me to take him out to dinner the week I left, and said that he would pay me back half of the cost later (which he did).  His so-called conversation was the same as always.  I kept calmly telling him that he was nuts and trying to get him to the basic illogic of his statements, but he just got more agitated.  I found myself wondering what the hell I was doing spending my precious time and money sitting across the table from him in a nice restaurant, when there were so many other people’s company I could have been enjoying and so many other things I could have done with that time and money.  I don’t know how much more I can tolerate his company – in any location or circumstances.

Life is too short and precious, and I no longer think that my attempts at ongoing friendship with him are doing him any good.  Until the pain of how is living is greater than the pleasure of it, he will never get treatment.  Worse, my continued involvement with him might in some way be helping to perpetuate the myth that he is a victim of government persecution.  Maybe that’s why I had that dream.

Posted by Me at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m going to spout off a bit about anti-depressants, since the issue has come up in one of my circles recently.

As a mental health professional, I have worked with many people on anti-depressants and I have recommended them to some.  I have had clients say that they were life savers, and had others say that they felt numbed out on them, that the medications eliminated the emotional lows but also the emotional highs of life, if you will, and that they would rather deal with the lows through other means so that they then could also experience the highs. 

In all honesty, what I have found in my own extensive personal and professional experience is that most people want to take the medications as a way to deal with the PROBLEMS instead of to deal with the SYMPTOMS.  Most people would rather take a pill than allow themselves to feel the immense sadness that can result from the death of someone close to them, or to leave a job that they abhor but which pays extremely well, or to end a relationship that has become much more like habit than any semblance of real intimacy.  That’s the American/Western way, isn't it, to pop a pill for every little ill?  We don't want to feel our feelings, or take the time required to do so, for whatever reasons:  finances; stigma; family responsibilities; the list could go on and on and on, couldn’t it?  Nevertheless, the medications were designed to treat symptoms that have persisted too long or are particularly debilitating and therefore impede one’s ability to address the problem, and NOT to treat the problems themselves.  In my opinion, that is exactly how they should be used.

Despite all the hoopla, recent studies have come out suggesting that the newer anti-depressants are in fact only slightly more effective, if at all, than the older ones.  (Please don't ask me for references.  I would have to google it too, just like you.  <g>)  Another recent study revealed that in fact anti-depressants work only slightly better, if at all, than placebos.  This was a huge meta-analysis of all of the studies done over decades, of all of the drugs, and included a critical look at the very data that the pharmaceutical companies used to pursue government approval.  It was discovered that big pharma selectively submitted results from their own research as well as twisted the results that they did submit, in order to make anti-depressants seem significantly more effective than they actually are.  (How shocking!)

Other research has shown that people with depression (and other "typical" mental health challenges) who use only talk therapy get well and feel better within the same time frames as people who take anti-depressants.  Six months seems to be the average, no matter what treatment you choose.  Yes, I know that this begs the question:  is it possible that everyone would get better regardless within the six months, then, with or without intervention of any kind; however, it is not within the parameters of this particular posting for me to muse on that issue!

I have taken a few of these medications myself.  I took Paxil about 7-8 years ago for perhaps a year, when a series of events in my life cascaded into disaster (in short, I lost several close friends, my job, my income, my housing, and probably a few other things, all at once - and no, it wasn't due to drug abuse or addiction) and I found myself simply psychologically devastated.  I didn't feel like it had much effect on my mood, frankly, or my sex drive and ability to perform in the sack, but I stayed at a pretty low dose.

Then I used Trazodone, which is often prescribed as a non-narcotic sleep aid and not for its anti-depressant effects, and is known to have an extremely low incidence of side effects.  I took it because when I was taking sustiva 600 mg at night it felt like my brain forgot to sleep.  I think at a regular dose, Trazodone did help me sleep another hour or so at night, but in the long-term it wasn't enough (from 4-5 hours to 6-7 and all the time fatigued anyway) and I had to change my sustiva dosing.  Other than getting a bit more sleep, I didn't note any other effects of the medication:  anticipated, side or (later) withdrawal.

Having said all this, it is important to note that lots of factors can influence feelings of depression:  HIV in itself can be depressing, as can low testosterone (in men and women, which can also be caused by HIV), and so can not sleeping.  On top of that, almost every single criterion for a diagnosis of depression can be a symptom of something else, including totally normal sadness and grief.

Some of my clients would see their psychiatrists periodically to pursue the often endless chore of cycling through every known anti-depressant instead of confronting the circumstances or events which lead to their depression in the first place.  For the chronically depressed, it could be compared to HIV-ers having to switch meds when the virus develops resistance, because usually whatever anti-depressant the patient is taking stops working after some years and he or she has to try other ones in order to continue to medicate the symptoms.  I think it’s critically important to note that HIV and AIDS can without a doubt be chronic mental health challenges, requiring on-going medication to address those symptoms.  Just like I said earlier, that’s what the medications were designed to do.

Chemical imbalances can result from the way that we behave and feel and think and from what we put in our body (why do you think you can't drink something as simple as grapefruit juice with some HIV medications?), just as they can result from other factors that then influence the way we think and feel and behave.  And you can often "cure" the imbalance by changing the way you think and feel and behave, just like you can "cure" the imbalance by popping a pill.

But good public relations and advertising go a long way, don’t they?  And afterwards it is hard to unbrainwash the brainwashed.  Besides, the placebo effect is extremely powerful and poorly understood (see the On Science article in the 3/17/08 issue of “Newsweek” magazine, which refers to some of these same studies).  In a sense the studies showing little to no effectiveness on the part of anti-depressants "don't really matter"; if a patient thinks it is helping, it is.

Posted by Me at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I spent a month with my best friend in Connecticut this spring, as I do every year.  She has two little girls who are the loves of my life, and husband who is the quintessential big, gruff guy who is a teddy bear inside, and a family who loves me and whom I love like my own (which is as much of a reflection on my crazy family as it is on hers!)

As soon as I got there I started getting rashes.  At first there were symmetrical rashes on my forearms.  Then the rash appeared on my thighs and hips at the same time as it seemed to clear up on arms.  However it looked on one side of my body, in only these select places, it showed up exactly the same on the other side.  Then I got a few bumps on my chest.  I thought the rashes might be due to the cold, dry weather, and I thought the bumps might be some kind of bug bites.  Then the bumps started to itch like crazy.  Eventually I was feeling similar bumps on my side, where I couldn’t see them, and they were itching as well.

I started to get a little worried, because I know there are strange rashes that you can get as a side effect of some of the anti-HIV medications, and that they can be a sign of something fatal – and quick.  In one case you have to immediately stop the medication and you can never take that medication again.  In another case, you might be able to take the medication if you start at a very low dose and increase it slowly, doing a sort of de-sensitization process with your body.  From what I remembered, though, these rashes occur only when you have just started one of the medications in question, and I haven’t changed any medications lately.  In fact, I couldn’t think of anything I had changed recently, or at least anything that made sense as an explanation for the rashes.

For example, if I were allergic to some product my friend used in her house, why was the rash appearing in only certain areas?  If something was biting me, why hadn’t it bitten anyone else in the house?  Why were the rashes different?  They were only getting worse and it was going to be several weeks before my next regular doctor’s appointment on the West Coast, so I decided to seek out medical help.

Our healthcare system being what it is, I had no option but to go to the emergency room.  No private practice doctor would see me because I wasn’t a regular patient, and they were booked up for weeks with their own patient load anyway.  If I were a regular patient they might have squeezed me in, but such was not the case.  I was halfway between New Haven and Providence, Rhode Island, but the Yale University urgent care clinic wouldn’t see me either without a referral from a primary care physician; figure that one out!   I had to go to the emergency room in Providence.

The doctor there diagnosed dry skin/weather associated rash, plus shingles/folliculitis.  I have never heard of shingles not hurting before; in fact, I thought it was always very painful.  She told me that sometimes it is not.  And she seemed to think that folliculitis made sense, but I wasn’t convinced.  She gave me a strong, broad-spectrum anti-biotic in addition to an anti-viral drug.  I bought some heavy-duty moisturizing creams and took the medications.  Very, very slowly it all cleared up, but I continued to have itchy spots all over my body despite taking lots of Benadryl every night for weeks because of sinus congestion.  It’s as if some little bug is biting me in various spots all over my body – sometimes there is a little red bump but just as often there is not.  And that has been going on all the way up through today, three months later.

My primary care doctor, my dermatologist, and my hepatologist on the West Coast concurred with the diagnoses from Providence – even though itching can be a sign of serious liver problems.  My primary care doctor in Brazil concurs as well.  I guess this is just another one of those medical mysteries that comes with having an HIV-infected body, never to be solved, and probably to resolve itself without any intervention.  Sigh.

Posted by Me at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

so i’m traveling in the u.s. for two months and arrive back at my boyfriend’s in rio, and we have sex the next day.  he cums but i don’t – and now two weeks have passed, and i'm still waiting to have an orgasm (with him - i masturbated a few times).  is it really so wrong for me to pursue sex outside the relationship?  he complains about our sex life and doesn’t want me to have sex outside the relationship – but almost without exception bothers me about having sex when i'm exhausted and we are finally getting to bed after he has run out of television-watching options – and he would seem to prefer to work really hard, go to the gym, watch t.v., and sleep.  i think that’s a little strange for someone who says that he wants a relationship, and one that includes a sexual component at that.

Posted by Me at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)