SarahAnnAlien's Journal: Alien vs. Bug II: Lessons Learned

Went to see Dr. S last Monday. I continue to be happy with Dr. S; I had eight items on my list of things to ask him about, and we got through all eight, to my satisfaction, in about ten minutes. This is much better than Old-Doctor-S, who could handle a list of that size in two minutes, but his answers tended to go like this: No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Dr. S even gave me an actual piece of electronic hardware. Batteries included!

And someone at the office, probably one of the other patients, also happened to notice that I wasn't fighting off an upper respiratory virus, and just gave me one, free of charge!

I had hoped that since I had successfully fought off a bug in September, I'd be miraculously exempt in October. No such luck.

Unfortunately, I have these weird lungs... they have this standard policy of "Caught one bug? Well, hey, why not collect the whole set!" Any additional random bugs that drift by simply hop in and join the party. Last month, I managed to head off the party before it got in full swing. No such luck this time around.

My lungs are an entertaining diversion at the doctor's office. When I explain, the typical response I get from a doctor is, "A what?". One doctor asked if I had had a lung transplant. And the weirdness is sufficiently obscure that trying to explain the potential and probable implications, which are only weakly addressed even in the research literature, is an exercise in frustration with any doctor. I typically end up receiving an irrelevant canned speech and inadequate medication.

When I saw Dr. M last month, he told me I should find a new internist. Mentally adding up the sheer number of arguments I have to have in order to get a doctor to the "useful" stage, this seems like a daunting task.

So instead of going to the doctor, I spent last week sick, and hoping that the medicine I had on hand would be enough.

Problem number one was a lack of food. No problem, Sarah; here are your shoes, the grocery store is a half mile *that* way. Never mind that you don't have the energy to go from the bed to the couch; a forced march carrying a ton of groceries will do you a world of good. Right.

Oh, never mind, who really needs macaroni *and* cheese?

At least I have enough kleenex... oops, no, just two boxes. And, sniff, sniff, it smells funny. Ugh. Looks like the mold monster got both boxes.

So I spent most of last week blowing my nose with moldy kleenex and eating whatever I could find in the cupboard that seemed vaguely edible, mostly cans of stuff that I'd be embarrassed to donate to charity. Honestly, I'm not sure what I ate.

In short, last week sucked.

But once I felt better, I realized that I had learned a lot.

Why is my life like this? Why couldn't I ask for help? Why couldn't I call someone and say hey, I'm not feeling well, could you maybe bring me a couple boxes of kleenex and something to eat?

It wouldn't have been much to ask. But I didn't ask. I *couldn't* ask. I didn't even *think* to ask until I was feeling better, and, even now, looking back, for every person I might have called, I can think of at least one good excuse why I shouldn't have bothered them.

This is a problem. It's a problem that goes way beyond moldy kleenex.

Being an alien is not easy. I *can't* do it alone. I *have* to have help. Not only does help need to be available, but I need to be able to recognize when I need it, ask for it when necessary, and accept it when it is offered. And I have to give people the opportunity *to* help.

I don't know how to do these things.

I spent too many years in raw survival mode. When things get difficult, my old survival skills instinctively switch on. A grim, solitary death march from one day to the next. No help. Doctors never help. Friends don't want to be bothered. I have to do it all myself.

When things aren't very difficult, I can occasionally ask for help, but I frequently feel disappointed with the results. Why is that?

Am *I* helping others in ways that I am happy with? Am I *able* to offer help?

Am I afraid? Afraid of what?

In some ways, my life is just fundamentally mis-structured. During the dark years, someone built a life for me that was set up so that issues of helping or being helped just didn't come up, allowing the entire issue to simply be ignored.

That person is gone now.

I don't want *my* life to be like that. I have to tear all that crap down, and replace it with something better.

How the heck do I do *that*?

When I discovered I was an alien, I knew life was going to be challenging. What I didn't know was that it would be, for all practical purposes, infinitely challenging! Every moldy kleenex opens a new world of complexity.