apache savage's Open Salon Blog

Anorexia, the physical presentation

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:05:40 -0400

I have read, as I am sure all of you have read, about diets that don't have enough calories in them causing you to gain weight rather than lose it by triggering the conservation mode in your body.

So how do Anorexics get skinny, then? I've heard all sorts of explanations of this as well. Silliest of all is that your body devours it's own muscle mass rather than burning the stored fat it has reserved for exactly this purpose. While this may be true, it is on a much smaller scale than medical professionals would like you to believe. I think it would be smarter to talk about the real dangers of anorexia than to continually drive home that muscle wasting thing to someone who already has a very sick and twisted self image.

I had anorexia when I was about 16 years old. I phrase it as "I had," rather than, "I was," [an anorexic], because mine was not due to purposefully starving myself. I had a severe case of tonsillitis, good ol' strep throat as it if often referred to today. I told my mom and she didn't believe me. She thought I was just trying to get out of going to school, which is something I rarely ever did, though she claimed my sister did it often. But as it turns out, my sister, at the time she is referring, actually had Mono.

When my voice began to sound like the far away squeaking of a bird, my mom insisted it was "theatrics" to help with my facade of sickness. I had a fever of around 103 the entire time, but that wasn't enough to convince her I had not somehow tampered with the thermometer.

My dad worked nights at that time so I didn't see him too much through the week. One morning when he came home, I was still lying in bed, crying because the pain had become unbearable and I was having trouble breathing. My dad took me to a doctor who stared at him accusingly when the doctor saw the condition of my throat. "Another few days, and her throat would have closed up entirely, and she may have died from asphyxiation," he told my dad.

Prior to this doctor visit, it had been 3 weeks since I had been able to open my mouth wide enough to fit a spoon inside it. Soup was all I could swallow. So I had been dumping out the noodles of my chicken noodle soup and drinking the broth through a straw. "Theatrics," my mother said. I lived on chicken broth and Pepsi for about 2 weeks. Then I couldn't find the straw. I was unable to drink from the bowl (didn't occur to me to pour it in a cup) so I stopped eating by the 3rd week.

In week four I had another straw and was now taking antibiotics, but the infection was so great that it took 2 weeks before I could fit a spoon in my mouth again. I wasn't really hungry anymore and hadn't the energy to make myself a bowl of soup anymore. So it was just Pepsi and a lot of sleep.

By week six I could eat again, but I had heard to take it easy or I might get nauseous. So I started with soup, then spaghetti on the 2nd day. I had lost 35 lbs. - from 115 to 80. Now according to dieticians and doctors, this is where I would put back on all that weight and more, right? Wrong.

I did gain 10 lbs, which was intentional and expected, but I didn't get back to 115 for a quite a long time - about 9 years later. Additionally, according to docs and dieticians, I never would have lost that 35 lbs from near starving to complete starving anyway, I would have gained weight from the chicken broth and Pepsi.

There are real dangers associated with anorexia, the largest of which being death, next would be causing imbalances within your body that will stay with you for the rest of your life - imbalances that seem trivial to a 16 year old, but regrettable when the 16 year old turns 40.

Pity

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:03:20 -0400

I come here once in a while. I will admit I've had writers block for a while now. So what? It will go away eventually. But when I come here to OS, I have to sign in through the front page. Oh my God. Every time its the same shit plastered all over the cover - poor, poor pitiful so & so, pity, pity for me, for him, for her, for them, for us.

Gimme a fking break will ya?

I admit I wrote some junk like that in the past because it sorta seemed to be the form here. Now, though, not so much, for me anyway. A well done rant is always good reading but the pity stuff is pretty freaking tired.

~~Everybody~~ Most people have their own brand of trouble and/or misery and don't really want to take on the burdens of strangers as well. Editors, please try to pick a VARIETY of stories for the cover rather than a pity parade. Who the hell would want to come in and read more when its all/mostly down trodden stories on the cover?

When I write negative toned posts, a lot of times I have written at the bottom "Don't pity me," because that was not the reason I wrote and made public the post. In the case of Autism, I don't want anyone's pity, I just want to shed some light on the subject, maybe get some other parents who have already gone through the trials to share their insights. And once it was for my own personal healing - "Daddy." But I do write some funny stuff and it sure would be nice to see more happiness on the cover.

Invisible (Autism)

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:02:13 -0500

Invisible - Disabilities from the inside out.

Autism, in the mid to mild spectrums, is invisible. You can't see it and it's not immediately, and sometimes ever, obvious to onlookers. In middle school, it seems, life becomes an asshole contest. Who can be the biggest asswipe on the bus, who can be the biggest asshole in class, who can be the biggest bully of the school and who gets to be captain of the peers, picking who will be accepted and casting out the rest, ostracizing them.

Is it an asshole gene that makes kids blurt shit out like they have a bad case of tourettes? Or have the parents never uttered the virtuous advice of, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all?" Maybe it's both. Maybe it's a need to blow out the flame of others so that one's own might seem to shine brighter.

I don't know what the reason for rudeness may be, but I do know I am sick to death of Spectrum intolerance among the blissfully ignorant majority. It makes me want to go balls out, stage 4, batshit crazy on people who are cruel to those with disabilities.

The disabilities of my youth were the stuff of wheelchairs, leg braces, dark glasses and retardation that could easily be detected just by looking. We were never made aware of people suffering from invisible disabilities and we have passed this same ignorance to our own children. I will admit I was once just as ignorant.

An insult that would have torn my heart out when I was 9 can effect a 12 -16 year old, who seems perfectly normal on the outside, but has a spectrum disorder, even more profoundly. When a child on the Spectrum comes home from school in tears or in a rage and threatening suicide because of the assholes on the bus, it makes a mom rather furious. How many times must I have a sit down with the bus driver? The teachers? The Principal? The counselors? My kid is big for his age and strong as an ox. I sometimes wish he would just release the fury on those who torment him and a guarantee it will not happen again.

Why was he kicked to the losers curb today? Because of his favorite jacket, given to him by his older brother that was all the rage (among middle schoolers and older) 4 years ago. Pretty freaking sad, no? Would these kids scream insults at a person in a wheelchair for taking up too much space? I doubt it. But someone who seems incapable of verbally fighting back is fair game.

I recall the father that went onto the bus to personally put a stop to the teasing and bullying (including hitting) of his handicapped daughter. He went to jail for saying what needed to be said, with a passion I am all too familiar with. He was out the next day with the majority of news viewers cheering him on. He did the right thing, in my opinion, and the hubub attracted the necessary attention for the school and county to finally do something about the bullies on that girl's bus. Unfortunately that father's approach was so different we showed him intolerance and ignorance as well. At least initially. Until it came out that his daughter was handicapped.

But seriously.... how many of us (parents of spectrum kids) wants to announce to every peer, every bus driver, every teacher, every coach, every parent of the few friends they have, that our kid has an autistic spectrum disorder? Whereupon an image of the Rainman pops into their head and we are off to the class room to give them the 10 minute education on Austism from severe to mild, blah, blah, blah when the whole damned thing could be settled if everyone, in general, made an effort to be nice to others. Everybody has a bad day from time to time, but when the bad day becomes one's way of life, one just becomes an asshole, no matter how old they are.

My Adventures in Bumphuck 2 (re-write)

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:11:00 -0500

{This was my second adventure in Bumphuck county and I did a pretty extensive re-write and thought I'd throw it out there because I have another chapter coming soon and wanted to refresh your acquaintance with some of the back-story)

So I made another trip out to Bumphuck for an estate sale on the prowl for antique dolls in dire need of a doctor. I make house calls like that.

Naturally when I get off the exit ramp I got turned around and couldn't find the street I was looking for. I stopped to chat a while with Zeek at the produce stand. I bought some fine bananas, home grown tomatoes and of course, some peaches.

Zeek, then stepped up so close that, for a minute, I thought we were gonna dance. He's a close talker. He set my feet in the right direction but gave me a stern warning.

" When you leave to go home, you can't come back the way you went, on account of the one way streets. You'll have to hang a left outta the subdivide and then take a left on Bumphuck Lane, back out to the highway. But once you get out on Bumphuck Lane you better not be speedin', on account of ol' Farmer Bill lives out there and he's had a bee in his bonnet over the speed limit increase for a coupla months now.

"Say's he's worried someone'll get hurt, but I know he's really worried his cows might get hit because he don't keep 'em penned properly. He's too thrifty to fix his pen and he gets mad at everyone else if his cows get hurt.

"He's been gettin' stranger and stranger lately. One day he had a speed detector gun he made out of cardboard and duct tape, tryin' to scare the passersby into slowin down. Another time he set a doll in the road to scare the hell outta the speeders on his "hairpin turn," as he calls it, just past his house. He nearly went to jail on that one. He'd come up with this idea that he would buy one o' them there baby dolls like they have up at the toy store that looks like a real baby and it comes in it's own carseat. Well he slipped on out one night after his wife went to bed and put that baby doll, strapped into it's car-seat, in the center of one lane of that sharp turn. Figured he'd teach them teenagers a lesson, he did.

"Well it just so happened that Ms. Bonnie Everett, a nervous and reclusive woman, who doesn't leave the house lessen she absolutely hastah ended up being the one to get schooled. Poor Ms. Bonnie is a hypochondriac and a nervous eater. She woke up in the middle of the night with an itchy and sore bite on her ankle. She thought it was a spider bite and went to her computer to look up spider bites on the innernet.

I can tell you, that's the one thing you should never do in the middle of the night. She saw all manner of terrifying images of brown recluse spider bites and set in t' worryin. She got so nervous, she musta been convinced she could feel the venom coursin through her veins and was sure she would either die of septicemia or gangrene that very night.

"When she saw the ice cream was all gone, no chips or snack cakes either, she knew she had to go out. It was the only way she could calm herself until the doctor's office opened in the morning. She won't go to a hospital on account of staph infections being so prevalent and her unshakable belief that should she ever set foot inside one, she'd most certainly become afflicted with the infirmity.

"Bonnie pulled on her coat and goulashes, hat and scarf and stole away into the night, looking wearily all around before darting to her car. She figured if she made the trip quickly enough she would not raise her blood pressure, thereby pumping more poison to her vital organs, and would be none the worse for wear by the time she got back. She was frantic by then, having stepped outside her comfort zone 10 fold in one night so she put the pedal to the metal and soon enough came to Farmer Bill's "hairpin turn."

"She didn't slow down, never even tapped the breaks. But when her headlights picked up an object in the road and her mind finally deciphered what she was seein, she locked 'em down and skidded off the road. The baby doll, car-seat, blanket and all hit the windshield face first on the driver's side so Ms. Bonnie looked her poor victim in the eye before it went flying over the top of the car and coming down with a smack that scattered limbs and plastic in every direction.

"When a traumatized Ms. Bonnie put in a call to 911 from her cell phone, Ol' Brett McGovern, the town Sheriff showed up. He knew exactly who was at the bottom o' that stunt and knocked on Ol' Bill's door. Bill was right sorry for it, seein how Ms. Bonnie had just come unglued by the idea that she had let her fears drive her to commit involuntary manslaughter. And she was carted away on a stretcher to procure her a goodly sized crop of staph bacteria that would surely be her undoing.

"Just watch it on that road. Ain't no telling what that lunatic'll do next."

I thanked Zeek for the produce and the 411 on Crazy Farmer Bill and was on my way.

When I finally got to the "estate," which was an Eames era bungalow, I was sorely disappointed. All they had was a knock-off of an antique doll (a fake) and a ziplock baggie of frozen (no moving parts) dollhouse babies. I figured since I was already there, I might as well take a look around and moseyed on back to the bedroom where there was an armed guard watching the customers. "Shoot, I musta hit the jackpot if they hired a cop to guard the room," I thought as I surveyed the vintage jewelry. One pair of earrings that were worth about $20, nothing signed or of any value, so I moved on and on around the room and never found anything worth guarding with a gun. However, there was a grouchy, elderly man in there that made the whole trip worthwhile.

He was surveying the merchandise and, like me, was finding nothing of any value at all. Only he wasn't merely moving on in quiet disappointment. He was throwing shit around the room and loudly exclaiming, "This ain't nothin' but a bunch of GARBAGE!" He was a loud talker anyway but each time he picked something up and examined it, only to find it was a fake or worthless, he'd throw it down like Nolan Ryan pitching a no-hitter, to show his disgust. If there was any dirt nearby, I dare-say he would have kicked some onto the cop's shoes.

I was now pretending to be interested in the thrift store fodder just so I could hang around and watch the show.

The man's wife, in her embarrassment, laughingly explained that she only just managed to convince her husband to come along because there was supposed to be a vintage and antique gun collection for sale. The old man piped up at this and shouted to the cop, "AND THIS PIECE OF CRAP RIGHT HERE," pointing disgustedly to a locked glass case the size of a phonebook, "IS A FAKE! THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW AGAINST TRYING TO PASS OFF FAKES AS THE REAL McCOY AT ESTATE SALES!"

The officer was apologetic, but also reminded the man that he had no affiliation with the estate sale group that was facilitating the sale who had hired him to guard a bunch of junk. He conceded that he knew nothing about antique guns and could not tell if the gun in question was a phony or not.

The old man decided, it seemed, that since he had a sympathetic ear from law enforcement at the time, that he would go global with his complaints. He said, "You know we drove 20 miles out here for nothing! And gas ain't cheap ya know. But what's worse is you all down at the county courthouse have gone and raised the speed limits. The trucks pass you so fast on the highway now I'm afraid they are gonna spin me around in the slipstream! And the side roads ain't much better. We live off a country road that's flat and curvy and them damned teenagers like to get out there and just let 'err fly; You'd think it was a Nascar race. I'm just waitin' for the crash each time one of 'em takes that hairpin curve just past our house at breakneck speed."

This must be the dude Zeek warned me about. He was a right funny ol' feller, I'll admit. He sort of reminded me of a 80 year old Yosemite Sam.

Well, time was a wasting and I had to get back to the real world so I made my leave. Like Zeek instructed, I hung a left out of the subdivision and a left on Bumphuck. The road was indeed flat, lonely and curvy. I finally reached the Ol' Man Bill's farm on the right side of the road. There is no doubt in my mind it was Farmer Bill's place......

Inescapable View

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 02:11:10 -0500

For the love of God, WHY, after all these long years, do you still haunt the halls of my dreams? Walking through the dark corridors of my mind like a ghost, faded, bitter-sweet, but empty, yet in that place, in dreams, you stir something lost. Like a locust shell in a bottle; the life, long gone, but a perfect empty replica saved and stored away on a high shelf. Where do you come from? Why will you not disappear from my dreams as you have from my waking life?

I do not long for you in any way. I did for a long time. But it finally faded. Then I saw who you had become, so far from the one I knew, a complete stranger. It was what finally put the memory of you to rest and I moved on and away and never looked back again for I had no desire to. Yet against my own desires, you manifest yourself in my dreams. They are almost always informant style; you are telling me things, interesting things. I listen. I want to know more. Then the memory of what once inhabited that locust shell washes over my dreaming self as if it is real and as if it is now and it feels good. I think it is joy. Then I wake and before I can remember who you really are, I wish I could go back but I cannot. No matter how hard I try, I cannot find you on purpose, in dreams. Though I can find you quite easily in real life, yet I have never tried. I don't want to.

Our eyes and hearts lie to our minds. They have learned to see and feel and take meaning for granted so that we see only what we want to see when we look in the mirror. You are my mirror, brought before me to show me something, some undeniable truth about myself, yet for so long I did not see it. Then when I did see it, I refused to acknowledge it. We were brought together to be mirrors of the other until the time comes that we realize that the reflection seen of you is also me.