WAGblog

About today...

One thing I do have to take back from last night's claims of normality is my BP. It is low, at least tonight it was, though normally it isn't so far as I know. But tonight it was 82/60, when Ana measured it, a little low but not by a great deal, since 90/60 is low but "normal" for me.

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I was up all last night and now I'm exhausted, ready to go to bed early tonight so I can get up early tomorrow in order to be ready to speak to a Yale abnormal psychology class tomorrow. We are doing so for free this time because we are so pleased that this large class all bought and read the book. That's what we are hoping for, and want to try for, to get in touch with as many abnormal psych teachers or psychology dept heads as possible in the colleges and universities across the country and send them a copy of the book, with a letter from us and a picture (maybe), hoping he or she would read it and then assign it to the class they teach. That would not only sell books, but much more important it would start a discussion about schizophrenia in the colleges and hopefully educate young people about the illness, facts and fiction.

Speaking of facts, and of fiction for that matter, I just came across the website of a girl from Australia who wrote rather floridly about an alter ego languishing in a mental hospital for 6 years, living in a world of vampires and sunny perfect happy creatures, a world where she was happy and content and wanted to live. But the big bad doctors and her family forced her to return to the horrible reality of people who loved her, taking her away from her beloved schizophrenia forever. Truly, that was the gist of it. And her commentary afterwards said as much. If this "creative writing" blog hadn't been terminated, apparently in 2004, I'd have written a comment disabusing her of such notions. But as it is, that post will have to go unanswered and one young person remain uneducated about what schizophrenia really is all about.

But if our book were assigned in classrooms, maybe she would eventually come across it and learn something useful from it. Boy, that would be great, because the classroom is the perfect venue for a discussion to arise and for the subject of schizophrenia to actually be talked about, not simply read about in secret. I would be proud to have my name on a book that students actually read and used to jump off to a broader discussion of issues having to do with serious psychiatric disorders and the treatment of the sufferers. But I'm just musing now...I frankly would speak for travel and lodging expenses then...but I'm not a wage earner. Lynnie and her fiance, Sal, our manager, must earn their daily bread, and neither have anything saved for retirement, because of the kids' college bills and messy divorces so alas they cannot afford to do so. Too bad -- I really enjoy speaking, at least the Q and A part; and the multi-media part of the program. The actual talk I cannot yet give without reading it, so it still sounds like a written speech, not a talk, and certainly not like I'm "just talking."

I dunno how college professors do it, give the same lecture year after year and memorize them all, so that they don't have to read anything and know their material cold. I suppose I could have done that years ago. But lyme has ruined my memory and I don't think I could maintain a speech in my head for long now, even if I managed to commit it to memory.

This week is not quite as busy as the last one, largely because it was so cold today that no one could go outside - Joe because of his breathing and immune system, Karen because of her handicaps making her fearful of falling on the ice, and me, frankly, because the wind was blowing at 35 mph and the temp was 4°F even without the wind, and I was afraid the two together might give me frostbite. So we all stayed in and I was happy to do so. There has been some recrudescence of the singing recently, I dunno why, but no nagging or hateful voices, just singing and the world seems very loud to me these days: I just wanted some peace and quiet. Unfortunately I got more of that all last night than I did today, what with Josephine coming to help me clean the apartment, and then Joe coming up to talk and then Karen coming up to learn how to transfer photos from a memory card reader onto her computer, then Ana coming to give me my pm meds, then the Xyrem people calling me to schedule a refill, then Karen calling me again! The noise never did stop, and neither did the singing on top of it all!

That's the sort of thing I mean, what drives me to distraction and so fatigues me. I need some time off, and I don't get it.

Posted by pamwagg at March 6, 2007 06:50 PM