I Want to Understand

I read a book recently called Dreamland by Sam Quinones.  It's about the opiate epidemic in the US and how it came to be, from medical journal articles to pharmaceutical companies to pill mills and the Mexican dealers selling black tar heroin in small towns.  I don't know if my mother is/was on opiates.  But I assume so based on their being the norm at the time and the side effects I saw.

I've started reading a book about benzodiazepine use and addiction because benzos seem likely to have been prescribed to my mother too, based on her complaints and again what was common to prescribe.

I want to understand what happened with my mother.  The more I read, the more I feel unsure.  How much of her behavior was because of how she is?  And how much was because of what she was taking?  How can I find out what she was taking?  Even if I reached out to her and asked, I don't think she'd necessarily tell me.  And if she's as sedated as Dante said she was the last time he visited, who knows if she'd even remember what she has taken, or what she used to take, if she replied at all.

The only place I think I might be able to find a record of what my mother was taking is maybe in my grandmother's letters to my cousin.  But I haven't looked at them since the time I read through them for genealogical information and realized my grandmother -- the sanest, kindest, highest functioning person in my extended family -- habitually talked about me behind my back.  She judged me for not being concerned enough about my mother because I didn't come to her with my worries or tears.  I cried regularly about my mother, just not to her.  I remember sitting in my dorm room after my mom really went off the deep end, spending hours Googling her symptoms and behaviors and trying to figure out what was wrong with her.  I spent too much time on WebMD and the Mayo Clinic website because I thought it was a disease.  I feel so stupid.

It was years before I realized it was the pills, and even now as I read about opioids and benzodiazepines, I'm just now realizing just how much can be explained by the pills.  Example:  I thought when I didn't hear from my mother for days or weeks at a time (glorious breaks from her calling to yell at me, apropos of nothing) that she was going through a deep depression.  But she was probably just on pain pills.  She was probably mostly asleep.  The muscle weakness my mother insisted was some sort of progressive illness like multiple sclerosis and the doctors and I explained away as muscle atrophy from her refusal to get up and walk -- a common side effect of extended benzodiazepine use.  I should probably just do a search for most commonly prescribed pills in 2003 if I want to know what she started taking when she went well and truly off the deep end.  She had gone to the doctor to treat her sadness at the death of her brother.  I had asked her to just grieve instead -- told her her feelings were normal and wouldn't benefit from antidepressants -- but she took whatever that doctor gave her anyway.  This was six or seven years after the first time I saw her high on Soma (Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant and non-benzodiazepine hypnotic).

I feel like an idiot.  I didn't understand anything about drugs.  I remember hearing about celebrities developing addictions to pain pills after surgery or injuries, but I didn't understand what that even meant or what that addiction looked like.  I didn't understand what being high on pills looked like.  When it came to what being high looked like, I had only seen caricatures of stoners in comedies on TV.   It seems from my grandmother's letters that everyone realized my mother was addicted to drugs but me, and I feel like an idiot.  When I was a freshman in high school, my mother had explained her behavior away with menopause (on the rare occasion she admitted it wasn't just me who was acting differently), and I was desperate to figure out what had happened that made her this way and how to prevent it taking hold of me too, since I had inherited half her DNA and assumed all of this was just happening to her and would do the same to me.  I had never seen my mother partake in so much as a glass of wine, and she was adamantly against any form of drugs.  Except the ones billed as medicine.  Then her adage of "little do good, lot do better" seemed to come into play.  Even when it came to Tylenol, she urged me to take more than the amount indicated on the bottle if the pain was "really bad," and she took god knows how many Tylenol herself everyday for as long as I can remember.  I wonder what her liver looks like.

I don't think my mother had any idea what she was getting herself into when she started with the Soma.  This all started in 1995 or 1996, around the same time doctors decided pain was "the fifth vital sign," no one should endure pain ever and, if you are in pain, you should drug yourself out of it.  Oxycontin was new to the market and a hot, highly prescribed "non-addictive" opioid (spoiler alert:  it's highly addictive and has killed a lot of people). 

The good news is I don't have to worry about inheriting any of my mother's madness, even come menopause.  The other good news is I understand more about pharmaceuticals now than at least 85% of the US population.  And I know not to take anything a doctor prescribes until I've thoroughly vetted it online and, even then, not if I can do without.  If I ever take morphine, it'll be because death is imminent because I don't want to have to try to STOP being addicted to it.  Had I been a high school athlete or gotten into a car accident that left me in pain, I probably would've been prescribed opiates and quite possibly ended up a situation like my mother's.  It happened a lot to other people at that time and for years afterward.  The only reason it didn't happen to me was luck.  But now I know at least.  Now I have information.  And I guess it's good my mother ended up in a nursing home after her last suicide attempt and her refusal to take care of herself (and our family's collective refusal to take care of  her anymore) because she might have died of an overdose by now if she were left to her own devices and dosing schedule.

My mother is the case study I teach my daughter.  They still do DARE or some variation on it in her school, but it doesn't go into enough detail if you ask me.  The "just say no" tagline implies a hit of pot and an oxycodone are equivalent, and if a kid comes to see that something like pot doesn't actually destroy their life, they might just assume the other one won't either.  Lack of nuanced understanding is dangerous when it comes to what we put in our bodies.  My mother's insistence that alcohol and sex are evil while indulging in prescription drugs and junk food multiple times a day is a good example of how black and white thinking fails us.

I wonder what she would be like if she weren't on the drugs.  I mean, she fit the criteria for borderline personality disorder before any of that.  But she started taking hypnotics and god knows what else when I was in eighth or ninth grade.  What would her non-drugged behavior even look like to adult me?  I don't know.  I don't trust my childhood memory and childhood interpretation of what she was like before the drugs.  She wasn't all bad by any means.  Sometimes she was great, and I loved her so much.  Would she still have drained my bank account?  Would she still have tried to turn my grandparents against me?  Would she still have tried to turn me against my dad?  Yes.  That started before the drugs.  Telling me he wasn't my "real" father and that I couldn't talk about it to anyone was earlier.  Telling me he'd never wanted me and had wanted to beat her into miscarrying me was earlier.  Telling me she'd let me decide if she should divorce him and that we'd be poor and have to find somewhere else to live was earlier.

I don't know what she'd be like now if not for the pills, but I trust this particular scenario has played out as well as it could for me.  Sometimes, since reading Dreamland, I think about reaching out to her.  I hadn't realized until that book just how much the deck was stacked against her NOT becoming an addict.  But I don't want her to have my phone number, and I don't want the nursing home to start demanding money from me (I'd never pay them, so it would just be frustrating for both of us).  I'd like to check in on her and see how she's doing and what she's doing, but I don't want to interact with her.  I'm not sure if it would be worse to let things go and maybe have some regrets when she dies, or to take the chance of appearing on her radar and what backlash that could prompt.  I wonder what drugs she's on now.  I wonder how she feels, or if she feels much of anything at all.

"Dad's Dead"

I got a call last week from my estranged brother who has literally never contacted me in our lives except at the behest of one of our parents.  Caller ID showed his name, so I let it go to voicemail.  Even if I hadn't seen his name, I won't answer calls from that area code unless I recognize them.  They could be from my mother.

Dante left a voicemail saying to call him back, nothing more.  I received a Facebook message from a random stranger immediately after the voicemail.  A Google image search showed that the profile photo had been all over the internet, and a search of the name yielded no hits, so I assumed it was Dante incognito.  I discovered I could read the message without "accepting" it or sending a read receipt, so I did.  It was Dante saying our dad was doing poorly and the phone number he had for me was defunct (this is the beauty of not having an outgoing voicemail message, Friends) and to call him back.  Dante is still living at home with our dad.

My best friend, Jerry, didn't think I should call him.  I knew the only reasons anyone from my family would be calling me would be either 1) because they wanted money, or 2) they wanted me to do something, and I didn't have any intention of giving them anything or going there, even if a parent was dead.  Still, I hoped for the narrow possibility that something would finally force to the surface the fact that I am not my dad's biological daughter.  Maybe Dante would be asking me to donate a kidney or bone marrow and I could say nonchalantly, "I'm not any more related to him than you are.  Didn't you know?"  Maybe Dad actually wanted to talk to me for the first time in years.

I called back on speaker phone so that I could record our exchange and listen to it later and get thoughts from Jerry as necessary.  That is why I have a recording on my phone of Dante choking back a sob and saying, "Dad's dead."

Dad had been in the hospital in Cleveland again when he died.  His wound had reopened, as it always has, and the VA hospital in Cincinnati had shipped him back to Cleveland to stay in their spinal cord injury unit, as they always did.  He had been in the ICU lately, which wasn't a first for him.  I've visited him in ICUs since the '90s.  Dante said he hadn't been able to get in touch with him lately, though I'm not sure how "lately" he meant.  Some of his updates, such as Dad's driver's license expiring, were things I remember happening four years ago.  He said he had tried calling Dad's cell phone but got no answer, which doesn't surprise me since he always avoided taking valuables with him to the hospital out of fear they would be stolen, even if they were his primary means of communication and entertainment and he didn't know how long he'd be there.  He said he'd finally gotten in touch with a doctor at the hospital and learned that Dad had gone into cardiac arrest, which was a first for him.  He was alive but couldn't communicate except for subtle head movements.  Dante said the doctor had called him on his own cell phone from the ICU and was asking Dad if he wanted "to be made comfortable," and Dad supposedly nodded.  He died later that day, right before I called Dante back.  He was a four hour drive from anyone he knew.

Dante and I talked for several hours over the next two days, mostly trading ridiculous stories of our parents.  Every time one of us tried to get off the phone, we'd feel compelled to share one more thing and stay on the line for another ten minutes.  He was doing it too.  It was good.  I've never connected with Dante that way.  Maybe he had changed.  Maybe I had imagined some of his scariness and inflated it over the years of estrangement.

I was also surprised at how little Dad and Dante had presumably talked since Dante had moved back home.  I'm not sure how long Dad had been in Cleveland when he died, but Dante didn't know we weren't in touch.  I told him that he had all my contact information but that, when he wouldn't ask me any questions about my family or my life and I stopped working to maintain the relationship, I stopped hearing from him at all.  It had been three years.  Dante had no idea.

He also had no idea what Dad wanted to happen when he died.  He'd apparently only had that conversation with me.  As I recall, it only happened because he wanted the go-ahead to cancel all his life insurance policies minus the one the VA paid for, and we were confirming it would be enough to cover the cost of cremation.  He didn't want a big service or burial, he said.  He just wanted his favorite jazz song playing on a boom box to send him off.   I can do that, I had said.

More to come.  So much has happened.

Spending My Childhood on Antibiotics

I complained of stomach aches a lot as a child, from as early as I can remember until I was in high school.  As much as I loved seeing my friends at school and socializing, the idea of inadvertently doing something wrong or getting in trouble terrified me.  I approached almost every school day terrified that I'd forgotten to do some piece of homework, or that something had been assigned during one of the many hours I'd spent zoned out and daydreaming without even realizing it, or that I might get scolded for something I didn't mean to do wrong.  In hindsight, my stomach aches were probably a combination of stress and my looking for any excuse to get out of school.  In most cases, my mother wouldn't let me stay home unless I could produce physical evidence that I was ill -- either a fever, which I ran only a few times in my life, or vomiting.

My mother took my temperature rectally until I was at least six.  When I asked why I couldn't use the oral thermometer like everyone else in the house, she said I would bite down on it.  I promised I wouldn't.  I don't even know what the problem would have been if I had -- it was a plastic digital thermometer, not one of the old style ones made of glass and mercury.  When I asked why we couldn't get one of the digital thermometers they stick in your ear at the doctor's office then, she told me they aren't accurate enough.  I wonder now how much of her insistence on using a rectal thermometer was as a punishment for my daring to ask to stay home.  I think it was at least a little bit punishment.

On the rare occasions that I was allowed to miss school, my mother took me to the doctor without fail.  I remember her saying something along the lines of how, if she let me miss school, I wouldn't be allowed to just stay home and lie on the couch watching TV all day like she did in my absence.  If I didn't go to school, by god, we would spend the day at the doctor's office.  She wasn't going to incentivize my sicknesses by letting me lie around at home all day.

No doctor ever found a source for my stomach aches or proposed that they might be stress related.  With few exceptions they told us instead that I had an upper respiratory infection and prescribed antibiotics.  I also had strep throat a lot, for which they injected me with penicillin and I was allowed to rest at home for 24 hours without being treated like someone who was trying to get out of something.  Getting a positive strep test was like winning a small lottery to me and always made me happy. 

Once when I was eight or so, my mother found an open packet of Sweet Tarts candies on a file cabinet in the family room.  I don't know how long it had been there -- it was a hoard house after all -- but she mistook them for antibiotics and got very upset at me for not taking them.  "Those are candy," I explained.  They weren't even mine.  Dante might have left them there, but they were from one of the communal baskets of candy my mother left scattered around the house, so it's anybody's guess.  I always took all my medicine though.  It never would have occurred to me not to take a dose of the medicine she gave me, let alone leave them scattered on top of a file cabinet.  To this day, I have never stopped taking a course of antibiotics before they ran out.

I was also about eight when I got my first vaginal yeast infection as a result of the antibiotics.  My entire vulva felt like an inflamed mosquito bite, and it itched so badly I writhed on my bed and cried.  I didn't know what was happening, but my mother did.  When she took me to the pediatrician and announced that I had an yeast infection, the nurse asked, "Oral yeast infection, I assume?"  When my mother said, "No, vaginal," the nurse raised in eyebrows in surprise.  When she left the room, I asked my mother why she had done that.  "Vaginal yeast infections are normally just from having too much sex," my mother told me.  "But yours is from all the antibiotics." 

She bought me Monistat antifungal treatment from the drug store later that day.  I didn't need the vaginal suppositories, she said, just the cream, but she insisted on applying it herself.  When I asked uncomfortably why I couldn't just do it myself, she argued that I wouldn't be able to see where to apply it.  "I don't need to be able to see it," I told her.  "I can feel where it itches."  She denied my request and rubbed in the cream with her fingers while I laid on my back on my bed hoping she would stop soon.  Not knowing how to explain the creepy, skin crawly feeling that was upsetting me, I told her, "I don't like it.  It doesn't feel good."  "It's not SUPPOSED to feel good!" she barked.  "If you liked this, there would be something wrong with you!"

DC Pride

There is a thread right now about what makes us proud or happy about being donor conceived.  This is my sincere and unsarcastic reply:

Genetic Counseling for the Donor Conceived

I'm getting to the point where I'm posting enough stuff my half-siblings know that, if they stumbled across this blog for whatever reason, they would be able to identify me.  This makes me nervous, but not nervous enough to stop posting.  Obviously.

My half-brother Hans emailed me the other day to say our uncle had tested positive for some sort of mutation that puts people at higher risk for specific types of cancer.  He said our father had asked him to let me know in case I wanted to get myself or my daughter tested.  Below Hans' note was a series of emails between my biological father and my uncle's wife.  She had the job of informing my uncle's family members that they might want to get tested.  There was a limited amount of information exchanged.  The emails were from several months ago, but the dates showed my biological father just had forwarded them to Hans to forward to me this week.  It reminded me vaguely of how people who find out they have an STD are supposed to reach out to everyone they've been intimate with.  "Hey, it's Joseph.  Yeah, the Joseph who sired you about 30 years ago.  Good times, huh?  So anyway, I tested positive, and it turns out you might want to get yourself tested too..."  I wish I had more known half-siblings, just to add to the comic effect.

I had a check up scheduled with my doctor for just a few days later, so I brought a print-out of the email chain to my appointment and asked my doctor what he thought of genetic testing.  I'd assumed he would say there wasn't much point in it if I'm not planning to have more kids and there is nothing actionable I can do with the results anyway.  When I'd brought up prenatal testing before conceiving my daughter, my OB/GYN at the time had said, "What for?  If you don't even know your family medical history, how can we know what tests to run?"  I hadn't known who my biological father was back then or anything about his family medical history, but I thought there were standard tests doctors could run for common disorders. 

To my surprise, maybe because I have more family information now, my current doctor had a different reaction.  He referred me to a local cancer center that does genetic counseling and strongly recommended I do it.  He said that, while there isn't often something actionable to be done with a heightened cancer risk, there might be more screening options in the future, and the field of genetics is progressing constantly so it would be good to have my results on file.

I called the genetic counselor to make an appointment.  She asked me if I had a copy of my uncle's report because there was relevant information in it that they could use in testing me.  I told her I might be able to get a copy.  She stressed the importance of it until I finally explained that my biological father was an anonymous sperm donor and I'm still a secret to most of his family, said uncle probably included.  I told her I would ask my brother for the report, but I wasn't sure I could get it.  She told me it was okay.  While it's useful information and would inform what genetic tests would be done on me and would probably make my testing cheaper, they can work without it. 

Then she asked me to compile a list of every  member of my extended family who has had cancer too, as well as which type of cancer and at what age it developed.  I know some of that.  I know what I know anyway.  I don't know when their various cancers developed, but I know they all died soon thereafter or as a result of the cancer, and I know when they died, so surely that counts for something.  My information isn't lacking enough that I would try to ask for more anyway.  Most of the cancer in my family is on my father's side.  All of the "lady cancers" are, and those are the ones whose risk are heightened the most dramatically by this particular gene mutation.

I told my brother thank you for the information and thank you when he got me the extra pages from our uncle's report.  He's always very prompt in his replies.  I didn't mention that I already have heightened risk for colon cancer, which I inherited from our father's genes, in spite of our father pointing out in the email chain that he thinks he got "the good genes" because he hasn't yet had the same colon issues his brother or mother have had.  I'm not going to tell any of them the results of my genetics testing either, both because I don't think they want to know and also because I want to have information they don't have for a change.  I'm not mad at my half-siblings.  They are nice and kind to me, but I'm angry at my father every time I remember he exists, not just for this.  I get so angry when I think of him that I often cry in impotent rage, and I don't want anyone in his family to know that.  I want them to think I'm calmer and cooler than them, as I've always pretended to be.  I do not want them thinking I'm irrational and ungrateful or expecting too much.  I will take what I can get.  I will take months' old forwarded emails indicating that my daughter and I might want to get ourselves checked out for new and exotic cancer risks, carefully funneled through a third party so that I don't dare take liberties with my father by responding to him directly.  I know I have more than most DC people already.  But I'm still angry.  

Bright Side:  At least it's not ALS.  I scoured my raw genome data from 23andMe, and I'm definitely not getting ALS.

A Minor DC Discovery

I had my birth certificate out the other day because of bank-related nonsense.  As I was putting it away, back in the lock box with the passports and the social security cards and the letter from my sperm donor father, a familiar name caught my eye.  The doctor who delivered me was the same doctor who had inseminated my mother.  I don't mean my biological father.  I mean he was the man who is now known for having impregnated patients with medical student sperm.  I learned his name from another local DC person long after the last time I'd look at my birth certificate.  I don't know why it surprised me.  I guess I had assumed he had been something more than a run-of-the-mill obstetrician and that he wouldn't do prenatal checkups or deliver babies.  Impregnating women with donor sperm doesn't require a medical mastermind, but I'd assumed he'd specialized in infertility.  I'd assumed he treated... something.

I wonder if the same doctor delivered Hans.  I was conceived the semester our father started medical school.  Hans was born the semester that he graduated.  It doesn't matter.  I'm just grasping at things we might have in common.  I wonder if Hans and I have ever known someone in common.  I wonder if my father and I have ever unwittingly been in the same building at the same time.  I never thought about these things before I knew who he was.  Then I thought how likely it was.  

I wonder if any medical student anonymous sperm donor has ever examined a woman carrying his child, or been present for the birth of his own child.  It didn't happen to me because first years don't see patients, but what if someone donated as a third year or fourth year?  Third and fourth years see patients.  If a medical student had his obstetrics and gynecology rotation when a patient or four were gestating his offspring, it seems like there would be a decent chance he might see one of them.  He could see one of those patients or possibly even be present for the birth of his own offspring and, based on the secrecy and alleged lack of record keeping at the hospital where I was created, there would be no way he or anyone else would ever know.   

Mother Takes Her Cut

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I applied for and accepted a campus job as a Resident Assistant.  My payment was a rent-free studio efficiency apartment that would normally cost a little over $10k for the school year.  In order to accept the job, I had to quit my mail room job I had worked since freshman year.  It had been my sole source of income during the school year.

Because my RA apartment didn't come with a meal plan, I had no way to pay for food.  I also had no way to pay for the phone line the school required me to have, or clothes or anything else.  My social security checks were still being kept by my mother to pay for my books and tuition.  My parents kicked in a lot toward tuition, and I paid for the rest with a hefty academic scholarship and student loans.

After my explanation of the situation -- that she wouldn't have to pay for my housing and could redirect funds toward the things I'd previously paid for with my mail room job -- my mother agreed to give me a monthly allowance so I could buy food and necessities.  I believe it was $150 per month, if I recall correctly.  I know the budget I worked out allowed me to spend $20 per week on food, so I had to stop buying whole grain healthy stuff and eat a lot more ramen.  Unfortunately, that was the same year I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, so I had a lot of doctors bills, and I had to pay bus fare three times per week to get to the hospital for my initial follow-up appointments and some related blood tests.

I called my mother and told her I needed more money to pay hospital bills, and she screamed at me for daring to pay any of them in full.  ALWAYS put them on a payment plan, she told me.  NEVER pay hospital bills in full!  I hadn't known.  I asked for payment plans going forward, but I still needed more money.  I was barely getting by, and my boss got mad whenever I argued that I didn't have money to eat restaurant food with the other RAs.  My boss expected me to pitch in an equal amount whether I ate their food or not.  My mother eventually gave me a little more money and purchased me a small supplemental meal plan through the school so that I could eat larger, healthier meals occasionally.  Then she spent somewhere in neighborhood of $70 -- more than three weeks' worth of grocery money in my world -- to send me a Hershey's Chocolate Tower of Treats made up almost exclusively of foods my doctors had told me to avoid, such as nuts and popcorn.  I had even told her about the diet restrictions before she sent it.

After graduation, after my mother went off the deep end, my dad mentioned the monthly allowance I had lived off of for those last two years of college, except the figure he quoted to me was more than double what I had received.  "She told me you hated me," he said.  "She said I had to give the money to her because you would never accept it if it came from me directly because you hated me so much."  And then she had taken a more than 50% cut for herself.  Every single month.  I'll let slide the fact that she told my dad I hated him because parental alienation was old hat with her and shouldn't have come as a surprise.  But knowing I was struggling, hearing me cry over the phone that I couldn't afford anything and was embarrassing myself in front of my boss, she made the repeated decision to take her cut.  Every.  Single.  Month. 

My dad didn't even control their money.  He only ever bothered controlling his own comparatively tiny social security checks, which were about 10% of their total monthly income.  The rest was all hers.  About $9k per month, all hers, at least $6k of which should have been disposable income.  I guess she wanted more.

[Edited:  I forgot to factor in my tuition and their various car payments -- I don't even remember how many cars they would have been paying off at that time -- when I said they had $6k in monthly disposable income.  I was going on what their finances looked like when I took them over a couple years later.  I think their mortgage payments were less back then, before the refinance, but I don't know by how much.  They might have had as little as $4k disposable income per month. Of course that number also factors in if my mother had paid both the home equity line of credit payment and my tuition rather than paying the HELOC payment every month and then immediately borrowing against it again to pay my tuition, which is what she said she did (in one of her "you are why we're poor" rants).  Actually, she said she paid for at least one car with the HELOC too, so that payment wouldn't have been extra.  Never mind.  I can't even picture what finances looked like when my mother was in charge of them.  I've tried before, and that way madness lies.]

Learning to Breathe (After Life in a Moldy Hoard House)

The title isn't a reference to something profound.  This post is literally about overcoming sinus problems associated with growing up in a wet, moldy hoard house.

I've mentioned here before how my childhood home had a flooded basement.  My parents said the house was built on an active spring, and they never had a sump pump installed.  The basement flooded every time it rained until, eventually, there was at least an inch of standing water over the basement's concrete floor even when it hadn't rained in days.  There was visible mold on the books and papers in the basement.  We weren't allowed to open the windows in the house either because "Dante is allergic to pollen," so the air in the house was perpetually stale and damp.  I lived there from birth until I left for college.

I have had severe sinus congestion for as long as I can remember.  When I was a child, my mother took me to the doctor regularly with sinusitis and upper respiratory infections, for which I was on antibiotics far more than any doctor today would prescribe them.  I remember being on either Amoxicillin or Augmentin for what seemed like most of elementary school.  I was prescribed them enough that I knew the drug names and what they were.  Even when I went to the doctor with what I can only assume were stress-fueled stomach aches, he told me, "You have an upper respiratory infection.  Here's a prescription for Augmentin." 

I can't remember the last time I took antibiotics for something and the problem didn't return within two weeks.  It was sometime before high school anyway -- I started researching and trying my own home remedies after that, and I found ones that worked.  I always finished all my antibiotics too, so that wasn't the problem.  I was just on prescription medications A LOT as a kid.  A lot more than should have been necessary.

My mother attempted to aid my congestion by keeping a humidifier in my bedroom, which at best probably exacerbated the problem.  She insisted on pointing it at my bed since that was where my breathing problems really bothered me, so my bed was damp whenever it was time to go to sleep.  When I redirected the humidifier so that it wouldn't dampen my bed, she would notice on her regular bedroom searches and move it back.  I finally had a talk with her about that -- both about the wet bedsheets and about how moisture dissipates through the air -- and thankfully she seemed to understand.  She also gave me a tiny Vick's inhaler with a sort of mild menthol scent.  It didn't seem to do anything, but I sniffed it obsessively in my bed at night for the first decade of my life in an attempt to be able to breathe through my nose.

At the age of eight, I tested positive for a mold allergy.  The doctor recommended I not keep bouquets of fresh flowers in my bedroom since plants are often a source of mold spores and he didn't know about the basement.  My mother now had a better reason than ever not to allow us to open the windows.  On the days when the weather forecast said the pollen count was low, the mold count was typically high from recent rain, so we stayed in our climate-controlled house and breathed the moldy air together.

When I was around eleven my dad introduced me to Dristan.  It's a medicated nasal spray that works like magic on even the worst congestion.  I wondered why he hadn't given me some earlier, but I didn't know it was highly habit forming or that it increases blood pressure and causes perpetual post nasal drip (that last one isn't even on the box).  I didn't learn any of that until I'd been using it for months, when I started noticing I had to use it more and more frequently to keep being able to breathe.  My dad had been using Dristan compulsively several times per day for twenty years at that point, so I guess it didn't occur to him to tell me any of the box warnings.

I weaned myself off Dristan for the first time when I was a senior in high school.  It was hard.  It meant enduring even worse congestion for several days until the withdrawal period wore off, then going back to the poor congestion of my childhood.  I started using it again my freshman year of college when I came down with a sinus infection.  I had sinus infections frequently growing up, and they would swell my entire nasal passage shut.  I couldn't sleep.  In college, using Dristan again seemed like less of a problem than not being able to sleep for several days in a row.

I weaned myself off the Dristan again a couple more times over the years.  Each time I started using it again was because of a sinus infection (which I treated by simply waiting for it to pass) and a complete inability to breathe through my nose.  I tried asking my doctor for help when I read that a prescription steroid nasal spray can help get through the withdrawal, but he said I should simply stop taking Dristan and learn to breathe through my mouth forever like everyone else.  Not terribly helpful.  I eventually developed a weaning process that made the withdrawal easier.  I also discovered the decongestant pseudoephedrine, which isn't habit forming when taken orally, such as in OTC allergy pills.  I also started using a neti pot regularly, which helped enormously.

When I was in my mid-twenties and had been off the Dristan but on oral decongestants for awhile, my doctor noticed that my blood pressure was higher than it should have been for someone so young.  He wrote it off to being nervous about being at the doctor's office, but I suspect the pseudoephedrine had something to do with it.  When I got pregnant, my blood pressure at every checkup was suddenly better than it had been in years.  It also happened to be the first time in years that I wasn't taking any kind of decongestant to aid my breathing.

I used Dristan again recently when I came down with a bad cold.  I find if I use it for three days or less there is no withdrawal period, and I managed to stop after two days when the congestion from the cold started to abate.  I was pleased with myself.  Dristan is a nasty beast, and being able to breathe through one's nose is highly addictive. 

Now that I'm getting older, I'm trying to manage my blood pressure better.  High blood pressure and heart disease run in my family on both sides, as does dying young (50-ish) of heart attacks.  I eat well and I exercise, and now I don't use decongestants regularly either.  I can breathe better now than at any point in my life thanks to discovering the SinuPulse Elite (I paid like $90 for it on Amazon, and it is worth every penny).  It's essentially an electric, pulsating neti pot.  It's like the Neti Pot 2.0.  I use it twice a day, spiked with a dash of Alkalol once a day (which doesn't appear to be a habit forming substance, but if you know things about it, I'd like to hear them).   I also drink enormous amounts of water.  My sicknesses still seem to last longer than they do for my husband or daughter -- I don't think my immune system will ever be quite as strong as theirs -- but my congestion isn't worse than theirs anymore.  I no longer dread going to bed at night and trying to breathe.  It probably also helps that, when I saw mold starting to form in one corner of my house from a leak in the roof, I immediately got the roof and drywall fixed. 

And my basement has TWO sump pumps.

Wanting To Be Sick

When I was little, I used to fantasize about being hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.  I knew nothing about what went on in mental hospitals; no one in my family had been hospitalized for mental reasons at that point, and I was also very young.  I remember my mother talking about specific teenage girls from our church who were straight A students and on the dance team and preparing for college and how they would be hospitalized because of the stress of being so amazing at everything, and also anorexia.  I wanted to be like that.  I wanted to be so amazing that I had to be hospitalized for it.  I envisioned my mother and doctors and nurses stroking my forehead and telling me to rest, that I shouldn't work so hard.

Mental illness wasn't acknowledged in our house or in our extended family, in spite of my uncle's suicide and almost all my mother's siblings eventually being diagnosed with one thing or another.  The only illnesses that were valued and treated (and faked) were physical.  Stress counted as physical though.  Only the best, hardest working, most put upon martyrs felt stress, so my mother was in a fairly constant competition to be the most stressed out person she knew.  I think this is part of why I wanted to be hospitalized.  I wanted the attention, and I wanted someone to acknowledge that the stress I felt was real too.  I wanted a reaction that wasn't, "Why is that little bitch crying again?" or "Stop being so sensitive."

One of the best side effects of my mother going off the deep end was that she stopped responding positively to my ailments, including the ulcerative colitis I developed in college.  I learned that I had to care for myself and no one else would do it for me.  I could ask close friends for specific help, and they usually came through, and hired help is an option for almost everything if you have enough money, but I was responsible for making sure I had what I needed.  No one else.  No one would decide I was too sick or under too much stress and tell me to take a rest.  If I let myself hit rock bottom, no one was going to come to my rescue.  It is a little depressing to grow up wanting so much for someone to stroke your hair and take care of you and tell you not to stress yourself, and then to realize that will never happen, but it was an important lesson to learn, and it was a better situation than the one my mother had. 

My mother's parents took care of her until they died.  She lived within walking distance of their house up until they moved to the next town over in their 70s.  I remember watching her mother cook for her, and her father giving her money when she needed it, despite her income via my dad's disability payments being several times that of my grandparents.  She moved in with them after the divorce, when she refused to bathe or feed herself or find anywhere else to live.  She always had a human safety net.  Until she didn't.

Shortly after my grandparents died, my mother took a bunch of pills, called herself an ambulance, and ended up in the psych ward of the local hospital.  Based on what I've heard as an adult, I imagine the psych ward wasn't as soothing or nurturing as I'd fantasized as a child.  No friends or family came to her rescue that time, and they ultimately discharged her to a low-end assisted living home where she was required to see a psychiatrist.  He was the one who diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. 

I don't know where she is now or how/whether she takes care of herself.  I heard she left the assisted living home after awhile.  My dad said they wanted her to pay something to keep living there, but I don't know if she got evicted or if she left because she wanted to go.  She had tried to reach out to me via Facebook from that assisted living home to say my brother, my husband, and I were all the support system she had left in the world and she wanted me back in her life.  It had been some three years since I'd heard from her at that point.  I never replied.  After she left assisted living, she talked about suing my dad for more monthly spousal support and wanting to pick up the things she'd left at the house after the divorce, including some major appliances, but nothing ever came of it and then she disappeared again. 

The Time I Told My Mother the Truth About Everything

This is an excerpt from an email I sent my best friend on the day I told my mother "The Truth As I See It."  It happened a couple years before my wedding, on the day my mother received divorce papers from my dad.  I count that phone call as one of the most important conversations of my life and one of the few times I was honest with my mother about her behavior and refused to back down when challenged.  I believe this conversation was at least part of the reason my mother has reached out to me to reconnect but has never once asked me why I stopped talking to her.  I said what she needed to know (if she heard it).

I mention unofficially diagnosing my mother as bipolar in this email, which in hindsight I kind of wish I hadn't done, though I thoroughly believed it to be true and that proper treatment -- especially a prescription mood stabilizer, which was one of the few things she didn't already seem to be taking -- could make her better.  She did receive a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder a couple years after this phone call took place, but I no longer believe it to be accurate.  More on all that another time.

Dear Jerry,

My mom was served the divorce papers today.  She called me sobbing and, when I answered, said, "I just called to say I love you."  I acted sympathetic and didn't say much until she started in on my dad, at which point the invisible string that my voice had been hung up on just broke and I announced loudly, "You sold ALL OF HIS STUFF," and basically told her the truth on just about everything.  I didn't yell, but when saying things I'd wanted to tell her for a long time, I announced them loudly like an orator.  I was still gentle through a lot of it though, particularly when talking about mental illness, and she was the only one who cried.  I told her she is bi-polar.  I told her she should be on meds for it and not on meds for EVERYTHING else.  I told her she appears to have Munchausen's syndrome and her car wrecks seem to be on purpose ("You think I rolled the car ON PURPOSE?!"  "Yes.").  I told her maxing out someone else's credit card is NOT OKAY, regardless of her defense that it was "only $500."  When she complained that no one speaks to her, I told her it's because she acts crazy now.  When she asked why I didn't call her at Christmas, I told her I didn't want to get yelled at.  When she acted shocked and asked, "What?" I repeated myself, only more loudly and enunciating better.  I did this every time she acted shocked at something I said.  I asked her if she didn't remember yelling at me and leaving voice mails in which she called me a selfish little bitch, or if she really believed it didn't hurt me.  She said she only remembered calling me that when I didn't send cards to my grandmothers.  I don't really remember how she said it, but it came out that she thinks I am bad for that, and I can't really remember that part through the haze of anger... 

When she said my father took the money away from her and that she would have to live without lights and heat, I explained that, if the bank account is empty, it's because she empties it every month.  Several thousand dollars every month.  I explained that I am handling their money now.  I explained that it comes to me so that I can pay the house payments that she would not.  I explained I had been instructed to put the rest back into their joint account each month, leaving my dad with nothing, so that the automatic withdrawal bills could be paid and she could blow through the rest the way she always does ("Blow through?"  "Yes."  "You think I BLOW THROUGH money?!"  "Yes.").  She said she spends money but (or because?  I can't remember) she has no other vices.  She said she doesn't own furs or diamonds; she pays bills and sometimes buys things for other people.  She said that nothing will make people happy.  We weren't happy when she was spending no money, lying on the couch all day refusing to move, eat, or bathe, and that we aren't happy now that she is out spending money.  What do we want from her?  I said, "We want you to act like a normal human being." 

She cried a lot.  She said we used to be best friends.  I told her she used to be the center of my world.  I told her she used to be my entire support system and that she dropped me in college, or in high school really, and I was forced to get over it.  She claimed it was the menopause.  I told her she should have admitted to it then rather than just yelling at me and accusing me of changing.  I told her she is bi-polar.  Again.  She said she might as well take all of the pills she has and end it all.  I confessed that I had thought about suicide in the last few months too, and then she cut me off to tell me about her problems some more.  Honestly, it's what I expected to happen.  It was more of a test than a confession.  But a normal person would have at least acknowledged the fact that the other person had spoken.  I realize it's hypocritical, but I hated her for not caring even a little bit.  I told her that, kill her or not, most pills don't just put you to sleep, they make you sick and kill you painfully (it's true -- I've read it in books).  I told her to think that over before making any rash decisions.  

She told me what a good mother she was, and how she made me independent.  I'm VERY independent, I told her.  Still, I confessed things I maybe shouldn't have told her, like how much it matters to me what she says to me and the fact that she doesn't seem to care about me.  I told her how fucked up it makes me when she calls and yells at me.  I told her that being told I'm a bad person doesn't make me a better one.  And I announced over her complaints, perhaps a little callously, that I know that's all I'm good for -- being her punching bag and something to bitch at -- to which she replied "no" and then returned to bemoaning her own sufferings, interspersed with bitching about how I don't send people greeting cards.

I guess that's why it doesn't matter how much I told her.  She doesn't care enough to hear it.  Ever.  I know it was a bad day.  I know it only makes sense that she would be upset about being sued for divorce and be focused on her own pain.  I know today might not have been the best day, after years of mostly silence, to announce The Truth As I See It.  And when she wasn't criticizing me or saying horrible things about my dad, and I had a chance to relate to her, I felt bad for her.  But she couldn't leave it alone for long, and I couldn't feel bad WITH her, because it wasn't just today.  It's her.  This will sound ridiculous, but I can't think of a better way to say it:  there is a quote that Christmas isn't a day but a state of mind.  So is the worst day of your life.  And she keeps that day alive in her heart all year round, and it makes sense to be focused on your own misfortunes on the worst day of your life, so maybe it makes sense to her to act this way.  Or maybe I'm trying to make it make sense to me and I'm giving her too much credit.  It's been a long time since she showed an interest in another human being, so it's hard to tell.

I don't envy her situation, but I don't pity her either.  She makes her own choices.  Her life hasn't been happy, but it has been in her control.   If you are unhappy, you have to decide whether or not to do something about it.  Doing nothing is still your choice.  It's just a stupid one.  I asked her to do something about it.  I asked her to see a different psychiatrist and be evaluated for bi-polar disorder so that she can get better.  She asked why she should bother.  I told her, because it isn't all about her, and if she cares about her mother as much as she claims to, she will do it to make her happy.  We'll see.

The Time I Invited My Dad to Come Live With Me

When I was in my early twenties, my dad suffered a wound that got infected.  As a paraplegic man, he pulled himself from bed to his wheelchair and back again every day using just his upper body strength and a triangle-shaped "monkey bar" hanging over his bed.  He'd been doing this everyday for thirty years, but at some point, something must've caught on his skin below where he had feeling, and a wound formed.  It got so severely infected that he had to be hospitalized.  He needed intravenous antibiotics and multiple surgeries to repair what had become a gaping wound on his rear end.  Because of the location of the wound and the fact that he normally sits in a wheelchair all day, my dad was hospitalized and bedbound.  For years. 

It was during that time that my mother went further off the deep end than ever before and I helped my dad to divorce her from his hospital bed.  That was when I helped save their house from foreclosure too, though the money was all his.  He was living in a VA hospital across the state from his home because that was where the closest Spinal Cord Injury unit was located, and he needed their specialized care.  He got a weekend pass from the hospital to attend my wedding shortly after his own divorce, but it was hard to achieve.  He said they had been threatening him that, if he left for my wedding, he couldn't come back. 

A few months after I got married, my dad received a diagnosis that the wound was not improving and no further surgeries would help.  He had had problems with wounds for decades, and his more recent type 2 diabetes seemed to worsen his healing abilities.  He had been discharged from the hospital a couples times over the years post-surgery and rehabilitation, only to have the wound break down and get infected again, usually within a couple of months.  The doctors were at a loss for what else to try and told him that he should just stay in bed for the rest of his life.  He was in his fifties at the time.

I talked to my dad on the phone a lot back then.  He had internet access, but I was the one who managed things remotely.  I hired his divorce attorney, I managed his finances, I talked to his debt collectors, and I looked into options for living bedbound the rest of his life.  Because of his disabled veteran status, he could continue living in the nursing home where the hospital had sent him for the price of a pay cut from his monthly disability payments.  He could also choose to move back home, a nurse would visit him for wound care daily on the VA's dime, and he could hire an aide to cook him meals and whatnot.  This second option was well within his financial capabilities too.  I investigated options for living somewhere that was less like a nursing home while still being able to provide him with full-time care.  No such places seem to exist.

Ultimately my dad told me he would move back home, do nothing, and let himself die of the ensuing infection.  I begged him to give me time to buy a house so he could live with me.  I was living in a small apartment with my new husband halfway across the country and working full-time, but I begged him to wait, to stay in the nursing home and hang on for 18 months until I could make arrangements.  He agreed.

In the next nine months, my husband and I moved halfway across the country to an area where my husband and I could both potentially find work in our respective industries, an area with one of the best VA hospitals in the country as well as a Spinal Cord Injury unit.  It was also an area where we could afford an appropriate house, unlike where we'd been living when we got married.  We started telecommuting to our jobs full-time and bought a nice house with a ground floor bedroom and bathroom for my dad, a garage large enough for our car as well as my dad's van, and lots of sunlight.  I told my dad the house was ready.  He could go to his medical appointments and, if he needed another surgery, he could do it all from here.  Then when he checked out, he could convalesce at home with us instead of in a nursing home.  I could make him good food like I make for myself so he wouldn't have to deal with the nursing home food he always complained about or his constant battle with them to give him decent diabetes-appropriate meals.  He could even have his satellite TV if he wanted to pay for that himself (we only had cable).   

He decided he didn't want to move in with me.  He said he wanted to try another surgery so he could move back home and live alone again.  He didn't want to stay with me while he did those things and move back home later.  He didn't want to change things.  I realize in retrospect that he was probably never going to move in with me.  I grew up hearing idle suicide threats, though not usually from him, and I had spent the last few years hearing my dad talk about how afraid he was of dying (he has a slow-progressing cancer in addition to the wound), in spite of how much he'd always complained about being alive.  I had wanted to do whatever I possibly could to make his life livable. 

I envisioned a beautiful life for us in my sunny house with lots of windows.  It was so unlike the house where I grew up, which was dark and dank and moldy, where my dad complained about the lack of sunlight or fresh air or ceiling fans.  My new house had all those things my childhood home lacked, and I had dreamed up all the ways to make a bedbound life nicer, like giving him a Wii (which was new at the time) so he could play games and sports from bed if he wanted.  If he recovered enough from being bedbound, he could easily access the kitchen and living room and large deck from his wheelchair.  Our neighborhood also had a wheelchair-accessible gym since he'd discovered in a previous round of physical therapy that he rather liked getting exercise.  I knew it wouldn't be fun to live from a bed, or even from a wheelchair, but I thought it would be nicer in my house than in a nursing home.  We could even celebrate holidays together, which we hadn't done in years except when he'd had surgeries scheduled around the same time and I'd traveled to be with him for both.

I can think of a few reasons my dad might not want to live with me.  First, I know he liked living alone, and he hadn't gotten to do it for very long.  I wasn't competing with living alone though; I was competing with the nursing home.  Second, he might think I'd be like my mother.  He barely knows me anyway.  Third, it might be easier to continue doing what he hates and complaining about it to me than taking the chance on making a change.  If he moved in with me and hated it, he'd have to move again.  He hadn't moved in thirty years.  And in retrospect, I realize he probably would have hated it.  I've never seen him not hate his life except for a few days here and there when he was living at home alone. 

In hindsight, I'm relieved he didn't move in with me.  I was clinging to the possibility of having a functional parent in my life.  My mother had threatened suicide so many times that I couldn't bear the thought of my dad effectively doing the same thing by letting himself die of infection, but I could see him doing it.  It was the kind of thing he might do, dying by inaction.  I thought I could help, the way I used to think I could help my mother.

When my dad first went into the hospital, he'd started behaving like a different, more optimistic person than the dad I'd known all my life.  He laughed more, and he made plans.  Being free of my mother was such a good influence on him, much like my moving out had seemed to lift a grey veil from over my face.  I thought my mother had been the source of all his anger and unhappiness.  Now I know they had both made each others' lives worse, but the longer he was away from her, the more he went back to being the dad I'd always known.  I don't think he was physically violent anymore, which made him less scary, but he still lacked empathy.  He was still a pessimist and a chronic complainer.  He was still someone with whom I wouldn't want to live.

If he were to change his mind and ask to live with me now, I would say no.  I can't imagine that question would come up though, under any circumstances.  Last I heard, he was living at home with Dante and Dante's ex-girlfriend's son, he seemed relatively happy, and I hope he never has to live in the hospital again.  As it stands, he has been out of the hospital for months now, longer now than at any other time in the last decade.  Fingers crossed.

5 Reasons I Contacted My Sperm Donor Father That Have Nothing to Do with Money

I read this article today, an interview with a former anonymous sperm donor who is incensed by the idea that his offspring might find out his name and contact him.  He is a doctor who has "made a few bob along the way" and says he is concerned his offspring will try to lay claim to it.  Or that they'll ask him for money and he'll feel uncomfortable saying no...?  I'm not sure what his specific concern is.  He also mentions that he has adult children from his marriage and has not told them about their secret half-siblings, of whom there are at least twenty.  That secret coming to light seems to me to be a more probable dilemma.

This sperm donor reminds me of an extended family member (and doctor) who sent out a mass email to everyone in the family who supports socialized healthcare, attesting that they just want to take her hard earned money for themselves.  No one on that recipient list had ever asked her for anything, and none were hard up by any stretch, but it was -- in my mind -- her way of saying, "I have more money than you and therefore anything you do that I don't like is because you are poor and jealous and greedy."  It wasn't really about money, at least not about hers vs. theirs.  But it was a decent attempt to make family feel bad for supporting something they believed in that she didn't like.  This reminds me of that.

This sperm donor also says he fears for his physical safety because his offspring could come to his home and assault him.  He says he and his wife are thinking of moving to... throw off how long it would take for people to look up his new address online?  I don't know what he would hope to achieve by moving.  Would he stop working too?  Would he keep moving forever?  I think waiting to see if there is a credible threat and then filing a restraining order if necessary would be more effective than living life "on the lam," but I'm unacquainted with the laws in Australia.  Also, my solution would do nothing to evade offspring who reach out in a normal, benign manner.

As I see it, refusing contact with offspring through a sperm bank is like being on the Do-Not-Call list for telemarketers.  You've made your desire for no contact known, but there's still a chance you might get an unwanted call someday.  No one can shield you from all unpleasant encounters and possibly having to say "no" yourself at some point.  But you probably won't have to do more than that. 

"When you think about it, anyone who contacts you is going to have a problem.... If I have that many kids, what is the chance of having one who is disabled?" he ponders.  I don't quite know what to make of the argument that anyone who contacts him is "going to have a problem."  Does he mean only people with issues, such as disabilities or the aforementioned poverty and anger, will reach out to him?  I can see why he might believe that, I suppose, but as someone on the other end, I don't think it's accurate.  I wouldn't try to argue that I have no problems, but I certainly wouldn't share them with my biological father.  Nor with the parents who raised me, for that matter.  I might have problems, but I'm not unhinged.  For context, here is why I contacted my biological father, none of which had to do with money:

5 Reasons I Contacted My Sperm Donor Father

1. I wanted to know what he's like.  I had questions, like does he have any hobbies or interests in common with me.  I'm so different from the people who raised me.  Is it because I'm like him?  (Answer: at least in part, yes)

2. I wanted to meet him someday if he was open to that.  I wanted to hear his voice and see his mannerisms.  I wanted to see the resemblance from online photos amplified.  It's a surreal experience seeing myself mirrored back in someone else.  I couldn't see it until I saw old photos of him. 

3. He has adult children who I wanted to talk to if they were willing, and I thought they'd be more open to the news of a secret half-sister if they heard it from someone they knew.  (Answer: They were open to it, and I think hearing the news from their father helped immensely.)

4. I wanted him to know I exist.  I wanted him to waste a few of his brain cells thinking about me, looking me up online, wondering about me, the way I wondered about him. 

5. I was the closest DNA match to a close relative on a DNA database.  I wanted to give my biological father a chance to disseminate information as he saw fit before the news came out by other means.

You know what I did when he wrote me a letter saying never to contact him again?  Nothing.  Not a damn thing.  When I sent him a letter introducing myself, I cost him as much as anyone else who has ever sent him an ad or another piece of unwanted mail.  And if I had contacted him a second time, harassing him or demanding money, or tried to assault him at his home as the doctor in this article fears, he would have been justified in sending me a cease and desist letter and/or filing a restraining order. 

What he really needed to be concerned about was his secret getting out.  He had to decide who to tell and who he might reasonably be able to keep hiding the secret from.  That should be -- and if we're being honest, probably is -- the primary concern of any anonymous sperm donor:  keeping the secret.  Even if a sperm bank doesn't give your name to your offspring, a DNA test might uncover it, as mine did.  I walk around everyday with 50% of his DNA coursing through my veins and pretty much every part of my body.  And DNA is highly traceable. 

I know it's hard to accept that the anonymity you were once promised is dead, but this is the new reality.  You can continue to focus on imagined crises like "what if they want my money" or you can face the issues that are inevitable.  If you donated sperm, tell your wife and children.  There is a very high probability that this news will come out, probably in your lifetime, and everyone will handle it better if you're the one to tell them. 

The Bad Things I Did as a Baby

My mother had a series of stories she would recount as evidence of how much trouble I had been as a baby.  She might still tell these stories, but I no longer talk to her, so for me they stopped a few years ago. 

The first one was my birth and the time surrounding it.  My mother had scheduled a c-section to happen a couple of weeks before I was due to be born because I was positioned transverse, with my spine perpendicular to hers.  The first thing I did was to "turn on her," into the standard head-down birthing position so that the doctor told her to skip the c-section and wait for my due date.  "You turned on me before you were even born," she used to half-joke.  She'd wanted the c-section.

The next thing I did was to be born.  I "ripped her from end to end," she liked to say.  This was her hyperbolic way of saying there was some amount of vaginal tearing.  Episiotomies -- or cutting so that the baby doesn't cause a vaginal tear while coming out -- were standard back then, but she said I was born too fast for her doctor to make a cut.  Small tears are considered pretty standard now, especially since episiotomies are no longer considered a great idea, but I didn't know this until I had a child of my own.  I also caused her pain when I was born.  I was also born a week and a half late and larger than the average baby.  I was also born facing upward, "spine to spine," which was wrong.  I thought this was very abnormal until I had a child of my own and the first thing I saw was her face.  It happens, I guess.

The next thing I did was biting down when nursing.  She said it was very painful, so she took to spanking me every time I did it.  I was too young to remember any of this, but she liked to talk about it.  After a few times being spanked while feeding, she said I refused to nurse anymore, and she considered me weaned.  She discovered the next day that I had caught chicken pox from my older brother.  I was two months old. 

When I was a few months old, my mother said she found me sucking on a vaporizer insert from the humidifier she kept on the floor of the living room.  She said she had to miss a favorite TV show to take me to the emergency room.  She always referenced that "Who Shot JR?" episode, but I've looked it up and that aired before I was born, so I'm not sure what show I actually made her miss.  She has never mentioned me needing actual medical treatment once we got to the hospital, so I presume I was fine.

When I was a little older and started pulling myself to stand, I fell and cut my head open on the corner of the coffee table.  She had to take me to the emergency room again.  She didn't talk about this event as much, so I assume there wasn't anything memorable on TV at the time.  She said I didn't need stitches but got a butterfly bandage.  I still have the shiny little scar on my forehead, but no one else notices it.  It's very small.

I also cried.  I also wanted to be held.  I wanted to be carried, despite the fact that I was heavy and "too big to carry."  I used to wake up during the night and call out for her, asking for water.  I don't know why she didn't just let me sleep in a real bed so that I could get my own water, but I remember sleeping in a crib.  I must've been at least three, and I was toilet trained, but I couldn't get out of bed to use the toilet during the night.  Still, I didn't wet the bed a single time since I can remember.  I remember crouching behind the bars of my crib, pretending to live in a cage at the zoo.  My mother said she had to take me to the doctor because I would go days without using the bathroom at all.  She said the doctor laughed at her overly careful parenting and said that I simply had a very large bladder, nothing to worry about.  I think now that I was probably dehydrated, something I was first hospitalized for the month before I started kindergarten.

I feel stupid and slightly ridiculous admitting I didn't know how much of this was normal baby stuff until I had a child of my own.  I thought I'd been terrible.  I thought I had caused everyone undue amounts of trouble.  I tried so hard to be perfect.

Sharing Health Information with Donor Half-Siblings

I have ulcerative colitis.  It's one of the two diseases under the Inflammatory Bowel Disease umbrella (Crohn's is the other).  I have to take pills twice a day to keep the inflammation down, and I have to have a colonoscopy every couple years to screen for colon cancer since IBD increases my risk.  Mine is a very mild case that doesn't otherwise interfere with my day-to-day life.  Most people aren't so lucky.  Some need medications with significant side effects, or need surgery, or never get the inflammation quite under control. 

IBD is largely considered to be a heritable illness.  Every gastroenterologist I've met since the time of my diagnosis over a decade ago has asked if I had a family history and, when I said I didn't but that my father was an anonymous sperm donor, the doctor assured me bowel disease ran in my father's family.  Therefore I was unsurprised when I learned that my paternal grandmother had colon cancer when she died.  It did mean, however, that I should probably stop avoiding my regular colonoscopies the way I have been for the last several years because now I knew of two increased risk factors:  the IBD and the family history of colon cancer.

My half-siblings probably know about the cancer.  Our father talks to them, after all, and they actually met our grandmother, who died nearly fifteen years before I learned of her existence.  But I don't know if I should tell them about my IBD.  It seems awkward to bring up, but I do know if they ever go to gastroenterologists themselves for whatever reason, the intake paperwork will ask if they have any family with ulcerative colitis, among other things, and having a sibling with a disease does count as an increased risk for developing the disease yourself.

If I develop cancer, I will tell them.  If they told me about their own health information, or that they were having some kind of health problems, I would be comfortable bringing it up then too.  But for now, I think I will keep the IBD to myself.  I'm afraid they'd think I'm weird for bringing it up.  We just aren't that close.

I'd be interested to hear what other people -- donor conceived or adopted or not -- think on this topic.  What would you do with this relevant-but-not-necessarily-critical information?

How Do You Feel About Donor Conception?

When I've written about my experiences being donor conceived -- always anonymously, as I do here -- one of the things people ask is how I feel about donor conception.  Would I donate my gametes?  Would I use donated gametes? 

I am not vocal about my opinions on donor conception.  I am not even vocal about the fact that I am donor conceived.  While I've been happy to shrug off the secrecy imposed on me in my youth and tell anyone who asks about my origins, I don't want just anyone knowing.  My close friends and "family of choice" know.  My donor conceived acquaintances know.  My half-siblings obviously know.  When you look up my name online though, I want you to see the delicately crafted persona that I wear for strangers.  Only flattering photos and self-deprecating humor and benign facts I'd want my boss or my biological father to see.  I admire many people who are outspoken about their beliefs, but I can't do it.  If you want to know my feelings or intimate details of my life, I want you to have to ask me.

When I first tested my DNA with 23andMe, I realized I only knew two surnames in my family tree -- my mother's maiden name and her mother's maiden name -- and I wasn't even sure how the latter one was spelled.  I confided in a maternal cousin about the DNA test and being donor conceived in the hope that she could provide me with more family names.  She was very supportive and very helpful.  She also confided that she was currently in the process of trying to conceive using anonymous donor eggs.  I'm not going to tell her how I feel about donor conception.  I'm not going to warn her that her child -- should she successfully have one -- might have some strong feelings about donor conception too.  She had already spent tens of thousands of dollars on failed fertility treatments.  I do not believe my opinion would change her mind.  Instead, I think it would make it even harder for her to talk to me, and I think it would drive a wedge between me and one of the few "original family" members I have left.  Most importantly, her choice to use anonymous donor eggs does not affect me.  I wished her luck and all good things, and I meant it. 

Personally, I would not donate my eggs, and I would not use donated gametes of any kind.  I told my husband before we tried to conceive that, if we couldn't conceive naturally, I knew I could not use donated gametes.  I don't expect someone who isn't donor conceived to understand or to anticipate the pain, but as someone who is and who has gone through it, I couldn't in good conscience do that to another person.  He understood.  He had thought it went without saying. 

I believe anonymous sperm and egg donation should be banned in the US, as they have been in the UK and several other first world countries.  I believe third party reproduction should be heavily regulated, donor medical information tracked, and number of offspring per donor severely limited, the way many people think it already is.  If we continue to let the free market decide the ethics of third party reproduction, money will continue to do all the talking.  Gamete "donors" will continue selling their sperm and eggs, people who desperately want children will continue buying them, and cryo banks and fertility clinics will continue making enormous sums of money as the wish granters and middle men.  People who haven't been conceived yet don't have money.  They are the goods.  Their rights will continue to be leveraged by their parents and doctors, all decisions on the matter made for them before they are even conceived, let alone born.  This is distasteful to me.

Of course, whether anything or everything is outlawed, people can still go onto Craig's List or have one night stands or recruit family friends and refuse to tell their children who their genetic fathers are (traditional "artificial insemination" can easily be done outside a medical setting), but I think fewer people will be willing to do that who weren't already planning to do that.  I'm aiming for improving the current situation.  I don't believe there is a way to fix it completely.  There will always be children born who don't know who their genetic parents are, for whatever reason.  I just want to limit those numbers as much as possible.

I used to feel much more upset about being donor conceived than I do now.  I used to feel much angrier and sadder and more misunderstood when people challenged me or disagreed with me.  I feel a lot better now that I know who my father is.  Knowing his identity doesn't solve all my problems, but it's all I really wanted, and I got it.  No one can take that knowledge away from me, regardless of how strongly they feel that I should shut up and be grateful to be alive.  I wish for everyone who is donor conceived (or adopted, or unsure of their parentage for whatever reason) to be able to know who their biological parents are.  I think it makes things easier.  On that note, please take an autosomal DNA test.  23andMe and AncestryDNA and Family Tree DNA each do them for about $99 or less, and even if you know who your parents are, you might help someone else find theirs.

A List of Mom's Antics While Dad's in Hospital

My best friend ran across and forwarded me an old email I had sent her in the days after my dad went into the hospital, but before the convict story or my taking over my parents' finances or their divorce or my wedding.  It details some of the little things I had forgotten. This email was dated November 8, 2006.

So my dad is in the hospital in Cleveland for the foreseeable future, which puts my mom back in charge of the finances (Dad had come up with a system for paying everything when she stopped paying bills, eating, and getting off the couch).  He had started digging them out of debt so that they were projected to actually be free of debt in five years.  Here is what my mom has done since he has been in the hospital:

1.  decided she has NPH, or Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus
2.  went to the emergency room 3+ times
3.  decided to sue Cincinnati Medical Center for putting her in a psych ward and ignoring her NPH back when she stopped eating and getting off the couch
4.  found out she doesn't have NPH
5.  decided she had multiple sclerosis
6.  bought herself a $2300 bed and explained "if I've got a disease that will make me bed-ridden, I want to be comfortable.  I deserve this." 
7.  found out she doesn't have multiple sclerosis
8.  fell down and "broke [her] nose"
9.  bought a motorized scooter and explained that "walking is obviously hazardous to [her] health"
10.  made arrangements to buy a $3000 van from a woman in Queens so that she will have something to ride in when the degenerative disease gets into full swing (as she said today, the doctors ruled out NPH and MS, but she could still have Lou Gehrig's disease, Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Parkinson's, or any other number of diseases that she has heard of on television -- she listed more but I can't remember them all)
11.  tried to convince me to drive said van from Queens to Cincinnati.  I said no, and she has decided my cousin will leave his job, wife, and young children to do it for her.  I'm pretty sure he doesn't know about this yet. 
12.  decided she could get Medicaid and cheap drugs if she divorced my father, so she went to see a lawyer about a "quickie divorce" while Dad is in the hospital
13.  saw an ad for refinancing home equity loans on the way to the lawyer's office and decided to do this instead
14.  demanded that my father get a fax number where she could send him the paperwork in the hospital so she could get his signature and refinance the loan the next morning.  got angry when she was told the fax wasn't coming through and said they (nurses?  I'm not sure who had the fax machine in the hospital) were lying.  found out two days later that her fax machine is broken.
15.  cancelled the non-profit program that had arranged for them to be out of debt in five years, because it was "too expensive" (note:  all money being paid into this program was paying off debts)

Where Are They Now?
Today she has decided she will use the $40,000 she expects from refinancing their home equity loan to fix up the house ("so I have somewhere nice to live when your dad dies"), to purchase back her parents house that they just sold for $35,000 and give it to them as a surprise gift ("yes, it will cost more than they sold it for, but it will be fixed up"), and to hire a personal care aide for herself since she will need someone to dress and feed her when the degenerative disease -- whichever one it happens to be -- finally kicks in.

My dad is pretty panicked in his hospital room in Cleveland with no way to do anything about this.  He never really paid attention to the finances before she gave them up, at least not to my knowledge, so it's distressing seeing him in this situation.  He doesn't know about 80% or so of the list above, and I want him to be aware of the stuff he might be able to prevent, but I don't want to freak him out since I think he'll heal faster if he calms down.  I'm glad for my situation, being out of there and all, but I wish I could do something to keep her from ruining the rest of his life.  I'm not sure what kind of situation they'd each be in if they did divorce -- surely the alimony would ruin them both, and he'd still be saddled with the debt she racked up.  Oh, and I forgot to mention that, shortly before #1 on the list, my mom canceled her medical insurance.

I made Thanksgiving travel plans finally and determined that I would not be able to tolerate actually being in the same house as that woman without snapping (I've been really docile on the phone -- you'd think I was on Valium or something, but in reality I just try not to pay too much attention to what she is saying), so I'm staying in a hotel in Cleveland and spending a few days with just my dad and fiance.  The hotel has an indoor pool, and there are a few restaurants in the area (it's in the outskirts of the city and we plan to stay in that area), so Michael* and I figure when we aren't hanging out at the hospital, we can pass the time in a leisurely fashion, and the hospital will probably be pretty calm too.  I'll miss not seeing friends in Cincy, but I really would not be able to handle her, plus she was insisting on accompanying me to Cleveland on the one day I'd get to see my dad.  It just wouldn't have worked.  I was really good today when I told her though, because when she accused me of loving him more than her and of not wanting to see her, I laughed and said, "You're being silly, Mommy," and explained calmly that my father has cancer and is in the hospital 4 hours from anyone he knows.  Even she knew that her retort of "that's what he wants!" was weak at best, and that her argument that he doesn't like people only holds for people he dislikes, like her.  

* The fiance.  This is not his real name.

The Letter from My Anonymous Sperm Donor Father

About a week after my half-siblings Hans and Simone contacted me online and "friended" me on Facebook, I received the long anticipated letter from my biological father.  Our father. 

He said he'd never expected me to be able to find him.  He said I'd had 20 years to get used to the idea of who he might be but that he had literally never thought of the offspring he'd created from his "donations." 

He said his wife was very upset that I had found them.  He said she is staunchly Catholic and had only agreed to let him donate sperm all those years ago under the condition that no one would ever know.

He forbade me ever to say his name on social media.  He forbade me ever to mention his children on social media.  He forbade me to contact Hans or Simone unless they contacted me first. 

He told me to be grateful for the parents who raised me because they made me who I am. 

He told me his favorite book, how tall he claims to be, and that he has no hobbies to speak of.  He answered all my questions.  Then he said breast cancer runs in the family, as does colon cancer, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.  My grandfather died young after quadruple bypass surgery.  My grandmother had colon cancer when she died, but he says it was the diabetes that killed her.  She was already senile at the time, Hans told me later.  Barely 70.

He told me never to contact him again.

The Time My Mother Put Me On Antidepressants

When I was in high school, my mother already had a knack for finding doctors who would prescribe whatever she asked for.  I remember her taking me to an ENT and asking for a specific dosage of Augmentin, and he just wrote the prescription.  I don't remember what was wrong with me, but growing up in a hoard house where the basement had standing water and there was visible mold on the walls, I had a lot of upper respiratory infections, sinusitis, and related ailments.  When I tested positive for a mold allergy, the doctor told me the best thing I could do was avoid having bouquets of flowers in my room.  I spent most of my childhood, as I remember it, on antibiotics.  My mother told me they would bolster my immune system.

I hadn't had a regular doctor since elementary school, when my male pediatrician had insisted on giving me my first breast exam and, subsequently, nightmares.  I'd never liked that doctor, but that was around the time I refused to see him again.  When my mother found out a woman from our church was a hematologist and oncologist, despite my lack of any blood diseases or cancer, she decided to make her my general practitioner.  My first PAP smear was done by that hematologist, though I don't know why.  She was not good at it. 

I remember one day my mother called the hematologist's office while I sat on the couch beside her, and she announced into the phone that her daughter was being "a moody teenager" and needed to be put on antidepressants.  I'd still never been allowed to speak to a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist of any kind at that point since, as my mother said, "our family doesn't believe in therapy."  I also made straight A's in school and was absolutely terrified of getting into trouble, so my parents stood to gain very little beyond my own happiness by letting me speak to a professional.  I didn't get to speak to the hematologist either, but she called in a prescription for an antidepressant to our local pharmacy at my mother's behest.

I took the pills my mother gave me.  I thought they might help me get through my final years living in that house, which had been hard.  My mother had been self-medicating with prescription drugs for about three years at that point, some combination of pain killers and muscle relaxants and sleeping pills, though I don't know how consistently she took them back then.  Her behavior was more erratic and confusing than before, but she didn't seem high all the time.

I don't remember what the antidepressant was called, but the pills made me feel self-conscious and anxious in a way I thought I'd long outgrown.  I had been a shy and nervous child, but as I got into high school I'd learned to lock down my fears, put on a smiling mask, and act my way through situations that would have crippled my younger self with social anxiety.  The pills unraveled all that. 

I remember in kindergarten my mother bought me an ugly red sweatsuit with clowns on it and insisted I wear it to school.  It looked like pajamas to me -- ugly pajamas at that -- and I desperately didn't want to wear it, but she insisted.  I sobbed and begged, she called me ungrateful, and I spent the entire day I wore it sure that everyone was staring at me, judging me for wearing pajamas to school.  The antidepressants made me feel like that everyday.  My nerves felt raw.  Fortunately, I recognized it must be the pills doing it.

I don't remember how long I took the antidepressants, but I would guess just a few weeks.  They broke me down pretty quickly, and I remember approaching my mother in tears, telling her honestly but melodramatically that I couldn't go on that way -- that I had to stop taking the antidepressants or double the dosage, but I felt terrible all the time and something had to change.  My mother said I wasn't acting any better yet and therefore couldn't stop taking them.  She looked me in the eye and told me to double the dosage, which struck me as odd because -- even though I'd proposed it -- I knew it was dangerous and a bad idea.  Was she calling my bluff?  Had I been bluffing?  Was she serious?  She didn't call the doctor.  I never saw that doctor -- or any doctor -- about the antidepressants, so I took matters into my own hands and just stopped taking the pills.  I know now that you're supposed to taper them off under a doctor's watchful eye, but I didn't have that, and I quickly went back to normal, mildly depressed but high functioning, feeling better than I had in weeks.

Much later, as an adult, I tried to look up those pills online to see why I'd had that reaction to them.  I'd become scared of ever taking antidepressants again, and I thought maybe if I knew what they were I could be sure to avoid them in future without writing off all antidepressants forever.  I tried to request my file from the hematologist's office, but she had retired years ago, her private practice no longer existed in any form, and no one knew what had become of her records.  I remembered the prescription was a generic, and I know it was the '90s.  I also know it had to be something commonly prescribed in order for a hematologist to feel comfortable doling them out.  I'm guessing it was an SSRI like Prozac or Paxil since these were the most common kind of antidepressants on the market at the time.  What I did learn from the internet is that my reaction -- anxiety, essentially -- is a common symptom of SSRI overdose.  I also learned that the starting dosage for these drugs in the '90s was often too much for a lot of patients -- meaning a lot of people had the same problem that I did -- and starting dosages are generally lower now.  Cue "The More You Know" music.