Alas, a Blog

Trigger warning: graphic descriptions of medical procedures.

As my Facebook friends are no doubt sick of hearing, I have a blocked tear duct. Turns out you really need your tear ducts! Give them a hug, because they are important! If they’re not working right, then tears that would normally drain through your throat run down your face and grow stagnant in your sinuses and breed bacteria, which leads to swelling and pain all around inside your head. My ophthalmologist thinks that when I broke my nose in high school colorguard fifteen years ago (yes, I was a flag team geek), some debris made its way into the duct and led to scarring, which eventually closed it up. That’s causality for you.

Over the past few years, I’ve been growing steadily more exasperated with my body – my creaking, grinding, breakable body, my body with its killer monthly cramps and its wild hair that got me picked on in school and its hunched shoulders and crooked nose (my mom claims, bizarrely, that a nose job should solve my tear duct problem) and its spazzy brain (since I’m no longer cross-posting on a site with my full name, I feel safe saying that the “chronic pain” I mentioned a while back is depression/anxiety with OCD) and its tear ducts that have now pooped out. I feel like my 2001 Saturn – every day a new issue. It wasn’t until very recently that I learned not to blame my body for its problems, but I still feel off-kilter in that mode of thinking. It’s so much easier to be mad at my body.

I’ve already had one procedure to try and open the duct. The doctor, dressed in full surgical scrubs while I sat in a chair in my street clothes, numbed the area between my eye and nose and proceeded to jab at the inside of me with a tiny flexible rod. At one point he punctured a membrane and my nose started bleeding. At another point I had to ask him to take the thing out because I feared I would throw up from the trauma of it. Finally I felt something give in one duct and he irrigated it; water flowed down my throat as he emptied a syringe into the tiny hole in the corner of my eye. The other duct, though, remained blocked.

When I got home, my eye swollen almost shut and splotched with red, I joked around with my husband and ate some dinner and then let my guard down and shook and cried for the rest of the night. I’d neglected to mention the anxiety disorder before the doctor started. I really should have.

The next step is surgery: dacryocystorhynostomy, or the creation of a new duct. Sometimes it works like an ear piercing; you put a thing in there and eventually it stays open. Other times they have to insert a tiny, permanent tube. In the operating room, the surgeon will make an incision between my nose and eye so that he can access the intricacies underneath the skin. It’s a relatively minor surgery, just a small thing, in and out of the hospital in a few hours’ time. But I keep thinking about the scar. Will my glasses cover it? Will people see? After decades of being told I was ugly, I finally consider myself pretty-in-a-way, and I’m scared that a scar on my face will obliterate my modest progress.

I’m also afraid of general anesthesia, which I’ve never had. When I was a kid, I prayed I’d never have to have my tonsils removed because I was afraid people would laugh at me while I was asleep, or that I’d lose control of myself before or after and blurt out all my secrets. All my life, I’ve kept myself under tight control, never letting people in, hating myself for moments of weakness. I hate myself when I have cramps and I ask my husband for tea. I hate myself when he cooks dinner because my back is out again or I’m too depressed to move. I’ve always been irrationally annoyed by people with lots of little health problems, because I’m disgusted by that aspect of myself. I hate feeling fragile and weak. I hate fearing that I’m acting like a baby.

My biggest fear, though, is waking up to pain. This blogger had the same surgery that I’ll have and she says they put a tube down her throat while she was under, and that afterwards her throat hurt. I came across a picture showing how deep these tubes go – boy, that was a mistake. I’m terrified of the violence of modern medicine: needles and tubes and catheters and monitors and machines. (I had a catheter once and it was awful.) At some point in my life, I became terrified of harsh touches, so much so that sometimes my husband can barely touch me without triggering some ancient, objectless fear. After the tube and the incision and God knows what else, I’ll have to wear a stent for three months before the doctor snips a knot and I blow it out through my nose. The pre-op anxiety has triggered the worst of my mental health problems. I don’t think we as human beings have the instincts to really deal with phenomena like this.

Then there’s the money. Lord, I can’t even think about that right now.

I feel like at some point, I and others around me were trained to be blasé about minor surgeries, to brush off the fear, to treat them like nothing special. There’s no room for the profundity of willingly forfeiting your free will to someone you’ve barely met so that they can hurt you. Even this post feels like a frightful indulgence, considering all the bloggers who have written about cancer, about childbirth, about experiences I can’t imagine.

I feel like I’ve been given no room to really deal with the effects of modern medicine on my mental health.

So I’ll ask you: what are your thoughts on surgery? What are your experiences (especially those of you who deal with anxiety or OCD)? What have you felt and learned? I’d love some reassurances here. People, I’m serious about the mental health thing – I’ve been in a continual state of panic (shaking hands, tears, racing heart) for five days now, and the surgery is almost two weeks away. I don’t know how my body can keep this up. When I say anxiety, I mean ANXIETY. When I say obsession, I mean OBSESSION. When I say disorder, I mean that things that are supposed to be in order are not in order at all.

So I’ve been keeping a worm bin (a compost bin that uses worms to turn food scraps into fertilizer) for about two years now. For the first year or so, I kept the bin in the garage, but that made it too easy to ignore; the food scraps would pile up in the bag in the corner of our kitchen and start to smell, and the worms would tunnel sadly for weeks through their own poop, hoping against hope for a delivery of broccoli stems and wilted chard. Mold would grow. Sprouts would become seedlings and then die from lack of sunlight. So I moved the bin indoors, which led to much better care of the worms and somewhat better care of my plants, too, since I was harvesting the castings more often. But it also led to a pretty harrowing fruit fly problem. So back down to the garage it went.

The city of Long Beach – or, at least, our block – has a giant cockroach problem, by which I mean that both the problem and the cockroaches are giant. A few months ago I caught our cat sniffing and pawing the wall of our living room; I thought he was communing with ghosties and laughed it off, but after the roaches started getting into the apartment, I realized that he was probably hearing and smelling them in the walls. For awhile, my husband and I would come out each morning to find roach parts lying here and there on the carpet, along with the occasional pile of cat puke. The exterminator said they were probably coming in from outside the building. We would see them crawling around on the wall of the garage when we came home from work.

Yes, the garage – where I moved the compost bin. Spoiler alert?

After I moved it back down, I promptly went back to my old habits. It wasn’t until I noticed that my jasmine buds were dying before they bloomed that I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fertilized it. I hurried to the garage, held the bin close to my body as I maneuvered it around the car, and opened it in the shade of the garage door.

Whatever substance was in there was definitely not compost. It was swampy. It smelled like a ripe sewer. The worst part, though, were the three-inch-long cherry red cockroaches that covered the surface of it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way they looked as they crawled on top of each other and scurried around the sides of the bin.

My husband heard me scream and came down. We moved it to the sun and kicked it a couple of times, but most of the roaches stayed. To make a long story short, we decided that the worm bin was kaput and the least terrible course of action was to just dump its contents in the garbage. If we’d been thinking more clearly, we would have tried to get it in a bag first; as it was, though, I was panicked and on the verge of dry heaving, so we each grabbed a handle, ran it to the dumpsters, and did our best to pour it in. There were a few worm survivors at the bottom. We paused while I tried to think of a way to save them, but putting them in one of the dusty planters would probably kill them, and keeping the compost bin would only invite more cockroaches. We dumped them. Situations like this are why I observe Yom Kippur.

While we were dealing with this, a guy from next door came out of his gate and sat silently on his bike, not quite staring at us, but making it clear that he was interested. Finally he said, “Not very neighborly, is it?”

“Huh?” we said.

It turned out that we were dumping our catastrophe into his building’s trash can. Or, rather, it had our address written on it, but it was a wee bit closer to his building than it was to ours, so obviously it was his.

“Does it really matter?” we asked.

“Just doesn’t seem very neighborly to me,” he said.

We had to apologize twice, and then remind him that we’d apologized twice, to get him to go away. What I felt genuinely terrible about later, aside from the worms, was dumping without a bag.

I still have a couple of unanswered questions about the whole fiasco. First off, my neglect of the worms wasn’t any worse than it had been in the past. What went wrong this time? Secondly, worm bins are designed to keep out larger animals. How did the giant roaches get in? I have some theories, but honestly, I’m still too revolted to start researching. In any case, we’re moving in a month, so the worm bin is on hiatus until we get settled in our new place – which, according to the UCLA student housing office, will have a balcony.

How are your DIY urban homestead endeavors going? Consider this a place to gripe, whine, and vent about those veggies that are dying, that bread that isn’t rising, and other projects that have gone awry.