Ceri B.

 I'm on the mend from a very strange allergic reaction—and keep in mind, I know from strange in this department. Thursday afternoon, something hit and produced reactions more like chemical burns than any normal rash or welt. Excrutiatingly painful, particularly when they erupted in the groinocological region. For a day or so there I did a lot of hobbling, not only from those particular outbreaks but from aches underneath the welts/burns/whatever on my arms and legs, too. A combination of my usual detoxing supplements and extra tea tree oil cream, then Neosporin, to soothe and relieve is doing the job, but wow. I've still got a lot of weird marks, and one of my neighbors asked if I'd been in poison oak. I haven't.

Best as I can figure, something had gotten on my skin, probably stirred up by moving-out-related action downstairs, and then something else hit downtown, so that it was kind of a binary chemical weapon attack. Love to know what it was.

My regular readers know that I write "wow" a lot. The world often surprises and boggles me, and I like to note the fact. But it does leave me at a bit short when I want to really, really say "wow". Wow. WOW, even. Seattle Counseling Service impressed me a lot.

The woman who did my interview has a classic casual style, but completely professional manner. Parts of my experience with systemic illness were unfamiliar to her, but she had a frame of reference that anchored her well enough to provide incisive questions that helped me make important distinctions. She's the first person I actually said a lot of these things out loud to, rather than writing them out as previously. They sounded strange to me, some of them, but...right. Knowing myself, I imagine I'll have bouts of self-doubt for a long time to come, but I feel a lot more firmly set in the rightness of my wishes after having laid them out for someone else.

As for the help they can offer me..."all of it" seems a pretty fair description. I have here on my desk a referral to a physicians' practice that takes Medicaid and works with SCS on a regular basis, so they're prepared to deal with the medical side if and when. I've got a push to go follow up on the dentist lead I already have. And SCS will do the paperwork so that I can get disabled people's bus passes again. Within their own practice, they're set to help with the grief, depression, and anger I've got built up, as well as with sorting through my gender identity better, working out a plan of action, and then putting it into practice. Medicaid in my flavor entitles me to 33 hours a year of counseling, so I'll have biweekly appointments, with a scheduling call this week or next to set them up.

One last thing: she volunteered the suggestion, when we got to that question, that the obviously right answer to "Gender?" for all their internal paperwork is "Female." Whatever I can or can't do and choose to do or not about it, as far as they're concerned, I start off as female, and only the expression of it changes. I could get used to this.

It took years of effort, as it always does, but in the end SSI did agree I have problems. What I didn't really get at the time is why the evaluators put emotional lability at the top of the list, ahead of what I usually think of as the "real" ones involving immune, endocrine, and other such complexities. Every so often something comes along to remind me with force that they did not make a bad call.

I navigate phone treees and deal with tech support stuff better than 78-year-old Mom does, and I tend to feel that she's earned a break on hassling such things when she doesn't feel like it. This morning something came up with her TV service, so I made a call on her behalf. It went badly. First the support person insisted on Social Security numbers for confirmation of both my identity and Mom's, a thing we've never been asked before, and I do this several times a year for her. Then they insisted that nothing could be done because the account is in my late father's name, and Mom would have to fill out a change of name form for it. This is a rank lie, or a terrible misunderstanding.

But I couldn't explain that, or do anything, really. I melted down. I got tongue-tied and inarticulate, furious about both the person on the other end and my own sudden loss of ability to explain (or demand a supervisor, or anything), then exhausted and depressed at another failure to do something so mundane. These episodes are officially not seizures because they don't produce the distinctive EEG activity required for a seizure diagnosis, so they're in my medical file as "seizure-like episodes". I staggered off to bed and slept badly for several hours. I'm awake again, but I'm still drained and shaky, and fighting down pre-migraine sysmptoms. The day's a dead loss for anything productive.

I do have some evening fun to look forward to - an in-game social event in World of Warcraft with some of my favorite people. And I let them know that I'll be slow and quiet, and that's okay with them. So I'll have fresh things to think about in a few hours. I just hate breaking so damn easily.