Time flies …. and this, too, comes with a price

Startling to see how long ago I started this blog, not to mention how quickly I abandoned it.  Okay, so not really abandoned, but just left it to moulder whilst filling that tumblr space with my mental health medicine of choice (read: Richonne adoration and Carlyle obsession).  Well, okay, maybe that’s a sign of good mental health, right?

So the undersized 12-year-old son is now a 15-year-old son and taller than me by a head, which is, granted, no big achievement as I’m short, but still.  His hospital stay in 2014 lasted through early 2015, and he returned to the hospital at the start of 2017 for just over a month.  The first time, an extended stay that included weaning him off the array of meds he was taking, was actually helpful, discharging him just shy of his 13th birthday to a wonderful therapeutic school in the south.  He remained med-free for a year and a half, but the anxiety just became too much to bear (along with a severe depression that manifested almost immediately when my mom died)  and he began acting out and …. well, the meds began again that summer.

And now?  Well, this last hospital stay was …. insane.  He spent it in a state of  controlled quiet or impulsive wall-writing, and the chief of the youth ward decided (after reading precisely two reports about him and only speaking to him for 10 minutes in one meeting) that he has ADHD, that’s his problem, and let’s give him Ritalin.

What. The. Fuck.

ADHD he may very well have, but the anxiety, panic attacks, and rage issues haven’t gone away.  And yeah, the DSM-V decided that his PDD is now just another point on the autism spectrum, but that hasn’t changed, either.

He was on Ritalin when he was in elementary school, Doctor.  And Concerta.  And RitalinLA.  And I’m not sure what other variation of it because I’ve forgotten by now.  BTDT.

The psychiatrist at his school, who has had many extended meetings with him, and his therapists and his special-ed teachers all agree that the ADHD (if indeed he has it, as it was ruled out in his first hospitalization) is the least of his problems.

But the doctor from the hospital gets the last word, because the Ministry of Health logo is on her letterhead.

Not sure what all this means for him, but at the very least it means he’s going to have to fight for help and support and services.  Not sure what it’ll mean when his Tzav Giyus comes, either.  Maybe his brother, who’s starting his own army service soon, can find out for us who to call to find out how to deal with that bit.

All medical care comes with a price, too.

I will say that is one of the things that has made all of this trial easier…. being here, where for all of the hospitalization and therapy and care that he’s been through, we have never been billed a shekel.  Or a penny.  Or anything else.  Okay, co-pays for meds, but even those are mild.

Can’t imagine what it would be like if we were still in the States.  Or now, with the travesty that the resident of Pennsylvania Avenue is making of health care over there….

Hoping for everybody that we all get through all of our trials.  With as small a price as possible.

So the importance of Fandom.

So for the past month, my 12-year-old son has been hospitalized in the psychiatric hospital in the next town over.  It’s a government facility and also associated with the Sackler Faculty of Medicine of Tel Aviv University.  It’s traumatic for him, traumatic for us, and has become a second home for me & my husband as we spend every afternoon and evening at the hospital with our son.

So for the past month, Hamas has expanded their range, and instead of just sending their usual daily rockets and mortars at the Israeli communities in the 20-mile radius around Gaza, they’ve been firing long-range rockets at the rest of the country as well.  I spent the first week of the rocket-flare-up-turned-war glued to news sites and frantically scrolling through Facebook, looking for info, in between the sirens which send us all running to the shelter.

Enough.

Can’t deal with it all.  So have moved my emotional headspace to the Scottish Highlands in the 18th century.  And there it will remain until it’s safe to come out.

Sure, I’m still going to the hospital to be with my son every day.  And sure, Hamas’ rockets are still firing at me (and occasionally making us pull over the car on the way to the hospital to run for cover) …. but my mental health clearly needs to be considered.  And contemplating James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser in a kilt is way better for the soul than contemplating Khaled Mashaal in a luxury hotel in Qatar while his people pay a very harsh price for his institutionalized hatred.

Besides, once I’m done shlepping out MOBY, there’ll be the series to torrent.  Well, to find the torrents of.  Well, to have on the computer to watch obsessively in the middle of the night until my eyeballs fall out.

Either way.

Fandom as survival mechanism.  Works for me.

 

Randoms …

I started this whole long thing about MI and men and boys and misogyny.  Didn’t work out.  Too much that’s too muddled in the brain.

My 12-year-old son has mental illness.  To start out with (and the least of his problems), he’s on the autism spectrum, but more to the point he’s got mood disorders.  Major temper problems, lashing out is his standard method of interaction.  He’s truthfully more than I know how to deal with.  

DH has (had) two aunts with mental illness, may they rest in peace.  His mother’s sister received treatment for it for years and was totally in control of her life … held a steady job, read the New York Times from cover to cover every day, went to museums, did sketches and artwork that was even published, and was generally very together for someone with mental illness.  His father’s sister, on the other hand, was untreated, and was quite off the deep end.  A bag lady for years at a time. She would talk about laser beams and the Kennedys and who knows what else.  

So that’s the bookends and my son is the book in between.  How the story goes, nobody knows.

But we spent the morning at his psychiatrist’s office (without him, since he refused to come) and at the social welfare office, trying to get a social worker assigned to help us with his benefits, etc.  Not so simple.

So now I have to tackle the backlog, and what am I doing?  Reading blogs by women obsessing about Jamie Frasier.  Help me L!rd.  This is not getting me anywhere.  Fictional perfect men can’t help me, no matter how perfect they may be.

More later.  I like this place to vent.  Should probably mark it all private, ‘ey?

Beginnings?

So I don’t get the PhantomoftheOpera love.  Really, I don’t.  And I adore the thing.

But honestly, I adore the thing for Gerry.  I could very happily live without any other adaptation (including the one I saw on B’way almost 30 years ago) of the musical and any other version of the book, even.  Leroux wrote another ugly-guy-wants-beautiful-girl story, except that in his version the ugly guy was uglier than usual and was also brilliant but was also batshitfuckingcrazy.  Pardon my French.  But he was.   And I enjoyed the book, but I wouldn’t want to kiss a guy without a nose, if I could avoid it.  Does that make me shallow?  Not sure.  Doubt it, though.

And the ugly-guy-gets-the-girl trope has been done in so many variations, that I am not getting why this ugly-guy-doesn’t-get-girl-in-the-end is supposed to be so much more … more.

Except for the movie.  The 2004 movie.  The 2004 movie adaptation of the ALW musical.  To be precise.  Because the ugly guy isn’t actually ugly at all.  He’s a gorgeous masterpiece of a man on half of his face, and the other half is, well, not quite so pretty, but really, with eyes like that, who needs to look at the rest of the face anyway?  And who wouldn’t want to be the object of adoring eyes that look like that?  (Really, Gerry’s eyes are truly something special.  But anyway.)

And all of this is why fanfic is a fine thing.  Because it can give us the variations on the Gerik-has-his-life-validated-when-Christine-takes-her-head-outta-her-ass-and-sees-that-she’s-supposed-to-be-with-Gerik story ending that we need.  Or that I need, anyway.

Would I want to have my life to do over so that I can do all the right things to be the object of such adoration?

No.  Because if he didn’t look like Gerry, I wouldn’t be interested anyway.

Okay.  So this is the fangirl blog of someone way too old for this.  Like, my-friends-are-already-grandparents too old.  But that’s okay.  Old people need outlets, too.  Even if we stopped being teenagers decades ago, we can play pretend, right?