Being female, being dismissed...

All my laundry is done, folded, and put away.  Laundry joy is having all your socks matched up at the end!

I coiled up my new basement laundry lines and put them in the laundry supplies cabinet in the basement.  See, holding on to some pretty purple rope for a couple of decades and still having office supplies on hand can come in pretty useful!

I have been doing a good job of eating down the food in my freezer, but that also means that I have filled up my mason jar drawer!  I do have plenty of food to last through November, still.  And I suppose I could line up the jars on the basement counter, but wouldn't it just be better to cook up some more tastiness than empty the freezer?  When I am more rested, after many more naps are under my belt, I should figure out what I can make with what I have on hand. I miss cooking.

I thought about going down and seeing just what meat there is in the basement, but then I thought napping was more important.  Poor Amos needed extra napping, too.  You see, every time I sneeze, he leaps away from me in terror.  Every since he came to live with me, sneezing has frightened him.  It was his one fear before the pit bull attack.  Weird, eh?

The other night, whilst washing my hair, I got to thinking about just how thick it is once more.  For a long time, this blog was filled with entries about losing my hair.  It got to the point of not wanting to step into the shower at all, because clumps were coming out right and left.

I brought a rather full ziploc bag of hair to several doctors, as an example of just how much hair I had lost.  Because my hair is very, very, very thick, though really, really, really fine, all the doctors I saw told me that my hair was fine.  Nothing was wrong with me.  It was just stress.

Just stress.  That's the ultimate rejection of your well-being by a physician ... especially if you are a female.  Oh, how hearing that "diagnosis" wounded me!  Several years later, a doctor treated my very real physical symptoms, instead of writing me off as a head case, and the hormones added to the thyroid medication I was taking resolved the imbalance within my body that triggered the hair loss ... as well as the constant bleeding and a host of other uncomfortable symptoms.

Michelle wrote on her dysautonomia blog this really great post about how being female can be a barrier to getting medical care.  It is a rather powerful presentation of how, especially with dysautonomia, females can become labeled as a mental patient, rather than one suffering from physical problems.  I believe that it is especially powerful, given that Michelle was a practicing psychiatrist before falling ill.

Having it arrive in my inbox was especially great timing for me.  I am still struggling with how that neurologist treated me (mistreated me/did not actually "treat" me) when I went for a dementia assessment.  The assessment (or lack thereof) is on my mind, today, because I gave someone a spreadsheet to modify so that I could work on a distribution list and I received the altered data back in a Word document.  The sad truth about the decline of my brain is that I simply cannot compare the two documents and find the corrections I need to make.

When I first started noticing that I could not longer make such mental adjustments, I would get back comments such as "You're still smarter than me!"  That is not helpful to hear.  At all.  I was trying to talk about both another loss and my frustration in not being able to complete a task.  A comment such as that is dismissive of both.  Is dismissive of me.

Battling being dismissed and battling assumptions are two of the things that trigger rather strong reactions in me.  My friend Mary, rather gently, always manages to point out my own assumptions, which has helped me to temper those strong reactions.

But I still have them and I wrestle with wanting to speak against assumptions when I receive them personally.  For example, I read a post about singing in church and how not singing is, essentially, not serving your neighbor.  Another failure.  SIGH.

The other thing that I do that startles Amos greatly is sing.  So strange, really, if you think about the fact that I've been singing since high school.  I sang in a group that toured North Carolina in graduate school.  Back then, I could never imagine a time where I didn't sing.  But I don't ... not anymore.

The Monday night services at my church are abbreviated, with just a single hymn.  Even if I knew the hymn when there, I no longer would sing the whole song.  In a full service, I could not sing the entire liturgy and the hymnody.  When I sing, I cannot breathe.  When I sing, I can faint.  Stopping singing was one of the hardest "letting go" experiences I have had.

I no longer try to stand for even part of the service, because I know the price I pay for standing still, where the effort of standing is concentrated on just a few muscles (as opposed to walking about some).  Just like I gave up kneeling at the altar, because the pain was just too great, as was the risk of falling whilst trying to rise.

I miss singing.  I miss it the way I miss teaching.  But where I still slip in a bit of teaching here or there, I do not sing.  A note or two in the shower.  Not much elsewhere.  Not even in the shower.  If I sing, I struggle with breathing and can start coughing.  If I start coughing, I can trigger my asthma.  And I can no longer take the emergency asthma medications.  I still do not have a plan for the next bad attack.  So, I avoid all the triggers I can.  Even the one I love.

A long while ago, someone wrote about empty pews, making negative assumptions about why folk were not there. I tried to offer an alternative assumption, one where folk wanted to come, but struggled for one reason or another.  My comments were dismissed.  Those folk, they are not the norm... was the rejoinder.

However, if you actually read the Christian Book of Concord, you will find repeated references to the anguished soul, to the burdened conscious.  I wish I had better words for the thoughts I have, but all I can think to say is that folk talk about the church being made up of sinners, however those same folk don't seem to acknowledge that the church is made up of broken and wounded folk struggling to live in a fallen world, a world where they live in a constant battle with the devil, the world, and their own flesh.

I think the church dismisses the spiritually wounded, passing them off as mental cases in need of psychological care.  I also think that the church dismisses the genuinely mentally ill as in need of psychological help more than spiritual care.   I think that the church looks for the easy answer as to why folk are not in a pew or not singing or whatever judgement-masked-as-assumption is made.  Even though, at the moment, I am opining, I think the church spends far too much time opining about others and/or itself rather than speaking of Christ crucified and sharing His gifts of Christ.

Whenever I read the Book of Concord, I am comforted. I am comforted because the struggling mess that is me is not abnormal in that book of pure doctrine, in that exposition of the Living Word.  It is the same comfort I find in reading the Psalter.  The struggling mess that is me is not abnormal in that collection of prayers God wrote for us to pray ... for me to pray.  When I read Michelle's blog, I am comforted because the struggling, medically dismissed and neglected mess that is me is not abnormal.

Wounded folk are everywhere.  Every two minutes another American is sexually assaulted.  One in four Americans struggle with mental illness.  Drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions are rampant in all age groups ... even children.  Theft and identity theft have become the work of seconds.  This world is rife with the effects of sin and teeming with folk bearing wounds from those effects.

Were my friend Mary listening to my thoughts, she would say, "Come Lord Jesus.  Come quickly!"