diagnosed autistic, trying to schedule surgery with Dr. Garramone, more about my mom (TW)
May 2, 2013
Well, according to my therapist Lorrie, I am officially on the autism spectrum. She explained that the “borderline" & “on the fence" thing she was talking about last week was “borderline Asperger’s syndrome", and it’s “borderline" only because I don’t have narrow & all-absorbing interests - but it’s pretty arbitrary and imprecise. Asperger’s, along with PDD-NOS and Autism, have been removed from the DSM-5 and replaced with “Autism Spectrum Disorder" (Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3) and somewhat different criteria. Not sure if Lorrie will have to reassess me after the DSM-5 comes out later this month or not. Anyway, she drew me a diagram/scale (in fuschia!) with “Neurotypical" (0) on one end & “Autism" (100) on the other, the cut-off point (~60), the overlaps, and a gradient so now it makes a lot more sense to me. (I understand things much better visually.) I got to keep the diagram/scale thingy :)
Lorrie lost her voice last week and still hadn’t gotten it back today so that’s why she couldn’t call me back last week but she did get my message, which is why the “borderline" thing was the first thing we talked about after hi/how are you.
I’m very glad to know it’s just that I’m on the autism spectrum and hadn’t been diagnosed, so I just have another neurodevelopmental condition (in addition to ADHD and learning disabilities) but there’s nothing wrong. “Different, Not Less" ♥
I was surprised to find out that the only criteria I didn’t meet for Asperger syndrome is the narrow & all-absorbing interests! I figured I didn’t meet the eye contact thing either, cuz I can make eye contact and sustain it (as in I stare at people a lot…. whoops) in certain circumstances, but a lot of the time I make eye contact and then look away. *shrug*
Anyway, so we mostly talked about that stuff, and how I talked about it with my dad over the weekend and he told me that he never thought my hair-pulling was trichotillomania (compulsively pulling out one’s hair) because I don’t pull mine out, I twist/twirl & pull (and rub when it’s too short to pull). So my dad told me over the weekend that he thinks my hair-pulling, rocking back and forth, and other repetitive movements are self-stimulation (AKA “stimming") / self-soothing, and I told her that. Makes sense to me, and it’s interesting my dad came to that conclusion. Now that I think about it, so many of my grounding/relaxation techniques are tactile (lying on the floor, walking outside barefoot, splashing cold water or holding ice on my skin, rolling a Wartenburg pinwheel over myself, self-injury) because that’s mostly what helps me feel better. So, anyway, I talked about that stuff a bunch, and how I try not to stim around most people because people act like it’s weird for me to pull my hair or whatever and I’ve gotten mocked a bunch (including by my parents, unfortunately). I was rocking back & forth in my chair in the waiting area before therapy started while I was rereading a Smithsonian magazine article about how some researchers in Munich mathematically got potassium molecules to a degree lower than absolute zero (though not actually lower) because I was excited or whatever, but I was not stimming very much, just a bit. I like having one word to call all the repetitive movements that I do.
Oh, when I was talking about social interaction and sensory stuff, she said another thing I can do for auditory sensory issues besides headphones is wrap a blanket tightly around myself. I wasn’t sure why that would help initially, but I think just because it’s comforting, not because it’d block out the noise (unless I wrapped a blanket around my head). She’d mentioned tightly-wrapped blankets before and it is a good idea.
I told her I got cleared for top surgery yesterday and she had this great big smile on her face, I think she was almost happier than I was because I was still nervous because the nurse hadn’t faxed it to Dr. Garramone’s office yet. (I called my cardiologist’s office and got a hold of a nurse named Nancy who faxed everything to Dr. Garramone’s office, and I called Dr. Garramone’s office like 20 minutes later and they’d gotten it but Dr. Garramone hadn’t read through it yet so I’m gonna call back & schedule top surgery tomorrow.) We just talked about general top surgery stuff kinda, but more so regarding school and whether I’ll miss classwork or something because it hurts to move my arms, but I’m gonna ask Dr. Garramone about that.
We talked about school too and she said I seem really motivated about school and it seems like I just had to get my life together before really getting into college, and that since fall semester starts not even a week after I’ll likely have top surgery (either August 20th or August 22nd, and school starts August 26th), I might wanna just take 1 or 2 classes instead of 3 or 4 since I’ll be dealing with top surgery recovery and I don’t wanna overwhelm myself. Not a bad idea. I told her I should be okay with getting back into school because if it’s online then I can just have a bunch of caffeine, hyperfocus for a while and then take breaks when I get hyper or whatever, and I’ve learned to kinda catch when I’m being a perfectionist and overly-focusing on details instead of the big picture, and I’ve learned that tutoring helps me with stuff like math and chemistry, and other things like that, and I’m on better meds now for my moods that actually work well so I should be good to go.
I don’t remember the context but I mentioned how I forget to eat a lot of the time and she said it sounds like an ADHD thing because I’m hyper-focusing. I didn’t talk about different stuff like avoiding food and binge-eating because I don’t do those things as much as I used to, but if it gets to bothering me again then I’ll mention it.
Umm, I also talked about how I’ll just zone out or not hear people when they’re talking to me so it’s just like (high-pitched Charlie Brown’s teacher’s voice) “wah wah wah wah" and she thought that was really funny and said “I wish I could laugh!" because her throat was hoarse, poor Lorrie :P
At some point she asked how things with my mom were, and I started kind of getting to it in a little bit of a roundabout way, but then I wandered off to a different subject so I never talked about my mom really. Nothing’s changed anyway.
I think maybe Lorrie felt bad because I told her how, the week when I had to miss therapy because I was at the farm with my dad, it kinda messed up my whole week so I had to try to pretend it wasn’t Thursday but it didn’t work so I still felt “off" and like “I should be in therapy right now" because I like to stick to a routine once I get used to it, and I like patterns and such. And I think maybe she felt bad that I felt bad about that? She’s going on vacation for 10 days next week but said this other therapist is taking over for her while she’s gone so I can call him if I need something. Hopefully she’ll get her voice back before she goes on vacation.
Oh, also, she either likes Nine Inch Nails or at least knows of them and recognizes their logo because she noticed my NIN keychain on my keys and thought that was cool :D
May 2, 2013
a nurse at my cardiologist’s office faxed my clearance form & cardiology report from yesterday’s appointment to Dr. Garramone’s office today, so i’m gonna schedule top surgery tomorrow after Dr. Garramone reads all the stuff :D yayyy so excited!
May 3, 2013
Well, so much for scheduling top surgery today :( I called at 1something but the nurse said Dr. Garramone still hadn’t read my clearance form and had just gotten out of surgery, so she would call me after he’d read it. I guess he must have had questions for my cardiologist or got really busy or something cuz his nurse never called. Dammit.
Feeling pretty bummed. Wish it were the literal fun kind (:D butt sex)
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May 3, 2013
So I wound up talking with my dad about my relationship with progenitor (“mom”) C.T. on the drive out here to the farm and let him know why I want nothing to do with her:
(TW survivor-blaming, rape, abuse, ableism, making excuses for an abuser)
she blamed/blames me for my abuse history & somewhat indirectly for being raped, she’s been ableist against me with regard to my mental health & learning disabilities & autism which she doesn’t even know about she just thinks I’m socially inept or whatever, she’s transphobic & cissexist, she’s queerphobic, I forgot to say she’s also sizist (like she mocks my body fat whenever I’m not rail thin which is all the time since I’m off Adderall), and fuck knows what else, and just in general she’s incredibly disrespectful and dismissive and awful. My dad got to talking about my (lack of a) relationship with C.T. because I was asking him who else he thinks I should invite to my top surgery to help him take care of me and he said I should reconsider asking C.T., or let her know she’s uninvited. I said I’d talk to her about her not coming to my top surgery and then he went on and on and we argued. I’ll get to that in a minute.
He asked me questions about the part of my abuse history and I told him he doesn’t know about it and I’m not ready to talk about it but also there’s no real point in talking about it cuz I’ve processed it myself about as much as I’ll likely be able to, and if I wanna talk to someone then I talk to my friends or a therapist. He said it’s interesting I chose to talk her about it and I said yeah, it was a mistake. (The reasons i talked to her about it were: 1 she basically made me 2 she was there to talk to about it at the time 3 those abusers are in her family.) He kept asking questions kinda heading toward trying to figure out who my abusers were that he doesn’t know about and it made me really nervous cuz we were talking about who in my family I’ve cut out of my life, and I guess I was inadvertently circling around talking about it more blatantly and made myself nervous too. So I just kinda stopped in my tracks with that. Then his phone rang so that helped.
Anyway basically we argued about C.T. cuz he thinks I should talk to her and let her know how I feel and maybe we can work things out somehow or she’ll at least know how she makes me feel or whatever, and I’m too “black & white” in how I think about things, and he thinks she has trouble with “empathy” (reading how other people feel) similarly to how I do and how my brother Chuck also does, and so she hurts my feelings unintentionally and whatever. I told him he can’t be objective about this because she’s his wife and he loves her and so he’s kind of… he can’t see clearly about this. And I told him that I have absolutely no interesting in wasting my time or energy trying to build a relationship with her or get hurt to see how she’s hurt me because I don’t even think of her as my mother, I don’t expect her to change, I don’t really care why she’s emotionally abusive toward me, and I don’t need or want her in my life. He talked a lot about how uncomfortable it makes HIM feel that C.T. and I snap at each other all the time and have no relationship and made it as much about how he feels as how I feel, if not more, which is fucked up and bullshit.
So, seems like I might possibly need to just not have my dad at top surgery either if he’s gonna keep giving me shit about C.T. ugh goddammit.
I did tell my dad not to basically guilt trip me about C.T. though.
May 5, 2013
So somebody from Dr. Garramone’s office was supposed to call me on Friday after he’d read my clearance form and whatnot because I’m not having a typical top surgery (it has to be in the main part of the hospital with a cardiac anesthesiologist), but they never called me back :( I hope they call tomorrow!
Well, according to my therapist Lorrie, I am officially on the autism spectrum. She explained that the “borderline" & “on the fence" thing she was talking about last week was “borderline Asperger’s syndrome", and it’s “borderline" only because I don’t have narrow & all-absorbing interests - but it’s pretty arbitrary and imprecise. Asperger’s, along with PDD-NOS and Autism, have been removed from the DSM-5 and replaced with “Autism Spectrum Disorder" (Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3) and somewhat different criteria. Not sure if Lorrie will have to reassess me after the DSM-5 comes out later this month or not. Anyway, she drew me a diagram/scale (in fuschia!) with “Neurotypical" (0) on one end & “Autism" (100) on the other, the cut-off point (~60), the overlaps, and a gradient so now it makes a lot more sense to me. (I understand things much better visually.) I got to keep the diagram/scale thingy :)
Lorrie lost her voice last week and still hadn’t gotten it back today so that’s why she couldn’t call me back last week but she did get my message, which is why the “borderline" thing was the first thing we talked about after hi/how are you.
I’m very glad to know it’s just that I’m on the autism spectrum and hadn’t been diagnosed, so I just have another neurodevelopmental condition (in addition to ADHD and learning disabilities) but there’s nothing wrong. “Different, Not Less" ♥
I was surprised to find out that the only criteria I didn’t meet for Asperger syndrome is the narrow & all-absorbing interests! I figured I didn’t meet the eye contact thing either, cuz I can make eye contact and sustain it (as in I stare at people a lot…. whoops) in certain circumstances, but a lot of the time I make eye contact and then look away. *shrug*
Anyway, so we mostly talked about that stuff, and how I talked about it with my dad over the weekend and he told me that he never thought my hair-pulling was trichotillomania (compulsively pulling out one’s hair) because I don’t pull mine out, I twist/twirl & pull (and rub when it’s too short to pull). So my dad told me over the weekend that he thinks my hair-pulling, rocking back and forth, and other repetitive movements are self-stimulation (AKA “stimming") / self-soothing, and I told her that. Makes sense to me, and it’s interesting my dad came to that conclusion. Now that I think about it, so many of my grounding/relaxation techniques are tactile (lying on the floor, walking outside barefoot, splashing cold water or holding ice on my skin, rolling a Wartenburg pinwheel over myself, self-injury) because that’s mostly what helps me feel better. So, anyway, I talked about that stuff a bunch, and how I try not to stim around most people because people act like it’s weird for me to pull my hair or whatever and I’ve gotten mocked a bunch (including by my parents, unfortunately). I was rocking back & forth in my chair in the waiting area before therapy started while I was rereading a Smithsonian magazine article about how some researchers in Munich mathematically got potassium molecules to a degree lower than absolute zero (though not actually lower) because I was excited or whatever, but I was not stimming very much, just a bit. I like having one word to call all the repetitive movements that I do.
Oh, when I was talking about social interaction and sensory stuff, she said another thing I can do for auditory sensory issues besides headphones is wrap a blanket tightly around myself. I wasn’t sure why that would help initially, but I think just because it’s comforting, not because it’d block out the noise (unless I wrapped a blanket around my head). She’d mentioned tightly-wrapped blankets before and it is a good idea.
I told her I got cleared for top surgery yesterday and she had this great big smile on her face, I think she was almost happier than I was because I was still nervous because the nurse hadn’t faxed it to Dr. Garramone’s office yet. (I called my cardiologist’s office and got a hold of a nurse named Nancy who faxed everything to Dr. Garramone’s office, and I called Dr. Garramone’s office like 20 minutes later and they’d gotten it but Dr. Garramone hadn’t read through it yet so I’m gonna call back & schedule top surgery tomorrow.) We just talked about general top surgery stuff kinda, but more so regarding school and whether I’ll miss classwork or something because it hurts to move my arms, but I’m gonna ask Dr. Garramone about that.
We talked about school too and she said I seem really motivated about school and it seems like I just had to get my life together before really getting into college, and that since fall semester starts not even a week after I’ll likely have top surgery (either August 20th or August 22nd, and school starts August 26th), I might wanna just take 1 or 2 classes instead of 3 or 4 since I’ll be dealing with top surgery recovery and I don’t wanna overwhelm myself. Not a bad idea. I told her I should be okay with getting back into school because if it’s online then I can just have a bunch of caffeine, hyperfocus for a while and then take breaks when I get hyper or whatever, and I’ve learned to kinda catch when I’m being a perfectionist and overly-focusing on details instead of the big picture, and I’ve learned that tutoring helps me with stuff like math and chemistry, and other things like that, and I’m on better meds now for my moods that actually work well so I should be good to go.
I don’t remember the context but I mentioned how I forget to eat a lot of the time and she said it sounds like an ADHD thing because I’m hyper-focusing. I didn’t talk about different stuff like avoiding food and binge-eating because I don’t do those things as much as I used to, but if it gets to bothering me again then I’ll mention it.
Umm, I also talked about how I’ll just zone out or not hear people when they’re talking to me so it’s just like (high-pitched Charlie Brown’s teacher’s voice) “wah wah wah wah" and she thought that was really funny and said “I wish I could laugh!" because her throat was hoarse, poor Lorrie :P
At some point she asked how things with my mom were, and I started kind of getting to it in a little bit of a roundabout way, but then I wandered off to a different subject so I never talked about my mom really. Nothing’s changed anyway.
I think maybe Lorrie felt bad because I told her how, the week when I had to miss therapy because I was at the farm with my dad, it kinda messed up my whole week so I had to try to pretend it wasn’t Thursday but it didn’t work so I still felt “off" and like “I should be in therapy right now" because I like to stick to a routine once I get used to it, and I like patterns and such. And I think maybe she felt bad that I felt bad about that? She’s going on vacation for 10 days next week but said this other therapist is taking over for her while she’s gone so I can call him if I need something. Hopefully she’ll get her voice back before she goes on vacation.
Oh, also, she either likes Nine Inch Nails or at least knows of them and recognizes their logo because she noticed my NIN keychain on my keys and thought that was cool :D
May 2, 2013
a nurse at my cardiologist’s office faxed my clearance form & cardiology report from yesterday’s appointment to Dr. Garramone’s office today, so i’m gonna schedule top surgery tomorrow after Dr. Garramone reads all the stuff :D yayyy so excited!
May 3, 2013
Well, so much for scheduling top surgery today :( I called at 1something but the nurse said Dr. Garramone still hadn’t read my clearance form and had just gotten out of surgery, so she would call me after he’d read it. I guess he must have had questions for my cardiologist or got really busy or something cuz his nurse never called. Dammit.
Feeling pretty bummed. Wish it were the literal fun kind (:D butt sex)
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May 3, 2013
So I wound up talking with my dad about my relationship with progenitor (“mom”) C.T. on the drive out here to the farm and let him know why I want nothing to do with her:
(TW survivor-blaming, rape, abuse, ableism, making excuses for an abuser)
she blamed/blames me for my abuse history & somewhat indirectly for being raped, she’s been ableist against me with regard to my mental health & learning disabilities & autism which she doesn’t even know about she just thinks I’m socially inept or whatever, she’s transphobic & cissexist, she’s queerphobic, I forgot to say she’s also sizist (like she mocks my body fat whenever I’m not rail thin which is all the time since I’m off Adderall), and fuck knows what else, and just in general she’s incredibly disrespectful and dismissive and awful. My dad got to talking about my (lack of a) relationship with C.T. because I was asking him who else he thinks I should invite to my top surgery to help him take care of me and he said I should reconsider asking C.T., or let her know she’s uninvited. I said I’d talk to her about her not coming to my top surgery and then he went on and on and we argued. I’ll get to that in a minute.
He asked me questions about the part of my abuse history and I told him he doesn’t know about it and I’m not ready to talk about it but also there’s no real point in talking about it cuz I’ve processed it myself about as much as I’ll likely be able to, and if I wanna talk to someone then I talk to my friends or a therapist. He said it’s interesting I chose to talk her about it and I said yeah, it was a mistake. (The reasons i talked to her about it were: 1 she basically made me 2 she was there to talk to about it at the time 3 those abusers are in her family.) He kept asking questions kinda heading toward trying to figure out who my abusers were that he doesn’t know about and it made me really nervous cuz we were talking about who in my family I’ve cut out of my life, and I guess I was inadvertently circling around talking about it more blatantly and made myself nervous too. So I just kinda stopped in my tracks with that. Then his phone rang so that helped.
Anyway basically we argued about C.T. cuz he thinks I should talk to her and let her know how I feel and maybe we can work things out somehow or she’ll at least know how she makes me feel or whatever, and I’m too “black & white” in how I think about things, and he thinks she has trouble with “empathy” (reading how other people feel) similarly to how I do and how my brother Chuck also does, and so she hurts my feelings unintentionally and whatever. I told him he can’t be objective about this because she’s his wife and he loves her and so he’s kind of… he can’t see clearly about this. And I told him that I have absolutely no interesting in wasting my time or energy trying to build a relationship with her or get hurt to see how she’s hurt me because I don’t even think of her as my mother, I don’t expect her to change, I don’t really care why she’s emotionally abusive toward me, and I don’t need or want her in my life. He talked a lot about how uncomfortable it makes HIM feel that C.T. and I snap at each other all the time and have no relationship and made it as much about how he feels as how I feel, if not more, which is fucked up and bullshit.
So, seems like I might possibly need to just not have my dad at top surgery either if he’s gonna keep giving me shit about C.T. ugh goddammit.
I did tell my dad not to basically guilt trip me about C.T. though.
May 5, 2013
So somebody from Dr. Garramone’s office was supposed to call me on Friday after he’d read my clearance form and whatnot because I’m not having a typical top surgery (it has to be in the main part of the hospital with a cardiac anesthesiologist), but they never called me back :( I hope they call tomorrow!