Seven

My student, like many autistic kids, repeats a variety of words and phrases throughout the day. It's some kind of self-stimulation, which is great for the kid, but not so great for those of us who don't like to hear AND THEN, THOMAS THUNDERED BY for the 832nd time that day. It can get pretty annoying after a while. Occasionally, at least, you'll get the kids who repeat such random stuff that I can't help but laugh. Like the kid who would make his voice the deepest, growliest voice you ever did hear, cover his mouth with his hand, and then start belting out Frosty the Snowman. Or the kid who would repeat the Microsoft Windows voice-assisted start-up menu. Or the kid who would repeat the DVD menu options... but only in Japanese. They're hilarious. Except when their stim is leaning over really close next to your ear and giving out ear-curdling screams (like my little guy used to do.).

Anyway, my current student doesn't have much language, and what he has is usually unintelligible to those of us who don't watch the television shows he must be watching on a daily basis. Some of what he says I can make out, like I'M JESSICA. No, you're not Jessica, I'll remind him. He usually stares at me, shrieks in annoyance, and tells me I'M JESSICA once again, just louder and that much closer to the don't-tell-me-no-or-I'll-attack-you mood. Ear-curdling screams were so much more my thing.

But more than anything, I really can't stand when my kid repeats one word in particular. He'll say "seven" throughout the day, but he accents the second syllable and drags it out, so it comes out as SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN. It just lacks the entertainment value of demonic Frosty, frankly. It's also killing my summer.

I like Sudoku. In my ever more fervent quest to find relaxing activities that do not involve food and/or vassalizing virtual civilizations and taking their dyes, all the dyes, I try to do Sudoku, but there are numbers in Sudoku.

So, I've put all nine sixes on the grid. I have a four here, and an eight here, so this box must be a SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN.

No, Grace, concentrate. It's summer. Everyone retains at least one item of clothing on their bodies at all times. Your biweekly trips to get your glasses fixed are no longer necessary. You can let your work go and just relax.

So here's the eight, and this much be a sev- SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN.

Seriously, kid? December through June, and you only missed school one day. Let me have my summer.

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

At which point I let loose several words that are not appropriate for a classroom environment, throw down my Sudoku puzzle, and go do something else. Like play Civilization.

Oh look, I just met the seventh civilization on the map!

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

Shut up, you. I'm playing Civilization right now and it is 770 BC and I'm having fun.

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

You're enjoying this, Grace. Just focus on making a trade with Shaka for his dye. It's a good one, he's offering you 7 gold per turn!

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

At which point I throw the computer, cry, and go hide under the covers and try to sleep.

But sometimes, when I can't get to sleep, I count from one to one hundred in my head.

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! 

No! Go away! No! No!

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

And slowly, ever so slowly, I slip further into oblivious insanity.

Grace accidentally overdoses on....

So, here's a picture of me in a hospital bed looking disturbingly chipper. If I recall, I was happy and smiling because Dan had arrived to cheer me up. The medical staff had also just decided to kick me out of the hospital, which was also quite cheering. I had gone by ambulance to the hospital and had survived, which was probably the best thing that had happened to me in the past 24 hours.

The story begins way, way back when I was very young and my mom was trendy before her time. My mom was all-natural, raw, and organic before 95% of the civilized population would even touch plain yogurt with cream on the top. I have terrified memories of mom's special smoothie that I nicknamed Hair for its hair-like, mangled threads of an unknown green vegetable. A few of my siblings were even subjected to cloth diapers. They functioned like regular diapers, except with pins and periodic visits from the diaper truck (I'd love to know if they still exist) to remove the stinky diapers and provide mom's victims with clean diapers. Long after my mom realized that American mothers overwhelmingly swore by Pampers for a reason, the clean diaper extras hung around our house as cleaning rags. Yes, our dining room table was wiped down for years with diapers. Ponder that statement for a moment. There were other awful things, too, like cod liver oil at breakfast. I'm surprised I lived past the age of twelve.

At any rate, for many years, unfortunately coinciding with most of my childhood, my mom was so hardcore healthy that she didn't do other important things like Tylenol. Actually, I'll qualify that. She did do Tylenol, but only when we were sick, like fever and chills sick. We didn't do Tylenol for, you know, pain. Headache? Pain. Twisted ankle? Pain. Muscle aches? Pain. She told me one time that Advil was bad because it altered your DNA, or something wonky like that. (For the record, my mom saw the errors of her ways after she took Advil once for a migraine and it did things like take away pain. She no longer engages in most of the questionable practices detailed above.) MomLogic was such that meds were bad and would kill you. Pineapple juice infused with two cups of kale was magical.

Understandably, when I was 18, the first thing I did was buy some Tylenol. Then I registered to vote, and because I'm boring, that's all I did with my legality. I'd pop those pills whenever I hurt for more than two or three hours at a time, which was actually pretty rare (no, it wasn't the power of cod liver oil). But I must have popped the pills often enough, because....

In my senior year of college, I had cramps. I took Tylenol. Tylenol did zilch. I took two Tylenol. Two Tylenol did zilch. I was in the library at the time, and I sat down on a chair and just started crying because it hurt so much. I was in quite a bit of pain, but I managed to get myself up to the campus health center. The nurse gave me some kind of pills for the pain. I don't remember what they were, but they worked very well! No pain! The nurse told me to take them every few hours as needed. And so I did, remaining pain-free for the rest of the day. I went to sleep as happy as a clam.

I woke up at 3 AM with my heart beating very rapidly. I was sweating and shaking. I am generally healthy (as in I don't usually get sick, but I do have a lot of fatigue/physical issues) and I didn't know what the heck was happening. I called the ambulance on myself and got a free ride over to the hospital (thanks, insurance that lapsed soon afterwards!).

Once I was admitted, I started to get very anxious. I usually experience anxiety physically before I become anxious mentally. But once I start getting physical symptoms, my mental anxiety goes through the roof. I was so nervous at the thought of kicking the bucket right there and then that I felt like I was crawling out of my skin.

I've found that there are two ways to calm myself down a bit if I am anxious. I can try to out-logicize myself and determine the actual versus the perceived dangers of the situation. Since I was currently possibly near death, I couldn't use that technique. I can also try to distract myself by talking. Sometimes it makes me feel better to just talk about the situation; sometimes it helps to talk about something totally random. And that's how the hospital intern got a quick overview of the development of feudalism. I hope he enjoyed it. Serfs up!

So while I was precariously balancing on a tiny footpath spanning the Great Chasm of Life and Death, they ran a few tests and took an x-ray. After what seemed like an eternity, wait, no, I wasn't there yet because I wasn't dead yet, so after what seemed like very close to an eternity, the intern came back to deliver the death sentence.

Long and short of it, I had accidentally overdosed on the generic pain meds from the health center. At the same time, I hadn't actually taken more than the prescribed dose. I was kind of mystified. How had I overdosed? Well, explained the intern, the pills contained caffeine. I had way too much caffeine, and it had made my heart race.

Let me reiterate. 

I had overdosed. On caffeine. Because I had apparently put the equivalent of a Red Bull into my system.

Caffeine.

Caffeine!

On the plus side, I'm sure I couldn't have been the only person out there who mistook the symptoms of too much caffeine for the symptoms of a heart attack. And I was already the weirdo who coped by spouting random information about feudalism, so the intern probably thought I was just a little kooky, not a hypochondriac.

I blame this little episode on my mother. Caffeine was not good for children. Soda with caffeine was particularly evil. Up until that point, my caffeine intake was probably the equivalent of two cups of coffee per year. I just had no idea what too much caffeine felt like.

I was discharged shortly thereafter, but not before Dan snapped my picture as a commemoration of my discovery of the highly popular stimulant of caffeine. The intern told me that next time I should just take an Advil or two because it worked differently than Tylenol.

I went home and I bought some Advil. While it's probably not news to the rest of the world, I'd just like to say that I do take Advil for most aches and pains, and it works quite well. I do ration the stuff like crazy, though. I have no wish to built up a tolerance.

I also started drinking coffee from that point forward. I discovered I liked coffee. I drank decaf and regular mixed together for a while, but I'll now drink a fully-caffeinated cup as a coping mechanism for my energy-draining job. Hopefully I won't die, and I hope that if I ever get carted off again, I'll have overdosed on something a little less wimpy than caffeine.

Summer vacation begins!

So this is it, guys! I'm finally on summer vacation!

It took sooooo long to get to this point. I know I've probably run this subject into the ground by now, but it's worth repeating, one more time. I had a very long, tough year, where I was put into the (not very fun) position of having to advocate for the kids within the classroom. It really tore me up inside, which is why I keep blabbing about the topic. And I still really, really miss my Little Guy. I hope he's doing okay (I've heard some conflicting reports.... and many non-committal reports... I get the distinct feeling nobody quite knows how he is because nobody's quite thought to look into it). I hope he's retained some of his communication skills (again, I've heard conflicting reports). I think way too much about what I could have done better for him. I think I did all I could, but when you get attached to one of these kids, it never seems like it's enough. I'm not sure where I'll be next year, but I do know that I'll be a very different person from last year, in many ways.

On the plus side, I did get the Little Guy to the point where he had a "vocabulary" of about 20 words (using PECS), which was up from the two words he had when I met him (using signs and PECS). When I left, he could say puzzle, marshmallow, bathroom, fork, spoon, napkin, TV, pillow, blanket, locker, lunchbox, bagel, gym, playground, Potato Head, playdoh, drink, bus, book, and shoes. When I got him he could say marshmallow and bathroom. I really wanted to teach him yes and no, but it was way too abstract for him at that point. But there was definitely progress, at least...

But back to summer vacation....

We just came back from a really wonderful trip to Los Angeles. Well, technically it was a wonderful trip to San Gabriel, which is a suburb of LA with much more affordable hotel rates. And technically it was a Chinese ethnoburb of LA, which was AWESOME. There were dozens of Chinese restaurants within a five minute walk of the hotel, all very good and all very cheap. We spent a huge amount of our time eating everything in sight. I came back much more lumpy than usual, but that's okay, because at least there was jook and scallion pancakes. We went to a few wineries, drove to the beach, went to the California Citrus State Park, went to a few aircraft museums (Dan went and took all these pictures of random airplanes; since I don't know or care I nodded and smiled and said "That's nice, honey," when necessary), went to museum with a replica of a Roman villa and tons of Roman art, met up with relatives, and drove way too much. It was really, really great. Oh, and we had cable television!

Now it's on to the rest of summer vacation, where Grace is ecstatic for about two weeks then dies of boredom until the middle of August. I do teach summer school during July, so I will have some of the structure required for being Grace. I have big plans for this summer, including decorating the house and going to the library regularly, but since I'm Grace, most of my plans will probably not happen due to attention span difficulties. I think I'll be pretty happy if I do get some house stuff done. Our walls are still blank and we've been here a year. I'll also be trying to, well, relax. I know I've mentioned in previous posts that I have huge difficulties trying to relax (and I am very aware of the paradox - if you have to try to relax you're already pushing the issue, which kind of doesn't make it relaxing), and it's really the area of my life where I need to focus, strangely enough. I tend to swing towards extremes - either I'm lying on the couch in a catatonic state for six hours watching football games from 2012 or I'm doing stuff for every minute of my waking hours. Neither of which is good for me. Since my attention span is so short, I start feeling anxious after I've been doing one thing for more than about an hour at a time, but because my attention span is short, I have trouble organizing my time. Yes, relaxing is tough.