It was a beautiful, warm day in March 2003, the birds were singing, the snow was melting, and I was incredibly, incredibly ticked off at my dad.
The reason for the argument has long been lost in the mists of time, but I'll always remember what I did next. I was so angry that I stormed out of the house (on a day I had class!), marched down the driveway (on a day I had class!), and proceeded to take a walk to cool off (on a day I had class!). Since I was just that upset, I didn't regain a semblance of happiness until I had walked for a long time. Four hours and fourteen miles, in fact. And I totally ditched class.
Back at home that night, angrily performing madd Zerg rushes in Starcraft, I reflected on my choices for the day. I didn't regret storming off and taking a (long) walk, even though I had counted fourteen, yes, fourteen unfortunate very dead and very squashed former squirrels along all those rural roads, but I was feeling very guilty about having missed class. What if I missed some crucial information? What if the TA had finally explained our most recent really vague assignment? Yikes. Seriously, yikes.
The snarls of the Swarm interrupted my crisis of consciousness.
We require more Overlords!
Yeah yeah, OK, fine, I grumbled to myself, clicking furiously. Here are your Overlords. But screw you for interrupting my thought process. Look, I'm going to save now and exit the game! Ha, how does that make you feel now?
Finally free from my obligations as the leader of the Swarm, I got on to the class website and typed out a desperate email.
Hi, everyone. I was not in class today and was wondering what I missed. Did anyone take any notes they could send my way? Thanks in advance. Grace.
I sent the email. Then I decided I had punished the Swarm long enough, and fired up Starcraft once again.
An hour later, I checked for a response. Well, that was quick. I had received an email already.
Sure, I type up my notes from every class. This is what I have. Enjoy! Dan Huang.
Being a supernerd, I could smell another supernerd from a mile away. Dude, he typed up his notes. Which meant he actually took notes. And nobody in the class brought a laptop, so he must have retyped his notes after class. Wow. Even I wasn't that bad.
Now I was curious. Who was this guy? Why hadn't I previously detected his presence in the classroom?
Well, begin the sleuthing process!
I thought back to the most recent class. Huang was an Asian name, I knew that. I remembered that there were three Asians in the class.
Well, one wore a frat shirt with random Greek letters emblazoned on the front every session. Nope, couldn't be him.
Another one of the Asian kids was incredibly hot. Yeah, that was definitely not the mysterious Huang.
That left but one Asian. That would be the fat guy who wore the fisherman's hat and T-shirts in terrifying neon colors to class. Yes, it had to be him. That was Dan Huang. No self-respecting normal person would ever walk around with corny math puns on his clothing.
Really, I thought. I must study this Dan Huang in greater detail next Monday.
So the days went by, all five of them. Monday dawned, and destiny would soon make an appearance right before my (rather confused) eyes.
I got to class early that day. I wasn't really that into the class, and I wasn't really that into stealing furtive glances at the other supernerd in the room (really, I swear!), but I was the commuter who hitched a ride with her employee father every day to school, and frankly, I had nothing else to do at 11:45 on a Monday morning. I'd usually get a seat about ten minutes before anyone else showed up and read the textbook to get anything I had previously missed.
But was I really alone in the room?
A fuzzy memory from the dark recesses of my cranium pushed forward into my thoughts. I started.
Oh no! For six weeks I'd been sitting there in the classroom, reading about the role of women in the French revolution with my mouth hanging open and catching flies, and there was somebody else in the room!
And if it wasn't that Dan Huang, I remembered. I was just so into feminist symbolism that I had just failed to notice the other supernerd in the room who apparently also came to class early every week.
Well, I decided, today I would only pretend to read my historical documents. But I would really be watching what a Huang did in the wild.
On cue, my possible nerdy soulmate lumbered into the classroom.
In this sense, lumbered does not perform a purely descriptive, verbtastic role in my kinda-grammatically-correct sentence. He actually did lumber. First of all, there was a lot of supernerd chunkiness clinging to one particular supernerd. Also, when he walked, his head kind of tipped to one side, and he hung his backpack on the same side, so he looked like he was just falling over on the one side all the time.
So lumber he did. He lumbered into the classroom, through the classroom, and out of the classroom door on the other side of the room.
Hmmmm. Was he coming in or not?
I guess he was.
Having left the classroom only moments before, Dan lumbered in once again through the opposite door. He lumbered through the classroom and lumbered out the other door.
Ummm. This was weird.
Soon enough, the lumbering cycle began again. He lumbered in. He lumbered through. He lumbered out. Wash and repeat.
But right in the middle of the sixth lumbering cycle, just when I was considering lumbering out myself towards a safe place until class began, he stopped. I glanced up, but I also moved my book up too, so it would look like I wasn't actually looking, because I was smart like that. But now I couldn't see because the book was blocking my view. Crap.
He spoke.
"Hi."
I spoke.
"Hi."
He lumbered about two feet towards the door. Was the cycle beginning again? Nope. Again, he stopped.
"I think I might have sent my class notes to you last week."
"Oh, was that you?" I lied, shamelessly. "I was wondering who that was."
"Did they help?"
"Yes, they did, thanks. They actually really helped me understand the rationale for the Revolution, actually." Crud, I actually said actually twice. Dang, I just thought actually twice. OK, Grace, focus.
"Well," he responded, "I'm glad they helped."
"They did, thanks." Man, was I awkward.
He lumbered three feet in the other direction. So he had a net lumbering quotient of negative one.
"And your name was Grace, right?"
"Yeah. You're Dan, right?"
"Yeah."
Awkward silence.
More awkward silence.
But then, Hott Asian was there to save the day. He sauntered in with a pencil (but no notebook?), sat down on the far side of the room, stared into space, and proceeded to ignore the growing awkwardness. It was a lot easier to be less awkward if somebody else was also being less awkward.
Dan lumbered forward, towards the seat in front of mine.
"I think I'm going to sit here today. I can see the professor better from over here."
"Yeah," I awkwardized, "It really is a good view. You can hear the professor pretty well too."
"Really? Good."
"Glad you think that."
"And also," he said, "Maybe we can share notes. I'll bet your notes are pretty good."
I blushed. He thought my notes were probably pretty good!
"Well, I know your notes are pretty good!"
He smiled. Despite his girth and his Top Ten Reasons To Be A Statistics Major neon green shirt, he had the nicest smile I had ever seen.
I smiled back.
We sat next to each other during class.
And then the next.
And then the next.
And then the rest of the semester.
And then the exam.
And then we emailed each other over the summer.
And then we ate lunch together on the first day back.
And then we sat next to each other in another class we were taking together.
And then he decided to be creepy and wait for me after another class that I took.
And then I decided to be creepy and totally stalk him in the library.
But that's a story for another time.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Monday, October 14, 2013
Confessions of Social Confusion, Part Two of an Excessively Long Expose
Labels:
curse of nerd
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Last December, when I was still working at the preschool, a bunch of the staff were sitting around the lunch table swapping stories about kids with Aspergers.
"Well," said the occupational therapist, "I'll never forget this one kid. He was maybe six, seven years old and just loved geography. And you know what? When I had him, he could name every single state and capital, and he was only in first grade!"
As if it had been planned beforehand, a thundering chorus of surprise rose from the rest of the table.
"Wow! That's amazing!"
I elected to totally shut up. In fact, I turned bright red and tried to crawl under the table, but then I remembered that this was a preschool and I probably couldn't fit my entire girth under the table, so I just stayed where I was.
I knew all the states and capitals when I was six or seven. Also, I knew a good number of the world countries and their capitals, too. I also used to critique maps. Why the heck would you still have Sri Lanka listed on the globe as Ceylon when it was the 1990s? It was almost as bad as listing Taiwan as Formosa. Also, Rhodesia was a British colony, so they could stop calling Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Also, Yugoslavia was now obsolete.
"Well, I had one kid who was such a picky eater that she would only eat cilantro," chimed in the speech therapist. "They actually had to put the poor girl on a feeding tube."
Okay, at least I wasn't that bad.
Part Two of the Diagnostic Criteria for Asperger's Disorder dictates that the budding social recluse demonstrate restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities. And this is where my self-identity as a questioning neurotypical individual starts to fall apart. Let's take a look.
1. Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus.
Eh heh heh heh heh. Heh heh heh. Heh heh heh.
OK, I am probably the queen of weird, weird interests. Like, pretty out there. Thankfully, my interests are all pretty nerd-oriented, so I can at least tell myself that maybe I was just born to do lab work on mice genetics or something. Yeah, something like that.
Unlike many other children, I never wanted to be a princess, astronaut, firefighter, singer, celebrity, cook, or other stereotypical careerist. No, I wanted to work at the post office. And you know why I wanted to work at the post office? Because at the post office, they had zip codes. And I could look at zip codes from all over the United States all. day. long!
I also liked area codes. In fact, I collected telephone books when I was a teenager. Not for any reason other than... well, there were lots of area codes. If you gave me a random local phone number, I could tell you where that number was located. 252 was Easton. 867 was Bethlehem. 588 was up in the Bangor area. Yeah, I was awesome like that.
I was into yearbooks, too. I liked yearbooks because they had names. Wow, there were so many kids with the last name of Rodriguez in this school! Who the heck names their kid Jhon, and what kind of severe mental illness did they have? Why did nobody ever have the fairly common Scandinavian affix of dottir?
And now that I have access to a ridiculous number of library research databases, my interests have only gotten weirder.
I like reading about the history of fruit. Bananas were known as Green Gold back in the early 20th century because they were just that profitable. Fruit companies literally built the infrastructure to bring several Latin American nations into comparative modernity. The banana that you eat today is quickly succumbing to a molding fruit disease. Research scientists are currently racing to develop a new banana that is mold-resistant.
I like perusing the zoning laws of area localities. Why did all of those acres of farmland you saw yesterday hold the Rolling Hills Development of today? Because the farmland is in a Rural Zone, which means that developers try to preserve as much green space as possible. Houses must be built on very large plots of land to meet the green space requirement. If you're looking for a larger home, or if you're looking to avoid city living, you're going to need lots of green space. Right in the middle of the former cornfield.
I like food marketing. I am slightly obsessed with Chobani. Not because I necessarily like to eat Chobani, but I'm fascinated by the growth of Greek yogurt in the past ten years. It's pretty rare that you have an innovation in, well, yogurt, but Chobani started it and now you can get Greek yogurt anything. I also subscribe to (free) food trade magazines. My favorite is Dairy Foods (shocker!) followed by Food Management, which is the periodical of choice for those who serve food in institutional settings like hospitals, schools, and... Google's main campus.
So you tell me: Are my eccentric interests abnormal enough to make me ever so slightly autistic? Or are they just abnormal enough to make me supersupernerd?
2. Apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals.
I am happy to report that, besides demonstrating symptoms of severe control-freak and rampant perfectionism, all my routines are very functional. They're pretty rigid, but definitely functional.
3. Stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g. hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole-body movements).
I chalk up my swaying while standing in church or waiting in line as just ADD fidgetiness. And I twirl my fingers through my hair. Small potatoes. However, there's just one more thing.
When I was in preschool, I used to "dance" to music by spinning around in circles. I have a distinct memory of me spinning around in our breezeway and holding up four fingers to signify my age at the time. I think that's pretty common behavior for a little kid. With me, though, I never really got over it. I have done a lot, a lot of spinning around in circles in my life. I won't go into the details because then I might really just die of embarrassment. But truly, it was excessive.
But was I ADD-bored or... Aspergers?
4. Persistent preoccupation with parts of objects.
Well, I've always loved only a particular few bars of a song. I remember listening to some Backstreet Boys song for 45 minutes and never got past the first thirty seconds because I kept rewinding and rewinding and rewinding. To this day, I listen to songs on repeat in the car... like two hours straight of U Want Me 2 on a loop.
I think, though, that it ends there.
And the eternal question remains: Am I just weird or am I actually neurologically different? I sorta kinda meet criteria, and I sorta kinda don't. I mean, when it comes down to it, I don't really need to stick myself in a box. I'm just Grace. But I'm very curious, and I probably always will be.
But at least one thing's clear.
God help the progeny of Grace and Dan, for they shall be genetically cursed on both sides of the equation. I, personally, am praying for the emergence of recessive genes.
"Well," said the occupational therapist, "I'll never forget this one kid. He was maybe six, seven years old and just loved geography. And you know what? When I had him, he could name every single state and capital, and he was only in first grade!"
As if it had been planned beforehand, a thundering chorus of surprise rose from the rest of the table.
"Wow! That's amazing!"
I elected to totally shut up. In fact, I turned bright red and tried to crawl under the table, but then I remembered that this was a preschool and I probably couldn't fit my entire girth under the table, so I just stayed where I was.
I knew all the states and capitals when I was six or seven. Also, I knew a good number of the world countries and their capitals, too. I also used to critique maps. Why the heck would you still have Sri Lanka listed on the globe as Ceylon when it was the 1990s? It was almost as bad as listing Taiwan as Formosa. Also, Rhodesia was a British colony, so they could stop calling Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Also, Yugoslavia was now obsolete.
"Well, I had one kid who was such a picky eater that she would only eat cilantro," chimed in the speech therapist. "They actually had to put the poor girl on a feeding tube."
Okay, at least I wasn't that bad.
Part Two of the Diagnostic Criteria for Asperger's Disorder dictates that the budding social recluse demonstrate restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities. And this is where my self-identity as a questioning neurotypical individual starts to fall apart. Let's take a look.
1. Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus.
Eh heh heh heh heh. Heh heh heh. Heh heh heh.
OK, I am probably the queen of weird, weird interests. Like, pretty out there. Thankfully, my interests are all pretty nerd-oriented, so I can at least tell myself that maybe I was just born to do lab work on mice genetics or something. Yeah, something like that.
Unlike many other children, I never wanted to be a princess, astronaut, firefighter, singer, celebrity, cook, or other stereotypical careerist. No, I wanted to work at the post office. And you know why I wanted to work at the post office? Because at the post office, they had zip codes. And I could look at zip codes from all over the United States all. day. long!
I also liked area codes. In fact, I collected telephone books when I was a teenager. Not for any reason other than... well, there were lots of area codes. If you gave me a random local phone number, I could tell you where that number was located. 252 was Easton. 867 was Bethlehem. 588 was up in the Bangor area. Yeah, I was awesome like that.
I was into yearbooks, too. I liked yearbooks because they had names. Wow, there were so many kids with the last name of Rodriguez in this school! Who the heck names their kid Jhon, and what kind of severe mental illness did they have? Why did nobody ever have the fairly common Scandinavian affix of dottir?
And now that I have access to a ridiculous number of library research databases, my interests have only gotten weirder.
I like reading about the history of fruit. Bananas were known as Green Gold back in the early 20th century because they were just that profitable. Fruit companies literally built the infrastructure to bring several Latin American nations into comparative modernity. The banana that you eat today is quickly succumbing to a molding fruit disease. Research scientists are currently racing to develop a new banana that is mold-resistant.
I like perusing the zoning laws of area localities. Why did all of those acres of farmland you saw yesterday hold the Rolling Hills Development of today? Because the farmland is in a Rural Zone, which means that developers try to preserve as much green space as possible. Houses must be built on very large plots of land to meet the green space requirement. If you're looking for a larger home, or if you're looking to avoid city living, you're going to need lots of green space. Right in the middle of the former cornfield.
I like food marketing. I am slightly obsessed with Chobani. Not because I necessarily like to eat Chobani, but I'm fascinated by the growth of Greek yogurt in the past ten years. It's pretty rare that you have an innovation in, well, yogurt, but Chobani started it and now you can get Greek yogurt anything. I also subscribe to (free) food trade magazines. My favorite is Dairy Foods (shocker!) followed by Food Management, which is the periodical of choice for those who serve food in institutional settings like hospitals, schools, and... Google's main campus.
So you tell me: Are my eccentric interests abnormal enough to make me ever so slightly autistic? Or are they just abnormal enough to make me supersupernerd?
2. Apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals.
I am happy to report that, besides demonstrating symptoms of severe control-freak and rampant perfectionism, all my routines are very functional. They're pretty rigid, but definitely functional.
3. Stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g. hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole-body movements).
I chalk up my swaying while standing in church or waiting in line as just ADD fidgetiness. And I twirl my fingers through my hair. Small potatoes. However, there's just one more thing.
When I was in preschool, I used to "dance" to music by spinning around in circles. I have a distinct memory of me spinning around in our breezeway and holding up four fingers to signify my age at the time. I think that's pretty common behavior for a little kid. With me, though, I never really got over it. I have done a lot, a lot of spinning around in circles in my life. I won't go into the details because then I might really just die of embarrassment. But truly, it was excessive.
But was I ADD-bored or... Aspergers?
4. Persistent preoccupation with parts of objects.
Well, I've always loved only a particular few bars of a song. I remember listening to some Backstreet Boys song for 45 minutes and never got past the first thirty seconds because I kept rewinding and rewinding and rewinding. To this day, I listen to songs on repeat in the car... like two hours straight of U Want Me 2 on a loop.
I think, though, that it ends there.
And the eternal question remains: Am I just weird or am I actually neurologically different? I sorta kinda meet criteria, and I sorta kinda don't. I mean, when it comes down to it, I don't really need to stick myself in a box. I'm just Grace. But I'm very curious, and I probably always will be.
But at least one thing's clear.
God help the progeny of Grace and Dan, for they shall be genetically cursed on both sides of the equation. I, personally, am praying for the emergence of recessive genes.
Saturday, October 5, 2013
I'm Not Actually Fat, I Swear!
Labels:
detention,
life
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I've almost always been small and compact. Small because I'm five feet tall and am scaled even smaller than petite (I fit better into child-sized clothing than adult-sized clothing). Compact because I'm not actually thin, but I'm not really large, either. I'm more thick and built like my Italian peasant ancestors before me.
I once explained density to my young felons by displaying my compactness for all to see. They all thought density was the same thing as weight, which I knew was incorrect because I had finally grasped the concept of density the week before. This misconstruction of such an important scientific concept could not stand, but I could definitely stand.
I stood at the front of the class and called everyone's attention.
"Guys," I deadpanned as best I could, "I've got a question for you all. How much do you think I weigh?"
Shocked looks from everyone involved.
"No, really, what do you guys think?"
Someone raised a timid hand.
"Uh, sorry miss, I don't wanna be rude. I think you're about 115."
"Well," I shot back, "You're wrong."
"Oh."
"Anybody else?"
"Miss, you 120?" asked a particularly annoying kid, whom I had silently nicknamed Mr. Incredibly Self-Conscious.
"Nope. Guess again."
And so they did, for the next three minutes. Then I pulled back the curtain of my self-revelation.
"You were all off by about twenty pounds."
Audible, possibly exaggerated, gasps filled the room.
"Anybody know why you all guessed on the low end?"
Silence.
"It's because I'm very dense. I'm short and small, but I have lots of muscle. I have more fat rolls than you thought I did because they're part of a smaller space than most people."
Heads nodded. They got it. Many relieved faces. Oh, so maybe not all females got incredibly annoyed if they asked you how much they weighed and you got it wrong.
"Miss," said Mr. Incredibly Self-Conscious, all six feet standing up. "How dense do you think I am?"
"You," yelled the youth worker, "Are a heck of a lot denser than you think. Now sit down and do your work."
I cut off the discussion.
But all science lessons aside, I've been noticeably dumpy only once in my life. That was my senior year of college, when I lived off campus and discovered brownie mix. To my credit, I actually lost it all a year later, so maybe I'm not as lazy as people tell me I am.
Even though I'm not actually fat, and I don't look especially chunky, lots of people have actually thought that I was quite severely obese.
It started when I called up my doctor about five years ago or so and asked for an evaluation.
On the operating table (I'm not a fan of doctors), I voiced my breathing concerns to my all-business Ukrainian doctor. Most times when I tried to drop off to sleep, I said, I would stop breathing all of a sudden, and I would wake up. This would happen a few times a night, and I always got to bed late. Oh, and I was always really sleepy and ready to go to bed at any time, like at 8 AM.
My doctor referred me to a sleep specialist. This was terrifying. I scheduled an appointment, nearly dying in the attempt.
A few weeks later, I walked into the sleep specialist's office.
"Hi! How can I help you today?" My, what a bubbly secretary. She must just love torturing people.
"I'm here for an evaluation," I said. "Sleep study with the doctor at 7."
"You're here for an evaluation? Really?"
What was this?
"Uh, yes, I'm here for a sleep study."
"OK," bubbled the secretary. Why the surprised look? "Here's some paperwork you should fill out. Have a seat and we'll be with you shortly."
Hmmmm.
After an absolutely awful night hooked up with two dozen different cords on my head to some kind of weird machine, the sleep specialist broke the news. I had sleep apnea, a fairly common condition where some random muscles in the throat collapse during sleep, cutting off the air supply. Once there was no air coming in, the brain alerts the body that something is not right, effectively booting all the involved members out of a deep sleep into a partially awake sleep for air. On one hand, it's good that your brain is trying to save you from death every night. On the other hand, you're not really getting to sleep, like ever. I was told that I had fairly moderate sleep apnea and stopped breathing approximately twelve times per hour.
Well, that explained why I would close my eyes when driving down long, straight stretched of a deserted road in an attempt to get some sleep.
The cure for sleep apnea, said the doctor, was to use a machine called a CPAP (or a BiPAP in my particularly sensitive case) while sleeping. This machine pumps air into your lungs as you sleep, basically giving you CPR whenever you have an apnea, and creating terrible air bubbles in your stomach every morning. Okay, they didn't actually tell me that last one, but it certainly happened to me until I got my air pressure settings all figured out.
Lacking the proper insurance, I shelled out $1200 of my own money to buy a complete BiPAP rig. It took me a horrible eight months to be able to sleep through the night hooked up to a machine, but it was also one of the best decisions I had ever made. It did wonders for my general health and well-being.
But then, everybody started thinking I was really fat.
It started when I bought my equipment from a place online. I had to read a disclosure agreement first.
Sleep apnea is a common condition that effects many individuals of all ages. There are two basic treatments for sleep apnea. Your doctor may prescribe a CPAP or a BiPAP machine. Many patients have also had success minimizing and curing sleep apnea by losing excessive body weight. Talk with your doctor about weight management as a possible treatment option for sleep apnea.
But I wasn't fat!
Then I joined a sleep apnea online forum for general BiPAP help, because the thing was a real pain to manipulate (and I had to do it all by my lonesome, since my insurance didn't cover it). All the users assumed that I was fat. Many assumed that I was also male and 50+. After a while, I got so sick of the obesity assumptions that I created a custom signature promising my fellow posters that I was not fat. Really.
I am a female in my twenties. Five feet tall and 123 pounds. That is a healthy weight. I have had undiagnosed sleep apnea since I was in high school.
No, seriously, I'm not fat. Really.
I had to fill out that stupid medical history form every time I went to a new doctor or specialist. Everybody lifted their eyebrows in shock.
"Wow, that's very unusual! You seem to be at a normal weight."
I am not fat. I swear.
My sister had trouble sleeping, so she went for a sleep study, just like me. She told the nurse she thought that she might have sleep apnea.
"Oh, I don't think so, honey," soothed the nurse.
"Well, my sister has sleep apnea."
"Yes, dear, but you're so thin!"
So even the actual sleep specialists thought I was, uh, special. And, you know, fat.
I. Am. Not. Fat.
But seriously, although I am not fat (really!), the typical sleep apnea patient really is fat. And male. And usually over the age of fifty.
Remember, apneas are caused by collapsing throat muscles. Most people have sleep apnea because they're so fat that the fat on their neck is pushing down on their throat, making the muscles collapse and inducing apneas.
But I'm not fat. Nor am I obese. Slightly overweight, you could even argue. But my neck is tiny.
The Grace Is Fat assumptions are probably going to happen throughout my life until I am miraculously cured of my sleep apnea. However, I did find out why I have sleep apnea even though I am an atypical apneatic.
I had minor surgery two years ago and had to be sedated at the hospital. The actual surgically-repaired area felt absolutely fine post-op, but my throat felt like it was bruised. The doctor called me a few days later to give me a heads-up. Apparently they had a dickens of a time intubating me during the procedure. I have, according to the doctor, a very, very narrow windpipe. And that was causing my sleep apnea.
So there you have it. I'm not fat, I'm not obese, I just sleep with a mask on my face that makes Darth Vader noises when Dan is trying to drift off.
I am compact, not fat. I am dense, not obese. And now, secure in my BMI, I'm going to chow down a very large piece of Dan's cilantro-cheese bread.
I once explained density to my young felons by displaying my compactness for all to see. They all thought density was the same thing as weight, which I knew was incorrect because I had finally grasped the concept of density the week before. This misconstruction of such an important scientific concept could not stand, but I could definitely stand.
I stood at the front of the class and called everyone's attention.
"Guys," I deadpanned as best I could, "I've got a question for you all. How much do you think I weigh?"
Shocked looks from everyone involved.
"No, really, what do you guys think?"
Someone raised a timid hand.
"Uh, sorry miss, I don't wanna be rude. I think you're about 115."
"Well," I shot back, "You're wrong."
"Oh."
"Anybody else?"
"Miss, you 120?" asked a particularly annoying kid, whom I had silently nicknamed Mr. Incredibly Self-Conscious.
"Nope. Guess again."
And so they did, for the next three minutes. Then I pulled back the curtain of my self-revelation.
"You were all off by about twenty pounds."
Audible, possibly exaggerated, gasps filled the room.
"Anybody know why you all guessed on the low end?"
Silence.
"It's because I'm very dense. I'm short and small, but I have lots of muscle. I have more fat rolls than you thought I did because they're part of a smaller space than most people."
Heads nodded. They got it. Many relieved faces. Oh, so maybe not all females got incredibly annoyed if they asked you how much they weighed and you got it wrong.
"Miss," said Mr. Incredibly Self-Conscious, all six feet standing up. "How dense do you think I am?"
"You," yelled the youth worker, "Are a heck of a lot denser than you think. Now sit down and do your work."
I cut off the discussion.
But all science lessons aside, I've been noticeably dumpy only once in my life. That was my senior year of college, when I lived off campus and discovered brownie mix. To my credit, I actually lost it all a year later, so maybe I'm not as lazy as people tell me I am.
Even though I'm not actually fat, and I don't look especially chunky, lots of people have actually thought that I was quite severely obese.
It started when I called up my doctor about five years ago or so and asked for an evaluation.
On the operating table (I'm not a fan of doctors), I voiced my breathing concerns to my all-business Ukrainian doctor. Most times when I tried to drop off to sleep, I said, I would stop breathing all of a sudden, and I would wake up. This would happen a few times a night, and I always got to bed late. Oh, and I was always really sleepy and ready to go to bed at any time, like at 8 AM.
My doctor referred me to a sleep specialist. This was terrifying. I scheduled an appointment, nearly dying in the attempt.
A few weeks later, I walked into the sleep specialist's office.
"Hi! How can I help you today?" My, what a bubbly secretary. She must just love torturing people.
"I'm here for an evaluation," I said. "Sleep study with the doctor at 7."
"You're here for an evaluation? Really?"
What was this?
"Uh, yes, I'm here for a sleep study."
"OK," bubbled the secretary. Why the surprised look? "Here's some paperwork you should fill out. Have a seat and we'll be with you shortly."
Hmmmm.
After an absolutely awful night hooked up with two dozen different cords on my head to some kind of weird machine, the sleep specialist broke the news. I had sleep apnea, a fairly common condition where some random muscles in the throat collapse during sleep, cutting off the air supply. Once there was no air coming in, the brain alerts the body that something is not right, effectively booting all the involved members out of a deep sleep into a partially awake sleep for air. On one hand, it's good that your brain is trying to save you from death every night. On the other hand, you're not really getting to sleep, like ever. I was told that I had fairly moderate sleep apnea and stopped breathing approximately twelve times per hour.
Well, that explained why I would close my eyes when driving down long, straight stretched of a deserted road in an attempt to get some sleep.
The cure for sleep apnea, said the doctor, was to use a machine called a CPAP (or a BiPAP in my particularly sensitive case) while sleeping. This machine pumps air into your lungs as you sleep, basically giving you CPR whenever you have an apnea, and creating terrible air bubbles in your stomach every morning. Okay, they didn't actually tell me that last one, but it certainly happened to me until I got my air pressure settings all figured out.
Lacking the proper insurance, I shelled out $1200 of my own money to buy a complete BiPAP rig. It took me a horrible eight months to be able to sleep through the night hooked up to a machine, but it was also one of the best decisions I had ever made. It did wonders for my general health and well-being.
But then, everybody started thinking I was really fat.
It started when I bought my equipment from a place online. I had to read a disclosure agreement first.
Sleep apnea is a common condition that effects many individuals of all ages. There are two basic treatments for sleep apnea. Your doctor may prescribe a CPAP or a BiPAP machine. Many patients have also had success minimizing and curing sleep apnea by losing excessive body weight. Talk with your doctor about weight management as a possible treatment option for sleep apnea.
But I wasn't fat!
Then I joined a sleep apnea online forum for general BiPAP help, because the thing was a real pain to manipulate (and I had to do it all by my lonesome, since my insurance didn't cover it). All the users assumed that I was fat. Many assumed that I was also male and 50+. After a while, I got so sick of the obesity assumptions that I created a custom signature promising my fellow posters that I was not fat. Really.
I am a female in my twenties. Five feet tall and 123 pounds. That is a healthy weight. I have had undiagnosed sleep apnea since I was in high school.
No, seriously, I'm not fat. Really.
I had to fill out that stupid medical history form every time I went to a new doctor or specialist. Everybody lifted their eyebrows in shock.
"Wow, that's very unusual! You seem to be at a normal weight."
I am not fat. I swear.
My sister had trouble sleeping, so she went for a sleep study, just like me. She told the nurse she thought that she might have sleep apnea.
"Oh, I don't think so, honey," soothed the nurse.
"Well, my sister has sleep apnea."
"Yes, dear, but you're so thin!"
So even the actual sleep specialists thought I was, uh, special. And, you know, fat.
I. Am. Not. Fat.
But seriously, although I am not fat (really!), the typical sleep apnea patient really is fat. And male. And usually over the age of fifty.
Remember, apneas are caused by collapsing throat muscles. Most people have sleep apnea because they're so fat that the fat on their neck is pushing down on their throat, making the muscles collapse and inducing apneas.
But I'm not fat. Nor am I obese. Slightly overweight, you could even argue. But my neck is tiny.
The Grace Is Fat assumptions are probably going to happen throughout my life until I am miraculously cured of my sleep apnea. However, I did find out why I have sleep apnea even though I am an atypical apneatic.
I had minor surgery two years ago and had to be sedated at the hospital. The actual surgically-repaired area felt absolutely fine post-op, but my throat felt like it was bruised. The doctor called me a few days later to give me a heads-up. Apparently they had a dickens of a time intubating me during the procedure. I have, according to the doctor, a very, very narrow windpipe. And that was causing my sleep apnea.
So there you have it. I'm not fat, I'm not obese, I just sleep with a mask on my face that makes Darth Vader noises when Dan is trying to drift off.
I am compact, not fat. I am dense, not obese. And now, secure in my BMI, I'm going to chow down a very large piece of Dan's cilantro-cheese bread.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
How I Cured Myself of Debilitating Mental Illness - And Other Stories
Labels:
life
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I was a strong-willed child growing up. Or, as one might put it less gloriously, I was as stubborn as an ox and fiercely independent.My mother told me at one point that I would make a great drill sergeant when I grew up, if it weren't for my oversensitivity to things like papercuts and itchy clothing tags. Little does she know that I actually am a drill sergeant.
"DUDE, YOU CALL THIS COUNTER CLEAN? JUST LOOK AT IT! THERE'S A STICKY SPOT FROM YOUR PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY IN THIS CORNER, AND THERE ARE BREAD CRUMBS IN ELEVEN AREAS. SERIOUSLY, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU CALL THIS CLEAN. ARE YOU BLIND? THIS IS NOWHERE NEAR DONE! WHY ARE YOU SITTING ON THE COUCH DOING NOTHING, YOU DIDN'T EVEN FINISH THE COUNTER!"
Ahem.
Anyway, there's a picture floating around of me, age three, partially naked, sitting around reading an upside-down copy of Parenting Your Strong-Willed Child. Or it might have been Toilet Training in Less Than a Day. Same thing. I was (and am) still have a cold heart of steel.
Growing up, I was afraid of two things. I was (and am) afraid of dogs. When I was four or five, I got chased by a dog at a party. I wasn't hurt, and the dog was probably just trying to play, but I was still scarred for life. I was also deathly, devastatingly afraid of throwing up.
Yes, as a child, I was the terrified victim of emetophobia, which is the irrational fear of barfing. (See? Like emetophobia... emet... emit... you emit bad things from your body when you vomit... see?) I'm not really sure where this fear began. I do know that when I was seven, I got a stomach bug and was perfectly okay with it, so it must have hit me after this point.
I lived in fear of getting sick to my stomach. I worried about it daily. Uh-oh, I had a twinge in my stomach. Maybe it was that chicken I ate. Maybe I was getting sick! Oh no! I was going to get sick! I was going to throw up! It would be awful! I would die of terror!
And just so we're all on the same page here, what's one of the physical symptoms of anxiety? Stomach problems. Yikes.
A pattern emerged. A family member would get a stomachache. I would worry that they were sick, the epidemic would begin, and I would get sick and barf. I would get so anxious that my stomach would feel sick, which would make me even more anxious. It was awful.
One of the scariest times of my life occurred when my dad was in England for a week on a business trip when I was eleven. Without my dad, my mom had two (yes, two, I never found out how that happened) king-sized beds all to herself, and on a whim, told all of us six kids that we could all hang out in her room for a night and have an epic slumber party. We all jumped at the chance, had a fun evening, and then all crawled into bed for the night.
Full of popcorn, I was just beginning to drift off when I heard the most awful sound coming from the sibling to my immediate left.
BLEEAARRRGGHHH!
Acutely attuned to panic at anything that could be construed as the sound of someone vomiting (for years, I would jump out of my skin if someone spilled a cup of water on the floor... what did that sound like?), I jumped up. Sure enough, there was definitely barf within six inches of my face.
I would have jumped out of bed immediately and run back to the safety of my own germ-free bunk, but before I could move, I heard another weird noise coming from the sibling two down from my right.
BLEEAARRRGGHHH!
Oh crap. There was a stomach virus in the house. And it was spreading super quick!
I ran at marathon pace out of the room of horrors. On my way out, I heard it again. Another sibling was throwing up. I knew I was doomed.
I finally reached the comfort of my own bed, but not before hearing the sound of vomiting yet again.
I didn't sleep at all that night. I just lay there wishing I could be transported to the deepest circle of hell instead. I stared at my ceiling, but I couldn't help but listen.
When I think back to that night, I admire my mom's ability not to run screaming from the house by the fifth barfing session. At the time, however, all I could do was count the number of barfing episodes I could hear.
Somewhere around 3 AM, I lost count after the thirty-second instance of vomiting. I am unfortunately not kidding. When there are six kids, and five of them have the stomach bug, and they're all doing what kids do and vomiting multiple times, well, that number actually sounds about right.
By dawn, still paralyzed in my bed, refusing to use the bathroom in case someone had vomited in the toilet, it struck me.
I hadn't barfed yet.
And in the week of terror that followed, all my siblings threw up multiple times. My mom got the bug. Some of my siblings got the bug twice in a week. Yours truly, wracked by anxiety, was mercifully passed over by the Angel of Death.
It could have been possible that my incredible fear of throwing up actually had a psychological effect on my body, preventing me from actually... throwing up. In seventeen years, I have thrown up exactly once, when I was fourteen. I knew I was fourteen because I was reading The Legend of Luke all night to try to alleviate the anxiety of my nausea, and that book came out in 1999. Unfortunately, I couldn't look at another Redwall book for years after that, and it sucked, because I just loved The Pearls of Lutra.
My emetophobia was a constant present all through childhood, all through adolescence, and all through college. When I was growing up, I used to pray every night that God would spare me from barfing until "I was forty," because I assumed that I would be over the fear by then. But I was now twenty-three, and I was becoming uncomfortably aware that I only had seventeen years years left until I had told God that I would be totally okay with Doomsday.
And then, one day, my fear went away. Just like that. Almost out of the blue.
I was sitting in the parking lot of the gym, terrified once again. Then it hit me. What if I could unscientifically calculate my chances of actually throwing up this time around?
So I started thinking.
Let's say, I thought, that I've had at least ten years of this, even though I know that it's been more. I've worried about throwing up at least twice a day each day since then. I'll round it to about fifteen times a week. There are fifty-two weeks in the year, and ten years, so that's 520 weeks. Multiplying together, I have worried about throwing up 7,800 times during the past ten years, and I have only thrown up once. Based on my previous history, there is about a 1 in 7,800 chance that I'll throw up for every instance of anxiety.
Then I looked at some other odds. What could be more likely than throwing up once in every 7,800 times I worried about throwing up?
Well, I was more likely to:
Die walking across the street
Die in an airplane crash
Die from a hornet sting
Die from an asteroid crash
Be audited by the IRS (and I didn't even make $15,000 a year)
Produce a child with a genius IQ
Become a pro athlete (and that was never happening)
Find a four-leaf clover
Win an Academy Award
Date a millionaire
Lose a limb in a freak chainsaw accident
Well then.
And just like that, I was no longer an emetophobic. I had successfully out-logicized my thought patterns. I had championed over my emotions. Maybe it wasn't quite correct, but my brain no longer cared.
I don't think about vomit every single day, anymore. But I still have a tiny bit of dread about hitting forty. Just a little.
"DUDE, YOU CALL THIS COUNTER CLEAN? JUST LOOK AT IT! THERE'S A STICKY SPOT FROM YOUR PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY IN THIS CORNER, AND THERE ARE BREAD CRUMBS IN ELEVEN AREAS. SERIOUSLY, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU CALL THIS CLEAN. ARE YOU BLIND? THIS IS NOWHERE NEAR DONE! WHY ARE YOU SITTING ON THE COUCH DOING NOTHING, YOU DIDN'T EVEN FINISH THE COUNTER!"
Ahem.
Anyway, there's a picture floating around of me, age three, partially naked, sitting around reading an upside-down copy of Parenting Your Strong-Willed Child. Or it might have been Toilet Training in Less Than a Day. Same thing. I was (and am) still have a cold heart of steel.
Growing up, I was afraid of two things. I was (and am) afraid of dogs. When I was four or five, I got chased by a dog at a party. I wasn't hurt, and the dog was probably just trying to play, but I was still scarred for life. I was also deathly, devastatingly afraid of throwing up.
Yes, as a child, I was the terrified victim of emetophobia, which is the irrational fear of barfing. (See? Like emetophobia... emet... emit... you emit bad things from your body when you vomit... see?) I'm not really sure where this fear began. I do know that when I was seven, I got a stomach bug and was perfectly okay with it, so it must have hit me after this point.
I lived in fear of getting sick to my stomach. I worried about it daily. Uh-oh, I had a twinge in my stomach. Maybe it was that chicken I ate. Maybe I was getting sick! Oh no! I was going to get sick! I was going to throw up! It would be awful! I would die of terror!
And just so we're all on the same page here, what's one of the physical symptoms of anxiety? Stomach problems. Yikes.
A pattern emerged. A family member would get a stomachache. I would worry that they were sick, the epidemic would begin, and I would get sick and barf. I would get so anxious that my stomach would feel sick, which would make me even more anxious. It was awful.
One of the scariest times of my life occurred when my dad was in England for a week on a business trip when I was eleven. Without my dad, my mom had two (yes, two, I never found out how that happened) king-sized beds all to herself, and on a whim, told all of us six kids that we could all hang out in her room for a night and have an epic slumber party. We all jumped at the chance, had a fun evening, and then all crawled into bed for the night.
Full of popcorn, I was just beginning to drift off when I heard the most awful sound coming from the sibling to my immediate left.
BLEEAARRRGGHHH!
Acutely attuned to panic at anything that could be construed as the sound of someone vomiting (for years, I would jump out of my skin if someone spilled a cup of water on the floor... what did that sound like?), I jumped up. Sure enough, there was definitely barf within six inches of my face.
I would have jumped out of bed immediately and run back to the safety of my own germ-free bunk, but before I could move, I heard another weird noise coming from the sibling two down from my right.
BLEEAARRRGGHHH!
Oh crap. There was a stomach virus in the house. And it was spreading super quick!
I ran at marathon pace out of the room of horrors. On my way out, I heard it again. Another sibling was throwing up. I knew I was doomed.
I finally reached the comfort of my own bed, but not before hearing the sound of vomiting yet again.
I didn't sleep at all that night. I just lay there wishing I could be transported to the deepest circle of hell instead. I stared at my ceiling, but I couldn't help but listen.
When I think back to that night, I admire my mom's ability not to run screaming from the house by the fifth barfing session. At the time, however, all I could do was count the number of barfing episodes I could hear.
Somewhere around 3 AM, I lost count after the thirty-second instance of vomiting. I am unfortunately not kidding. When there are six kids, and five of them have the stomach bug, and they're all doing what kids do and vomiting multiple times, well, that number actually sounds about right.
By dawn, still paralyzed in my bed, refusing to use the bathroom in case someone had vomited in the toilet, it struck me.
I hadn't barfed yet.
And in the week of terror that followed, all my siblings threw up multiple times. My mom got the bug. Some of my siblings got the bug twice in a week. Yours truly, wracked by anxiety, was mercifully passed over by the Angel of Death.
It could have been possible that my incredible fear of throwing up actually had a psychological effect on my body, preventing me from actually... throwing up. In seventeen years, I have thrown up exactly once, when I was fourteen. I knew I was fourteen because I was reading The Legend of Luke all night to try to alleviate the anxiety of my nausea, and that book came out in 1999. Unfortunately, I couldn't look at another Redwall book for years after that, and it sucked, because I just loved The Pearls of Lutra.
My emetophobia was a constant present all through childhood, all through adolescence, and all through college. When I was growing up, I used to pray every night that God would spare me from barfing until "I was forty," because I assumed that I would be over the fear by then. But I was now twenty-three, and I was becoming uncomfortably aware that I only had seventeen years years left until I had told God that I would be totally okay with Doomsday.
And then, one day, my fear went away. Just like that. Almost out of the blue.
I was sitting in the parking lot of the gym, terrified once again. Then it hit me. What if I could unscientifically calculate my chances of actually throwing up this time around?
So I started thinking.
Let's say, I thought, that I've had at least ten years of this, even though I know that it's been more. I've worried about throwing up at least twice a day each day since then. I'll round it to about fifteen times a week. There are fifty-two weeks in the year, and ten years, so that's 520 weeks. Multiplying together, I have worried about throwing up 7,800 times during the past ten years, and I have only thrown up once. Based on my previous history, there is about a 1 in 7,800 chance that I'll throw up for every instance of anxiety.
Then I looked at some other odds. What could be more likely than throwing up once in every 7,800 times I worried about throwing up?
Well, I was more likely to:
Die walking across the street
Die in an airplane crash
Die from a hornet sting
Die from an asteroid crash
Be audited by the IRS (and I didn't even make $15,000 a year)
Produce a child with a genius IQ
Become a pro athlete (and that was never happening)
Find a four-leaf clover
Win an Academy Award
Date a millionaire
Lose a limb in a freak chainsaw accident
Well then.
And just like that, I was no longer an emetophobic. I had successfully out-logicized my thought patterns. I had championed over my emotions. Maybe it wasn't quite correct, but my brain no longer cared.
I don't think about vomit every single day, anymore. But I still have a tiny bit of dread about hitting forty. Just a little.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Communication Revisited: Or, How I Taught a Kid to Talk
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autism
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I was hired as a one-on-one for my little guy, LG, back in April. He needs the extra support because not only is he autistic, but he may also have other mental health issues, as evidenced by the manic fits he will have a few times a week where he runs around the classroom screaming, jumping up and down, flapping, and laughing hysterically. When I was first hired, he was in a mental health classroom for otherwise-normal kids with severe emotional issues. I spent a week in this particular classroom with him before he was transferred back to his original autistic support classroom, dragging me along with him.
LG is non-verbal, and when I first met him, he had exactly two signs for expressing himself - marshmallow and bathroom. He didn't consistently use these two signs, and would usually just grab my marshmallows or randomly run out of the gym to use the bathroom. He couldn't tell you if he was tired, hungry, sick, bored, annoyed (well, I guess he could punch and kick...), too cold, too hot, wanted a snack, wanted a different puzzle, wanted to watch a movie, and on and on and on. So he pretty much ran around the classroom grabbing various things, crying, screaming, and being aggressive. I felt very bad for him, and my bruises were increasing exponentially by the hour.
Remember this post, where I taught a kid in summer school how to request snack foods he liked, and how it generally helped him to calm down and not punch me in the stomach all day? Well, once we moved over to our current classroom, the first thing I said after saying hi was "LG needs some PECS, pronto. Do you have any?" And yes, this being an autistic support classroom, they had a box full of PECS (PECS are small cards about one inch by one inch labeled with pictures of various items - if a child wants something, he can just give you the picture of the item, which he understands and you understand). Even though he had been in this classroom for most of the year, PECS hadn't really been tried with him, possibly due to his punching and kicking all the time, or possibly due to all of the other kids punching and kicking all the time and focusing staff's attention on safety, not PECS. LG had already learned the PECS for bathroom and help.
So I went over to the PECS box and filled up three pages with illustrations of just about anything I could think of that LG might want. I might have overdone it just a little ("Dude, Grace," said the teacher, "He doesn't even know what half of these things are.").
I worked on the PECS for the stuff LG likes the best to start. His main focus in life is completing puzzles and then carefully putting away each piece in the box so that all pieces are face up and absolutely no cardboard bottom is visible, so we worked with the picture for puzzle. When LG wanted a puzzle (which was about 6,783 times per day), he had to give me the PEC for puzzle. If he didn't, there was no puzzle. Even though LG is nonverbal, there are certain areas where he catches on pretty quick, and this was something that he caught on to pretty quick. By the end of the week, he knew that the quickest, most efficient way of getting that puzzle was to give me the puzzle picture. Once he seemed to get the idea, we worked on marshmallow, yogurt, and cantaloupe (the latter two items are what he eats for lunch every. single. day.). He got that right away, too.
Then something pretty much amazing happened.
Most kids with autism are pretty slow with learning the PECS system. In the traditional method (which I, as a trained non-speech therapist, did not follow), a student learns how to ask for just one item with just one available PEC. Then the child learns how to ask for something out of a field of two PECS, then three, then four, etc. It's a long, involved process that can take years for a cognitively impaired person to understand.
Not LG, however.
One afternoon, LG was throwing a fit. He was being a pain in the rear end, and I was trying to lay down the law and make him sit at his desk and show me quiet sitting before he went to pack up. He was punching and kicking and wiggling his fingers in my face and saying DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE with enough emphasis to let me know that he was really, really not happy with having to wait for the bus. Suddenly, he stopped attempting to bruise my ribs, jumped up, and ran across the room. I assumed that he was headed for the table or a desk or somewhere he could crawl under and further demonstrate that he was really, really, really unhappy with me, so I ran after him. But he didn't try to do that. Instead, he ran towards one of the other student's visual PECS schedule hanging on a wall, a schedule that I didn't think he had ever noticed before. He pulled off a PEC and pretty much threw it at my hand.
It was a picture of a backpack.
I almost cried. Then I forgave LG for the twenty-minute pinching session and let him go get packed up.
It was a huge communication breakthrough. LG had realized that he express himself through PECS. He had learned to talk.
In the next few weeks, it became increasingly clear that the only thing holding LG back from expressing himself was the number of PECS that we could give him. Most kids in our classrooms who used PECS were able to choose a picture of a favorite item out of a field of two. LG could flip through three pages of PECS with fifteen PECS each and pull out the picture of whatever he needed. Amazingly, something in his brain was able to make the connection between sometimes-abstract pictures and communication. Some kids need to be taught each PEC individually. LG could pick out a picture of something he had never seen before or had never needed before and communicate accordingly.
These days, it sometimes feels like my job can be a little boring. LG doesn't sleep well, so he's often a grumpy, crabby kid who hits you on the arm if you tell him no, you can't have snack at 8:15 in the morning, but overall, he's not really that much of a problem. He doesn't have to hit me to communicate. What do you want, LG?
He flips through his book and pulls out a picture of a shoe.
Alright, I say, I'll tie your shoes.
I tie his shoes.
He flips through his book and pulls out another picture. Can he play?
Sure, do you want Mr. Potato Head or Legos?
He points to Mr. Potato Head. He works on making an impressively genetically mutated Mr. Potato Head for twenty minutes. Seriously, it looks like Mr. Potato Head was the victim of an unfortunate disaster at a nuclear reactor. He has two arms on the right side of his body and a nose growing out of the top of his head.
After a while, he gives me yet another picture. He's mercifully all done with Mr. Potato Head, the poor spud.
Yay, you finished up just in time, LG! The bus will be here soon.
Then he asks to go to his locker. He packs up and goes home to annoy his parents with his excited shrieking at the sight of movie credits.
Maybe I'm a boring Plain Jane and careening right down the path of short and fat. But I unlocked someone's world. How many people, dumpy or not, can boast of that?
LG is non-verbal, and when I first met him, he had exactly two signs for expressing himself - marshmallow and bathroom. He didn't consistently use these two signs, and would usually just grab my marshmallows or randomly run out of the gym to use the bathroom. He couldn't tell you if he was tired, hungry, sick, bored, annoyed (well, I guess he could punch and kick...), too cold, too hot, wanted a snack, wanted a different puzzle, wanted to watch a movie, and on and on and on. So he pretty much ran around the classroom grabbing various things, crying, screaming, and being aggressive. I felt very bad for him, and my bruises were increasing exponentially by the hour.
Remember this post, where I taught a kid in summer school how to request snack foods he liked, and how it generally helped him to calm down and not punch me in the stomach all day? Well, once we moved over to our current classroom, the first thing I said after saying hi was "LG needs some PECS, pronto. Do you have any?" And yes, this being an autistic support classroom, they had a box full of PECS (PECS are small cards about one inch by one inch labeled with pictures of various items - if a child wants something, he can just give you the picture of the item, which he understands and you understand). Even though he had been in this classroom for most of the year, PECS hadn't really been tried with him, possibly due to his punching and kicking all the time, or possibly due to all of the other kids punching and kicking all the time and focusing staff's attention on safety, not PECS. LG had already learned the PECS for bathroom and help.
So I went over to the PECS box and filled up three pages with illustrations of just about anything I could think of that LG might want. I might have overdone it just a little ("Dude, Grace," said the teacher, "He doesn't even know what half of these things are.").
I worked on the PECS for the stuff LG likes the best to start. His main focus in life is completing puzzles and then carefully putting away each piece in the box so that all pieces are face up and absolutely no cardboard bottom is visible, so we worked with the picture for puzzle. When LG wanted a puzzle (which was about 6,783 times per day), he had to give me the PEC for puzzle. If he didn't, there was no puzzle. Even though LG is nonverbal, there are certain areas where he catches on pretty quick, and this was something that he caught on to pretty quick. By the end of the week, he knew that the quickest, most efficient way of getting that puzzle was to give me the puzzle picture. Once he seemed to get the idea, we worked on marshmallow, yogurt, and cantaloupe (the latter two items are what he eats for lunch every. single. day.). He got that right away, too.
Then something pretty much amazing happened.
Most kids with autism are pretty slow with learning the PECS system. In the traditional method (which I, as a trained non-speech therapist, did not follow), a student learns how to ask for just one item with just one available PEC. Then the child learns how to ask for something out of a field of two PECS, then three, then four, etc. It's a long, involved process that can take years for a cognitively impaired person to understand.
Not LG, however.
One afternoon, LG was throwing a fit. He was being a pain in the rear end, and I was trying to lay down the law and make him sit at his desk and show me quiet sitting before he went to pack up. He was punching and kicking and wiggling his fingers in my face and saying DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE with enough emphasis to let me know that he was really, really not happy with having to wait for the bus. Suddenly, he stopped attempting to bruise my ribs, jumped up, and ran across the room. I assumed that he was headed for the table or a desk or somewhere he could crawl under and further demonstrate that he was really, really, really unhappy with me, so I ran after him. But he didn't try to do that. Instead, he ran towards one of the other student's visual PECS schedule hanging on a wall, a schedule that I didn't think he had ever noticed before. He pulled off a PEC and pretty much threw it at my hand.
It was a picture of a backpack.
I almost cried. Then I forgave LG for the twenty-minute pinching session and let him go get packed up.
It was a huge communication breakthrough. LG had realized that he express himself through PECS. He had learned to talk.
In the next few weeks, it became increasingly clear that the only thing holding LG back from expressing himself was the number of PECS that we could give him. Most kids in our classrooms who used PECS were able to choose a picture of a favorite item out of a field of two. LG could flip through three pages of PECS with fifteen PECS each and pull out the picture of whatever he needed. Amazingly, something in his brain was able to make the connection between sometimes-abstract pictures and communication. Some kids need to be taught each PEC individually. LG could pick out a picture of something he had never seen before or had never needed before and communicate accordingly.
These days, it sometimes feels like my job can be a little boring. LG doesn't sleep well, so he's often a grumpy, crabby kid who hits you on the arm if you tell him no, you can't have snack at 8:15 in the morning, but overall, he's not really that much of a problem. He doesn't have to hit me to communicate. What do you want, LG?
He flips through his book and pulls out a picture of a shoe.
Alright, I say, I'll tie your shoes.
I tie his shoes.
He flips through his book and pulls out another picture. Can he play?
Sure, do you want Mr. Potato Head or Legos?
He points to Mr. Potato Head. He works on making an impressively genetically mutated Mr. Potato Head for twenty minutes. Seriously, it looks like Mr. Potato Head was the victim of an unfortunate disaster at a nuclear reactor. He has two arms on the right side of his body and a nose growing out of the top of his head.
After a while, he gives me yet another picture. He's mercifully all done with Mr. Potato Head, the poor spud.
Yay, you finished up just in time, LG! The bus will be here soon.
Then he asks to go to his locker. He packs up and goes home to annoy his parents with his excited shrieking at the sight of movie credits.
Maybe I'm a boring Plain Jane and careening right down the path of short and fat. But I unlocked someone's world. How many people, dumpy or not, can boast of that?
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