The tight bra chronicles

Just over a month ago, for the very first time in my life, I desperately wanted to take my bra off when I got home.  As soon as the apartment door was closed behind me, I reached up my shirt (not even bothering to take off my coat), undid the hooks, and felt the relief of more pain than I'd realized I was experiencing.  But there was still some residual pain floating around in my back even after I undid the bra.

I conducted experiments in the days that followed, and the correlation was clear: bras were causing the back pain. The pain worsened and worsened as I wore a bra, was immediately relieved when I unhooked the bra, but residual pain lingered even after I removed the bra.

Which is a problem, because I have the kind of body where my breasts hurt if I don't wear a bra!

The weeks that followed were consumed with bra shopping and bra testing and immersing myself in solutions to back pain.  And finally, after much expense and despair, I think I have a bra paradigm that's not exacerbating the pain, and, in the absence of bras that are exacerbating the pain, I think my back is healing.  I have gone as long as six hours without adjusting or thinking about my bra, and the residual pain is such that I wouldn't even be noticing it if I weren't obsessing about how my back feels.

And this makes me feel hopeless.

Not for myself specifically - all signs point to me, personally, being on an improvement trajectory.  Rather, it makes me despair for all humanity.

This is such a stupid problem that, despite over a quarter-century of bra wearing, I could never have predicted.  Yes, I could see with my eyes that the old bras were a bit snug, but before this has only resulted in unsightly bulges, not unprecedented back pain.

And then it took significant time and resources to fix - time and resources that were only available to me because of the privilege I have that is not available to everyone.  Many people can't drop everything and spend hundreds of dollars on bras - for quite a few people, it may well be a choice between a bra that doesn't hurt and food for their family. (The single cheapest available bra that didn't exacerbate the pain was $60, but I needed a fitting from a store where the cheapest appropriate bra was $80 to figure out the approach to solve my problem.) Most people don't have a comfy work-from-home situation where they can switch their bra four times a day, or sit around slathered with Icy Hot or Voltaren, or take frequent yoga breaks. Many people might have to pick up extra hours at work wearing a painful bra to make the money they need to afford a non-painful bra!

What if I had to choose between feeding my children and getting a new bra? What if I were a refugee fleeing oppression with only the clothes on my back?  What if I lived somewhere where I didn't have access to expert bra fitters, or the internet access and/or savvy to find out options on the internet? What if I didn't have a credit card that I could use for online shopping?

And this is just one of the zillions and zillions of stupid little problems that could come sneaking up and disrupt people's lives!  Not to mention the zillions and zillions of much bigger problems that some people reading this are having, as they sit there saying "Ha, she thinks a bra that hurts is a real problem!"

***

It was a year ago this weekend that I had my head injury.  My eyesight still hasn't completely resolved, and my vision therapy progress has been stagnant for so many months that I think it may never completely resolve.

The head injury falls into an annoying space that, before it happened, I never knew existed: an injury that hinders your quality of life, perhaps permanently, but isn't serious enough to count as a disability.

I'm fortunate enough to have disability insurance, so I figured if something happened to me, I'd be fine.  If I can't work, I'd go on disability.

But I can work with the head injury, it's just harder, and takes more out of me so I have less left for the rest of life.  If I wanted to take sick leave and my manager asked for a doctor's note (my employer's policy is that it's up to the manager's judgement), I don't know if I'd be able to get one.  I certainly couldn't get the documentation necessary to go on disability.  So, basically, life is harder, but not bad enough to be permitted a respite.

As I googled around the idea of back pain, I discovered that it's similar - not even as a question of whether it counts as a disability, but just for whether it counts as a problem.

Medical criteria for evaluating back pain ask about whether it affects your sleep, your range of motion, whether it affects your daily activities. This affects none of those. It's a 1 on the pain scale. Even WebMD doesn't think I need to see a doctor unless it persists for over 6 weeks (and they probably mean six weeks from when I stopped wearing bras that worsened the pain.)

And when I read up on what happens when you go to the doctor for back pain, the emphasis seems to be on pain management, not on solving the underlying problem. (There doesn't seem much that can be done to solve the underlying problem, except take care of yourself and maybe it will go away eventually.) It seems quite likely the doctor would say "It goes away when you take an Advil? Great! Keep it up!"

So this is another area where life becomes harder but not bad enough to be permitted a respite.

How many more things like this are going to happen???  And what on earth do people with real problems do?

Scared

As I do every year, I read every birthday horoscope I could find. Like 80% of them suggested that a lifestyle change would be happening in the next year. This scares me, because a) I've never had that degree of agreement among different horoscopes before, and b) apart from the possibility of a dog entering my life, I can't think of any way my lifestyle might realistically (i.e. no winning the lottery) change for the better. I'm in a good place now, I have what I need and what I want, I can't really see any realistic room for improvement.

Many of my horoscopes also talk about overcoming new challenges, in that bright, perky, slightly desperate tone of optimism used by people who have been laid off and decide to/are forced to go it alone as "entrepreneurs" in contract hell.

My horoscopes always come true, but never in a way I could have predicted. However, given the limitations of reality and the finite nature of the resources available to me, I can't see any possibility of a change in lifestyle or new challenges to overcome being a positive thing. And intellectually I know I've already had more than my lifetime's share of good luck.

I'm scared. I just want to stay safe.

Blah

I wish that knowing intellectually that my worries are unfounded was enough to make me be able to stop worrying. Usually being a pessimist works well for me, but sometimes I wish I could turn it off on demand.

Wrinkles

I don't mind getting wrinkles. I've looked entirely too young for far too long, so I don't mind looking more like a grownup. (Although I do strongly resent still having to deal with zits at the same time.)

What I do mind is that the lines on my forehead, which are starting to not go away anymore when I'm done furrowing my brow, look exactly like my father's! I've already inherited his nose and brow and eyesight and body hair and adult acne and all the worst aspects of his bone structure and personality, and have been working very hard as I grow up to eliminate or conceal these characteristics and assert myself as a separate individual defined by who I actually am instead of by my genes.

How dare my body age me in a way that counteracts all this hard work??

For the lack of an interpreter, a life was lost

A translated transcript of the Dziekanski video.

I'm glad the G&M did this, because I'm too squeamish to watch a person die. I wish we had more context though. I'm not familiar with Vancouver airport and I haven't been on an international flight in years. Was he just in the wrong room and not leaving that room going looking for his mother? Or was someone preventing him from leaving that room? If someone was preventing him, why couldn't they find an interpreter? Wasn't he in there for 10 hours? It would make more sense if we knew the layout.

While I know the real issue is that the police tased him at least three times, but I keep thinking how this might never have happened if there had just been someone there who had enough Polish to understand him and enough English to navigate the airport. Which I can do, either alone or with the help of my cellphone.

I've never been in the situation of witnessing someone acting erratically in another of my languages, but I might rethink my reaction in the future. I've always been told by people who know better than I do that if someone is acting threateningly because of distress or a mental health problem, they're still a threat to me and I should protect myself accordingly. But now I think I should take the Starfleet approach and answer any distress signals I can decode, at least until someone better able to help them gets there. I've always been willing to intervene to protect a person from another person, but I never thought before about protecting people from themselves before the police come. I'm not the kind of person who trusts the police unconditionally, but I always assumed they'd be able to handle the situation of a person in distress in another language. It looks like I can't assume that any more, which means it's my job now.

Edit: So far, I've been thinking about this in terms of the difficulty of getting an interpreter in the context of everyday life, about how I'd handle the problem in ordinary public space. But, as a letter in today's Toronto Star from one Omer Lifshitz of Toronto (whose name I am deliberately making Googleable because he deserves credit for seeing something I missed) pointed out, Robert Dziekanski had just gotten off a plane from Poland! They knew where he came from, and there must have been members of the flight crew who spoke Polish since he managed the flight okay. It should have taken far fewer than 10 hours for someone to notice that he had been in the arrivals area for a long time, look at his passport and/or boarding pass, identify his language needs, and find someone who speaks Polish. Before I disagreed with people who said this is the airline's responsibility, but now that I think about it they had people, right there getting off the same plane as Pan Dziekanski, who could have explained things to him in Polish.

Handshake logistics

If I'm noticing that the other person's handshake is weak, does that mean that my handshake is sufficiently firm? I know I can give good handshake, but I always forget to pay attention to it. Then when I notice someone else's hand is limp, I start fretting about whether mine is too.

The relevant Eddie:

The bottom layer

I've been slowly sorting through everything in my apartment, culling piles and throwing out stuff I don't use. But whenever I get to the bottom layer I get sad and don't want to throw the stuff out.

The bottom layer is the stuff from when I first moved in here, from the last little bit of university. There are university projects that I foolishly thought would make a good portfolio, my planner from 4th year uni (which ended up being the last time in my life that I ever used a planner), bits of administrative minutiae - things of no further importance and no sentimental value by any standards.

And yet finding them makes me sad.

I don't know why. The time they are from was not good. It was uncertain and terrifying and angst-ridden. Now is much better. My life is not changing, I'm just moving to a nicer apartment. I don't know if I'm picking up on residual sadness from back then or if I'm feeling some irrational sadness now, but this is most inconvenient.

Exercise makes me angry

Whenever I exercise, it brings out any anger I might be feeling. And I don't mean that in a good way, like that the anger gets channelled into the exercises and then burned out. I mean that the act of exercises takes any latent anger I might be feeling and draws it to the surface, so I find myself yelling at people who have wronged me in the past, and occasionally at the exercise people on the screen when they're giving me bad instructions.

I don't like this. I don't like the person it makes me. I never get angry at non-immediate things, except while I'm exercising. I'm a much better person when I'm sedentary. It would be enough to make me stop exercising forever, were it not for the need to keep my blood pressure low enough to stay on the pill and the circumference of my body small enough to not drift into plus-size clothing.

I think I had/have Asperger's Syndrome. The symptoms listed there are an exact description of me as a child. I still have problems with eye contact, body language, repetitive movements, coordination, and rituals.

I am so good at creating angst where there is no reason to be any. I should have no angst whatsoever right now, and yet I still find a reason to angst. And it's such a stupid reason that you'd smack me if I were in the same room as you.

For example: I need to travel for my job. The travel arrangements are all made, I have an allowance, all I need to do is pack and go. On the train they serve a meal. So I'm angsting that I have to call and ask for a vegetarian meal. Why? Because I feel like it's only a 4 hour trip, so I shouldn't NEED a meal, and by requesting a special meal I'm acting as though I'm entitled to one. Even though it would be wasting good food for me not to get a veggie meal, because then I'd have this meal I can't eat.

Quelle brat suis-je.