Well, it's been a week..pppffffffffttt

I can't say it's been a great week, but it's been a week.

First my poor doggie's butt explodes. This should have been a sign.

After doing all of that distgusting "prep" for the colonoscopy, I managed to have a diabetic blood sugar crash, mainly because I had no idea what I should have been doing all day to manage the fasting. So, after all the fasting and the Roto-Rootering of my insides to clean them out for the exam....No test. just an embarrassing late-night conversation with my doctor, an angry tummy, and, yes...(wait for it...) a return date next month to do it all again.

Great start.
Apparently, after having all day Tuesday and Wednesday to percolate in my system, the clean-out stuff decided to make a repeat visit. A bad one, apparently the precise millisecond I was waking up. This meant washing sheets, brand new pjs going in the trash, lots of cleaning, and a whole day of misery with a whopping side of humiliation.

(Hey, you people want to read an honest cancer blog, you're in the right place. A happy, tidy one without diarrhea or adult sanitary products? Try again.)

Luckily, thanks I'm sure to the massive, excessive doses of imodium and adult sanitary products, I made it TO and THROUGH chemo without further incident.

Of course, somewhere in the course of the day, my cell phone froze up, and refused to unfreeze. Of course. So, after our nice dinner at Marie Callendars (and following the crushing disappointment of Sees, the Source Of All Bonbons, being closed) we hopped on over to the Verizon store, where a very nice new friend named Patricia swapped it out with a functioning one. Lots of re-customizing, and I have to re-do my entire ICE medical app, but those are minor concerns in the face of what could have been, had I lost all my contacts, photos and random data. Someday I really need to learn how to back that thing up...

And then we came home, and I barfed a lot.

That brings us to yesterday, the day I started this entry, the day in which this entry started posting itself to the blog long before it was done, just because the tech gremlins wanted to prove that they could. Yesterday started with me feeling terrible. It ended with me feeling terrible - nothing terribly shocking for the day after chemo and a major intestinal explosion.

The real capper was a just-before-bedtime random discussion which spontaneously mutated from a discussion into a teenage tantrum. I meant no harm at all in the discussion, which was simply another variant on the "kids who refuse to leave their computers" topic, but I apparently hit a really sore spot without knowing it. That made me feel like absolute shit. It always does, if I hurt someone's feelings, because I never, ever, ever try to intentionally hurt someone's feelings. The fact that the tantrum-throwing boy seems to think that it is always my intention to hurt him or attack him directly for no reason hurts MY feelings pretty good too though. Being the Evil StepMonster does get very, very old after a while. But, I grit my teeth and take my anxiety pills and make sure they never see me crack as I retreat to my corner and chant my mantra, "when they're thirty...when they're thirty..." under my breath. I figure since actually telling them that my feelings are hurt (or are capable of being hurt) just makes them scornful, to say the least, letting them see it would result in precisely nothing good.

Ahhh, a lovely end to a lovely day!!
Things like that deepen my resolve to read "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," just to read about a "mother" (& I use that term loosely here) who is far and away worse at the job than I am.

•••• Have you heard of this book?! It's all over the magazine reviews right now; a memoir by a woman determined to raise her two daughters "the Chinese way," and in the course of doing so, does things like call her little girl "garbage" for less-than-perfect piano skills, threaten to burn all her stuffed animals if the piece isn't played perfectly the next time and reject handmade birthday cards from both girls because they didn't show enough effort. Good lord. And yet, while I think the woman should have been jailed for child abuse (she made her three-year-old stand outside in the rain at night for yet another musical imperfection), she is oft-quoted often saying ONE thing that has my attention - "Chinese parents assume strength, not fragility." Hrm. Hrm. I admit, I'm intrigued. ••••

But ANYway, it was a less than stellar week. I am really, really hoping that this weekend provides a nice buffer and leads to a pleasant no-chemo week ahead. Admittedly, I have a dentist appointment, and one with Andy, but I'm still looking forward to a poison-free few days to let my system rebound a bit.

Back on the subject of parenting for just a minute though - I found another magazine article that was particularly interesting. Time magazine, January 31, page 17: "How Video Games May Contribute to Mental Illness." Oh, how I wish this article had come out when these boys were younger...we might have fought harder, instead of completely giving up in the battle over restricting computer use time.

The study cited in the article looked at associations between personality, gaming and future mental disorders. One finding is that kids with impulsive personalities, less empathy for others and poor social skills were more likely to become pathological gamers. Uh huh, I'm listening... These kids ended to log nearly twice as much computer time weekly compared to their peers. "Addicted gamers also tended to be more aggressive and antisocial." But most disturbingly, the study also found that pathological, addicted gamers were at a higher risk of developing mental conditions like depression, anxiety and social phobias within a couple of years. All of the study results seem to counter the popular belief that some teens play as a way to cope with existing mental illness. Instead, the latest results demonstrate that the relationships between addictive gaming and mental health are more complicated than we thought, "with mental disorders being both contributors to and consequences of video-game dependence."

Yup.

I hate to say it, but every single point made in the article could be illustrated inside this household. If your kids are young enough to stop this behavior before it starts, grab that chance and run with it. With our boys, at least, I can safely say that almost every, and I do mean almost every - say, 99 of 100 - argument or conflict we have is rooted in that pathological, obsessive gaming and the void it creates, suspending time so that chores, homework and even dinnertime are at the least, very annoying interruptions to their very important business of game playing and more often, reason for explosion. They haven't got the slightest idea why we find this to be a bad thing; unacceptable, or why we continue to intrude on them the way we do. That is the scariest part, right there - they really think that their game play is as important, if not more so than any events in the real world.

Well, it scares the crap out of *me* anyway.

Here's hoping for a very uneventful weekend. Cross your fingers and toes for me, ok?