Why I Don't Like Doctors

As a warning, this is a depressing post. I've been thinking about it a lot, it's been bothering me, and I think I'll just put it out there.
I just found out my mother wants me to go to the doctor next Tuesday when I'm home for Jbreak. I really don't like going to the doctor. My stomach ties itself in knots, I get sweaty and shaky, and generally feel like shit. Really, I'm getting anxious thinking about having to go to the doctor next week as it is. I need a little more time to prepare.
I used to not mind going to the doctor. When I was very young, under 7, our pediatrician was Dr. Rock and all my memories of him are good. He would let me hang on to my bear, Griz, when I was getting shots which was nice.
Unfortunately.. when I was in 8th or 9th grade I had a not so nice experience with the doctor. In order to play softball on the school team, I needed to have a physical. So my mom schedules an appointment, and we go to the doctor. The female doctor I normally saw wasn't there and the only doctor available was a guy who was doing some temporary work at the clinic.
Anyways. So we go in and he starts asking the usual general health questions, and tests my reflexes and vision and looks in my ears. He listens to my heart with the stethoscope. Instead of putting it down the back of my shirt like the other doctor, he put it on my chest. That was when I started to feel uncomfortable. He asked me to lay down on the table, and does the thing where they press on your abdomen to check for weird stuff. Or whatever it's for. Then he tells me he has to check my genitals, since I've started menstruating. And.. yeah. He puts on a glove, pulls down my underwear and touches the labia. He put a finger inside me. It was.. not ok. I felt horrible. He stopped, took off the glove, told me I could head back to my mother in this really cheerful voice. I get up, go back out to my mom and just kinda sit there. The doctor comes out later, I don't know how long, and gives the information sheet to my mother saying I have a clean bill of health.
I never told my mother. I really tried hard to forget it. I managed to all through high school until I got to college and got involved in feminist and queer activism. Even then I didn't really talk about it. I told a few people. I just didn't want to deal with. I still really haven't. I'm still utterly terrified of doctors. I haven't been able to go to the gynecologist yet, even one who's a woman. I just get freaked out. You'd think I'd be able to work past that. *sigh* Well. This is enough depressing blogging for now. I'm gonna go enjoy the sun.

The Golden Compass

If you haven't read the book The Golden Compass, feel free to attend the movie. You will probably find it enjoyable, though perhaps slightly confusing. If you have read the book, you might want to reconsider.
The movie is visually very beautiful, and the effects are very well done. But unfortunately the movie falls short in the plot and following the book department. I do understand that when they make books into movies they have time restrictions and all of that jazz. But to end the movie at a point that is about 1/8 of the way from the end of the book? I feel bereft, and slightly cheated.
Yes, the movie does hit all of the major plot points. Yes, it is technically well done. But I feel like by adding even half an hour to finish the plot, or by using that half an hour to explore some of the more intricate aspects of the plot in the book, the film would have been better.
I guess the lesson is that I should never expect as much out of a movie as I do out of a book.
His Dark Materials, the trilogy that The Golden Compass starts was one of the most influential books in my teenage years. I remember doing pursuit book club discussions on it, and being extremely excited when the next two books, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, came out. The books challenged my rather basic undeveloped beliefs about god, free choice, and the ideas of good and evil. The books are wonderful. And the protagonist is a brave, intelligent girl which is really rare even today in fiction.
Either way. This isn't an extremely coherent or thought out post. I just wanted to get out a little of my irritation at the movie. But really, it's ok, because it's just a movie.

Thanksgiving Pineapple

So it's Thanksgiving again. While the origins of the holiday remain questionable, school lets out for a few days, and people are generally a little nicer to each other for a few days.
One of my favorite Thanksgiving memories is from sophmore year of high school. First, you need to know that my dad loves to cook. He will watch the Food Network with pen and paper nearby so he can take notes on his favorite recipes. He's quite easy to shop for, any time I buy him a gift I just go to a culinary store. This particular year my dad thought up one of his craziest cooking schemes yet. He decided that we were going to get a huge turkey because we were having around 30 family members over for Thanksgiving. Personally, I thought it was a little crazy. Either way. My parents get turkeys every year from the Schmidt's who do the whole free range turkey and chicken thing. I think they also raise goats and one cow a year.
Either way. So at the beginning of October my parents find out this turkey is probably going to weigh in at over 40 lbs. This turkey isn't going to fit in our oven. So my dad decides that we are going to cook it luau style. So over the course of October we dig a huge hole in our backyard. This thing is about 4 feet deep and wide. Thanksgiving Day we get up and set a fire in the bottom, put a grate over it, and put the turkey on top of the grate wrapped in foil. Then we put a sheet of metal over the hole. And then we wait for the turkey to cook.
So around 11:30, my friend Monica shows up at the door with a surprise for us. We let her in, exchange pleasantries, she tells us all to close our eyes and pulls out a pineapple and gives it to my dad. I had told her about the whole turkey cooked in a whole in the ground thing and she decided that the perfect thanksgiving present for us would be a pineapple. Every year after that we've gotten a lovely thanksgiving pineapple.
Luckily, the turkey in the ground thing actually worked. Also luckily, my father hasn't ever tried cooking food in the ground ever since.

names

This semester I finally settled on a name. Instead of the rather feminine first and middle name I was given (Amy Elizabeth) I wanted something different that wasn't exactly masculine, but certainly wasn't that feminine.
On more than one occasion I've enlisted the help of my friends to think up names, and that was very helpful in thinking up options. Eventually after much consideration, I settled on Dylan for a first name. According to one book on name meanings I read it means "born of the water" which I think is a good meaning. Some of my earliest memories are at my grandparents house when they lived on Lake Arrowhead in Wisconsin. When I was in high school and I was stressed out, I would go to the park that overlooked Lake Michigan to think. So I thought Dylan was a fairly appropriate name. It also was the first name that really felt like it fit.
My middle name gave me more difficult. Elizabeth is a family near on my mother's side. Her great-grandmother was named Elizabeth. When I was at my grandmother's earlier this year, I was looking through her genealogy stuff and decided that I would use Moss as my middle name. Moss was my grandmother's maiden name, and it was my great-grandmother Elizabeth's last name.
It's kind of a strange middle name, but it's better than the options on my father's side of the family where everyone's middle name seems to be either Gene or Jean.
I did consider coming up with something completely new, but over the past year I've been realizing how important my family has been to me. It's not like we're perfect or anything, we definitely have issues. Even so, my biological family is part of who I am, and I don't want to erase that.

Grandma Vreeland

My maternal grandmother is an amazing woman. She is wise, strong, and generally one of the greatest people I know. My grandmother was born during the Depression, so she saves everything. My father always jokes that my mother became a pack rat because she learned it from my grandma. My grandmother has had cancer twice already and she also has osteoporosis and has shrunk 5 inches. She tells some of the best stories, and taught me that it's ok to be a book junkie and read almost anything you can get your hands on. She's always reading a few different books at a time, one up in her room, one in the basement, one at her easy chair, and occasionally a few more in case she gets bored with one of them.

My Grandma went to college back when everyone sat down to eat together and there were curfews for the female students. She married a man who flew crop dusters and had two children, my uncle Tom and my aunt Amy. The crop duster ran off and left her when my aunt and uncle were very young, so she had to support them herself for a while. She worked at the same paper mill that my grandfather worked in. It was quite the drama when she and my grandfather decided to get married. In fact, they weren't allowed to be married in the main sanctuary of their church, they had to be married in the chapel because my grandma had already been married. My grandparents had more children, my aunt Peggy, my mother, and my aunts Cindy, Holly and Betsy.

My maternal family is a close knit bunch. You can run out of money, get into college, go on a date, or simply go see a concert and the entire clan will have been notified within the next twenty-four hours. Family gatherings are always interesting, with rehashings of childrens relationships, political discussions, photo sharing, card games, planning vacations that most likely won't happen but are fun to dream up, huge amounts of food, and of course a little alcohol. And my grandmother subtly smoothing out arguments, making sure everyone eats, correcting my father's martini making, keeping track of relationships, birthdays, anniversaries and all the other little things everyone relies on her for.

Like I said earlier, my grandmother is a bit of a pack rat. She saves newspaper clippings, photos, tickets, programs, paper scraps, plastic cups and cutlery, even the stubs of pencils. You can move through the rooms of her house and find all sorts of exciting little treasures. For example, last week I was visiting with my grandparents before flying out to Albany for fall break. I sat down in my grandmother's easy chair, and found a rubber banded packet of slips of paper. On the paper were lists, memories. Books she wanted to read, names of presidents who have served while she's been alive, classmates from grade school, all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren's birthdays, stories about her childhood. When she was little, her father would tie a rope from the top of the tree to the ceiling because their cats would climb in the tree and knock it over if it wasn't tied up. Or when she was at college, the courses that she took and the names of her professors.

A few months ago my grandmother had a melanoma removed from her cheek. Recently the doctors discovered that the melanoma had gotten into one of the lymph nodes in her neck. They removed all of the lymph nodes in her neck, and luckily only the one had melanoma in it. Still, she is undergoing radiation therapy just in case. Her last radiation treatment is next Wednesday. It's painful for her, and it wears her down. It's been a little scary for the rest of us, when my grandmother passes away there will be a huge void in our lives. Everyone dies though, and even though my grandmother seems to have won this particular medical battle it still reminds me not to take her for granted.