Sweet Yet Sour

No. 1 – “Why are you nodding your head ‘no’?”

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 | Weird Things | 2 Comments

I get this question a lot, and I generally don’t explain why, but I will for No.1 on my list of weird things.

A good portion of the time I am frustratingly unable to control my own head, so sometimes it will look like I am nodding “no” when I am really not.

I have an essential tremor, which affects the movements of my head.  It’s called a “movement disorder” and is somewhat similar to Parkinson’s disease.  My tremor is genetic, my mother has it and she can remember an uncle having a tremor as well.  Catherine Hepburn had the same condition towards the end of her life; it’s noticeable in “On Golden Pond”.

Sometime in my mid-twenties I began to notice that sometimes when I read a book or watched t.v., my head would move in a “no-no” fashion, without my control.  At first, it didn’t bother me much and was not generally noticeable, so I simply discounted it as nothing to be worried about.

When I was 27 however,  I moved from my home town to Denver and the tremor became much more noticeable.  I was stressed at the time, adapting to a new city, living with my sister, and was working as a temp.  The movement of my head became so violent and uncontrollable that I was at times unable to read a book because my head would move so much that I could not focus on the pages.

I finally went to see a doctor about the problem and was fortunate enough to have a doctor who recognized what was wrong.  (My mother’s is very slight and she has never had it diagnosed, so I did not know what it was, even if my mother had the same thing.) He explained that an essential tremor is similar to Parkinson’s and epilepsy in that all of them involve some sort of electrical mis-firings in the brain.  For me, this misfiring affects the side to side movement of my head; the more the mis-firings occur, the more my head moves back and forth.

Since essential tremor is similar to epilepsy, my doctor and I began first to try medications used to treat epilepsy to see if they would help.  After those made me nauseous and tired, we tried a whole bunch of different medications over the course of several years in an attempt to find one that worked and that did not make me sick.

The tremor was still pretty bad during this “medication trial” period and it caused me to shy away from contact with other people.  I rarely went out or sought out friends and when I did I generally spent the entire time trying to mitigate the tremor by resting my chin on my hand and by avoiding face-to-face conversations.

I searched for and found a tremor support group at a local hospital and went with the expectation that I would meet some new friends.  Instead, I found a room of people all over the age of 70, except for one woman who turned out to be there to discuss the tremor of her adopted daughter.  A neurologist was speaking at the meeting about a new brain surgery that had been shown to help with tremor symptoms.  During his lecture the doctor stated that tremor was generally a condition of older people and, while looking directly at me, said “If the tremor starts when you are young it is only going to get worse as you get older.”  That was the end of my visits to the support group.

By the time my high school reunion rolled around I had found a medication that was able to help with the tremor and did not make me sick.  However, it could not diminish the tremor in situations when I was nervous and because the medication’s main use was the lowering of blood pressure, it had caused me to gain a lot of weight.  I had gained about 50 lbs, both due to the medication and honestly, because I was low on self esteem but not on potato chips.

While I really wanted to go to the reunion and see some of my friends, I simply couldn’t get the courage up to go.  I was certainly never popular or well-liked in high school, and so had hoped to at least go the reunion a “better” person that could wow everyone with how great I had turned out to be.  Instead, I was overweight, single, with no real career and couldn’t control my head.   For my own self-esteem I stayed home and missed seeing my friends.

As the years passed and the medication built up in my system the tremor became less noticeable.  I also learned to avoid caffeine, and learned that the tremor was worse when I was overtired.  By the time I met my husband the tremor was only slightly noticeable and by our third date I was able to talk to Mike about the tremor.  He’s such a great guy that he went out and researched it himself.

Last year I had to stop the tremor medication since Mike and I were trying to get pregnant and it was not a drug I could be on while I was pregnant.  I was really nervous about going off the medication, since it been many years that I had been on it and my tremor was somewhat under control.

In the end, even without the medication the tremor was only slight; sometimes people would ask why I was nodding “no” and I would not have noticed the tremor occurring.  I am still unable to talk about the tremor to most people who ask, it’s really embarrassing for me since it seems like I am nodding my head of my own volition when I am really not.  It’s strange and frustrating to not be able to control your own body, especially my head, since it’s movements are not something I can hide during a conversation.

On the other hand, it’s been a year since I took any tremor medication and I have not had any episodes as bad as when I was in my twenties.  I keep my fingers crossed that my tremor will stay slight without the need for medication and that I can finally start to lose some of this weight…

The List is Dwindling

Friday, September 5th, 2008 | Weird Things | 2 Comments

I am finally down to the last 3 “Weird/Interesting Things About Dorrie”.  I have a draft of the “No.1″ on the list in my head, and I can tell right now that it’s going to take me a while to complete.  In the interest of time I’m going to combine 3 and 2 and just do short bits on each one.

3. The Last Insect Post

I promise this is the last one about insects and their deaths Rena!

When I was 5 I took a tick to my Kindergarten “Show and Tell”. When I was a little girl I really liked bugs a lot and was fascinated with them.  I was even taken with the tick that my dad pulled off my head.  We had been camping the weekend before and I had apparently brought home a friend in amongst my hair.  When it was discovered that I had a tick on my head my father quickly picked it off with a pair of tweezers.  But, being the weird little kid that I was, I made him put it in a plastic bag for me to take to school.  I proudly showed it off to the class saying “This was on my head.”

2. Paper towels

This is definitely the weirdest thing about me, but I hate paper towels.  It’s the texture and the noise that paper towels make when people use them.  For some reason, when I, or someone within my hearing, rubs their hands on a paper towel, the noise made by the paper towel makes my skin crawl.  When I was younger I wouldn’t even touch paper towels; there is just something about how rough they feel.  I’ve gotten over not being able to touch them, but every once in a while, when I hear someone drying their hands on a paper towel I still get a tingle in my spine.  It’s weird, I know!

Number 4 – Where have the words gone?

Thursday, September 4th, 2008 | Weird Things | 1 Comment

I began this list as “10 Weird/Interesting Things About Dorrie”. So far, it’s been mostly weird things, generally involving insects (which is strange in itself).

I thought I would try writing about something that’s more interesting than it is weird.

Once, a long time ago, I loved words.  I loved the way certain words sounded and I loved stringing them together to make something beautiful.  Once I was a poet.

I “published” my first poem when I was in 8th grade.  I say “published” because it was a kids magazine that was printed and circulated only in my home town.  Nonetheless, I was very proud of it; it was a poem about imagination and it was called “Women and Children First”.

During that time I wrote a lot of poetry; to the point of always having a separate notebook with me just for my writings.  Where I went to high school each year a collection of student poetry, stories and art would be published – “Echoes”.  For all three years of high school I had at least one poem, if not several, in Echoes.

I really thought I was going to be a poet, and I read a lot of poetry then as well.  For my high school graduation present to myself, I bought the Complete Poems of E.E. Cummings, my favorite poet, and read almost every page.

Where I went to college for the first three years, Lawrence University, there was a similar collection of student work called “Tropos”.  As in high school I was able to have at least one poem in Tropos for each of those three years.

And then for some reason, the poems stopped.  Honestly, I have no idea why or when, but I stopped thinking about words, stopped writing poems in my head and stopped keeping a poetry notebook.

When I think about why I don’t write poetry anymore it’s a strange feeling that comes over me.  It’s hard to describe, but it feels like an envelope closing inside my chest; as if once there was a place where the words came from inside me, and now it’s closed.

When I look back at the poems I wrote and published, I think some of them are the typical crap written by an angst-ridden teenager.  I suppose that a lot of people go through a poetry writing phase in their teen years; it’s an art that is sometimes driven by depression, and well, teenagers are a hormonal, depressed bunch.

But there are a few of my old poems that I still find beautiful.  Here’s one of them:

Topic

to tickle the lollipop of the sunset
to cling to ambrosia twine
between the stars
to find sanctuary in Beloved Moon
where time is arabesque in its lines
to be so long amaranthine
where why is no longer a question
where smooth is more than touch
but a place to think
to put beauty upon the shelf
and begin again with ethereal
where words are the pin cushion
of some vast seamstress
whose cloth is woven
of me’s and you’s
and mixed with the colors of a bubble
on the brink of popping
to say to the children
gathered at one’s feet
these are the flowers
that grow on the tips of fairy noses

such
is life
for the poet laureate
upon a rose petal

Number 5 – The Gibbons

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 | Weird Things | 1 Comment

Okay, back to the weird/interesting things about Dorrie list. Here’s number 5.

I am proud to say that once, I was hit in the head by an ape.

In college I majored in anthropology, which has a few areas from which to choose your focus.  Anthropology includes cultural anthropology – where you can do a Margaret Mead thing and go live with the natives, and archaeology – where you spend days using a paint brush in the dirt to reveal ancient trash.  There is also forensic anthropology – the study of human bones, and evolutionary anthropology – where you learn that you can call someone “Australopithecus” and they won’t know that you are calling them “Ape Man”.  The other area of anthropology is primatology – the study of primates.

I was really fascinated with forensic anthropology and I had a great professor who was a nationally known expert.  While I was a student he helped to identify the remains of a 12-year old girl who had been murdered and dumped in the mountains by her neighbor.  But I decided my junior year to focus on primatology.

In order to complete the graduation requirements the anthropology department at Colorado College requires that you do one of two things.  Either take a test about all of the areas of anthropology or complete a research thesis documented with a paper and a presentation.  I chose the thesis because I have never been a good test taker; I’m a much better writer.

For my thesis I chose to focus on gibbons and their calls.  Gibbons are a “lesser” ape (in contrast to Gorillas for example, which are a “Greater” ape), native to Borneo and Sumatra.  Gibbons spend almost all of their lives in the trees, they live in family groups of mom, pop and babies, with each family having their own territory.  In the wild, each morning the male and female gibbon do a series of calls while circling the edges of their territory in sort of a “this is our house” statement. I found a YouTube video of a female gibbon so that you can hear an example of what gibbons sound like when they call.

During the morning call session the male and female have very specific parts; it’s as if it’s a scripted song.  For my thesis I wanted to research whether captive gibbons do the same calls and if they do if it’s the same as the calls that wild gibbons perform each morning.

I studied three pairs of White-handed gibbons at three different zoos.  Spike and Ebony at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Rocket and Suzy at the Heritage Zoo (in Grand Island, Nebraska), and Ralph and Lucky at Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha.  Of these gibbons, only Ralph was born in the wild.

Studying gibbon calls means that you arrive at the zoo by dawn – since that’s when the calls start and spend all day observing them.  I would bring a chair, a tape recorder, and a special form to take down every move that the gibbons made under my observation. When they moved, I wrote down what they were doing and for how long.

Just as a side note, being outside all day writing down gibbon movement during the summer in Nebraska has two downsides: a) It’s freaking hot – like 105 degrees with 100% humidity, and, b) Gibbons, being pretty intelligent, know that the best thing to do when it’s hot is too sleep in the shade.  I spent hours writing “sleeping” on my observation notes when all I wanted to do was find air conditioning.

I discovered that gibbons perform pretty much the same calls in captivity as they do in the wild – which was good since that was my hypothesis. The male and females sang their parts at exactly the same time each morning and didn’t really deviate from the song performed in the wild.

I also discovered that you can very easily piss off a male gibbon if you mess with his baby.  Rocket and Suzy, the pair in Grand Island, had a cute 1-year old baby named Bubba Sue.  (Don’t ask, because I do not know the logic on the silly name.)  At the zoo I was allowed to sit next to the cage within a few feet of the gibbons.  One day Bubba Sue was playing in the cage near me and decided that a small piece of metal wire would be the perfect thing to put in her mouth.  Rocket and Suzy were at the other end of the cage and I didn’t want Bubba Sue to be hurt by the piece of wire.  So, without thinking, I leaned over to take the piece of wire from Bubba Sue.

Here’s the problem, gibbons have really long arms, and can swing 30 feet in one swing.  I was just grabbing the piece of wire from Bubba Sue when I got smacked on the back of my head – hard.  Rocket did not take too kindly to me being close to the baby and in the space of a few seconds had swung across the cage, reached out and taken a good swipe at my head.

Thankfully Rocket wasn’t close enough to bite me, because he would have if he had the chance and gibbons have nice, sharp teeth. And really, I think “once I was hit in the head by an ape”, sounds so much better than “I lost my three of my fingers in an incident with an angry gibbon”, don’t you?

Weird Thing No. 6 – You put that in your hair?

Saturday, August 9th, 2008 | Weird Things | 1 Comment

I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but around 9th grade I decided to join a synchronized swimming team with my best friend Sarah.  Yep, that’s right, I used to swim around making leg formations while holding my breath under water.  And no, I have no idea what I was thinking.